The State Looked Everywhere and Found Nothing. The Defense Asked How Anyone Would Know.

Ashley Flynn was thirty seven years old. She coached, she taught, she was the mother of two young girls, and she died in her own bedroom in Tipp City, Ohio, in the small hours of February 16, 2026. Her husband called 911 and said a stranger had come into the house and shot her. Seven months later, on Friday, a jury in Miami County finally started hearing what the State of Ohio thinks actually happened in that house, and what Caleb Flynn's lawyers say the State cannot prove.

Caleb Flynn is charged with aggravated murder. He has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent, and nothing you read here changes that, because the only people who get to decide this are the twelve people sitting in that jury box in Troy. What I can tell you is what they heard on the first day of evidence, and what I heard underneath it.

The State spent Friday building one thing. Not the affair, not the phone records, not the door. It spent Friday building the idea that nobody was ever out there. A bloodhound brought in from a neighboring county, a second dog requested from a second county, a thermal camera in the air over the house for about an hour, and the FBI knocking on more than eighty doors looking for anyone with a doorbell camera. Nothing. Nobody. Not a track, not a heat signature, not a witness.

And the defense spent Friday answering every one of those witnesses with the same four words, dressed up differently each time.

That is the day. That is the whole day. The State says we looked everywhere and found nothing. The defense says you cannot tell this jury what you actually looked at. And the thing that makes it genuinely hard, the thing that makes this a real trial rather than a formality, is that both halves of that came out of the State's own witnesses, under oath, on the record, in front of the jury.

Where this case stood before a word was spoken

Some context, because Friday was the first day of evidence and not the first day of this case.

Caleb Flynn is charged with aggravated murder in Miami County Common Pleas Court. Aggravated murder in Ohio is the top of the homicide ladder, the charge that carries the heaviest exposure the state has. He was indicted, and then a superseding indictment followed, which is simply a second indictment that replaces the first when a grand jury returns different or additional counts. His bond was reported at two million dollars and was raised to three and a half million after that superseding indictment came down. He has been out on bond, and he walked into that courtroom Friday morning a free man wearing a suit, which is what the presumption of innocence looks like from the outside.

Judge Pratt has already handled this case through its pretrial fights. She denied a defense motion to move the trial out of Miami County, and she denied the prosecution's motion to sequester the jury. Both of those rulings shape what you are seeing now: local jurors, going home every night, in the county where this happened, with a judge who spent real time Friday morning telling them not to read about it.

The jury itself was picked on Thursday, the day before evidence started. Six men, six women, and four alternates. That is why our coverage calls Friday Day 1: it is the first day of testimony, which is the day the trial actually starts for anyone watching from outside.

And the timeline is worth holding onto. Ashley Flynn died on February 16. The trial started on September 18. Seven months. In that gap the State built the case Watkins previewed on Friday, and the defense built the list it read back.

Two explanations, and the State picks one

Judge Jeannine Pratt opened the day with the instructions every jury gets and almost nobody outside a courtroom ever hears in full. The jury alone decides who to believe. Opening statements are not evidence. One stray comment online, one search, one conversation with a neighbor about this case, and everybody in that room starts again. She spent real time on it. She should have.

Then Miami County Prosecutor Paul Watkins stood up and opened for the State, and he did not open on the scene. He opened on words.

He read the jury two messages. He told them the messages came from Caleb Flynn's own phone and were sent to a woman he was involved with. The second of the two is the one that will follow this trial around: "If I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat. That is how dark and how hateful I feel."

Now hold on, because the next thing Watkins said is the part that matters and the part that a lot of coverage is going to skip.

He said that himself. The prosecutor, in his own opening, told the jury those messages were not from that night. He put the correction inside the same breath as the accusation. That is not a small thing, and I want to be straight about why I am flagging it up front: those two lines are going to get clipped and reposted without that sentence attached, and a reader who only sees the first half walks away believing the State said Caleb Flynn wrote a murder plan hours before his wife died. The State did not say that. The State said those words go to motive and intent, and then it moved on to the night itself.

What the State said about the night itself is different, and it is separate. Watkins told the jury that in the late hours of February 15, hours before Ashley died, Caleb was messaging the same woman. "I choose you. I'm free. Actions will come tomorrow. February 16th, day I'll never forget." The State says there were more than a hundred thousand messages between the two of them in the year before Ashley's death, and that these are the ones the jury needs to sit with.

Then he laid out the physical promise of the case. There is no eyewitness. There is no recovered gun. Watkins said both of those out loud, to the jury, in his opening, before the defense ever got a chance to say it for him. And then he pivoted to the thing he says fills the gap, and he pivoted on four words.

That is the sentence this opening is going to be remembered for. The one that does the actual work came straight after it.

An app deleted. Movement on an Apple Watch. A Face ID unlock before the 911 call ever went out. And a door. The State told the jury that an FBI tool mark examiner will testify about damage on a door that was unlocked, damage the State says was made with several different tools. That is the promise. That is what the State is asking the jury to wait for.

Near the end he gave the jury the line that is going to be the spine of this prosecution for however many weeks this runs: the only evidence of an intruder is Caleb's own words, and it was the story Caleb told after the evidence had already begun to speak. Then he closed, and there was not a hedge left in it.

That is a confident opening. It is also a narrow one. He has told the jury he does not have a weapon and he does not have someone who saw it. He is betting the whole case on the idea that the story does not survive contact with the data.

The defense does not deny the affair. It concedes it in the first minute.

Judge Pratt invited L. Patrick Mulligan to open for the defense, and Mulligan handed it to his co-counsel, Emily Smith. Whoever expected a denial did not get one.

The defense opened on Ashley. It called her death a profound tragedy and said nobody in that courtroom was going to dispute it. Then it conceded the affair outright, and turned it into the first argument of the case.

I have watched a lot of these. That is a good opening. It takes the single ugliest fact the State has, the one the jury is going to be angriest about, and it hands it over before the State can wield it. Then it tells the jury that their anger is not evidence.

From there the defense did the inventory. No gun. No gunshot residue. No forensic link. No established time of death. And a line that every juror in America needs explained at least once, which the defense said plainly: motive is not an element. That means the State does not have to prove why, and the jury does not get to convict on why. The State has to prove the act. Motive is the story around the act, and a story is not proof.

The defense called the investigation plagued with errors from the start. It said the State found an affair and built backwards from it. And about a minute into the opening it laid down the line I expect to hear again in this trial's closing argument. It then said it twice more before it sat down, once in the middle of the inventory and once in the last minute, which is how a theme gets planted:

Both openings are in full in the first Part of Friday's coverage, without interruption, in the order the jury heard them.

WATCH THE FULL SEGMENTStaged Scene or Intruder? State Opens With Caleb Flynn's Texts as Defense Calls It a Theory (Pt 1)

The jury goes to the house

Before a single witness was sworn, Judge Pratt sent the jury out to see the scene for themselves. A jury view is exactly what it sounds like: the jurors physically go to the location, under the court's supervision, and look. It is not evidence in the ordinary sense. Nobody testifies. Nobody argues. They just look at the geography of the thing, because photographs flatten a house and a jury deciding whether someone could have come in through a garage needs to understand how far a garage is from a bedroom.

Caleb Flynn confirmed on the record that he would not be attending. That is his right. Court went off at 9:51 in the morning and did not come back until 11:30.

When it did come back, the State started its case with paperwork, which is almost always where a case actually starts.

The call

The State's first witness was Beth Hull, the director of the Miami County Communication Center, which is the county's 911 operation. She is a records custodian, and her job on the stand was not to tell the jury what happened. Her job was to make it legally possible for the jury to hear the recording at all.

So she walked them through it. How a call comes in. How it is captured. Where it is stored. Whether it can be altered or edited once it exists. Who can pull it, and how it gets handed to police. This is the foundation, and it is the least dramatic thing that happens in a trial and one of the most important, because without it the tape does not come in.

Then she identified the recording as State's Exhibit 1, and the court played Caleb Flynn's 911 call to a jury that had never heard it.

I am not going to transcribe that call here. It is a man in the worst minutes of his life, or it is a performance, and the entire trial is about which. What the jury heard was a report of a break in, a report that his wife had been shot, the statement that the door to the garage was wide open, and the fact that his daughters were in the house. The call was admitted into evidence. The defense asked her nothing. She stepped down.

Understand what just happened there procedurally, because it tells you something. The defense did not cross examine the 911 director. There was nothing to fight about. The tape is the tape. The defense is not going to argue the recording is fake. That tells you the defense's problem with this case is not the call, it is everything the State wants to hang off the call.

WATCH THE CLIPJury Hears the 911 Call Caleb Flynn Made From the Staged Scene

2:36 in the morning, and a camera that was not on

Sgt. Corey Rismiller of the Tipp City Police Department was the night shift supervisor and the first officer to reach that house. He got there at 2:36 a.m.

He testified that Caleb Flynn flagged him down in the street. Not at the door. In the street. And that Flynn told him there was nobody else inside.

Inside, Rismiller described a bedroom. Two spent shell casings on the floor. A towel over Ashley's head, which Flynn told him he had placed there on a dispatcher's instruction. And a side of the bed that looked to him like nobody had slept in it.

He called for a canine unit, because Tipp City's own dog was not available. He asked Troy for its drone. And he told the jury why. He took it as a burglary in progress, he said, and he was treating it as a burglary in progress, and the reason he wanted dogs he gave in his own words: "we wanted to see if we could pick up any kind of track outside to see if a suspect entered a house, where they left out, where they would have gone out."

Then the State asked him the question it clearly wanted on the record.

That is the State inoculating itself. It is getting ahead of a defense argument that the police decided Caleb Flynn was guilty in the first ten minutes and built everything afterward to fit. The first officer on scene just told the jury he did not think that at all.

Then the State sat down. In the whole of that direct it never once raised his body camera.

L. Patrick Mulligan stood up for the defense and was on the camera inside two minutes, and this is where the defense landed the first genuine blow of the trial.

Rismiller's body camera was not recording when he arrived. Not for the first stretch. Department policy says it should have been on. He told the defense the new system is supposed to switch the camera on with the light bar and that his did not, and then he gave the answer the State is going to lean on for the rest of this trial: his worry that night was the victim, the family, and looking for a shooter. Note who got that out of him. This was not prosecutors taking the hit early so the defense could not land it. The prosecution never touched the subject. The defense raised the camera, the defense got the concession, and the defense then spent the next stretch of cross walking through everything the missing footage cost.

What it cost is this. The first conversation between the first officer and Caleb Flynn, the one where Flynn described the open garage door, the one where the original state of that bedroom was first described out loud, exists nowhere except in a police officer's memory seven months later.

The State wants the jury to weigh Caleb Flynn's story against the physical record. The defense just pointed out that for the most important minutes of that night, there is no physical record. There is a man remembering.

Both the segment and the sergeant's entire testimony, direct and cross, start to finish, are up.

WATCH THE FULL SEGMENTTipp City's First Officer Admits His Body Camera Wasn't Recording the Staged Scene (Pt 2) THE WHOLE TESTIMONYThe First Officer On The Staged Scene Testifies: He Never Treated Caleb Flynn As A Suspect

Why a camera that was off matters more than it sounds

I want to spend another minute on the Rismiller body camera, because on paper it reads like a technicality and it is not one.

The State's case, as the State itself framed it in opening, is a comparison. Compare what Caleb Flynn said against what the evidence says. Watkins used that structure explicitly: his words, his conduct, and his story, set next to the physical and digital record.

A comparison needs both sides to exist. And the very first version of Caleb Flynn's story, the one he told standing in the street at 2:36 in the morning before he had time to think about anything, is the single most valuable version of it for exactly that comparison. That is the account a prosecutor most wants captured, because it is the one told under the least control.

It is not captured. The camera was not rolling. What the jury got instead is a sergeant's recollection, given seven months later, of what a man said to him in the dark.

Sgt. Rismiller struck me as a straightforward witness and I have no reason at all to think he is shading anything. That is beside the point. The defense does not have to argue he is lying. It only has to remind the jury that memory is not a recording, and that the State chose to build its case on a comparison while missing the earliest half of one side of it.

The answer he gave the defense, that a shooter and a victim mattered more to him that night than his camera did, is a human answer and I think most people would accept it. It also does not put the recording back.

The night plays back to him

After lunch the State called Officer Alexandra Giampapa, also Tipp City, second on scene. Before she said a word about that night, the State spent twenty minutes on who she is: five years with the Chicago Police Department, including its tactical unit in the 11th District, and more than a hundred homicide scenes before this one. That is deliberate. The State is building a witness the defense will have a hard time calling green.

Then she took the jury into the garage, and this is the most consequential two minutes of physical testimony the State got all day. She cleared it with a second officer. The lights were already on. And what she says she saw is this: "I almost immediately noticed that the side man door was open with the refrigerator kind of um almost as if it it had been pushed out of the way."

Her partner then pointed something else out. The center console of the pickup truck parked in that garage was standing open. She told the jury it meant very little to her at the time.

It meant more about a minute later. Back inside the house she asked Caleb Flynn whether there were firearms in the home. He answered a shotgun, a .22 and a pellet gun, and then, without being asked anything further, he added the one that was not in the house: "I have a handgun in the glove compartment of my truck." The State had told the jury in its opening that a 9mm handgun lived in that truck and is gone.

Be careful with that stretch, because it reads both ways and a careless reader will only take one of them. A side door standing open with a refrigerator shifted out of the way is what the State says an arranged scene looks like. It is also, just as easily, a refrigerator that sat against that door and got pushed aside so the door could open. The officer described what she found. She did not tell the jury which of those it was, and neither will I.

Her assignment for the rest of that night was to stay with Caleb Flynn. Her body camera was admitted as State's Exhibit 2, and the court played it.

This was the moment of the day, and everybody in the room knew it. She put its length at somewhere around twenty to twenty four minutes, cropped out of just under two hours of her own recording, and it ran a little over twenty minutes in court. The jury watched a man's own worst night played back to him while he sat at the defense table and watched it too. The courtroom camera kept cutting to him crying. His own voice filled the room. About twelve minutes in he says she's gone, and a minute after that comes the hardest stretch of it, one word six times with nothing around it: why.

That is not where it ends, and the difference matters. It runs on for roughly eight more minutes, and the last thing the jury heard on it was Caleb Flynn on the porch steps giving the intruder account over again to a different officer. He heard something. He froze. Then he ran, and the door to the garage was wide open. Asked whether he saw anybody after the gunshot, he says only that he froze.

I am going to say something uncomfortable about that, because pretending otherwise would be dishonest. That footage is the single most powerful thing either side has shown this jury so far, and both sides think it helps them. The defense wants the jury to watch a husband fall apart. The State wants the jury to watch a performance and then compare it against a phone that says he was awake. Twelve people are going to have to decide which one they saw, and there is no expert who can tell them.

On cross, Emily Smith went back to the credentials the State had spent twenty minutes building and put it to her that she had investigated more than a hundred homicides. She would not take the premise. "Not investigated." On scene for over a hundred, she said, all of them in Chicago, and none at all in her time with Tipp City. I want to note that because it is the kind of small honesty that actually matters. She was handed a flattering version of her own record and she corrected it instead of letting it stand.

The defense then took one line off that same body camera and put it back to her. On the recording, she says someone should be watching him. The defense asked whether she meant Caleb. She said yes, she was referring to the defendant.

Then she explained it, and her explanation is the whole fight in miniature: that is training. You do not leave anyone unattended at a scene. It was not suspicion.

Maybe. It is also the exact phrase the defense will read back in closing when it argues the investigation decided early. Both readings are available and the tape does not settle it.

WATCH THE CLIPCaleb Flynn Watches the Officer's Body Camera Play for the Jury From the Staged Scene

The paramedic, and the first real forensic crack

Alex Huels is a firefighter paramedic with the Tipp City Fire Department, about three years there and roughly thirteen years in the job overall. He went into that bedroom and he found no signs of life and a serious head injury, and he ended his assessment at 2:42 a.m. under what is called a non initiation of care protocol. In plain English: there are circumstances where a paramedic is permitted to determine that resuscitation would be futile and not begin it. He made that call and he told Caleb Flynn she was dead.

On cross, the defense got something out of him that I think is the most underrated moment of the entire day.

Huels described the skin as pale, but of a uniform paleness. Not the mottling he would expect to see if someone had been gone for hours. He told an officer that night that the death looked recent rather than old.

Understand why that matters. The State's theory, as it has been framed so far, depends on a timeline: Caleb Flynn was awake, doing things, and the 911 call came after. If the first medical professional on scene formed an impression that this had just happened, that is a data point the defense can hold up next to whatever the coroner eventually says. It is one paramedic's visual impression, not a scientific time of death, and the State will say exactly that. But the defense now has it on the record from a State witness, and the defense had already told the jury in its own opening that the coroner has given no time of death at all.

That is the first place in this trial where the two sides' timelines actually touched each other. It will not be the last.

A drone, a bloodhound, and what the searches could and could not say

Here is where the day found its shape.

Officer Hunter Bradburn of the Troy Police Department is an FAA Part 107 certified drone pilot. He flew a DJI Mavic 3T, which carries a thermal camera, over that scene for about an hour on a foggy February night. Thermal means it sees heat, not light, which is why you use it to look for a person in the dark.

The State asked him the only question it cared about.

The only moving heat signatures all night were rabbits and bedded deer.

Then the defense stood up and did not argue that an intruder was out there. It never has, all day. It asked him how he would know.

He could not calculate how much ground the search actually covered. The flight was bounded by the limit of his remote connectivity, not by any geographic plan, and asked what that limit actually is, he said he did not know off the top of his head. He could not say how far a person on foot could have traveled in the hour and twenty minutes the defense put to him. That figure is worth pinning down, because it is the whole point of the question. The drone left the ground at about 3:56 in the morning. The first officer pulled up at 2:36. That is eighty minutes, and it is eighty five from the 911 call. And a drone over a house does not follow a car that is already gone.

None of that is a criticism of the officer. He flew what he could fly. It is a criticism of what the State wants the jury to conclude from it.

Then came the canine handler, a deputy with the Preble County Sheriff's Office, about nine years there and three as a canine officer. His dog is a bloodhound. He explained the distinction his entire testimony turns on, and he explained it better than I could:

That night he ran a track, not a trail. No scent article. He did not know who he was looking for. He started the dog from a known entry point and worked out from there.

And then he told the jury what the dog actually did, and this is the half of this witness that gets lost when people only remember his cross. The conditions were good and he said so. There was heavy dew on the grass, which he told the jury holds scent in, and which shows prints: he could see the marks he and the dog were themselves leaving in the wet grass as they walked, and he saw no marks like that leading away from the residence.

He took the dog to the concrete pad at the west side garage door, the door the first officer had told him a suspect went in and back out of, and gave the command. The dog took the strong scent and pulled. It pulled toward the house. "He started to pull straight um and proceeded to try to enter through the west garage door." Not away from the building. Into it.

So he pulled the dog off and walked a full perimeter of the yard, the back door included, to see whether anyone had left that way. Nothing. The dog cut back to the same garage door and tried to go in again. He ran a second perimeter. Nothing again, and the dog cut back to the same door a second time. Asked what his canine's finding was, he told the jury it was a negative alert for any suspect leaving the scene.

That is the State's canine case and it is a real one. A dog in good scent conditions, started at the exact door the intruder account depends on, that would not go outward and twice tried to go in.

On cross the defense established that the dog is not always right, and that the handler could not say how many of the fifty or sixty tracks he has run came up negative. Fair. Real. That is exactly what cross examination is for.

And then the defense reached for the concession, the one that would have handed it the whole afternoon. It walked him toward agreeing that because he had searched the backyard and found nothing, that meant nobody had left that house.

He would not go.

I want to be very clear about what happened in that exchange, because it cuts against the grain of the day. A State's witness, on cross, being handed an easy way out, refused to overstate what his own search proved. He told the defense that the honest answer is that no scent was tracked, and that is all it is. He would not say nobody left, and he would not say somebody did.

He also conceded, straightforwardly, that he never checked the front of the garage doors.

That is the most credible witness the State put up on Friday, and it is precisely because he refused to help either side more than the facts allowed.

WATCH THE FULL SEGMENTFlynn's Own Body Camera Replays the Staged Scene as the Drone and K9 Searches Come Up Empty (Pt 3)

Eighty houses, and a door that closes twice and then opens

The State's last witness of the week was not another local officer. It was an FBI special agent out of the Dayton office, sixteen years in, working a safe streets task force, brought in on an urgent request from Tipp City investigators the day after Ashley Flynn died.

Nine agents worked it between February 17 and February 19. They went door to door through the neighborhood looking for doorbell cameras and home security footage, more than eighty houses, handing out business cards and coordinating with a Tipp City detective so residents could send footage in or have it pulled from their own systems. They went back out on the 19th to the houses where nobody had answered on the 17th.

Then the State asked him what those residents reported.

He got most of a sentence out. "So the only thing that was really reported out of the ordinary, uh the a couple of residents have reported..." and the defense was on its feet. Hearsay. Sustained.

Hearsay, in plain English, is an out of court statement offered to prove that what it says is true. A neighbor telling an FBI agent they saw something cannot come in through the FBI agent. The neighbor has to come in and say it, under oath, where the defense can cross examine them. That rule exists for a good reason and it applied cleanly here.

The State tried again, rephrased as a yes or no. "Did anyone report anything out of the ordinary to you?" The agent started to answer. The defense objected before he finished the sentence. Sustained again.

And then the State went a third time, and the third time is the one that matters, because the third time it got over.

The prosecutor took the question apart and rebuilt it so that it asked for nothing anyone had actually said. Without telling us what anyone told you, what did you learn about any suspicious activity in that area. No objection. The agent answered it.

What came back was thin. There was not much reported. Whatever did come in went to Tipp City, and there was follow up on it, footage reviewed with the residents or by the department, and formal interviews where the Bureau or Tipp City thought one was warranted. That is the whole of it. He was not permitted to say what any of it was, and what he was permitted to say is that there was not much.

The defense did not cross examine him at all. Not one question. It let the State's final witness of the week walk off the stand, because by that point there was nothing left to take and anything it asked risked reopening the door the judge had closed twice.

So the jury did not go home with a blank, and I would not tell you it did. It went home having heard an answer get cut off twice and then having heard the safe version of the same answer, which was that there was not much there. Which of those two a juror carries into Monday is a real question, because the one that got shut down is the one that sounded like it had something in it.

WATCH THE FULL SEGMENTFBI Agent's 80-House Canvass Near the Staged Scene Hits a Hearsay Wall Twice (Pt 4)

What Friday actually proved, and what it did not

Let me pull this together, because seven witnesses in one day can blur.

The State proved, and I mean proved in the ordinary sense of put it in front of a jury with nobody seriously contradicting it, that a substantial search for an intruder happened and produced nothing. A bloodhound worked in good scent conditions, at the door the intruder account turns on, that would not track anyone away from that house and twice tried to go back into it. A second dog was requested from a second county and came, though only the one handler testified and only his search is in evidence. A thermal drone overhead for an hour. A federal canvass of a neighborhood. There is no evidence before this jury of anyone else. Not a print, not a track, not a witness, not a camera.

The State did not prove that nobody was there. Those are different claims, and the difference is the entire defense.

Because every single one of those searches, when the defense got hold of it, turned out to have an edge the witness could not describe. The drone covered whatever it covered and the pilot cannot tell you what that was. The dog ran a track without a scent article and the handler will not say what the absence of a scent proves. The first officer's account of the most critical conversation of the night is not on tape because the camera was off. And the FBI agent who ran the canvass was stopped twice by the rules of evidence and then, on the third try, allowed to say only that there was not much to report.

That is a strong day for the State on volume and a good day for the defense on precision. If you only counted witnesses you would say the State ran the day. If you counted the moments where a juror's eyebrow probably went up, I think it is closer than that.

The thing that keeps this honest, and the reason I keep saying it, is that all of it came from the State's own witnesses. The defense has not called anybody. It has not put on a case. Everything above is what happened when prosecutors put their own officers on the stand and the defense asked them one more question.

What a staged scene claim actually has to carry

The word staged is doing enormous work in this trial, on both sides, and it is worth slowing down on what it means as a matter of proof.

To say a scene was staged is to say that someone arranged physical evidence, after the fact, to tell a story that did not happen. That is a claim about intent, and you cannot photograph intent. You get at it the long way: by showing that the arrangement does not make sense on its own terms.

That is what the State has promised. A garage door reported wide open. Damage on a door the State says was unlocked, made with several tools. Shell casings where they were. A side of a bed that did not look slept in. None of those individually says anything. The State's argument is that together they describe a break in that nobody actually broke into.

The defense's counter is not going to be that a stranger did it. Listen again to the opening and you will notice it never says that. The defense's counter is that an investigation that started from an affair will find staging in an ordinary chaotic crime scene because that is what it went looking for, and that the pieces the State calls a pattern are pieces nobody measured carefully enough to call anything.

Friday was the first test of that, and it was a preliminary one, because the searches are not the staging evidence. The staging evidence is the door and the devices, and both of those are still ahead of us.

The part nobody in that courtroom said out loud

The State has told this jury it does not have a gun and it does not have an eyewitness. It has told them it is going to prove this with devices and with a door. That is a case built on inference, and there is nothing wrong with that. Most murder cases are. Juries convict on circumstantial evidence every day in this country and they should, because a demand for a confession or a camera would let almost everyone walk.

But a case built on inference has a floor under it, and the floor is that the inference has to be the only reasonable one. That is what reasonable doubt actually means in practice. Not any doubt. Not a fanciful one. A reasonable one.

So the defense's whole strategy came into focus on Friday and it is simple: it is not going to give the jury an alternative suspect. It is going to hand the jury a list of things nobody measured, nobody recorded, and nobody can quantify, and ask whether a man goes to prison for the rest of his life on top of that.

The State's answer is going to be the devices and the door, and the jury has not seen either yet.

What Monday has to answer

Court resumes Monday morning at 8:30, sharp, in front of Judge Pratt, and the judge told the jury to be in the building and ready to go by eight. She also told them Monday starts with what she called the State's longer witnesses, which is the phrase that tells you the investigative core of this case is about to begin.

Three things I am watching for.

Whether anything at all comes of what those neighbors reported. The agent was eventually allowed to say there was not much, that what there was went to Tipp City, and that it was followed up. Nobody has told the jury what any of it was. If a resident saw or recorded something worth a juror's time, the State has to bring that resident in to say it under oath. If nobody comes, then the reading the agent himself gave is the honest one: not much was reported, and more than eighty doors produced no intruder.

The door. The State promised an FBI tool mark examiner and damage from several tools on a door that was unlocked. That is the physical heart of the staging theory. The word unlocked is doing a lot of work in that sentence and the defense knows it.

The devices. "Caleb said he was sleeping. His devices say he was awake." That is the strongest sentence in the State's opening, and it is also a promise. Phone and watch forensics are the most persuasive evidence in a modern trial when they are clean, and the most attackable when they are not.

Whoever the State calls Monday, the defense is going to ask them the same thing it asked everybody on Friday. I would bet money on it.

If you want the whole day without my voice on top of it, the No Breaks edition is the full trial day, gavel to gavel, in one sitting.

THE FULL DAY, NO BREAKSTHE STAGED SCENE Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings, the 911 Call and the First Responders

And if you want the five moments that carried the day, the Day 1 Top Moments compilation premieres Monday morning at 7:30 a.m. Eastern, an hour before the gavel. Both openings in full, the 911 call as the jury heard it, the sergeant's cross on the camera that was not recording, and the canine handler refusing the concession.

PREMIERES MONDAY 7:30 AM ETThe Staged Scene, Day 1 Top Moments: Two Competing Explanations of the Night Ashley Flynn Died

Every Part of the Case Story, in order, lives in the case playlist. That is the way to watch this trial if you want the record rather than the highlights.

The Ohio v. Caleb Flynn Case Story Trial Podcast

Ashley Flynn is the reason any of us are watching this. She is not a theory and she is not a headline, and whatever those twelve people decide, she was a real person who was alive on February 15 and was not on February 16. The system owes her an answer that can survive being looked at. That is what the next few weeks are for.

We will be there every day.