Lori Vallow Daybell stoked tensions with judge in her Arizona murder conspiracy trials
Judge Justin Beresky abruptly interrupted, saying: 'Actually, they do.'
It was a moment that further highlighted the tension between Lori Vallow Daybell, who represented herself in two murder conspiracy cases in Arizona, and Beresky, who pulled no punches when the time came for him to address the court.
Beresky said Vallow Daybell was not truthful when she claimed she was prevented from telling her side of the story and was unable to get a fair trial. The media attention she craved, he said, will fade into obscurity now that her trials are over.
'The amount of contemplation, calculation, planning and manipulation that went into these crimes is unparalleled in my career,' said Beresky, who has been a Maricopa County Superior Court judge since 2017 and has presided over other high-profile cases.
Friday's sentencing ended the legal saga of Vallow Daybell, 51, who will likely spend no time in an Arizona prison because she already was serving three life sentences in Idaho for killing her two youngest children and conspiring to kill a romantic rival.
In Arizona she was convicted of conspiring to kill her estranged husband, Charles Vallow, and her niece's ex-husband, Brandon Boudreaux. Charles Vallow was fatally shot, while Boudreaux survived.
Vallow Daybell maintained that she did nothing wrong and said the string of deaths were simply tragedies.
She turned to her own religious beliefs in saying she believes she is among servants who Jesus is sending into prison to become warriors and who, ultimately, will be released to serve him.
Beresky implied that she got the meaning wrong when she referenced a verse about prisoners going free.
'That is a verse about people that accept Jesus can be in prison and they will go free when they die and go to heaven, but it will take an act of God for you to go free,' the judge said. 'In short, you should never be released from prison.'
Vallow Daybell's trials in Phoenix were infused with her religious beliefs, including that people in her life were possessed by evil spirits. She routinely sparred with Beresky, occasionally leaning over to consult with her advisory counsel.
Charles Vallow's sister, Kay Woodcock, praised the judge's demeanor outside the courtroom.
'I don't think we could have had a better judge," she said. "He is a better man than a lot of people putting up with her like he did.'
Mel McDonald, a retired Maricopa County judge who was not involved in the trials but watched them, said Beresky did an exceptional job of maintaining courtroom decorum and demonstrated extraordinary patience despite obstructive tactics from Vallow Daybell.
'He gives her latitude,' McDonald said. 'But he doesn't let her run wild.'
Last month, during the trial over the conspiracy to kill Boudreaux, Vallow Daybell falsely accused Beresky of yelling at her after he explained that her efforts to introduce favorable evidence about her character could open the door to jurors hearing about her convictions in Idaho and for Vallow's death.
'You don't need to talk to me that way," Vallow Daybell said.
'Take her out,' Beresky told a security officer, who led her from the courtroom.
In defending herself, Vallow Daybell struggled with legal matters that most lawyers consider routine, such as lining up witnesses to testify. She insisted on exercising her speedy trial rights and rejected the judge's offer for later dates, yet complained about not having enough time to prepare. She also tried to get Beresky removed from the case, arguing that he was biased against her.
In another moment emblematic of the tensions between judge and defendant, Beresky expressed skepticism during jury selection for her second Arizona trial when she claimed she was too sick to move forward. The proceedings were postponed for the day.
But the trial continued, with Beresky later saying there was no objective evidence to support her claims.
___
Associated Press writers Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake City and Sejal Govindarao in Phoenix contributed.
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The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘I shouldn't have to fight for answers': David Amess's daughter on the MP's murder and her fury at his friends and colleagues
The last time Katie Amess saw her dad, the Conservative MP Sir David Amess, he was dropping her at Heathrow for her flight home to Los Angeles. Usually, she would cry when they said goodbye, but this time neither were sad – they were both excited. In six weeks, Katie would be back for her wedding. 'It was going to be in the House of Commons and my dad could not wait to walk me down the aisle,' she says. 'He'd been practising, taking my arm, walking me around. We joked about it – we were calling it the 'royal wedding'. At the airport, we hugged goodbye and he kissed me on both cheeks. I skipped off thinking the next time I saw him would be the best day of my life.' Instead, just four weeks later, her father was murdered at his surgery, stabbed 21 times by an Islamic State sympathiser. He was buried in the suit he was going to wear to the wedding. The music planned for walking Katie down the aisle – Pachelbel's Canon – was instead played as his coffin was carried into the church. The murder of David Amess in October 2021, while serving his constituency in a church hall in Leigh-on-Sea, sent shock waves across the country – and the details that have since emerged should have deepened the outrage and furthered the questions. Amess's killer, Ali Harbi Ali, was a once bright, motivated teenager planning to study medicine who had self-radicalised during Syria's civil war. The teachers at his Croydon school had noticed – one described it as a light going out and that his 'eyes were dead'. Ali's attendance fell, his grades plummeted and attempts to talk to him only raised more concerns, leading the school to contact Prevent, the government-led counter-terrorism strategy designed to identify and deradicalise extremists. One home visit was made, followed by one brief meeting between Ali and an 'intervention provider' in a McDonald's. Conversation was limited to two subjects: whether western music and student loans were unlawful in Islam. Ali was deemed a 'pleasant and informed young man'. (He later said: 'I just knew to nod my head and say yes and they would leave me alone afterwards and they did.') There was no follow-up, no further consultations or contact with his referring teachers. There was no monitoring. Despite the atrocity Ali went on to commit, Katie believes there has been little scrutiny of any of the above, no accountability or consequences for the anonymous officials involved and no requirement to give a public account of their actions and lessons learned. For almost four years, Katie, on behalf of the Amess family, has pushed for an inquiry. Partly as a result of this pressure, the Home Office commissioned Lord Anderson, the interim Prevent commissioner, to produce a rapid review of the case in order to identify whether questions remain unanswered. It was published last week and concluded: 'Though the information available on [Ali's] case is not complete and likely never will be,' the 'unhappy story' of his engagement with Prevent had been 'squeezed almost dry'. Katie doesn't agree. 'I'm not going to give up,' she says. 'All we want is for someone to say: 'We're sorry. This is what happened, these are the mistakes made and this is what we're doing to make sure it never happens again.' I shouldn't have to fight for answers.' Born in Basildon to an electrician father and a dressmaker mother, David Amess was a working-class, Catholic Conservative and had been an Essex MP for 38 years when he was murdered. He was approaching his 70th birthday – on that last airport trip with Katie, she had broached the subject of retirement. 'He didn't want to retire any time soon,' she says. 'He felt he had so much left to do.' Having an MP father was all Katie had ever known, but Amess was not an absent figure, away at Westminster. He was committed to his constituency with no ambitions for higher office. 'When I was young, I used to ask: 'Do you think you could be prime minister?' He'd say: 'Absolutely not!'' For Katie, the second of five children, all born within seven years, he was present and fun and always loomed large in her life. 'My dad was absolutely hilarious and completely inappropriate,' she says. 'He'd do the craziest things and sometimes they were a bit dangerous.' He would booby trap the house at Halloween. He would take all five children to water parks even though he couldn't swim and would have been unable to rescue any of them. At toll booths, on family road trips, all five children were instructed to blow raspberries while he paid the operator. 'He was obsessed with animals, so we had dogs, cats, chickens, bunny rabbits, hamsters, gerbils, a goat called Tinkerbell,' says Katie. 'He wanted a small pony at one point, but Mum vetoed that. He had fish and birds in his office even though no animals were allowed, but he didn't listen to rules. At Halloween, he'd go to Westminster in full goblin outfit. At Christmas, he'd put a tree on his balcony at Westminster, which was definitely not allowed, and his whole office was lit up with flashing lights.' From the age of four, Katie accompanied him to constituency events. 'My elder brother was out playing football and my mum had my three younger sisters to look after, so I was all dressed up and dragged to garden parties and village fetes.' Later, when she moved to London for drama school – she is now an actor – she stayed in her dad's London flat. 'I'm so glad I spent all that time with him so I could just be around him and soak up what he was about,' she says. 'I never knew I wouldn't be with him for another 30 years.' Amess was very well known in his Southend West and Leigh constituency. 'He spent so much time there,' says Katie. 'Everybody knew his name and face. 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Two home secretaries – Priti Patel and Suella Braverman – assured the family that they were working on it, but their successor James Cleverly refused to meet them. Instead, there has been only a Prevent learning review, completed in February 2022. This gives a glimpse of Prevent's failures in the case – the strange decision‑making (why focus on student loans and western music only?), the lack of record-keeping, the absence of communication, returned emails or follow-up. 'I was absolutely gobsmacked when I read it,' says Katie. 'I could run Prevent better with my friends. If these are the people entrusted to save us from terrorism, we've got a huge problem.' Equally striking is the sparsity of the review. No one involved is identified or even interviewed. It's a review of secondhand accounts and the records kept (and not kept). 'The main conclusion it seems to draw is that so much has changed with Prevent, it's all been fixed, so we don't need to look any harder,' says Katie. 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'It's my 40th birthday this month and I know I'd have flown back to England like I did every summer and my dad would have thrown me a huge party. There'd have been 40 balloons and he'd have made my friends give me 40 bumps! I want to have children, but I think: 'What sort of mother would I be now when I'm in so much trauma and heartache?' I used to think he'd be such a funny grandpa. All that has been robbed from me.' For Katie, the lack of support from Westminster after her father's decades of service is deeply painful and nonsensical, too. 'I just cannot believe the way we've been treated by his friends and colleagues,' she says. 'It's in all their interests. They are meeting the public day in, day out, so why don't they want to investigate properly and establish what would make them safer? Dad's legacy needs to be that through what happened to him, he saves other people. Please, just show some human decency. Do the right thing.' Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
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The Guardian
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- The Guardian
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