The State Picked One Text. The Defense Picked a Stack. Then the Jury Heard Caleb Flynn, Twice.

Ashley Flynn was killed in her own bed in Tipp City, Ohio, in the early hours of February 16. Her husband, Caleb Flynn, told a 911 dispatcher that someone had come into the house. Prosecutors allege he staged the scene to look like a break-in. That is the whole case, and on Friday the jury heard it from both ends: from the investigators who decided what to pull and what to show, and from Caleb Flynn himself, in his own voice, on two police recordings made the day she died.

The recordings are what everyone will talk about. They should be. But the moment I keep going back to came earlier, when an FBI agent who had pulled every message off Ashley's phone was asked about the one page of it the State chose to mark as an exhibit, and then about the stack of pages the defense brought instead. She would not vouch for the defense's pages. She agreed they were cherry picked. And then the defense turned the same word around on the State.

Caleb Flynn is charged with the aggravated murder of his wife. He has pleaded not guilty. No verdict has been returned, he is presumed innocent, and nothing in this piece should be read as anything other than what the jury heard on Friday, Day 5 of this trial, and the questions I think that testimony leaves open.

Where the Case Stood Friday Morning

Thursday belonged to Alleigha Botner, the woman prosecutors describe as the other party to an affair with Caleb Flynn, reading his messages into the record one date at a time, and then conceding on cross that some of his worst texts about his wife might not have been sincere. It ended with a digital forensics examiner from Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, Special Agent Joseph Wilhelm, halfway through a device timeline built from Caleb's phone, his Apple Watch and his AirPods.

Friday picked up exactly there, and it moved through five witnesses in one day: Wilhelm finishing his direct and taking his cross, an FBI special agent named Andrea Kinzig, a neighbor with a Ring camera, the lead pastor of the church where Caleb and Botner both led worship, and finally the Tipp City detective sergeant who ran the case. By the time court broke, the jury had watched roughly an hour of that detective interviewing Caleb Flynn.

I want to walk through the day in the order that makes it make sense, which is not quite the order it happened. Because underneath five very different witnesses there was one thread, and it is the one a jury never gets to see directly: a trial is a series of choices about what the jury is shown. Which records get pulled. Which pages get marked. How a detective frames a question, and how a lawyer frames the answer back. Friday was a day of those choices, made by both sides, and I think they deserve a hard look.

The Examiner Who Built the Timeline

Wilhelm's direct resumed with the pieces the State still needed on the record. He identified a report from Caleb's iPhone documenting a note on the phone that held the lyrics of the songs the jury had heard the day before. He told the jury an audio file with the same name as one of those recordings was played on Caleb's phone on the evening of February 15, through the AirPods, and that the AirPods' charging case was found in the nightstand of the bedroom. He told them Caleb's Apple Watch, a Series 9 named "Caleb's Apple Watch," was locked with a PIN, that no forensic tool he knew of supports an extraction from that model, and that he reviewed it by hand. What he found on it largely matched what was already in the phone's health data, down to the watch's hardware address.

Then he turned to a different phone: Alleigha Botner's. Wilhelm testified he examined it as thoroughly as he examined Caleb's. According to his analysis, her phone was first unlocked the morning of February 16 at about 7:46 AM. He walked the jury through its location data for that night as well. That morning, he said, an Instagram message sent to her asked whether she had heard what happened to Ashley, and at 8:29 AM her browser opened a news story about a woman killed in an apparent burglary at a Tipp City home. He also found screenshots of ChatGPT conversations that, in his words, appeared to be about "assisting Mr. Flynn in getting a divorce."

The last device was a laptop. Its user account was tied to Caleb's Gmail address. On it, Wilhelm found an old iPhone backup from 2023 and browsing history the State plainly wanted the jury to hear. On February 18, two days after Ashley died, someone on that laptop ran Google searches reading, in substance: do Fire Sticks have cameras, can an iPhone record video with the screen off, and if an iPhone is off and charging, could it record video. On February 19, the browser visited Botner's Instagram page. The record does not say who was sitting at the laptop. It says whose account it was, and when.

Asked at the end of his direct how accurate the timeline he had built was, Wilhelm answered in two words: "It's accurate."

"So You Just Flat Don't Know"

Defense attorney L. Patrick Mulligan left the data alone and went after what the data can tell you, and he got the State's own examiner to draw the line for him.

He started with a report Wilhelm had written about the browsing history on Caleb's phone, which said the history may have been deleted manually or the phone may have been used in private browsing mode. Which one? Wilhelm said those are the two possibilities that would create those conditions. Mulligan pressed him to just answer: you don't know which. "Yes."

Then he went to location. The phone, the watch and the AirPods were all in the Flynn house that night, and they talk to each other over Bluetooth whether anyone touches them or not. Mulligan asked him to confirm that none of those devices left the house from the evening of February 15 until police arrived. Wilhelm would not confirm it. He said he could not say whether the AirPods or the watch left the house at some point. "The data shows connections, it doesn't show location."

"So you just flat don't know."

"Correct."

From there it was one concession after another, and every one of them came in the witness's own careful words. The watch's heart rate does not tell you whether a person was awake, asleep or dreaming. He agreed. Nobody asked Apple to verify the devices were working properly; Wilhelm said he doesn't know that Apple offers such a thing, but agreed the request was never made. A "step," to a forensic examiner, means the watch moved in a way Apple's software counts as a step, and Wilhelm allowed that you could be wearing the watch and rolling over in bed and have it counted. His own report described the AirPods as "very unreliable" when it came to false positives, and he explained why: put them in your pocket or between your fists, and they will almost certainly think they are in your ear. Mulligan boiled it down to a sentence the jury will remember: so it can reliably tell you false information. And an audio source change the phone logged in the night could have happened automatically under the default settings, or a user could have triggered it from the watch. Which one? He could not say. What he could say was that it meant the AirPods were out of their case.

There was a lighter moment in the middle of it, when Wilhelm admitted he had spelled the sleep ring's brand wrong in his report and "it has kept me up at night ever since." The point Mulligan made with it was not light: that ring recorded no sleep data on those nights, and the only thing that proves is that nobody was wearing it.

Here is how I read the exchange. The State's timeline is accurate in the sense Wilhelm meant: the databases say what they say, at the times they say it. What the cross established is that the databases do not say where anyone was, whether anyone was awake, or whether a human being did any particular thing. That is a real limit, and the jury is entitled to hear the State's own expert name it. It is also not the same thing as the data being wrong. Both of those are true at once, and the jury has to hold both.

What Ashley's Phone Did, and Did Not, Say

FBI Special Agent Andrea Kinzig spelled her name for the record letter by letter, then walked the jury through a long career: the Dayton office since late 2010, years on the FBI's evidence response team, the bureau's child abduction rapid deployment team, training as a digital extraction technician. She joined the Tipp City investigation on Tuesday, February 17, the day after Ashley died. The FBI's role, she said, was to lend technical and investigative resources and oversight to the Tipp City Police Department's case, and for the first two weeks she was on scene for most of it.

Among the jobs she took on was the extraction of Ashley's iPhone, and some of what she found matters more than it sounded in the room.

She found nothing on the phone indicating Ashley was in an extramarital affair. She found nothing that appeared to show Ashley was worried about her safety. And other than messages with Caleb, she found no communications showing significant disagreements or confrontations with anyone.

The messages with Caleb were a different story. Some of them had been deleted from the phone's messaging app and survived only in a system log called the biome, which keeps a record of activity even after a message is gone. Kinzig described one exchange from around January 21: Caleb told Ashley he was at worship and would call her back later, and Ashley answered, "you can be honest, is it her?" Kinzig testified that other messages showed Ashley's frustration that Caleb had not made a reservation for their Valentine's Day dinner. And she found two searches on Ashley's phone: whether your iCloud can get hacked, and whether someone could hack into your iCloud and create a fake conversation.

The phone's movements on February 15 were ordinary. It stayed at the house until about 2:31 PM, went to a credit union and a car wash, came home around 3:24, left again around 4:28 for the Target in Huber Heights, and came back around 5:41, where it stayed. That lines up with what Caleb told the detective in the recorded interview that morning, that Ashley went to Target to return something while he stayed home.

Then the night. The screen turned on and off and changed orientation through the evening. At about 11:20 PM the phone appeared to be plugged into a charger and locked. Nothing happened on it after that until about 2:05 AM, when it restarted. A separate hardware report showed no button presses from 11:20 PM until almost noon the next day, when officers were searching the house, and the step data showed nothing between about 11 PM and 11 AM. Kinzig's explanation for the 2:05 restart was an automatic software update, which Apple typically pushes between 2 and 4 AM to a phone that is plugged in, on Wi-Fi, locked and undisturbed.

Put plainly: according to the State's extraction, Ashley's phone went on the charger at about 11:20 PM and, apart from that automatic restart, shows no activity again until officers were in the house the next day.

The Emails That Were There, and Then Were Not

This is the part of Kinzig's direct that the State built toward, and it is worth slowing down on, because there are two things you have to understand to follow it.

The first is a preservation request. When police expect to get a search warrant for an online account but worry the contents could be deleted first, they can ask the provider to freeze a copy. The provider hands nothing over. It just keeps what is there. The second is the warrant itself, which is when the provider actually produces the records.

Kinzig testified that a BCI analyst sent a preservation request to Google for Caleb's Gmail account on or around February 16. She served the search warrant herself on February 20, and Google produced the records the same day. And when she compared what Google had preserved against what Google produced, she found that email messages had been deleted from the account in between.

The deleted emails, about six of them, involved a website called Snoop Report. Kinzig explained that Snoop Report is a paid service: a user pays to have a particular Instagram account monitored, and the site emails weekly reports on that account's activity, including AI-generated analysis. The reports in Caleb's Gmail were for an Instagram account under Alleigha Botner's name. One email went the other way, from Caleb's account to Snoop Report, about a problem logging in; Kinzig dated his message to February 5 and the company's reply, saying the issue was resolved and he could log in now, to February 8. The account's login history, she said, showed two unsuccessful attempts and about five successful logins on February 17.

Watkins asked her why a suspect deletes digital evidence after a crime. "It's often to conceal information."

On cross, Mulligan walked her through the weekly reports themselves, which ran from early December 2025 into early February 2026, and pinned down what the record does not show: when any given email was deleted. On redirect, Kinzig explained how she knew they were deleted inside that window at all, by comparing Google's preserved copy against the warrant return.

So here is where it stands. The emails were in the account when it was preserved, and they were gone when Google produced it. The account was logged into on February 17. Nobody on the record said who deleted them, or on which day. The State asked the agent why people do this in general. It did not ask her whether anything connects a particular login to a particular deletion, and she did not volunteer it. Those are two different questions, and the jury has only been given an answer to the first one.

Cameras That Went Dark in January

There was one more set of records, from Amazon, about the Blink security cameras at the Flynn house. Kinzig testified the Blink account was tied to Caleb's email address and phone number and was created in October 2021. Three cameras were registered to it, labeled front door, back door and living room. All three were last updated on or around January 26, 2026, and the hub that connects them sent its last "heartbeat" to Amazon's cloud the same day. In other words, the cameras were last online about three weeks before Ashley died.

Mulligan's cross on this was short, and he framed it his own way: we do not know if that was Ashley, one of the kids, or the dogs tripping over the wire. Kinzig agreed with the part that matters. "We do not know who unplugged the devices."

A house with three cameras, none of them online since January, on the night a woman is shot in her bed, is a fact the jury will weigh. The record, as of Friday, says when they went offline and nothing about why.

A Tip the State Brought In Itself

Then prosecutor Paul Watkins did something I did not expect. On his own direct examination, he asked Agent Kinzig about a tip.

Here is what she told the jury. A man called the Tipp City Police Department and reported that a co-worker had told him a man on the co-worker's crew had been hired to kill Caleb Flynn's wife. The caller reported that the co-worker, Caleb Flynn and the man who was named all worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Kinzig said she and another agent made multiple attempts to reach the caller, and he never responded. So she went to the co-worker directly, the supposed source.

The co-worker told her that he and Caleb had both been contractors on a project rehabilitating housing owned by the base. He said he and the caller had talked about Ashley's death, about what they had heard and theories they might have had, and that he may have offered up, as a general theory, that someone on his crew could have been hired. And then, in Kinzig's account, he took it all back. He "made it very clear that he did not believe that to be true," that nobody had told him that, that he "was just offering that up like as conjecture," and that he had no reason to believe the man he mentioned had any relationship with Caleb, Ashley, their family or their home.

I am not going to print the names of the caller, the co-worker or the man he mentioned. They are private people, and the only person said to have named that man says it was conjecture. You will hear their names in the audio, because that is the record. You will not read them here.

Why would the State put this in front of the jury itself? The obvious answer is that it was coming anyway, and a prosecutor would rather the jury hear it first, from an FBI agent, with the denial attached. That is a legitimate choice. It is also a choice, and it set up the most important exchange of the afternoon.

"Nothing Happened After That"

When Mulligan got to the tip on cross, he did not argue with the denial. He asked what investigators did with it.

The caller was never reached, so Kinzig could not say where he worked. His identity, the one he gave, was known to Tipp City police, and he left a phone number. Kinzig said the tips were primarily handled by one task force officer and she picked this one up because she had a break in her own work.

Did anyone investigate the man who was named? Kinzig said that because the co-worker reported there was "absolutely no merit" to what he had said, it was not further investigated. Did anyone run a record check on him? His name, she said, "is very generic," and "we don't even know who" the right person with that name is. Did anyone try to contact him? She began her answer with what the co-worker had provided, and the questioning moved on. One further defense question about the tip drew an objection, and Judge Jeannine Pratt sustained it. Mulligan asked whether Kinzig recalled that the caller had actually called twice, and that in the later call, after speaking with the co-worker again, he said the man who was named had entered the residence through the side door. That is what the question asserted, not what any witness said: minutes earlier Kinzig had told Mulligan she did not recall whether the caller called once or twice, and the co-worker, the supposed source, had already told the FBI the whole thing was conjecture. The jury never heard the answer.

Then the exchange I have been thinking about since. Mulligan: the tip was never followed up on. Kinzig: it was followed up on, by discussing it with the co-worker. Mulligan: but a decision was made not to pursue it any further. Kinzig: yes, "made collectively by the team." Asked how long that took, she said she joined the case on the 17th and began trying to reach the caller that day, and on the 18th investigators spoke to the co-worker. Mulligan: "and nothing happened after that, correct?"

"Correct."

I want to be fair to both sides of this, because the record supports both. The man who supposedly started the rumor told a federal agent he made it up, and he had no reason to believe the man he mentioned even knew the Flynns. Investigators are allowed to close a lead when the source takes it back, and chasing workplace gossip in a murder case has a real cost. That is the State's side, and it is a reasonable one.

Here is the other side. The person who actually called the police never answered agents. The one person asked about it was the person with the most reason to say it was nothing. No record check. No attempt the jury heard about to find or speak to the man who was named. And it was done by the 18th, two days after Ashley died. By the afternoon of February 16, on the State's own recording, the case investigator was already asking Caleb about motive and arguments in his marriage. Maybe closing the tip was the right call. The question a jury gets to ask is whether it was made on the evidence, or made easier because investigators already had someone in view. The State raised this tip first, on its own direct. I think it owed the jury a better answer to Mulligan's last question than one word.

Two Slices of One Phone

The longest stretch of Kinzig's cross was about what the jury gets to see of Ashley and Caleb's marriage in their own words.

On cross, Mulligan went to the one exhibit the State had marked from Ashley's phone for this witness, Exhibit 290, a pair of routine texts from a car wash. He made the point that this was one example chosen by the State out of thousands of messages Kinzig had extracted and handed over. Then he put up the defense's own pages, lettered Exhibit C, and matched the source information on them to the source information on the State's exhibit, to argue they came from the same extraction.

The State objected on hearsay grounds. Judge Pratt overruled it, reasoning that the witness had reviewed these as records she obtained in the course of her work, and let the questioning go forward. She sustained a later objection to one page, and on another she overruled the State after Mulligan laid more foundation with the phone numbers. So the jury heard a run of February texts between husband and wife, read aloud by an FBI agent, with the agent noting more than once that the timestamps were in UTC and ran a few hours ahead of Ohio time.

They were the texts of an ordinary, tired, sick household. Caleb reporting from the pharmacy that he was picking up a steroid and an inhaler, and joking about fighting her for pillows a little longer. Ashley answering that she could handle that. "I love you." "Love you too," nineteen seconds later. Caleb apologizing for sleeping late because the cough and no sleep were catching up with him, and asking if he could go to bed at nine; Ashley telling him to do whatever would help. Caleb explaining he hadn't been more excited about a date night because he would be gone the next night and just wanted to spend time at home that night. Ashley, on February 13, asking three questions about Valentine's night: which restaurant, what he wanted her to wear, and whether they would get in the hot tub after. His answer: he was excited for the restaurant, surprise me, and yes. And Ashley to her sister on February 1, saying she felt good but Caleb did not, and if he wasn't better by tomorrow she was going to make him go to the doctor.

On redirect, the State took Exhibit C apart as a document. It is not a record the FBI keeps. Kinzig had not independently verified any of it. There is a way to print an extraction report that shows its accuracy, and that wasn't done here. It was, in the prosecutor's words, "copied haphazardly, things are cut off, right?" Yes. "Items are cherry picked. Correct?" Yes. It is not a complete record of the communications. And her confidence that any of it was accurate? "I have not validated it myself, so I can't provide any opinion on it."

Then Mulligan stood back up for one more question, and he could not resist. "As an old basketball player, I love the concept of cherry picking." Exhibit 290, he pointed out, is the only one of those thousands of messages the State decided to mark as an exhibit. Kinzig agreed, adding that it had been shown to other witnesses.

So what did the jury actually get? Two curated slices of the same phone. The State's is one routine message and a set of deleted texts it describes as frustration. The defense's is a stack of affectionate February texts nobody verified. The defense matched the source information on its pages to the State's own exhibit, but the agent would not vouch for them, and the jury heard her say so.

Here is my question, and it cuts both ways. Kinzig has the full extraction. Both sides have it. If the true shape of this marriage in February is a question the jury has to answer, and the State's motive case says it is, why is the jury getting it one hand-picked page at a time from both tables?

Three Clips From a Neighbor's Camera

After lunch, the State called Joseph Stratman, an engineer. He has Ring cameras on his house, motion-triggered, which record about a minute when they detect movement. Police reviewed the footage on his phone with him, chose three clips, and he sent them those three. Together they are State's Exhibit 237.

He read the stamps for the jury: February 16, 2026 at 12:14 AM; February 15 at 6:54 PM; and February 16 at 9:57 AM. One of them looks different from the others because he had trouble downloading it and made a screen recording instead. He testified the dates and times on his system are accurate. The defense had no questions.

Stratman did not describe, in words, what each clip shows, and I am not going to describe it for him. The State did not ask him to. What the clips mean is something it has not yet said out loud to this jury, and I want to hear both sides say it in closing.

The Pastor

Jordan Hansen is the lead pastor of Christian Life Center, the church at the center of this case. He told the jury Caleb volunteered on the worship team and was also paid as a contracted worship leader, taking the lead on the music on some weekends. Alleigha Botner was a full-time staff worship leader and was primarily the person who brought on those volunteers and contractors. Ashley, he said, came from a four-generation church family, taught kids in the church's children's ministry, and had a prominent volunteer role; her sister, Kayla Keyt, and Kayla's husband had welcomed Hansen and his wife to Dayton when they arrived from the West Coast. He described the church's standard in one line: a sexual relationship between staff and volunteers is "absolutely prohibited unless they're married," and a staff member who crossed it would likely be terminated.

He and his wife were in California for a wedding when Ashley died. Early Monday morning he got a very distressed call from Todd Smith, Ashley's father, and prayed with him. While the family was away, Botner was house-sitting, looking after their dog and cat. "We trusted her," he said, and he did not know how much she was at the house.

Then the State showed him a portion of one of Stratman's clips. He identified his own house and a white SUV pulling out of his garage. Asked whose camera it was, he said, "I believe that's my neighbor's, based on the proximity." That clip is the one stamped 9:57 AM on February 16, the next morning. Nobody on the record said who was driving, and I will not guess. Hansen has no cameras of his own. He never spoke to Caleb about what happened to Ashley, and Caleb never told him. Botner resigned; he read her resignation note after he preached the following Sunday.

The defense's short cross went around the back of the house. The home is not church property. The backyard backs up to a road, the end of the street opens onto ground with no homes, and the yard is fenced with metal bars about chest high. Is there a gate? There is, and Hansen said it faces the camera that was just shown, toward the driveway, where you cannot see it from the front yard. The defense sat down without saying why that matters, which usually means you will hear about it later.

The Detective and the Door

The last witness of the day was Detective Sergeant Mike Morgan of the Tipp City Police Department, the case investigator. Seventeen years in law enforcement, nine in Tipp City. Captain Tony Smith called him that morning, and when he arrived there were about ten officers on scene and the area was taped off. He met Caleb outside, and Caleb signed a consent form letting him walk through the house.

He stepped only a couple of feet into the master bedroom, so he would not disturb anything. He saw two shell casings on the floor and a woman lying in the bed on the north side with a head injury. There were pillows and a blanket up by the dresser. The bedroom, he said, was "very, very clean." Ashley "appeared to be asleep," in a resting position, in night clothes.

In the garage, the center console of Caleb's Ford F-150 was standing up; later, he said, investigators were told there was possibly a gun in that console. On the north wall, the side door was open with a refrigerator butted up against it at about a 45-degree angle. He saw damage on the inside of the door where the deadbolt's receiver would be, and no matching damage to the frame. Asked whether that damage was consistent with forced entry from the outside, he said no, because if the deadbolt had been latched and someone forced it, it would be "like an explosion on that door" that would break the wood apart toward the inside.

He called BCI for crime scene processing, and Special Agent David Hammond took control of the scene with another agent while Morgan got the search warrant and kept everyone out unless asked in. And in between, at about 4:28 that morning, he drove Caleb to the police station for a voluntary, recorded interview.

4:28 in the Morning

The State played it for the jury, video and audio.

Morgan starts by telling Caleb he does not have to be there, that the door is not locked and he can walk out any time. Then he asks him to walk through the weekend. Caleb describes a normal few days: the girls home sick, him leading worship at church Saturday night and Sunday morning, Ashley at Target on Sunday returning something, him walking the track at the YMCA in the evening, the girls in bed around 8:30. He tells Morgan about two things that come to mind: a man Ashley told him came to the door Saturday with a strange sales pitch and a flag, and an incident a couple of months earlier at the program where Ashley taught, when a man who was turned away said something like he knew where they all lived.

Then the night. They watched a movie in the living room until about 11, went to the bedroom, and he took an over-the-counter night-time medicine to try to knock himself out because of his cough. (In the second interview it comes out that his coughing sent him to the living room couch.) The dogs' collars woke him, he said; he thought one of the girls was up, went to their room, tucked them in, and lay down on the bottom bunk with his youngest. That is where he says he heard it. "I didn't know what to do. I froze. I was scared." He says the door to the garage was open, wide open. He heard two shots.

Morgan asks how soon after the gunshots he called 911. Caleb says three minutes, maybe five, he doesn't know, that his phone was in the living room and it was pitch black and he was trying to find it; then two or three minutes, maybe two to five. Remember that the question was about the 911 call. It matters in a minute.

Morgan asks whether he has text messages from Ashley. Caleb says he deletes texts all the time because pictures she sends take up his storage, and that she had sent him pictures that night, which he deleted. Morgan asks him to write down every gun in the house. He closes the recording at 5:02 AM.

"This Feels Like It's Pointing to Me"

Later that same day, Morgan sat down with Caleb again. The jury watched that one too.

This time Morgan does most of the talking, and I want to be careful here, because what a detective says to a person in an interview room is not evidence that it is true. Detectives are allowed to tell a subject things to see how he reacts. So when I tell you what Morgan said, read it as what Morgan said.

He tells Caleb the side door was found not latched, that there looked to be a tool mark on a bent strike plate, and that damage on the inside of the door looked like it had been blown out, which he says does not make much sense to him if the door was not latched. He tells Caleb it appears whoever did this was standing close to Ashley and that she was lying there asleep, with no sign of a struggle. He talks about motive: in his experience, when someone is killed, there is usually a reason. He tells Caleb they will get into Ashley's phone, and his, deleted messages included. And he tells Caleb a neighbor said they had heard the couple arguing.

Caleb says the last argument was Friday, over whether one of the girls should lose a sleepover. "I have no idea who would say they hear us arguing." And then: "This feels like it's pointing to me." Morgan tells him that is not what he is trying to do. Caleb: "I've never laid a hand on her. I've never screamed at her."

Then Morgan goes back to the minutes after the shots. Earlier, he says, you told me you froze for two to five minutes. Caleb corrects him: no, you asked how long before I called 911, and that was two to five minutes. When he heard the shot, he says, it surprised him and he sat there, "I don't know, five seconds," then ran to the bedroom, shook Ashley by the foot or the calf in the dark, said her name, turned on the light, and went for his phone in the living room.

That exchange is being described as two different timelines, and I understand why. But go back and look at the first interview. The question Morgan asked there was how soon after the gunshots he called 911, and "two to five minutes" was the answer to that question. The correction Caleb makes in the second interview is consistent with the question he was actually asked the first time. The jury may still find something in how he tells it. They should do that with the first question in front of them, not a detective's summary of it.

The interview ends with the gun. Caleb says his handgun, maybe a Springfield, he isn't sure, bought in South Carolina years ago, was kept in the truck's center console with some Christmas money, headphones and business cards. Only his girls and his wife knew it was there, he says, and nobody he works with.

What Monday Has to Answer

Just after 3 PM, the court told the jury there was one more video to play, a lengthy one, and that with nice weather out it was a good place to stop for the weekend. Morgan is still on the stand under direct. Court resumes Monday with the jury due at 8:30 and the record opening at 8:45. The court also told counsel it would send a draft of the proposed jury instructions over the weekend and would hold the charging conference on Monday "if we're at that point."

Read that last sentence again, because it tells you where this trial is. The State's case is closer to its end than its beginning, and the defense has not called a witness. So far, everything the defense has built, it has built on cross: an examiner who agrees his data cannot say where anyone was, an agent who agrees nobody knows who unplugged the cameras, a pastor walked around a back gate, and a stack of loving texts nobody has verified. Whether the defense puts on its own case, and what it chooses to show, is the next big choice in this courtroom.

And the State has promises to keep, too. Its theory is that the scene was staged. On Friday its own investigator told the jury the side door was not forced from the outside, and on the State's own recording the same detective told Caleb the door damage "doesn't necessarily make a whole lot of sense" to him. What the State has not yet done, in front of this jury, is explain how the pieces it has shown them, the watch, the AirPods, the deleted emails, the cameras that went dark, the door, fit together into what it says happened in that bedroom. Morgan's last video comes first. Then we will see.

Caleb Flynn has pleaded not guilty. No verdict has been returned. He is presumed innocent, and the State carries the burden of proving otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. Every Case Story Part from this trial lives on the Case Story Trial Podcast playlist on the channel, in order, if you want to walk it from the first day.