The Staged Scene, Day 4: A Door No Lab Can Tie to a Tool, and the Woman in His Messages Takes the Stand

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 4 the State brought two things into the courtroom that the jury had been hearing about since the opening statements. The first was the side door to the garage, the door an intruder would have had to come through. It was unsealed, reassembled and rolled in front of the jury box on wheels. The second was the woman in his messages. Her name is Alleigha Botner. She says she and Caleb Flynn were in a relationship for about a year and a half, and in the last hour of the day she opened a State's exhibit and began reading his messages out loud.

Six witnesses testified. Four investigators looked at that door and told the jury it did not look forced to them. An FBI toolmark examiner found marks on it consistent with a prying tool and could not tie a single one of them to any tool she tested. Then the State's motive witness took the stand, admitted she had lied to the FBI the first time they talked to her, and told the jury he wanted his wife dead "just about every day."

That is a heavy day for the prosecution, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But the question I kept coming back to on Day 4 was about the investigation itself. Where did it look hard, and where did it look lightly? Because the same witnesses who described searching the Flynn property for more than fifteen hours, again and again, also told this jury that the check on where Alleigha Botner was that night came down to three short clips from a neighbor's doorbell camera.

A door on wheels

The morning began with Detective Brad Kline of the Tipp City Police Department, who also works as a DEA task force officer. He was one of the first investigators inside the house on February 16, and the State, through prosecutor Matt Joseph, walked him to the side door.

His answer about the damage was short. Asked whether what he saw was consistent with doors he had seen broken into, he said no. Asked why, he said: "Because of where the debris was, it was all on the inside of the door frame, inside of the garage."

That is the core of the State's door evidence, and every investigator who followed him on Day 4 said a version of it. If you kick a door in from outside, the wood goes inward and the damage shows on the outside too. Here, according to these witnesses, the chips were inside and the outside was clean. Then the State had the door itself, State's Exhibits 283 and 284, unsealed and assembled in front of the jury, and the courtroom sat through several minutes of near silence while it went together.

The defense cross was short and it went to three places.

First, the door. It opens to the inside. It cannot open outward because of the frame. Kline agreed. So the only way through that door is inward, which matters when the State's point is which side of the frame the damage sits on.

Second, the neighbors. Kline had canvassed the street. The defense put it to him that nobody he spoke to, including the people who lived closest to the Flynn home, heard anything before law enforcement arrived. He agreed.

Third, the X-ray. Two days later, on February 18, investigators had asked the Ohio State Patrol's interdiction team to bring an X-ray machine to the house. "Did they ever respond?" "No."

And then an exchange I want you to notice, because it tells you something about who was steering this investigation on the first day. The defense asked who decided that Caleb Flynn, after a voluntary interview, should be brought back into the police station. Kline's answer: "Prosecutor Watkins." That is Paul M. Watkins, the prosecutor trying this case. Asked whether Watkins was also the person who ordered the arrest, Kline said he did not know. So the jury heard that the man now presenting the evidence was the one who decided, on day one, that the defendant should be brought back into the station after a voluntary interview. Prosecutors do sometimes advise police early in a homicide. It is still something a juror is entitled to weigh when the same office is the one telling them the investigation was careful and complete.

Hundreds of doors

Lieutenant Jason Moore runs the entire detective section of the Miami County Sheriff's Office and has been with that office for almost twenty-nine years. He is also a SWAT commander, and assistant prosecutor Bailey Arnett built her direct around that. Asked how many doors he has forced open in his career, he said hundreds, interior and exterior.

Did he see damage consistent with forcible entry on this door? "No, this I did not see anything that I would expect to see." Which would be what? A mark from a shoe or a boot or a knee or an elbow, a dent, damage to the jamb inside and out. "And did you see any of that damage here?" "No, not consistent with my explanation. No."

Then Moore described the searching. He estimated he and his team spent at least fifteen hours searching the property and the surrounding area. He was sent to a local gun range to ask whether there was any record of a Flynn firearm, ammunition or range time, and the range could provide no information that it had ever happened. That is what the investigation did with the defendant: search, search again, and go find the places a gun might have left a trail.

On cross the defense asked him why so many searches took place. His answer is worth hearing in his own voice, because it is candid: "If at first you don't succeed, you try and try again, right?"

I do not say that to mock him. Repeated searches are what a serious homicide investigation looks like. But hold on to that answer, because by lunch the jury had heard how much effort went into a second person, and it was a great deal less.

The task force officer and the three clips

Detective Zachary Farkas is a Dayton police officer assigned full time to the FBI's Safe Streets Task Force. He has eighteen years in law enforcement, and on direct Watkins asked him the same question the State had asked everyone. Was the damage he saw consistent with the door being kicked or forced open? "It was not." When a door is kicked in, he said, the inside of the garage looks almost like an explosion, wood chips flying.

So that is three investigators, and a fourth was coming, whose view is that the damage on that door does not look like a kick or a pry to them. I want to be careful with how that gets repeated. It is their opinion, based on their experience, about one door. No witness went further than that opinion, and it should not be repeated as if one had. The defense had already pointed out that the door only opens inward, and the State's own lab witness, as you will see in a moment, did find marks consistent with a prying tool on that frame.

Farkas was also one of the two investigators who went and found Alleigha Botner, and that is where his cross went.

Investigators had collected video from a neighbor's camera near the house where Botner said she was staying on the night of February 15 into February 16. The defense walked Farkas through exactly what was done to check that. He collected three videos. The homeowner had additional videos that he did not collect. Did he ever search the house where she was staying? They did not. Did he search the area around it? "No, we did not." Did he search Alleigha Botner's vehicle? "We did not." He did canvass for other cameras. One neighbor had a camera that he said was not recording. Another person down the street was not willing to give them video.

Put that next to Moore's fifteen hours. The Flynn home was searched repeatedly, the backyard was walked shoulder to shoulder, a gun range was visited, an X-ray machine was requested. The whereabouts of the woman the State now calls its motive witness rested, on this record, on three motion-triggered clips from somebody else's camera, with more clips left uncollected and no search of where she stayed or what she drove.

Nobody in that courtroom has suggested Alleigha Botner had anything to do with Ashley Flynn's death, and I am not suggesting it either. The point is narrower and it is about method. An investigation that tells a jury it closed every door owes that jury an honest account of which doors it tried. The defense got that account out of the State's own witness, and the jury should weigh it.

The agent, the phone and the first interview

FBI Special Agent Sarah Deamron has been with the Bureau since 2015 and worked about forty homicide investigations, active and cold. She was brought into this case in February by Captain Tony Smith of the Tipp City Police Department.

She gave the jury the fourth opinion on the door. In roughly seventy-five forced doors she has seen, was this consistent? "It wasn't consistent, in my opinion." Then she described the grid search of the backyard, investigators walking shoulder to shoulder so that nothing would be overlooked.

Then she turned to Botner. Deamron and Farkas interviewed her twice. The first time was February 20. Was she truthful? "Alleigha originally was not truthful during the initial portion of our interview." Over the course of that interview, Deamron said, Botner did describe the relationship. The second interview was February 26, with Botner's attorney present, and Deamron said she was "far more truthful at that point in time," answering questions without the agents having to circle back. The State also put in Botner's phone, which Deamron collected from her, as State's Exhibit 277.

And then Deamron gave the jury the first word on the hammer. The FBI laboratory had examined the tools collected from the house. Its paints and polymers unit found no paint on them. What it did identify, she said, was a claw hammer, the State's item 15, as "potentially the item that was used on the door to cause the markings." The State had it in front of her.

The cross took that sentence apart in about thirty seconds. The report says consistent. "That's not exclusive." She cannot say that is the hammer that damaged the door, and neither can the analyst at the FBI. "Correct." And the report does not say who operated the hammer. "No, it did not."

So by the late morning the jury had a hammer that the lab called potentially the tool, and an FBI agent who agreed she can't say that's the hammer. Both of those things are true at once and both belong in any honest account of the day.

The defense also asked her about burner phones, the prepaid phones you can buy at a Walmart or a convenience store and activate on the side. Did Botner identify a burner phone to the agents? "No." Keep that in mind for the afternoon.

What a toolmark examiner can say, and what she can't

After the mid-morning break the State called the witness who actually did the lab work. Sarah Stuchell is a physical scientist and forensic examiner in the FBI Laboratory's Firearms and Toolmarks Unit. She was declared an expert without objection, and she spent the rest of the morning, until lunch, on direct with Watkins.

She began by explaining what her discipline allows her to conclude, and this part is worth slowing down for, because everything else she said depends on it. A toolmark examiner can reach one of three conclusions. An exclusion, when the general features of the mark (the class characteristics, like size and shape) don't match the tool. An identification, when the class characteristics agree and there is enough agreement in the fine, microscopic detail (the individual characteristics) to say this tool made this mark. Or inconclusive, when the class characteristics agree but the fine detail neither agrees nor disagrees enough to decide.

And then she told the jury something that surprised me, and I think will surprise a lot of people: "It is a policy within the FBI laboratory that we do not exclude based on individual characteristics," because tools change over time through use, abuse, rust or deliberate alteration. Think about what that means. If the general shape fits, the FBI lab will not rule a tool out on the fine detail. The best a tool can do, short of a match, is inconclusive.

Then the work. She examined about twenty prying tools, about ten gripping tools and two compressing tools submitted from this case. She worked from casts of the door frame and found marks on the frame, the rubber trim and the trim consistent with a prying type tool. Compared against her test marks: inconclusive. The strike plate carried seven pry marks: inconclusive. A cast made at the scene by people outside the FBI carried five pry marks: inconclusive. A piece of wood from the frame carried a striated mark (inconclusive) and an impressed mark that had a shape but no microscopic detail at all. The doorknob was slightly compressed, which she said could come from a gripping tool or a compressing tool "such as a hammer."

Then the hammer. When she made test marks with it, she noticed the profile was consistent with the impressed mark on that piece of wood. The measurements were close, with slight differences she attributed to the material, the angle and the force. She showed the jury where that wood fit in the door frame and which way the tool moved, right to left.

Watkins then asked the question I would have asked. Are hammer claws always the same size? "They are going to be fairly consistent, hammer to hammer, yes." There are different types of hammers with different size claws, she agreed.

And her conclusion, in her own report, after technical and administrative review, with no changes: "the pattern examination between the tool marks that were present on the items and the test marks that I created, they were inconclusive."

Millions of hammers

After lunch, defense attorney L. Patrick Mulligan cross-examined her, and he did it the way you cross an honest expert: he did not fight her, he just made her say it plainly.

He went through the whole list of tools, the casts rather than the door itself, and the fact that every comparison she reported was inconclusive. Then: her analysis never covers who used any tool, correct? "That is correct. That is not something that I can determine in my examinations."

He asked about the linesman pliers. The distance between their jaws was 20.11 millimeters. How wide is the door handle? She did not measure it.

Then the hammer, and the sequence is worth reading whole. She agreed the only thing she could say was that the measurement and overall shape were consistent, because the mark on the wood had no individual characteristics to compare. There must be millions of hammers in this country, he said. "Most likely, yes." Most households have at least one. "Potentially, yes." A lot of similarities between these style of hammers. "Yes, that's correct." Any claw hammer with the same measurement would be considered consistent with that mark, she said. And the only thing that matches, potentially, is that it is similar in size to the millions of other hammers made and owned in America? "That is correct."

Last question. You, as the representative of the FBI, are certainly not saying that item 15 was the tool that made the impression on that door. On the independent audit of the audio her answer reads: "That is correct."

No redirect. The State did not try to rehabilitate her. She was excused.

Here is how I would put the whole forensic morning to you, as straight as I can. The State has four experienced investigators whose opinion is that the damage does not look like a kick or a pry from outside. It has a lab that found marks consistent with a prying tool, tied none of them to any tool, and will not exclude a tool on fine detail as a matter of policy. And it has a hammer from the garage whose shape matches one mark on one piece of wood the way any similar hammer would. The examiner is not saying it made the mark. The agent can't say it's the hammer. Nobody has said who used it, or when.

None of that means the hammer was ruled out. It wasn't, and anyone who tells you the FBI cleared it has it as wrong as anyone who tells you the FBI matched it. What it means is that the hammer is, on this record, a shape. The jury heard the word "potentially" in the morning and "similar in size to millions of others" in the afternoon, from the same laboratory. Which one they carry into deliberations is going to matter.

The woman in his messages

Then the State called Alleigha Botner.

For three court days the jury had been hearing about messages to another woman. On Day 4 she was sworn, spelled her name for the record, and became what the State needs her to be: its motive witness. She is still on direct examination as I write this. The defense has not cross-examined her.

She told the jury she met Caleb Flynn when she was twenty and he was thirty-six or thirty-seven, and that for a long time it was professional. It changed in the spring of 2024. By May of that year, she said, it was sexual, and it lasted about a year and a half. She knew he was married. He told her Ashley had cheated on him two years earlier and that he only saw her as a roommate. She did not say he ever offered her any proof of that, and there is no way to test it with Ashley.

She described meeting his mother at a Kroger, and how that was arranged. She had always wanted to meet his family, she said, "so Caleb said that we would plan like accidentally running into each other so that I could meet his mom at the store." They set it up by text. She showed up and ran into them.

Then Watkins did what a prosecutor does with a witness who has a problem: he raised it himself before the defense could. She had been interviewed by the FBI twice. Why did she lie in the first interview? "I was selfishly afraid that my reputation was going to be ruined and that I was going to lose my job. And now that there was a murder attached, I didn't want to be attached to that." Deamron had already told the jury that Botner went on to describe the relationship before that first interview ended.

And then, early in her testimony, the line that tells you where she stands now. How would she describe her feelings for him today? "I hate him." Had she ever felt differently? When they were in a relationship, she said, and she thought she was in love. Why the change? "Because I believe that he murdered his wife."

That is her belief. It is not evidence that he did, and the jury will be told so. I raise it because it matters for everything she said after it. The jury is now weighing a witness who admits she lied to federal agents to protect herself, who says she hates the defendant, and who believes he is guilty. None of that makes her wrong. All of it is what cross-examination exists for.

A hundred and seven thousand messages

They moved from iMessage to WhatsApp to GroupMe, she said, and in about a year they exchanged around 107,000 messages. Watkins did the arithmetic for the jury: almost three hundred a day. They deleted as they went.

How often did he express negative feelings about Ashley? "Just about every day." She said hating Ashley and wanting her dead was "kind of the same theme." And then she was asked who else said awful things about Ashley in those messages, and she answered honestly: "I also said awful things about Ashley." She described the names he used for his wife. I am not going to print them. You can hear them in the Part if you want to.

She told the jury he once showed her a gun in the center console of his truck, on a drive out of town. She could not describe it. "He only showed me once." Every week at least, she said, he said he wished Ashley was not in his life. At least once a month he talked about wanting Ashley to die, something to the effect that he wished he could kill her and not go to jail. She placed the first time she remembers that at the end of last year, after the couple's anniversary cruise, and said it got worse from there.

On that cruise, she said, Ashley found their messages. The State then played the jury a voice message, State's Exhibit 225, that Botner said he sent her from the ship. She identified the voice as his. In it a man apologizes, says he was wrong for going on the cruise, says he is crying in front of thousands of people, and asks to be forgiven. It ends with him telling her he hopes she has a great day.

Deleting

This part of her testimony cuts in more than one direction, and I want to lay it out carefully.

She said they deleted messages from the very start. Asked when she advised the defendant on how to delete data from his devices, she said: "Multiple times. One of them being the night before Ashley was murdered." She said he told her he did a factory reset on an iPad, and that two or three times he told her he had looked through Ashley's phone for screenshots of the messages Ashley had found.

The State then showed the jury State's Exhibit 238, screenshots of questions put to ChatGPT that she said she sent him, about permanently deleting messages and whether deleted GroupMe messages can be recovered, and later about what a spouse has to prove in a divorce, custody, no-fault divorce and Venmo records.

The State offers all of that as a man covering his tracks. The jury can take it that way. But notice whose advice it was. By her own account, the witness telling the jury about the deleting was the one advising on it, including on the night before Ashley died, and she was also the one sending the divorce questions. On that same night, as you will see, she says he was talking about a divorce. An affair both people were desperate to keep hidden explains a lot of deleting. So does the State's theory. The jury gets to decide which one this evidence fits better, and it should do that knowing the advice came from the witness.

She also said the idea of a burner phone came up between them, and that it was "his idea." The agent told the jury in the morning that Botner never identified a burner phone to investigators. Nobody on Day 4 said whether one ever existed.

Deadlines

She told the jury he gave her deadlines for leaving his wife and never met one. In January 2026 she told him it was his last chance: if he did not leave by January 11, she was done. He said he would. He didn't. They went quiet until February 14.

The State also had her read song lyrics, State's Exhibit 227, which she said he wrote to show how much he cared about her. "To me right now, they mean nothing," she said.

On February 14, she said, he told her he was filing, "I'm actually leaving her this time," and that night they talked in person. He told her he had already talked to Ashley and told her he was divorcing her.

Three clips from across the street

This is where the morning and the afternoon met.

The State showed Botner three Ring videos from a camera across the street from the house where she was staying, the same three clips Farkas had collected. The defense objected to the jury seeing them, for improper authentication. Watkins answered: "We'll authenticate with another witness, Your Honor. Just need her to identify herself in the picture." The court permitted it.

The first clip, by her reading of its timestamp, showed her leaving at about 6:54 in the evening on February 15, the night before. The second showed her pulling into the garage at 12:14 a.m. on February 16, alone. The third showed her leaving at about 9:57 that morning, alone, headed to Ashley's parents' home. She said she did not leave in between.

Two things about this, and both are about the record, not about her.

The first is a promise. The State told the court, in front of the jury, that another witness would authenticate those videos. That is a commitment, and we are going to track whether it is kept. If no witness ever lays that foundation, the jury will have seen evidence on the strength of a promise the State did not deliver, and that should matter to how the court handles it.

The second is what those clips are being asked to carry. They are the whole of the whereabouts check the jury has heard about. Farkas said in the morning that the homeowner had more video he did not collect, that nobody searched the house she was staying at or her car, and that one neighbor's camera was not recording and another neighbor would not hand over footage. Three clips can show a car coming and going. They are a thin foundation for "she never left," and the State has built nothing else under it that this jury has heard. If the investigation had pointed the same fifteen hours at her that it pointed at the Flynn property, maybe it would confirm everything she said. We don't know, because on this record it didn't.

Actions will come tomorrow

After the afternoon break came the part of Day 4 that the State has been building toward since its opening statement, and it did not land quite the way the opening suggested it would.

On the evening of February 15, she said, he told her he was going to divorce Ashley the next day. He said he would delete the app from his phone on the morning of the 16th. She asked him to protect her through the divorce because she did not want to lose her job or have the affair found out, and he said he would protect her at all costs. What did he say about February 16? "He said it'll be a day I never forget."

Then Watkins asked about the text the jury first heard about on Day 1. "Did he say actions will come tomorrow?" "Yes." "What did you understand actions tomorrow to mean?"

"A divorce."

Read that again, because it is the most important answer she gave all day and it came from the State's own witness. The person who received that message, who knew what they had been talking about that night, told this jury she understood it to mean a divorce. She said the last thing he told her was something like: good night, tomorrow's a big day. The prosecutor then asked whether she remembered him saying "I choose you" and "about to be free," and she said yes to both. In context, on her account, a man was telling the woman he was having an affair with that he was finally leaving his marriage.

The State's case is that those words meant something darker, and the jury is free to read them that way in light of everything else. But the witness it called to explain them gave the innocent meaning, under oath, on direct examination. That should not get lost in the reading that followed.

The next morning, she said, she learned of Ashley's death from a message on Instagram. "My heart started pounding," she said. "It just seemed like too much of a coincidence that the day he's divorcing her, she's just dead all of a sudden." She texted him asking whether he was involved. He did not respond. She deleted that message, she said, "because since there was a murder involved, I knew that they would probably be searching his phone, and if they saw any messages between us anywhere, the affair would be found out."

Sit with that for a second. On the morning Ashley Flynn died, before any investigator had talked to her, the State's motive witness deleted a message she had sent to the defendant, and her stated reason was to keep the affair hidden. Four days later she lied to the FBI for the same reason. The State is asking the jury to believe her now. It may well be right to. But the defense will get to ask her about that morning, and it should.

Row 1,339

Then the State handed her State's Exhibit 236, the GroupMe records, thirty-four books of them, and asked her to read.

For most of the last hour of Day 4 the jury listened to Alleigha Botner read messages, row by row, naming who sent each one and when. The rows the State chose begin at 1,339, on February 11, 2025. The first one she read that the exhibit attributes to him says: "Why can't it be you?" Then: "Why couldn't I have met you and married you and had kids with you?"

Row 1,349, the same day: "I need her to die, to cheat again, to leave." The prosecutor pointed out the date. One year to the day before Ashley died? "Yes." When the messages said "her," Watkins asked, who was that? "Ashley."

The reading went on. Row 12,973: "I want her dead and gone." Row 19,700, her message: "What can I do?" Row 19,701, the reply the exhibit attributes to him: "kill her." Row 32,138 carried the same line again, "I want her dead and gone," and at row 39,455: "I want her gone so bad."

Those are ugly words and I am not going to soften them. If the jury believes he wrote them and meant them, they are powerful evidence of how he felt about his wife. That is exactly why the State put them last.

But there are things about that reading every juror should hold onto, and none of them require you to like the man who wrote those messages.

The State chose the rows. The exhibit runs past row 39,000, out of about 107,000 messages in a year, and the jury heard dozens. It heard what the State selected, in the order the State selected it, in her voice. The defense will have its chance to put other rows in front of the jury, and until it does, what the jury has is a curated reading, not the thread.

Every word came through a witness who says she hates him and believes he killed Ashley. The rows are records, and the records can be checked. The tone, the emphasis and the pauses were hers.

And by her own testimony, "I want her gone" and "I need her to leave" sat in the same conversation as years of promises to divorce her, deadlines, an ultimatum, and "actions will come tomorrow," which she herself read as divorce. "Gone" can mean dead and it can mean gone. Row 1,349 put both in one sentence: to die, to cheat again, to leave. The State's reading of those messages is that they show a man who wanted his wife dead and then made it happen. A different reading is that they show a man in an affair saying terrible things about a marriage he kept promising to end. The jury has to decide which reading the evidence proves beyond a reasonable doubt, and wanting something, however ugly, is not the same as doing it.

His voice

The last evidence of the day was State's Exhibit 235, a flash drive with three GroupMe videos she said he sent her. They were played in open court. In one, a man's voice says he is home alone. In another, he says he loves Alleigha Botner. After each one Watkins asked her whose voice it was. "Caleb." The State is using these to tie the account behind the messages to the defendant himself, and it is the first time this jury has heard, on the State's evidence, what it says is his voice speaking to her.

Earlier in the afternoon she had also testified about matching tattoos, and said his was placed where Ashley would not see it.

What the jury has not heard yet

The court broke for the day at about 4:15 with Botner still on the stand. That matters more than the clock does. Everything the jury heard from her on Day 4 came on direct examination, from the side that called her, in the order that side chose. The defense has not asked her a single question.

Here is what I expect that cross to go after, based only on what she said on Day 4. The first interview with the FBI, and exactly what she denied. The morning of February 16, when she deleted her message to him before anyone asked her anything. The deleting advice, which by her own account came from her. The divorce: the questions she sent him about it, and her own answer that "actions will come tomorrow" meant a divorce. The rows the State did not read. And the check on her own whereabouts, which rested on three clips the State still says another witness will authenticate.

I also want to be fair to her, because she earned some of that on Day 4. She did not hide the things that hurt her credibility. She volunteered that she said awful things about Ashley too. She volunteered why she lied. She said she could not describe the gun because she only saw it once, when it would have been easy to say more. A witness who gives you the damaging answer about herself is often a witness who is trying to tell the truth. The jury will get to watch her under cross and decide.

And one thing about the messages that nobody in the courtroom said out loud but every juror should keep in mind. The State charged aggravated murder, which in Ohio means it has to prove Caleb Flynn purposely caused Ashley's death with prior calculation and design. The messages go to motive and, the State will argue, to design. They say nothing about what happened inside that house in the early hours of February 16. For that, the State has the door, and on Day 4 its own lab told the jury it could not tie the door to any tool, and could not say who used one.

Where Day 4 leaves the case

The court adjourned for the day with the State still presenting its case and its motive witness still on direct. The jury was told to be back by 8 a.m.; court goes on the record at 8:30. Alleigha Botner is expected back on the stand, and at some point the defense will stand up.

Day 4 gave the State its two strongest themes so far: a door its investigators say was not forced from outside, and a set of messages in which, the State says, the defendant wished his wife dead. It also gave the defense the cleanest material it has had in this trial. A lab that could not tie any tool to the door. A hammer that is similar in size to millions of others. A whereabouts check built on three clips. And a motive witness who lied first, advised on the deleting, and told the jury that the most ominous text in this case meant a divorce.

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 five moments that defined the day, Top Moments premieres Thursday morning. 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.