(NewsNation) — Lori Vallow Daybell’s brother told jurors in her murder-conspiracy trial Thursday he believes she was responsible for her estranged husband’s 2019 shooting death.
Adam Cox said he concluded his sister had conspired with their brother, Alex, to have Charles Vallow killed in July 2019, in part because Vallow Daybell had told others that her spouse was possessed by a zombie. Alex Cox, who claimed to have killed Vallow in self-defense, died later that year.
“No doubt in my mind that they killed him — that’s a feeling that I got,” Adam Cox said under questioning from an Arizona prosecutor.
Vallow Daybell, the so-called “Doomsday mom” who is representing herself at trial, addressed her brother as “Mr. Cox” and suggested through her questions the two had fallen out of contact in recent years.
She finished by asking Adam Cox if he personally witnessed her conspiring with their brother Alex to murder Vallow.
“No,” the brother replied.
Vallow Daybell, who is not a lawyer, has pleaded not guilty. She was already convicted in Idaho of killing her two youngest children and conspiring to murder a romantic rival and is serving life sentences.
Prosecutors say she conspired to kill Vallow, her fourth husband, to collect on his $1 million life insurance policy and marry Chad Daybell, an Idaho author who wrote several religious novels about prophecies and the end of the world.
Adam Cox said was in the Phoenix area at the time of Vallow’s death for an intervention that never occurred. He said he was supposed to stay with Alex, but the brother didn’t respond to his calls or texts.
He said he later learned Alex was staying at Vallow Daybell’s home and only found out about Charles Vallow’s death days later from a friend who found out online.
The trial over Charles Vallow’s death will mark the first of two criminal trials in Arizona for Vallow Daybell. She’s scheduled to go on trial again in late May on a charge of conspiring to murder the ex-husband of a niece.
In a previous trial, author Chad Daybell was sentenced to death for the murders of his first wife and Vallow Daybell’s two youngest children. The children went missing for several months before their bodies were found buried in rural Idaho on his property.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.