46. The Brick House
"The Lord worketh not in secret combinations."
Last month when he delivered his opening statement, Chad Daybell’s fiery longtime attorney, John Prior, let the court know he would be putting up a fight.
This was obviously a sea change for how things had gone so far in this case. Last year when Daybell’s co-defendant and wife Lori Vallow stood trial, her attorneys did not call witnesses. Vallow didn’t take the stand either. For years she had been quiet, and that quiet extended to the court proceedings. The photographs of her decaying and destroyed children were loud in their own way, and those images echoed into the jury room when they delivered her a guilty verdict.
While so much of the evidence in Chad Daybell’s trial has been the same, this time around has gone very differently because of John Prior. He’s a smart lawyer, a bit of a brute and often combative; it’s just him on his own — one defender versus four prosecutors. You’ve got to hand it to him. His strategy has been to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of the jury, creating alternative stories and explanations.
I’ve always wanted to know what was going on inside the Daybell house — that brick home outside of Rexburg — when the alleged murders at the heart of this case occurred.
As I’ve thought about this over the years, the term “secret combinations” has danced around in my head, and I’ve wondered if it applied here in some way. It’s a reference throughout the Book of Mormon. According to the Church, “secret combinations” is used to describe “an organization of people bound together by oaths to carry out the evil purposes of the group.”
Was there a kind of secret combination — to use the parlance of the people involved — happening among the proud Mormons living inside that brick house?
Today’s testimony began to answer that question.
Some of the most anticipated voices in this case were on the stand today, testifying for the defense: Chad Daybell’s own children. They have spoken very little over the years, save for a very strange interview with 48 Hours.
Emma Daybell Murray took the stand first this morning, wearing a black skirt and pink cardigan, hair pulled back. Emma has come off as incredibly tone-deaf to many people who’ve watched this case — callous to the seriousness of dead mutilated children being found in her parents’ yard. Early on, she was seen sticking her tongue out and making faces behind a TV journalist reporting on the children. And then she defended her father on 48 Hours, laying all blame on Lori Vallow.
In When the Moon Turns to Blood I wrote about how Emma publicly showed her adherence to at least some of her father’s alternative spiritual views. She defended the near-death experience author Julie Rowe, who Spring Creek Books published, and her father’s ideas about his own visions:
“Julie is not a snake oil salesman,” she wrote. “She is a humble servant of the Lord who is doing what He has called her to do. He asked her not to share her testimony in the form of a book and a few speaking engagements, and she has obeyed even though she knew that everything she held dear would be attacked at every angle.”
Emma Daybell would later become the narrator of Rowe’s audiobook. “One thing that fascinates me,” she wrote of Rowe, “is how the Lord uses ordinary people to complete extraordinary tasks. Julie is by every definition an ‘ordinary’ Mormon woman.”
Today Emma explained that at the time of her mother’s death, in October 2019, she and her husband Joseph lived kitty-corner1 from the brick house where her parents and older brother, Garth, resided.
Emma hammered more on the story that Prior has been telling all through the trial, which they desperately want the jury to believe: that Tammy Daybell was anemic and in failing health, avoiding doctors and seeking alternative health remedies. “I was really worried about it. She’d always been one to be able to meet the demands of daily life without being exhausted,” Emma said. “She started going to bed before dinner some nights.” (On cross-examination, the prosecution asked how Emma could know her mother’s bedtime every night if she did not live with her?)
“Colloidal silver was her favorite” way to treat her health issues, Emma said.
This caused me to yell a football-game-yell from my desk when she said it.2 I was surprised to hear this, but not shocked. Colloidal silver has been a point of obsession for me: I have an entire chapter in my forthcoming book3 about the pervasiveness of colloidal silver as a “healing remedy” among the far-right.
Colloidal silver has been long for a way for the griftiest of the grifters to make money: from Alex Jones, to Jim Bakker, to countless preppers at countless prepper conferences around the country. The Food and Drug Administration has continually tried to tamp down on manufacturers of the stuff — a game of whack-a-mole that’s been going on for decades, as far as I can tell. It should be no surprise to me that the Daybell medicine cabinet had a bottle or two of it — given who the Daybells were publishing, and for whom, I’m betting they purchased it on the prepper conference circuit.
Emma (and later her husband Joseph, who was on the stand as well) spoke about how Tammy Daybell was unable to run a 5K race that Joseph planned as a fundraiser for Operation Underground Railroad. Sound familiar? Back in November, I wrote about how similar the beliefs of Tim Ballard and Daybell were for The Daily Beast — and here were Emma and Joseph, saying I was more right on that than I could have realized! I love that. Another football scream from me. It’s the little things, people, that give me happiness in this weird world I’ve built.
Anyway, Emma talked about Spring Creek Books, how the business was a collaboration between her parents. And she talked about her parents’ faith, too, how it differed from hers, which she views as more mainstream. She described Chad Daybell’s faith as “very traditional” and “fundamental.”
“He wanted to stick to the original form as he could. He was really interested in teachings from Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, and other early church leaders,” she said. A “literalist,” she concluded.
In 2022, the church said there is “no such thing as a fundamentalist Mormon.” They were clear: there are simply members of the Church, and those members believe in the Latter-day Saint faith as it stands right now. And then there are people who believe in polygamy, who adhere to an originalist interpretation of what LDS founder Joseph Smith created. Those people “have nothing whatsoever to do with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.”
Harsh words, coming from the big men in Salt Lake! But this goes to show how truly fringe the conferences Daybell relied on to sell his books were, where this kind of “literalist” talk was normal, where people considered themselves fundamentalists who were still card-carrying members of the mainline church.
Emma talked about how her parents liked the book The Emotion Code, which is about energy healing4 and was written by a chiropractor who was a fixture on many of those same fringe LDS conferences that Daybell so enjoyed. Emma said the whole light and dark spirits thing was something both of her parents discussed and believed. “Dark means you’re selfish, focusing inward like Satan would be,” she explained. Once she said her parents did a kind of “casting” on her. “I have struggled with anxiety for years and it was feeling very unmanageable,” she said. “I felt like there was a being that was with me. And I talked to my parents about it. My dad cast it out using the power of the priesthood, and I felt better afterward.” By Emma’s estimation, as what she described as the “patriarch” of their family, she believed her father had the authority to give blessings.
When it was the prosecutor’s turn to cross-examine Emma, they certainly painted a portrait of her as her father’s most faithful, doting child, whether or not that’s actually true. They replayed the bodycam footage of Emma talking to her father when he said he wouldn’t be coming back. They asked her if she calls him every day in jail — she admitted that she does. They teased out how uncooperative she has been with law enforcement, and how many things she thinks she “knows” are really things that her father told her. She believed him.
“Did you ever ask your dad where JJ Vallow was,” prosecutor Lindsay Blake asked Emma.
“He told me he was in a safe place.”
Tylee Ryan.
A safe place.
“Do you know where JJ and Tylee were found?” Blake asked.
“Yes,” Emma said. “In the backyard of my dad’s property.”
Garth Daybell, who was living at home at the time of Tammy’s death, also took the stand today. He wore khakis, a shirt and tie, a blue sweater, looking very much the part of the LDS missionary.
The Very Famous Raccoon Text, sent on the day Tylee Ryan is believed to have been killed, comprised a large part of Garth’s time today on the stand. Here’s a snippet from my book if you don’t remember what that is. That day:
… Chad Daybell texted his wife. “Well, I’ve had an interesting morning!” he wrote. “I felt I should burn all of the limb debris by the fire pit before it got too soaked by the coming storms. While I did so, I spotted a big raccoon along the fence. I hurried and got my gun, and he was still walking along. I got close enough that one shot did the trick. He is now in our pet cemetery. Fun times!”
… Several hours later, Tammy finally texted her husband back about his earlier message. “Good for you!”
Garth spoke about how they had raccoons in the yard who had taken a keen interest in the rabbit food the family gave the bunnies they kept, and they trapped and shot three or four that summer. But, Garth said, they buried the dead raccoons in a compost heap, and never put them in the pet cemetery. So, I can’t say this testimony helped his father’s case out much.
Garth also echoed his sister’s testimony, saying that he had a sense that his mother was struggling with her health. She would come home exhausted from work. She asked for help carrying heavy things in the yard. Once she asked Garth to go get McDonald’s instead of making dinner.
But if the jury heard these things like I did, it just seemed like she was tired and carrying a lot of weight for her family. While Daybell went to write his books, she was the one bringing in consistent pay. What her family seems to describe as “failing health,” to me, just sounds like a middle-aged woman who needed a break, who maybe knew her marriage was on the rocks, or that her husband was having an affair. She struggled with depression and took medication for it. A slump is hardly a death sentence, my God.
Garth is a middle-school science teacher in Rexburg, and when asked how his father’s faith differed from his own mainstream LDS beliefs, he said: “Well, I teach and believe in evolution. I teach that to my students. I teach that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old, as opposed to 6,000.”5
But Garth also said the castings of evil spirits out of people’s bodies is something he sees as completely mainstream. He recalled the story of a man named Newel Knight, who Joseph Smith supposedly had to cast Satan out of. And Knight went on “to do great things,” Garth said.
There’s a lot more that happened during the trial today, so of course you can watch all of it online (link here) and come to your own conclusions. But I think the thing I’m taking away from this long-anticipated day is that these children grew up in a house where their father, their patriarch, spoon-fed them a version of the faith that was tainted with the ideas of its fringe.
We know from hearing Daybell’s sister-in-law, Heather, testify earlier this month that she believed Tammy was in a potentially abusive relationship with Chad. He was controlling what people talked to her about and what she could say, while all the while having his affair with Lori Vallow.
But the Daybell children, too, maybe have never known anything but this life. And regardless of what else we don’t know about them, or that we can’t know, it’s hard not to see them as their own kind of victims, too.
One more thing — in case you missed it, Oregon Public Broadcasting published a new story of mine this month about a New Age group that has raised a LOT of eyebrows around Ashland, Oregon. They’re called TwinRay. As one local resident told me “you cannot go to a dinner party or a gathering here without [them] coming up.” If you have been at all compelled by my Daybell-Vallow coverage, you’ll want to read this.
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And hey, keep your eyes on this space — lots of stories coming out soon.
This is completely off-topic, but every time I use this term I think of a great quiz on regional dialects that The New York Times made about a decade ago. It was the first time I realized other parts of the country do not use this term, or many others that are normal to me.
Reason number 6,589 why I work alone: yelling along to court livestreams. Court is my sports.
Consider this a soft announcement. More soon.
We’ve gone over this before, but energy healing is a no-go in the mainstream church.
Forthcoming book- YESSSSSSS!
Also, I’m sure TwinRay LOVES colloidal silver.
Lastly, thank you for your coverage on this case. I look forward to it.
Dear friend, as I listened to Emma say her mom went to bed at 5, or 6, or 7, I thought, "that sounds familiar." You are 💯 correct, sometimes you're really tired when you're pulling the whole weight off the family. Chad has been outed as a spiritual manipulator and emotional abuser.
I write this horizontally, from my bed. Yawn...