Lori Vallow, sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of her two children

Lori Vallow Daybell was sentenced Monday in Idaho to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murders of her two sons and for conspiring to murder her husband's first wife.

The 50-year-old woman was convicted in May of murdering her children Joshua JJ Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 16, and conspiring to kill Tammy Daybell, the ex-wife of her fifth husband, Chad Daybell. During the case, Lori Vallow went so far as to claim that her children were zombies and that she was a goddess sent to herald the biblical apocalypse.

The case garnered media attention in 2019, when Vallow's children went missing without the couple reporting it. The bodies were found a year later on a Daybell property in Idaho. Following this, investigators discovered a series of deaths around Lori Vallow and her new husband. In 2018, the woman's third husband had died from an apparent heart attack. In 2019, her fourth husband was shot by Vallow's brother, who claimed self-defense. The latter also died shortly after being found unconscious in his residence. In October 2019, Daybell's ex-wife, Tammy, died apparently of natural causes.

Vallow and Daybell moved to Hawaii a few weeks after the disappearance of the children and the death of the ex-wife and then married.

She was found guilty of first-degree murder and conspiracy charges in May, as a jury agreed with prosecutors who said she wanted to eliminate her youngest children as part of a plan to embark on a new life with Chad Daybell, as well as conspiring to murder Daybell's then-wife, Tammy Daybell.

Lori Vallow's husband, Chad Daybell, will be tried separately in April 2024. He has pleaded not guilty.