The Staged Scene, Day 3: The State Builds a Case on What Wasn't There. Who Looked?

Ashley Flynn was thirty-seven. She died in her own bed in Tipp City, Ohio, in the early hours of February 16. Her husband, Caleb Flynn, called 911 and said an intruder had shot her. Prosecutors allege the scene inside that house was staged to look like a break-in. He has pleaded not guilty, and as you read every word below, he is presumed innocent.

On Day 3 the State did two things it had not done before. In the morning it put Ashley's family on the stand: her mother, her sister, her brother-in-law and her father, the people who hugged Caleb on the porch, took in his daughters and believed him. In the afternoon it put up its scientists, one after another, the DNA people, the firearms people, the print examiner, and finally the woman who lives next door.

By the time the court rose, the shape of the State's case was clearer than it has been at any point in this trial. It is a case built on what is not there. No stranger's DNA identified. No stranger's print. No tip that panned out. Nothing on the neighbor's cameras. A trained dog that alerted to nothing. A database that returned no leads on the gun.

That is a real kind of case. Juries convict on it. But an absence is only evidence if somebody went looking, and the question I kept coming back to on Day 3 was a simple one. Who looked? Because in at least three places, the State's own witnesses told this jury that nobody on the stand could say.

The officer who took the swabs

The day opened with a warning from Judge Jeannine N. Pratt to the gallery. No outbursts. Anyone who disrupted the courtroom would be removed and could be held in contempt. "I will not tolerate it. This is a court of law." In a domestic homicide with the victim's family in the room and the defendant's family in the room, that is not a throwaway line. It sets the temperature for a day that was going to be very hard on a lot of people.

Then the State called Officer Will Roberts of the Tipp City Police Department. He is a patrol officer and an evidence technician, and on February 16, later that morning, he was the man who processed Caleb Flynn at the police station.

He described it step by step. Two cheek swabs for DNA, dried in a small cardboard box so they would not mold, sealed and logged into an evidence locker. Fingerprints and palm prints rolled with inkless ink onto cards. One print did not come out well, so he rolled it again, which is routine and he said so. Photographs of Caleb's arms, his palms and the backs of his hands. Asked what he saw in the photograph of the arms and palms, he said nothing out of the ordinary. Then he bagged Caleb's clothing.

It matters what this officer did and what he did not do. He collected. He did not test anything, compare anything or report a result. When the State handed him the sealed envelopes, he recognized his own handwriting and said the packages had since been opened by a laboratory, but he could not say which one. Anyone who tells you this witness put DNA or fingerprint evidence in front of this jury has it wrong. He is the man who took the swab. The people who tested it came later in the day.

Two days after the killing, on February 18, he was back at the house for a search. He used a pin camera, a light and a lens on a long flexible wire, and fed it into the return and supply air vents, the heating and cooling system, and under a shed outside. He said plainly what he was looking for: a firearm. The result: "Uh, came up negative." Nothing from it.

Then came the cross, and it was short and deliberate. The defense got three things.

First, Caleb Flynn volunteered all of it. His DNA, his fingerprints, his palm prints, the clothes he was wearing. He had been asked to bring a change of clothes to the station, and he did. The officer agreed.

Second, the officer did what he did that day on the detectives' instructions, not on his own judgment.

Third, this exchange:

And a moment later, he agreed that after the inkless ink he told Caleb to wash his hands.

I want to be precise about what that answer is, because it is going to get stretched. The question was whether HE was asked. He said no. That establishes that the officer who processed Caleb Flynn on the morning of the shooting was never asked to swab him for gunshot residue. It does not establish that nobody anywhere requested that test, and no witness has said that. The hand washing came after the inkless ink, which is the reason anyone washes after it, and nobody has suggested any other reason.

So why does it matter? Because this is a shooting case, and the State's method, across three court days now, has been to close every exit. The garage door damage runs the wrong way, says the crime scene agent. No stranger's DNA, says the lab. Here was an exit the State's own witness says he was never asked to approach. Gunshot residue is a weak and contested kind of evidence. It transfers, it falls off, and a negative result hours later proves very little. I am not telling you a test would have cleared him or convicted him. I am telling you the jury heard that the man doing the processing was never asked, and nobody on the stand on Day 3 said whether anyone else was.

Three in the morning

The State then called Jill Smith, Ashley's mother. She spelled her name for the record. She and her husband Todd have been married forty years. They had two daughters, Ashley and Kayla.

Asked about her relationship with Ashley, she said: "It was wonderful. We were best friends. We talked every day, encouraged each other every day." She said Ashley was an excellent daughter.

She had known Caleb for sixteen and a half years, since he started dating Ashley at college. "We liked him." The families saw each other every week and vacationed together, by her count about twenty-five times. Every October the family went to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, every year Ashley and Caleb were married except the last one. In October 2025, Caleb did not go. He said he was sick. Was that usual? "No."

She described the marriage at the end as good, then qualified it. Somewhat strained, she thought, over the last six months. "You can tell there's not a lot of peace in their home. And I couldn't pinpoint why, and I don't think she could pinpoint why." Ashley never confided in her about it. "She always wanted us to think the best of Caleb."

Then the phone.

At three in the morning on February 16 her phone rang. Her husband had left that morning for a snowmobile trip in Canada, and she thought it was him calling to say he had arrived. It was Caleb. She told the jury the call the way she remembered it: "She's gone." Who? "Ashley. She's gone." What do you mean? "Someone broke in and shot her." She said she would be right there. He told her she could not come, the police were there. She said she would be right there anyway.

She hung up, got dizzy and lay down on the cold bathroom tile. Then she called her husband, got dressed and drove over. "I pulled around the corner and I saw all the flashing lights, and then I knew it was true. And all the yellow tape."

What happened on the front porch step is the part of her testimony that will matter most, because it is the first time in this trial that Caleb Flynn's own account of that night reached this jury. It came through his mother-in-law, from memory, seven months later.

They had gone to bed and he was coughing, so Ashley asked him to sleep on the couch. He heard the dogs' collars shaking and thought one of the girls was up for water. He heard the older girl coughing, went into the girls' room, and lay down with the younger one. Then he heard a gunshot. He froze. He went to check on Ashley, shook her foot, "Ashley, baby," and she did not respond. He turned on the light, saw she had been shot, and called 911. "And that's all he told me."

She took the girls and the dogs to her house before dawn. When Caleb arrived he asked whether the girls knew. She said no. He sat between them on the couch and told them someone had broken in and hurt their mother, and that she was in heaven. I am not going to go further into what happened in that room. The victim's two daughters are children, they are not on trial, and nothing about them belongs on a page like this beyond the fact that they were there and that their family has cared for them since.

One more detail from her direct is worth holding. At the funeral planning, she told Caleb someone had been asked to sing and named him. "He just whipped really quick. He said, 'Who'd you say?'" She thought it was odd. Nobody said who that person is or why the name would matter. That is the whole of what is in evidence, and I am not going to fill the gap for you.

The defense asked her nothing. That was a choice, and I will come back to it, because the defense made the same choice three times on Day 3.

The sister who called him her brother

Kayla Keyt is Ashley's younger sister by eighteen months. She spelled her surname for the record, K-E-Y-T. The two sisters talked every day and, in her words, "just tag-teamed life." And she knew Caleb about as well as anyone. "He was family. I called him my brother."

This is where the State's motive case arrived, and it was not the affair. It was the business.

The family owns a commercial flooring and church furnishings company that has been in the family since the 1960s. Kayla is a CPA and does the books. Caleb worked there for three or four years in sales and project management. His income in 2025, she said, was around two hundred thousand dollars.

Her father planned to retire and to give the company to his two daughters as a gift, now, while he could watch them enjoy it. There was a meeting with a financial advisor in August of last year, with Caleb in the room. The advisor wanted to keep the business "in the blood," so Ashley and Kayla would be fifty-fifty owners. Afterward, Kayla built a spreadsheet of projections off five years of tax returns and showed it to both husbands. "Boys, in the future, if it continued to grow, you could make upwards of three to four hundred thousand dollars." Caleb, she remembered, was quiet. "Yes, yes, I see them." And then: "In September he asked for that spreadsheet again."

Then she told the jury what Caleb said when the family asked him what happened, after the children were in bed that first night. It was the second telling of his account on Day 3, from a second witness, to a different person in a different room. The cough. The couch, "but it wasn't in a mean way." The dogs' collars. The girls' room, where "they were both asleep," so he lay down in the younger girl's bed. "I heard a loud noise." He froze. He ran to the bedroom in the dark, grabbed Ashley's toe, "Ash, are you okay?" Then the light. "I will never forget what I saw."

The two accounts are close, and the differences are the kind two listeners remember differently seven months on. I would not build anything on them. What I would hold onto is what she said she asked herself at the time.

"We loved Caleb so much, we didn't question anything." But the sleeping in with the girls seemed odd to her; she had never heard of him doing it. "How did you not see the intruder running out of Ashley's room when you came in?" She could not make it make sense that anyone would target Ashley alone. "If this person who killed Ashley was a psychopath, why did he not just come in and shoot all of you?"

And on the Monday night, after Caleb came back from questioning, he sat down with her and her husband. "I really don't like the way the investigation is going. They're pointing at me."

That night her husband bought cameras, barred the doors of their own house, and they kept their children in their bed, because the family believed an intruder was out there and might come for them next. That belief is the thing to understand about this family. They did not start from suspicion. They started from terror on his behalf.

The cross that turned the motive over

Then the defense cross-examined her, and it was the longest and most deliberate cross of the trial so far.

Defense counsel L. Patrick Mulligan started with the business and took the State's motive and turned it on its head. Caleb was a hard worker. The three men carried their weight. And then the question: based on those numbers, would she agree there would be great financial incentive to MAINTAIN that? "Yes, sir." Significant? "Yes."

Think about what that does. The State spent the direct building a man who stood to gain from the family business. The defense got the State's own witness, a CPA, to agree that the business was the reason a man in his position would want everything to stay exactly as it was. Both sides now want the same money to mean opposite things. The jury is going to have to decide which way it cuts, and on Day 3's record nobody has yet asked the question that would settle it: what happens to Caleb's place in that business if Ashley dies?

Then the defense did something I did not expect. In its own question, it referred to "the affair that he was having." She said she had absolutely no idea. The affair is what prosecutors allege, and on Day 3 it was the defense that named it in front of the jury, on purpose, so that it would come from them first.

Counsel walked her through the FBI interview on the morning after Caleb's arrest. On that day, she did not know of any affair, and she told investigators they had arrested the wrong man. How sure? "One hundred percent. Yes. I did." Why? "Trusted Caleb with everything I had in me." She found out about the alleged affair that same morning, from the agents, and asked them two or three times whether they were sure.

That is her state of knowledge, and it is evidence of exactly one thing: what she believed and when. It is not proof that an affair happened, and it is not proof that it did not.

Then the cross turned to the victim's two daughters, who now live in her household. I am going to be careful here, because they are children and they are not on trial, and nothing they have said about that night is in evidence. Not one word.

What the defense established was about the adults. When the girls ask questions, the family's answer is "that is what we are being told." They were advised what to say, and what they say is that the police have sufficient evidence that points to their father. The family has, in her words, "all committed to saying the exact same thing." And yes, they have told the girls the police are a source of truth.

The rulings on this stretch are worth watching. The State objected when counsel first asked whether the household had told the girls their father shot their mother. Overruled. Then counsel twice asked her to say whether she believed the girls had been convinced. Sustained both times, as leading. The line the court drew is exact: what the household said and did is fact and it came in. Whether it worked on two children's minds is opinion, and it is not this witness's to give.

Why would a defense lawyer spend fifteen minutes on this with a grieving aunt? Because somebody in that courtroom expects the girls' account to become part of this trial, through their own testimony or through what they told investigators. The defense is laying the ground to argue that whatever they say was shaped by the only story they have been allowed to hear for seven months. It did not accuse her of anything. Everything she described is what a loving family does when it has to explain the unexplainable to two grieving children, and she said openly that they did not know what to say and took advice. That is why it cost her nothing to agree, and that is why it worked.

Her husband, Matthew Keyt, followed her. He and Caleb met in college, joined the same fraternity, married sisters, and worked side by side in the family business. "I thought nobody could outwork us." On the morning of the killing he went looking for Caleb just to be near him, and drove him to the police station twice. Back at the house Caleb said he was worried they were going to take him and his girls would lose their mom. Did Caleb ever say who could have done this? "I don't think he did." The defense did not cross-examine him.

Sixteen hours from home

After the morning break the State called Todd Smith, Ashley's father.

Ashley, he said, was the most encouraging person he had ever known. She was always sending him notes. God had given him two perfect daughters, and he had both of them.

He had known Caleb sixteen or seventeen years. They took mission trips together, remodeled two of the couple's houses and a lake house together. When Caleb's sales job was not going well, Todd brought him into the family company because it was only fair to both daughters. Caleb's 2025 W-2 showed one hundred ninety-five thousand dollars, and a year-end medical reimbursement put him over two hundred thousand. The plan, he said, was to gift the company to his two daughters, fifty-fifty, and Caleb knew it. Caleb's income would have grown with sales. There was also a monthly family fund the parents gave both daughters' households, to be generous and make memories. Caleb came on every family trip for years, except one: Gatlinburg in 2025. He said he was sick. He had never missed one before.

Then the night. Todd was in Quebec, having just driven about sixteen hours with two friends to go snowmobiling. They had fallen asleep around midnight when his wife called at three. He called her back to make sure he was not dreaming. Then they loaded the truck and trailer and drove home. "It's the longest ride of my life."

And on that drive, he told the jury, the story stopped making sense to him. Why would somebody break in, go through the truck, walk in there, shoot his daughter and run out? And the dogs. The two golden doodles slept in that bedroom, and when anyone pulled up to the house they went crazy. "How in the world did that happen and those dogs not go bananas?"

He said he searched online whether a Christian man could snap and shoot his wife. On one of the calls he told his wife, "This really doesn't look good on Caleb," and she said, "Don't even go there." He said he pushed it down.

When he got home that Monday evening, Caleb said, "I am sorry. I am so sorry." Did Caleb ever tell him what happened? "He did not."

Here is where I want to stop and ask a question about the process, because nobody in that courtroom did.

That is a father's opinion that his son-in-law is guilty. It is the most human testimony of the day and I believe every word of what he felt. But he was sixteen hours away. Everything he reasoned from came to him secondhand, through his wife's retelling of Caleb's account. The rules on lay opinion exist to keep exactly that kind of testimony, a witness's conclusion on the ultimate question, away from a jury, and it went in without a single objection.

I understand why. Objecting in front of a jury to a grieving father, in the middle of the story of the night his daughter was killed, can cost a defense far more than the testimony does. This defense did not cross the mother, did not cross the brother-in-law, and did not cross the father. Its posture toward this family is to let them grieve and take what it needs softly, which is what it did with the sister. That may be smart trial strategy. But it has a price. Without an objection at the time, a court reviewing this later looks only for plain error, which is a very hard standard to meet. The jury heard a father say it did not look good on Caleb, and nobody asked the court to tell them what to do with that.

The dogs, for what it is worth, are now a real question in this case. But notice where the point came from: a father's intuition about his daughter's dogs, not anyone who was in that house that night. Three court days in, no witness who was inside the Flynn home has said whether those dogs barked.

The money, and the tips

The next witness shared a surname with the family and no relation. Captain Tony Smith of the Tipp City Police Department supervises the detectives. He got the call at about 2:40 that morning, and his job in this investigation was logistics and oversight. He is the one who asked the FBI to join.

He took the jury through the money. Grand jury subpoenas went to two banks. At Ally Bank there was a joint savings account in the names of Caleb and Ashley Flynn, opened in 2016. On February 16, 2026, the balance was $84,369.29. At Citibank there were two cards, one in Ashley's name and a credit card in Caleb's name alone.

On Caleb's card, from September 2025 through January 2026, there was a small monthly charge to a service called Snoop Report. The captain explained what it does: you enter someone's Instagram account and it sends you regular reports on that account's activity, what it likes, who likes its posts, its new friends. Nobody on Day 3 said whose Instagram account was being watched. Until somebody does, it is a charge on a statement and nothing more, and I would be careful with anyone who tells you otherwise.

Then the life insurance. A policy with Banner Life on Ashley's life for $100,000. The owner was Caleb Flynn. The sole beneficiary was Caleb Flynn.

And then the tips. On Day 2, the case detective could not say whether any tip in this investigation was ever run down. On Day 3 the State put up his captain to fix that. Every morning, he said, he printed the tips from the department inbox and handed them to Detective Adam Bernard, whose job was to get them to the FBI, which had people dedicated to following them up and reported back at a daily briefing.

How many tips were substantiated? "Zero."

On cross, the defense reopened it in three questions. He did not spend a considerable amount of energy on the tips himself; he printed them and handed them on. The FBI investigated them. And he did not know how extensively, because he did not micromanage their investigation and got only occasional summaries.

So here is what is in evidence: the FBI told Tipp City that no tip was substantiated. Here is what is not: what "substantiated" meant, what was done with any tip, or who did it. The "zero" came from a witness who says he did not spend a considerable amount of energy on the tips and does not know how extensively they were worked. No FBI agent has testified to it. A juror can hear that number as "every lead was run down and died," or as "nobody on this stand knows." Both sides will argue it in closing, and each will be right about half of it.

The defense also asked about devices belonging to a third party that went missing before the investigation began, a work laptop and a phone. Neither was ever recovered. The captain passed the laptop's details to the investigative team and did not know who, if anyone, followed up. He was not part of any neighborhood canvass and not part of any search for surveillance footage.

When the State offered its bank and insurance records, the defense renewed the objection to their authenticity it made on Day 2. Overruled, on the certifications that came with the records.

A dog that found nothing

After lunch the State began what it called its next grouping of witnesses: the scientists.

First came David McMullen, a special agent with the ATF, and his explosives dog, Hilton. Explosives dogs find firearms and firearm evidence; that is most of what their searches turn up. On February 17 he was asked to search the grounds "in case anyone had fled and discarded a gun." He and Hilton worked the yards, the house exterior, a playset and a shed, the tree line between the house and a farm field "very thoroughly," the wooded walking path toward the high school road, and the field itself, looking for disturbed ground where something might be buried. Then the garage and the inside of the house, after investigators had done their own hand search. He came back the next day and did it again.

She alerted to nothing. Not outside, not inside, not either day.

He was fair about the limits. Something buried deep, wrapped, or inside a wall might give off no odor she could find. But I will say what the witness said, in full, because it needs no help from me: an ATF firearms-detection dog and her handler searched the house, the garage, the outbuildings, the wood line, the path and the field over two days and alerted to nothing. The defense did not cross-examine him.

That is now a search in the house by a detective over tens of hours on Day 2, a pin camera through the vents on the morning of Day 3, and a dog over two days, all described in evidence, all looking for a gun, and none of them found one. That is what the record says. It is not the same sentence as a claim about everything every investigator ever did, and I am not going to write that sentence.

Five scientists, one chain

Then came four scientists from Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, each of whom did one step of the lab's DNA work, before a fifth put the results together. The State called them one at a time, and that was the point. Before it gave the jury a single result, it built the chain.

Lindsay Koenig opened the sealed evidence, checked the seals, photographed it, ran a simple color-change screen for blood where it made sense, and took the samples. She walked the jury through the items as she opened them: the knob by the exterior garage door, the pickup truck's center console latch, a suspected blood stain on the master bedroom light switch that screened positive, the master bedroom door handles, the master bathroom sink handles, and the master bathroom sink drain, where she also pulled out what looked like a hair before testing.

On a short cross, the defense got two answers from her in under two minutes that it will use for the rest of this trial. Wearing gloves can act as a barrier to leaving touch DNA on something like a door handle. And there is no test that can tell how old a DNA sample is. "We cannot date when DNA was deposited on an item."

Nicole Augsback did the extraction. When she read her item numbers off her notes, the defense objected. Overruled. Jennifer Akbar measured, copied and profiled the DNA. Phillip Irion ran the known samples from Ashley and Caleb Flynn; when the State handed him the report to confirm item numbers, the defense objected that the proper steps for refreshing a witness's memory were not being followed. Overruled again. The court treated it as a scientist consulting her own lab's work rather than a memory being jogged, and I do not see an issue there worth your time.

Then Andrea Weisenburger, the scientist who compared everything and signed the report. The known samples she compared against were five people: Ashley Flynn, Caleb Flynn, Ashley's mother, and the couple's two daughters. The girls' samples were taken in July, as reference standards, which is ordinary forensic practice in a house where children live. Nothing about them is implied and nothing may be.

Here is what she found, and what each result can and cannot carry.

The knob by the exterior garage door carried Caleb Flynn's DNA, alone. That is the door area where, on Day 2, forced entry was said to have occurred. It is his own garage door, and DNA cannot be dated. The strike plate had no DNA profile at all, and the garage entry door handles had too little to compare.

The pickup's console button was a mixture. Caleb was the main contributor. The rest of the mixture was too poor to compare with anyone.

His shorts screened positive for blood, and a stain cut from inside the right pocket was his own DNA, alone. Ashley Flynn was excluded. No blood was found on his T-shirt, and there were no stains to test on the sweatshirt.

The stain on the master bedroom light switch that screened positive for blood carried Caleb's DNA alone. Ashley Flynn was excluded. That revises what a lot of people heard on Day 2, when the screen came back positive and the natural assumption was that it was hers. It is not.

And the master bathroom sink drain. It screened positive for blood, and the DNA was a mixture consistent with both Caleb and Ashley Flynn. The chance of an unrelated person also fitting it was one in 900 billion. That is the State's strongest DNA result, and it is the one it built toward. The next questions told you why. If DNA on an item was washed off with water, how would that affect it? "Water could remove DNA from an item."

The State is laying the ground for a clean-up. But look at the ceilings. "Presumptive" means a screening color test, not a confirmed test for human blood, and nobody said a confirmatory test was run. A mixture does not tell you whose DNA came from blood and whose came from skin or hair. It is a married couple's own bathroom sink, and the analyst pulled a hair out of that drain. DNA cannot be dated. And nobody has testified that anyone washed anything; the water question was a hypothetical. So what the State has, as of Day 3, is a physical fact that is consistent with a clean-up, and not one witness saying there was one.

Then the State asked the question it had been working toward all afternoon. Was there any DNA found from anyone other than Caleb Flynn or the people living in that house?

"There was no DNA found that wasn't attributed to a standard that was submitted in the case."

And on cross, the defense got the other half. "DNA can't tell time." She could never say when or how DNA got onto an item. The pocket stain was his, and Ashley was excluded, so none of her DNA has been found on the clothing that was tested. And on the truck console mixture: that does not exclude other people, correct? "Correct." There is additional data she cannot compare to anyone. "I can't say who that DNA belonged to." She has no standard for an unknown person, by definition.

Both of those answers are true at the same time, and neither one is a bombshell. You are going to see the second one turned into "unknown DNA found on the truck," and that is false. The minor data is too poor to compare with anyone: not a stranger, and not the family either. It could be a child, a grandparent, a friend who rode in the truck, or somebody else entirely. The State cannot say an intruder was not there. The defense cannot say one was. What the defense actually won is narrower and real: "no foreign DNA was found" does not mean "no one else was there."

The last point on cross was the date. The final report is dated August 14, 2026, because the reference samples from Ashley's mother and the girls only came in in July. It was her third report, and she said she was not asked to redo anything, only to add the new comparisons. Then the State told the court it was finished with DNA.

One gun, and no gun

After the afternoon break, Jared Schultz of BCI explained NIBIN, the national database of fired cartridge casings used to connect one shooting to another. The casings from this case carried the same breech-face marks and firing-pin impression, so he entered the best one. He reviewed the top thirty candidates from crime scenes around the country. No leads. His explanation of what that can mean, in general: either the firearm has not been recovered, or it has not been used in another crime that was entered into the database. The defense did not cross-examine.

Then Alex Miller, a BCI firearms examiner. Two 9mm Luger casings: fired by the same gun, the strongest conclusion she can give. The bullets, including one recovered from Ashley Flynn's elbow and a jacket fragment labeled as coming from a pillow: fired by the same gun too. She was asked to predict the make of gun from the rifling marks, and the characteristics were too generic. The database list of possible guns ran, she believed, about fifty pages.

And then the State asked her something no one had asked in three days of this trial. Did her analysis exclude a Springfield? It did not. There were Springfield options on the list, among a very large number of options. Nobody said why the question was asked. When a prosecutor names a make of gun on Day 3 without explaining why, that is a thread to hold, and I will be watching to see whether a later witness puts a Springfield anywhere near this case.

On cross, the defense made her lay it out cleanly. The casings match each other. The bullets match each other. If she had been given a gun, she would have test-fired it and compared it directly to the evidence. She could not, because no firearm was ever submitted to her lab. "That's correct." And the casings carried, in her words, "the most generic set of class characteristics." Were there several Springfield models on that fifty-page list? Yes, several.

So here is the sentence I can write in my own voice: no firearm has been submitted to the lab for comparison in this case, and every search described in evidence found none. Which gun the State says was used, and whether anyone found one anywhere else, is not in evidence.

His hands, in his own house

Vicki Bartholomew has been a BCI latent print examiner for twenty years. She explained friction ridge skin, the difference between a known print taken on purpose and a latent print left by chance, and why a person can touch something and leave nothing at all: skin too dry or too wet, gloves, pressure, a surface that is handled or wiped all the time.

She compared every usable lift from the scene against the known prints of both Caleb and Ashley Flynn. Every print she could identify was Caleb's. A palm print on the interior door frame from the hall into the garage. A palm print on a master bedroom door frame. A palm print on the side of the refrigerator. A fingerprint on the outside of the F-150's driver's door. A palm print on the minivan's hood.

This is the State's first direct forensic link between Caleb Flynn and the scene, and it was the headline of the day. The State also asked her what she would expect if a gloved hand had been placed over one of those prints. Smearing, movement, an impression over the top. She saw none.

Then the cross, which lasted under a minute and was two questions long. Can a print be dated? "No, there isn't a way to scientifically determine the age of a print." And is it expected that people leave prints on their own property? "It's obviously very common."

Both halves go together, and anyone who gives you one without the other is giving you the inaccurate version. His prints are on the door frame to the garage. He lived there. No test can say whether they went on that night or any other night. And I am not going to supply an inference the State has not argued. The State has not yet told this jury what it says those prints mean, and until it does, they are exactly what the examiner said they are: his prints, in his house, with no date on them.

Next door

The last witness of the day was Kimberly Bingaman, the Flynns' next-door neighbor of about five years. She knew the couple in passing, talked with Ashley more than Caleb, and had been inside once, dropping off Girl Scout cookies. That December she noticed a camera mounted over the Flynns' front door.

On the night Ashley died, she was home. She heard nothing and saw nothing unusual until she woke for work to police lights. Her three dogs were in the bedroom with her, two of them corgis she called "very vocal." Would they normally alert her? Yes. That night they did not. And her house had three motion-activated recording cameras, on her own front door, her garage door and her shed. They captured no activity at all that night. She showed police the footage that same day.

This is the State's best answer so far to the intruder story, and it is a strong one: the person next door, with dogs and cameras, and nothing. But it has a precise edge, and the defense found it in two questions.

First: did she know whether the Flynns' own front-door camera was plugged in or working? The State objected. Overruled, correctly, because she had just told the jury the camera was there. She thought it was hardwired. She could not say whether it worked. Which raises a question nobody on Day 3 answered: what happened to the Flynns' own camera footage? If it worked and recorded nothing, that helps the State. If it worked and nobody pulled it, that is another hole. If it never worked, it means nothing. And on Day 2 the jury heard about a second camera collected from under the television in the living room, with nothing said about what was on it. That is two cameras inside the Flynn home, and the jury still has not been told what either one recorded.

Second: when she showed police her footage, did they do any testing to see what size of object would trigger her motion detection?

"Not to my knowledge."

So what her cameras establish is that nothing triggered three motion-activated cameras on her own property, pointed at her own doors and her own shed, and nothing set off two dogs that normally bark. That is real evidence. It does not tell you whether anyone approached the Flynns' house, and it does not tell you an intruder could not have reached the side of their house without being recorded, because as far as she knows, police never tested what those cameras would or would not see.

What an absence is worth

Step back and look at what the State built on Day 3. Taken whole, the afternoon carried one message: no sign of anyone else. No stranger's DNA identified. No stranger's print identified. Zero substantiated tips. A dog that found nothing. A neighbor's cameras and dogs that stayed quiet. A national database with no leads on the gun. Put next to Day 2's crime scene agent, who told this jury the garage door damage looked like it happened with the door open, you can see the whole argument coming: nobody broke in, because nothing shows anybody broke in.

That is a legitimate way to prove a case. Circumstantial cases are proven this way all the time, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. And the State has some presences too: his DNA alone on a light switch stain that screened for blood, both spouses in a sink drain that screened for blood, followed by a question about water. A policy he owned on her life. A monitoring subscription on his card. A family trip he missed for the first time.

But a case of absences carries a burden a case of presences does not. The absence only means something if somebody went looking. A negative result means something only if the test was run. A quiet camera means something only if someone knows what it can see. A number means something only if someone on the stand can say how it was reached.

And Day 3 gave this jury three places where the State's own witnesses said, in effect, that they could not tell them who looked. The officer who processed Caleb Flynn on the morning of the shooting was never asked to swab him for gunshot residue. To the neighbor's knowledge, police never tested what her cameras would trigger on. The captain who reported "zero" substantiated tips printed them and passed them on, did not spend much energy on them himself, and does not know how extensively they were worked, and the agency that worked them has not testified.

Each of those, taken alone, is ordinary. Labs split the work. Officers follow orders. Captains delegate. That is how an investigation is supposed to run, and I spend a lot of time on this channel showing you how that process is supposed to work. But the other half of the job is asking whether it did. Across Days 2 and 3, the State's own witnesses have described collecting without analyzing, again and again: swabs taken by a man who never tested them, dozens of warrants drafted by an officer who analyzed none of what came back, three named warrants with no stated result, and a defendant processed without that officer being asked for gunshot residue. The fair question, and it is a question and not a finding, is what this jury is being asked to infer from evidence nobody has told them was examined.

The defense deserves the same scrutiny, and it will get it here. It let a father's opinion of guilt go in without an objection. It chose not to cross three members of the family. It opened the affair itself. And its best-sounding point of the afternoon, the "DNA she can't compare" on the truck console, is not what some people will say it is. It is not a stranger. It is data too weak to compare with anyone.

What should this mean for the rest of the case? It means the State has work left to do, and the jury should expect to see it. Who, if anyone, asked for gunshot residue testing? What was on the Flynns' own front-door camera, and on the one collected from under the television? Whose Instagram account was that subscription watching? What does "substantiated" mean to the FBI, and who can come in and say what was done with each tip? And the question that still has not been asked of anyone who was inside that house: did the dogs bark?

We are not here to show you only what the jury saw. We are here to show you what they should see, what they have not seen yet, and to ask what it means when it does or does not come in.

Where Day 3 leaves the case

The court adjourned a little after four. The jury was told to be back by 8 a.m. for the Day 4 session, which goes on the record at 8:30 "with further State witnesses." The State has not rested. Sixteen witnesses testified on Day 3.

The charge is aggravated murder, which in Ohio means the State has to prove Caleb Flynn purposely caused Ashley's death with prior calculation and design. Day 3 moved the identity question, but not far. The State's evidence of identity is still entirely circumstantial, and it now leans hardest on what investigators did not find. On prior calculation and design, the State has put up a business Caleb was doing well in, a $100,000 policy, a missed trip and the affair prosecutors allege. Those are the materials of a motive. What no witness has yet said is what Caleb gained by Ashley's death that he did not have with her alive, and nobody has put a planning act in front of this jury.

Caleb Flynn is presumed innocent. Nothing in this article should be read as saying the State has proven anything the jury has not yet been asked to decide.

If you want the whole day exactly as the jury heard it, the No Breaks Edition is the full court day with the recesses removed, and every Case Story Part of this trial lives on the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist.