Judge's Ruling in Daybell Hearing on Alleged Prosecutorial Misconduct

Closing arguments are set for Friday afternoon over whether a Lori Norene Vallow prosecutor committed misconduct in the ongoing case. The defense for the 47-year-old Idaho woman and her husband Chad Daybell, 52, are trying to push Rob Wood out of the matter over interviews he had with Vallow’s sister in law Summer Shiftlet, and Zulema Pastenes, the widow of Vallow’s brother Alex Cox. The prosecutor allegedly stepped over the line in discussing a possible charge for conspiracy to commit murder, and in smack-talking Vallow attorney Mark Means. You can watch in the player above. It is scheduled to begin at 3 p.m. EST / 1 p.m. MST.

Vallow (aka Lori Daybell) and Chad Daybell are charged in Idaho with allegedly covering up the deaths of her children Joshua “JJ” Vallow, 7, and Tylee Ryan, 17, who went missing on separate dates in September 2019 and turned up dead in gravesites on Chad Daybell’s Fremont County property.

Homicide long hung over the case, even before the children were found dead. Cox shot and killed his sister’s previous husband Charles Vallow on July 11, 2019 when Lori Vallow and her children lived in Arizona. He maintained self-defense. Cops in Arizona think that’s garbage, as indicted in a stated plan to charge Lori Vallow with conspiracy to commit murder in connection to her husband’s death. No such charges have been announced, however, and it’s moot point for Cox, who died in December 2019 of what Maricopa County medical examiners called a blood clot. Investigators said this was a “natural” dead.

Other passings raised eyebrows amid the disappearances of the children, with Chad Daybell’s previous wife Tammy Daybell dying in her sleep in October 2019, between the time the kids went missing and her husband’s November 2019 marriage to Vallow. It’s also worth mentioning that another one of Vallow’s previous husbands, Joseph Ryan, died in 2018 of an ostensible heart attack. Authorities announced that they were taking a second look at both deaths.

As for Wood, he has denied wrongdoing, said he only spoke to the women before their interviews with law enforcement, asserted that a recording of the interviews was made without his knowledge, and suggested the recording was incomplete and possibly edited. Garrett Smith, an attorney for Shiflet and Pastenes, said he made the recording.

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