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The brother of Lori Vallow Daybell took the stand in an Arizona court, claiming there was “no doubt” in his mind that the defendant conspired to kill her fourth husband.
On Thursday, April 10, 2025, Adam Cox, 56, was called to testify in the Maricopa County Superior Court to speak against Vallow Daybell, 51, the woman serving life for the separate 2019 murders of her children and romantic rival, according to NBC News. Adam Cox said he traveled from his home in Kansas to Arizona to aid in an intervention following Vallow Daybell’s increasingly bizarre statements about her then-estranged husband, Charles Vallow.
“Lori had told people that Charles was no longer living,” the brother testified. “That some guy named ‘Ned’ was inside of his body, that there was a zombie living inside of him.”
The statements matched what Vallow Daybell claimed about her children, Tylee Ryan, 16, and Joshua J.J. Vallow, 7, before she and her fifth husband, Chad Daybell, murdered them and hid the remains for months on the latter’s Idaho property. Many close to the said they shared shared fanatical beliefs, a stray from their Mormon faith and into End Times and apocalyptic rhetoric.
The woman dubbed “Doomsday Mom” now stands accused of plotting Charles Vallow’s July 11, 2019, murder with her late brother, Alex Cox and continues to represent herself in court.
Who killed Charles Vallow?
Alex Cox told police he shot and killed his brother-in-law in self-defense at the estranged couple’s Chandler, Arizona home. During opening statements earlier this week, Vallow Daybell doubled down on self-defense claims, stating Charles Vallow allegedly raised a baseball bat to harm the then-living teen Tylee Ryan.
The admitted triggerman was never charged with the homicide and died in December 2019 of an apparent pulmonary embolism.
According to what the surviving brother said in court on Thursday, he flew to Arizona not long before the shooting in hopes of staging an intervention. Alex Cox was due to pick him up from the airport, but never arrived, as reported by NBC News.
“Alex didn’t respond to any of my text messages when I was supposed to be with him, and he was at that house that morning,” Adam Cox told the court. “Lori talking crazy about how she’s a translated being — all these things all added up into that moment and that morning, once I found out on Saturday that Charles was shot and killed, no doubt in my mind that they killed him. That’s a feeling that I got.”
On the day of the shooting, Charles Vallow went to the Chandler home to take his and Vallow Daybell’s adopted son, J.J., to school before a heated exchange broke out, as previously reported by Oxygen. Adam Cox told the court he knew “something was really off” when Charles Vallow texted him that day and reported Alex Cox was at the residence.
Prosecutors allege Lori Vallow Daybell and Alex Cox conspired to kill Charles Vallow to cash out on a life insurance policy.
Adam Cox testifies against Lori Vallow Daybell
Adam Cox, who said in 2022 that “death [wasn’t] good enough” for Vallow Daybell, gave more insight into his sister’s line of thinking and what prompted him to intervene in the first place, NBC News reported.
The brother testified that Vallow Daybell believed “she was in the process of translating from a mortal human being to an immortal human being. Becoming a celestial being.”
Adam Cox noted his sister’s beliefs were “off the wall” and in no way aligned with their faith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, according to Arizona’s KTVK-TV.
On January 31, 2019, months before his death, Charles Vallow contacted local authorities and reported his wife was “mentally unstable” and had “lost her mind.” By then, she’d already spent several years engrossed in the teachings of Chad Daybell, an author and self-proclaimed prophet.
In March of that year, Charles Vallow texted friends to say, “something snapped” in his wife and that it was “so unbelievable and scary.”
“It seemed like Charles was just desperate, and he wanted to do anything he could to this last ditch effort to try to shake Lori loose of whatever she was under, some spell, that he said,” Adam Cox said on Thursday, according to ABC News.
Vallow Daybell was indicted in 2021 on charges of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder for Charles Vallow’s death, though charges were later upgraded to first-degree murder, according to NBC News.
She has pleaded not guilty in that case, as well as the conspiracy murder charges she’ll have to answer for in May regarding the attempted shooting of Brandon Boudreaux.
Learn more about Lori Vallow Daybell from her recent explosive interview with Dateline’s Keith Morrison.
