Estimated read time: 4-5 minutes
- Chandler police detective Ariel Werther testified location data contradicts Lori Daybell's account of Charles Vallow's death.
- Data gathered by Werther shows Daybell either not at home when Vallow was shot or the call to 911 was made long after he was shot.
- Daybell is on trial for conspiring to kill Vallow, who was her husband at the time.
PHOENIX — A police detective who analyzed phone records for the day Charles Vallow was shot and killed said the location records do not add up with what Lori Vallow Daybell and her brother Alex Cox reported to officers that day.
Chandler, Arizona, police detective Ariel Werther said the 911 call from Cox reporting that Vallow had just been shot came in at 8:36 a.m. on July 11, 2019. Werther said Daybell arrived at her home at 8:48 a.m., after police officers had arrived, so they were surprised when Daybell said she was there when her husband was shot.
Later, the detective said consistent GPS data from Vallow's cellphone, which Daybell had with her, matched location data from Daybell's own cellphone, showing it was nowhere near her home when 911 was called.
Ultimately, Werther said all the data "led to the inescapable conclusion that either the shooting did not happen that close in time to the 911 call or that she (Daybell) wasn't there for the shooting — I could not see a third way of interpreting that data."
He did not hypothesize which of the two ways of interpreting the data matched better but said if Daybell had been present when her husband was shot, then the shooting would have occurred at least 45 minutes before Cox called 911.
Daybell is on trial in Arizona on charges she conspired with Cox to kill her husband. Tuesday was the sixth day of trial, and prosecutors have said they intend to finish presenting their evidence this week. Cox died a few months after shooting Vallow and was never charged with a crime.
In the courtroom Tuesday, Werther testified that he initially looked into the location data on the cellphones because the distances and travel time didn't make sense with Daybell's explanation of where she was that morning and what she had witnessed. He said Daybell told police she dropped Joshua "JJ" Vallow off at a school 7 miles away from her house and went to a Burger King, and that would not have fit into the 12-minute time period in which she would have been gone if she left as the 911 call was made.
Werther said location data from Vallow's cellphone showed the device arriving at Daybell's house at 7:31 a.m. and then leaving the house along with Daybell's phone at about 7:50 a.m. According to testimony on Monday, Daybell reported she left the home after one shot was fired at Vallow.
Werther said he also analyzed location data from Cox's phone and found that Cox had called Daybell twice that morning — once at 7:52 a.m. and again at 8:06 a.m.
During his investigation, the detective said he found video footage and receipts placing Daybell at a Burger King at 7:54 a.m. and at a Walgreens at 8:19 a.m. that morning, times he said were corroborated by the phone data in her car.
He also looked at location data from a second phone belonging to Daybell that showed she was with Cox at his Arizona home after they had been interviewed by police and before they were allowed to return to Daybell's home.
Werther also talked about investigating the scene of the shooting and visiting Vallow's hotel room to collect his personal items and take them to the police station, but he said that was all done as he was shadowing other officers.
During her cross-examination, Daybell, who is representing herself, focused on multiple questions about text messages and calendar information found on Vallows phone, all of which prosecutor Treena Kay objected to and Judge Justin Beresky sustained. Specifically, Daybell asked about three women Vallow had scheduled dates with on consecutive days, along with daily texts to her.
"Whether he went on dates or had dates scheduled is not relevant to this case," Beresky said.
Lori Daybell was found guilty in Idaho of the murders of her two children, 7-year-old JJ and 16-year-old Tylee Ryan, and conspiring to murder them and Chad Daybell's wife in 2023. She is serving five sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole. Her case gained attention when her two children were reported missing while she and Chad Daybell were in Hawaii in early 2020.
After this trial ends, Lori Daybell will face another trial on charges she conspired to murder Brandon Boudreaux, her niece's husband, in 2019. Boudreaux was shot at by someone — investigators believe it was Cox — in a Jeep that was found to be connected to Daybell.
