The State Rests on His Words. The Defense Rests on What Police Never Tested.

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 and shot her. Prosecutors allege he staged that scene himself. For seven days of testimony the jury has been handed pieces of that question. On Monday they got the last of them, and by the end of the day each side had written its list.

The defense's list came out of the mouth of the lead detective. No blood of Ashley's on Caleb or his clothes. No gun. No tool that matches the marks on the door. No blood spatter results. No gunshot residue test, ever. No lab results back when Caleb Flynn was arrested, and the affair that became the State's motive still a rumor on that day.

The State's list came from Caleb Flynn himself. His own account of the night, on video, in his own voice, for more than an hour. And then his own written words, read to the jury by a state analyst exactly as he typed them: "if I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat." "Trying to think of ways to kill her and not go to jail." That he was "taking actions on February 16th."

Then the State rested. The defense rested without calling a single witness. Closing arguments are Tuesday morning at 8:30.

Caleb Flynn is charged with the aggravated murder of his wife. He has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent, no verdict has been returned, and nothing in this piece is anything other than what the jury heard on Monday, Day 7 of this trial, and the questions I think that testimony leaves on the table. There are real ones, and they run in both directions.

Where the Case Stood Monday Morning

Detective Sergeant Mike Morgan of the Tipp City Police Department led this investigation, and he had been on the stand since Friday. On Friday the jury watched two of Caleb Flynn's recorded police interviews in full: the first, taken at 4:28 in the morning at the Tipp City police station, hours after Ashley died, and the second, taken later that same day. The jury had also heard from Alleigha Botner, the woman on the other end of Caleb's messages, over Days 4 and 5, and from a string of forensic witnesses who, one after another, testified to what the physical evidence could and could not show.

Monday was built to finish that. The State had one more video to play with Morgan, a third interview. Then it had one more witness, an analyst from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation who had spent months inside the phones, the Instagram returns and a messaging app called GroupMe. After her, the State planned to rest.

Before the jury came in, Judge Jeannine N. Pratt of the Miami County Common Pleas Court warned the room that the court had "some technical difficulties with volume" on the video and asked the gallery to keep the paper shuffling to a minimum "so that the jurors can properly hear how that tape unfolds." Hold on to that. It matters more than it sounds.

His Night, in His Own Hand

Morgan identified the flash drive for Miami County Prosecuting Attorney Paul M. Watkins as "The third interview with Caleb Flynn," an interview Morgan did with Chief Deputy Steve Lord of the Miami County Sheriff's Office. The camera stamp puts it at February 19, three days after Ashley died. The court let it play.

The shape of this interview is different from the first two. Morgan explained its purpose from the stand: he wanted Caleb "to draw a diagram of the residence to explain where he was at at each time" in the account he had already given. So for most of an hour the jury watched a man at a table with a pen, drawing his own house, room by room, and the detectives writing times beside each thing he said he did.

He worked in military time. Twenty thirty, the girls tucked in. Twenty thirty to eleven, a movie on in the living room while Ashley read on her phone. Eleven, to the bedroom. Around 11:45, lights out, or close to it. Then the cough. He had been coughing for two weeks, he said, and it was worst "anytime I got horizontal." Ashley rolled over, he said, and he went to the couch so she could sleep. He took a store-brand cough medicine. The dogs came with him.

At some point, he could not say when, a dog's collar woke him. Both girls had been sick, he said, so he went to their room to check on them. The younger one's blanket had slipped, so he put it back over her, and then he lay down next to her. He fell asleep there.

What woke him, he told the detectives, was shots. And here the interview slowed down, because the detectives kept coming back to the same question in different words: when you heard it, did you know what it was? Asked whether at the time he recognized the sound as gunshots, he said no. He said he knew something that loud was not normal in his home. He said he "paused" for two or three seconds and then ran from the girls' room to the hallway, "and this is when I saw this door was wide open."

Asked if he heard anything after the shots, he said this: "I think I heard the one that I paused in the girl's room, which haunts me."

It is the most human line in the interview, and I understand why the jury will remember it. A man describing the seconds he did not move. He said he could not see in the dark bedroom and had to reach for her legs to find her. He said he shut the door to the garage as he ran past it. When Morgan asked him directly, "At any point did you go check the garage?", he did not describe going out there; he said he went back into the room.

Then the gun. Asked when he last saw his own handgun, he said it lived in a holster in the secured center console of his truck. He said he did not see it that night and had last seen it within the week.

He also gave the detectives something to chase. On an earlier night, he said, Ashley had told him a man with long hair came to the front door with a little American flag, asked her to wave it for his boss, and said he would be back later. He said a video of a man doing the same thing had been going around a local parents' page. He said they had been extra careful about the doors for the previous couple of weeks, and that was why he put the refrigerator in front of the side garage door.

After the tape, Morgan summarized what Caleb had told them on the drawings (State's Exhibit 282): he froze for four to six seconds, ran across the house to the master bedroom, and within two to five minutes went to the living room for his phone and called 911.

"We Also Kind of Need to Eliminate You"

Near the end of the interview, the tone changed. This is the part I want you to watch closely if you watch any of it.

Morgan laid it out plainly. If police ever found somebody else and built a case, he told Caleb, the first thing that person's defense attorney would do is point at him. So police had to rule him out first. A minute later he said it in so many words: "we also kind of need to eliminate you." He raised a polygraph, not that day, as one of the things that "help us." He said they were not finding anything on the cameras or out on the perimeter. He asked Caleb, in so many words, whether he did it. He told him they would have to "take a good look" at him, "for the integrity" of the case. He asked him to turn off a theft protection setting on his phone so the download would go faster.

And then, near the very end, a line from the detectives that did not land as gently as the rest: "If you stay on this train, you're gonna be lost."

Here is what I want to put on the table about this tape, and it cuts both ways.

For the State, this is the defendant's account, locked in his own words and his own drawing, three days after the fact. He did not recognize the shots. He paused. He saw a door and shut it. He did not go into the garage. His gun was last seen within the week. Every one of those details is something the State can hold up against its own timeline in closing, and the defense cannot un-play it.

For the defense, this is a man who came in voluntarily for a third time, drew his house for them, and answered every question, while two detectives told him he was the one they had to rule out. Morgan agreed on cross that both earlier interviews were voluntary and that Caleb came in on his own, without being ordered to.

But there is a third question, and it belongs to the process itself. The court flagged a sound problem with this exhibit before the jury ever saw it, and much of the playback was hard to make out. Our own transcript of the courtroom feed could not recover long stretches of it. The jury has to weigh this interview, and the court asked the whole room to stay quiet so the jurors could hear a tape the court itself said had volume problems. How much of that hour could twelve people actually hear? What do they do with a passage they could not make out? Nobody asked that out loud on Monday. I think somebody should have.

The List

Before Morgan stepped down, Watkins asked him one more question: when Caleb Flynn was arrested, what evidence did police have about his affair? "We had heard rumors," Morgan said. They had not confirmed it yet. The State's exhibits from the interviews came in without objection, and Watkins sat down.

Then the court called on L. Patrick Mulligan, Caleb Flynn's lead defense lawyer, and for the next half hour he did the thing the defense has been building toward since opening statements. He walked the lead detective through the physical case one item at a time, and he got an answer on each one.

Luminol, the chemical investigators spray to find blood that has been cleaned up: did police get any results from luminol testing at the house? "No, we did not."

Blood. Mulligan put it to him that none of Ashley's blood was found on Caleb or his clothing. "No, it was not," Morgan said, and when Mulligan pointed out that English is funny that way, Morgan confirmed he was agreeing.

The drains. Mulligan asked whether BCI's tests of the drains in the house found any of Ashley's blood washed away. Morgan said he could not remember that part and the jury would have to look to BCI's reports. That one stays open.

The tools. Police seized more than 80 of them. Did any match the marks on the side garage door? Morgan said he could not answer that yes or no. The hammer earlier testimony called "consistent" with the marks? Mulligan put it to him that it was one of millions of hammers of that style in the country, and Morgan agreed. When Mulligan pushed further, that the 80-plus tools "gets us nowhere" on how those marks got on the door, Morgan disagreed. I am giving you that because it is his answer and it matters.

The gun. Without it, nobody can match anything on the door to it. "We do not have the gun," Morgan said.

Blood spatter, the pattern blood leaves when it travels from a wound onto the things around it. Did police get any results from blood spatter analysis in this case? "No, we did not."

Ashley's phone was analyzed. Mulligan put it to him that there was nothing on it that identified who killed her, and nothing showing she had a problem with anyone in the world when it came to her safety. Morgan agreed on both. Caleb's phone was analyzed too, and police found evidence of an affair on it. Was there anything on his phone that identified who committed this homicide? Morgan did not give a yes or a no. He said, "We did not use his, the evidence from his phone, no, to determine the case."

That is a long list, and you should hear it for exactly what it is. The absence of forensic proof tying Caleb Flynn to the shots is not proof that somebody else fired them. A clean pair of hands and an empty lab report do not point anywhere by themselves. But in an American courtroom, the defense does not have to prove who did it. The State has to prove that he did, beyond a reasonable doubt, and on the physical evidence the State's own lead detective agreed with the defense, line by line.

The Test Nobody Ran

The sharpest exchange of the morning was about gunshot residue, the microscopic particles a fired gun leaves on the hands and clothes of whoever is close to it. Investigators can swab a person's hands for it. In this case, nobody did.

Mulligan reminded Morgan that he had talked with Caleb, in the second interview, about getting gunshot residue evidence. Was Caleb tested for gunshot residue? "No, he was not."

Mulligan then put it to him that the reason was that after Caleb's fingerprints were taken, the department asked him to wash his hands. Morgan said, "That was not the reason why we didn't." But he agreed that "washing your hands can remove gunshot residue."

So what was the reason? Morgan said he arrived on scene at about 3:45 in the morning. Mulligan asked why, with a woman dead, two children in the house and her husband there, testing him for gunshot residue was not one of the first priorities. Here is Morgan's explanation, in full: "It was not done because we believe that with his timing that he stated he only took four to six seconds to get in the bedroom, the gunshot residue would be there present on his body, and we didn't want to rush to judgment and take him into custody that night."

Read that twice, because it is a strange sentence. The reason police did not test him for gunshot residue was that they expected the test to come back positive, and they did not want to rush to judgment. Mulligan asked the obvious follow-up: Caleb was talking to police voluntarily and was willing to cooperate, so why not simply ask him if he would let them swab his hands? That has nothing to do with arresting anybody at three in the morning. Morgan went back to the same answer. He said he discussed it with a BCI agent, and was told his thinking was correct, that residue would be present on Caleb.

Then the rest of it. Gunshot residue can literally be shaken off, Morgan agreed. The carpet in the living room was never tested for it either. "There was never a gunshot residue test done in this particular case, correct?" "Correct."

I want to be fair to Morgan here, because there is a real argument on his side. A gunshot residue result is not the clean answer television makes it out to be. A husband who ran to his wife's body seconds after the shots, as Caleb described it, could carry residue for reasons that prove nothing. Morgan's point seems to be that a positive test would not have told them much. That is a defensible view.

But it is not the view he gave. He did not say the test would be meaningless. He said they expected it to be there. And the one test that might have spoken to that question in either direction was never run, on a morning when the man was sitting with police, cooperating, with his hands available to be swabbed. If you are a juror trying to decide whether the investigation followed the evidence or decided early where the evidence was going to lead, this is the exchange you replay.

The Arrest Came First

Mulligan then went at the size of the thing. Who decided to call in BCI? Morgan did. The FBI? Captain Tony Smith of the Tipp City Police, after discussing it with Morgan. The Miami County Sheriff's Office and the Troy police? Captain Smith and Morgan together. Why did a case in Tipp City need seven or eight law enforcement agencies? "Because if something like this happened to my family, I would want the best of the best." Did he feel his own department could not handle it? "Absolutely not."

Then the timing. At the point of the arrest, how many reports had police received back from any of the labs? "I don't believe we had any back at that point." They were still investigating, he agreed. The affair was still only rumors, he agreed. Police did not have the download of Caleb's phone yet. They had not interviewed Alleigha Botner. They had not even identified her yet.

Morgan agreed that at the end of that third interview, on February 19, Caleb was told he was free to leave the room, and he walked out to the parking lot.

Then Mulligan asked the question the whole cross had been walking toward. Was it Morgan's intention to receive lab results before making an arrest? "No, it was not."

Who ordered the arrest? "We worked as a team, and it was a team approach, and we all discussed the evidence that we had currently at that time, and at that moment, Prosecutor Watkins, along with the team, executed the arrest." Was Watkins the one who told Morgan and Chief Deputy Lord to make it? "He was the final say." And Watkins did not have any of the lab results either? "No, he did not."

And the last question on it. When the lab reports all came back without identifying a shooter, did any of those agencies reassess and start looking at the other leads coming in? "We felt that we had enough information and the investigation was in the right direction."

Let me explain the law here, because the defense's framing can make this sound like more than it is. Police do not need lab results to arrest someone. They need probable cause, which means enough facts to lead a reasonable person to believe a crime was committed and that this person committed it. That is a much lower bar than proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and investigators make arrests before forensic results come back all the time. Nothing Morgan said Monday suggests the arrest was illegal.

But legal is not the question the jury is being asked, and it is not the question I am asking. The defense's theory of this whole case is tunnel vision: that police settled on the husband early and then read everything that came after as confirming it. On Monday the lead detective gave that theory its best facts. By his account, the arrest came before a single lab report. The affair that became the State's motive was a rumor. The woman at the center of it had not been identified. The prosecutor, not the detectives, had the final say. And when the labs came back without a shooter, nobody changed course, because they already had "enough information."

The State will answer that the investigation was right, and it will point to everything that came in after the arrest, which is exactly where the afternoon went. But ask yourself the question the defense wants the jury asking: if the lab had come back and pointed somewhere else, would anyone have looked? On Monday's record, we do not know, because it did not happen. What we know is what the lead detective said about the reports that did come back. They did not change anything.

The Leads

The last stretch of the cross was a list of things nobody did.

The refrigerator Caleb said he pushed in front of the side garage door. It has been part of this case since the first day, because the State's theory has to account for how an intruder could have come through a door with a refrigerator against it, and the defense's theory has to account for it too. Did anyone weigh that refrigerator? "No, we did not." Did Morgan try to move it himself? "No, I did not."

Flock cameras, the automated license plate readers many Ohio towns now run. Did Morgan examine the ones in the area? "I did not." Around the home of Pastor Jordan Hansen, a Day 6 witness? He was not aware that was done. The big field behind the pastor's house? He did not recall anyone checking it.

The man with the flag at the Flynns' door the night before? The FBI followed up on that, Morgan said. A threat Mulligan said had been reported at the place Ashley taught, serious enough to close an activity for the day? Morgan said that was what Caleb had stated, and he did not recall any follow-through with that person.

A tip that came into Tipp City police from an employee of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. An officer took the call and wrote a report. Morgan said the FBI and Detective Adam Bernard handled that follow-up and he was not involved. Did Morgan, the lead detective, review that officer's report? "I did not." Did it concern him, as lead detective, that the FBI never identified the caller, an employee of an Air Force base where everybody who goes through the gate needs an ID? "No, it did not."

On redirect, Watkins brought out that the project in question was off the base, not on it, and that in Morgan's experience the FBI is "very thorough," with no reason to think it was not thorough here. On recross, Mulligan got one more line: even on that off-base project, Caleb had a base ID. Morgan agreed. He stepped down, and the court took its morning break.

Here is my honest read of all of that. None of those leads, standing alone, is evidence that somebody else killed Ashley Flynn. Some of them may have been nothing. A refrigerator's weight, a camera nobody pulled, a report the lead detective never read: each one has an ordinary explanation. But a jury is allowed to look at them together and ask whether the investigation ran down the alternatives with the same energy it spent building the case against the husband. That is what reasonable doubt can be made of. The State has one more day to show the jury why none of it matters.

The State's Last Witness

After the break, the State called Samantha Reeb. The courtroom managed to say her name three different ways in about half a minute, so she settled it herself: "Reeb is R E E, B as in Boy." She is a criminal intelligence analyst with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, about twelve years in its Criminal Intelligence Unit, well over a hundred cases, most of them homicides. She was assigned to this one the evening Ashley died, when Tipp City police asked BCI to send preservation requests, the letters that tell phone and social media companies to hold on to a person's records before they can be deleted. A week later she was working the case full time.

She did not extract any phones herself. BCI Special Agent Joseph Wilhelm and FBI Special Agent Andrea Kinzig did that and handed her the extractions. The Instagram returns came to her from Tipp City police. She loaded everything into a program called PLX, which lets an analyst put records from different companies into one database, search them, and tag what matters. She told the jury it "doesn't alter the data" beyond adjusting the time zone. She said her work was peer reviewed.

Then Watkins asked her how the court visuals she prepared reflect her opinions about guilt or innocence. "They do not reflect any of my opinions, just the data."

I want you to remember that sentence, because by the end of the day the defense would ask the jury to hold her to it.

She started with a map. State's Exhibit 240 was a neighborhood canvass: every house around the Flynn home, color coded from police and FBI reports. Orange for houses that had cameras but no footage of value. Red for houses with no cameras. Black for vacant homes. It was a picture of what the canvass did not find.

An Account Called "Derek Hammett"

Then State's Exhibit 241, her report on Instagram returns for Ashley's account, Caleb's account, Alleigha Botner's account, and one more: an account under the name "Derek Hammett."

I am going to report this part carefully, because it is the kind of evidence that sounds bigger on first hearing than what the witness actually said.

Reeb testified that the "Derek Hammett" account was registered November 5, 2025, and last logged into on November 16, 2025. It messaged Alleigha Botner on November 5 and again on November 7. How did she respond? "She did not respond."

The account's photos came from someone else's public Instagram, a real person's account that Caleb Flynn's own profile followed. And Reeb found those same images in the extraction of Caleb's phone. "So the day a picture was posted, that time is the same time that that image was saved in Caleb's phone."

She testified that the IP address used when the account was created came back, through a subpoena to Spectrum, to the home of Ashley's parents, Todd and Jill Smith, which is also where their business is run. And she testified the account was created on an iPhone that also accessed Caleb's, Ashley's and Alleigha Botner's Instagram accounts, although, in her words, "I can't say exactly what device it was created on."

She also testified about who had been logging into Ashley's Instagram. Ashley's phone was an iPhone model reported as 15.2 and last accessed her account on February 15. A device reported as an iPhone 17.2, the same model as Caleb's phone, last accessed and logged out of Ashley's account on February 13 at 1:41 in the morning. What did that tell her about who accessed it? "I can't say for sure who accessed it." The most she would say is that it was consistent with the same device model as Caleb's. She also testified that Caleb's own Instagram account had Ashley's account blocked.

Now here is what that testimony does not say. Reeb did not say who created the "Derek Hammett" account. She did not say who ran it. She tried to identify the person in its photos through her databases and a reverse image search and could not identify anyone as "Derek Hammett." The IP address points to a household's internet connection, not to a person. And the account's messages to Alleigha Botner went unanswered. The State is plainly asking the jury to connect the saved images on Caleb's phone to the account. The analyst herself did not make that connection out loud, and I am not going to make it for her.

107,000 Messages

Then State's Exhibit 242, the GroupMe report. GroupMe is a messaging app. Reeb said Caleb and Alleigha moved their conversation there in February 2025 after using other platforms, and the return on Caleb's account ran from February 2025 until the messages stopped on the morning of February 16, 2026. Her report on it is 111 pages long, finalized on August 14 of this year. The return behind it held about 107,000 messages.

She walked the jury through the arc. Watkins asked whether she found videos of Caleb walking around his home yelling things like "I love Alleigha," and she said yes, and that her report links three of them. She charted the messages by month to show how the relationship rose and fell. In August 2025, Caleb and Ashley went on an anniversary cruise, and it caused, in Reeb's words, "a lot of conflict" with Alleigha. Caleb told Alleigha he was going on a 40-day fast "to seek guidance from the Lord" about whether and how to leave his wife. He then said he believed he had received word that he could leave. He said he would leave in October. He did not. He said November. He did not. Alleigha asked him to leave before Christmas. He did not. On January 3, she gave him one week. On January 11, she told him he had missed it, and she stopped talking to him.

Then the groupings, and this is where the case turned in the morning. Reeb had sorted messages into sections. There were 109 messages about key events. Then 141 messages, in her words, where Caleb "references wanting to kill Ashley or wanting to get rid of her or make her disappear, things like that." Then 95 where he says he hates her. Then a section on the two of them worrying about a divorce. Then a September 2, 2025 conversation about deleting data.

Then the final days. The two had stopped talking around January 11. On February 14 they started again, and the report carries every message from that restart through the morning of February 16. On the evening of February 15, she testified, Caleb sent Alleigha an image of an iPad, and the discussion was that he would give her access to his iMessages on it so she could see all of his messages going forward. He sent her images through the evening, one at 9:38 p.m. letting her know he was in his office. And the report puts the GroupMe app's removal from Caleb's iPhone at 1:01 a.m. on February 16, and Instagram's at 1:02.

That is roughly an hour and a half before the 911 call. The State will lean on that timing. The defense can answer that removing an app from a phone did not make the messages disappear, which is why the State had all 107,000 of them to work from, and that the two of them had talked about deleting data months before that night.

The court broke for lunch with Reeb still on direct.

His Words, Read as Written

After lunch the State put Saturday, February 15 on a map.

First, one image from Alleigha Botner's phone (State's Exhibit 293): a screenshot of a lost-item claim on an airline's website, taken January 29, 2026, just after searches on her phone for the Tampa airport and the airline. The State did not connect it to anything on the record Monday. Keep it in mind for the cross.

Then a message Caleb sent Alleigha at 4:13 p.m. on February 15. Reeb read it: "I went to lunch on my own, practiced what I would say, went to their house and no one was there. Stayed a little while and nothing." And then: "I'm not chickening out or making excuses. I told you straight up I do it today or Monday."

Reeb had mapped 5,162 location points Special Agent Wilhelm pulled from Caleb's phone that day. The phone was at Christian Life Center from about 7:30 in the morning until about 12:20. It went to a Kroger around 12:37, left around 12:42, and was back home by 12:51, where it stayed until the message at 4:13. The map marked the Smith home, Ashley's parents' house. How many data points were in the area of the Smith residence in that time? "There's no location data in the area of the Smith residence."

The State did not tell the jury on Monday whose house "their house" was in that message. It left the map beside the words and let them sit together. That will come back in closing.

Then State's Exhibit 239, a series of timelines. The first was the night as Caleb told it to police, which by now the jury has heard four ways: the movie, the couch, the cough medicine, waking to the dog, praying over his daughters and falling asleep in their room, waking to gunshots, freezing, seeing the door to the garage open and shutting it, reaching for Ashley, the light, and the 911 call at about 2:30, two to five minutes, he said, after the shots.

The second timeline is the one the jury will carry into the deliberation room. Reeb said it was built "from all of the different pieces of evidence that we had in this case," and it ran from the Flynns buying their home in 2021 through the morning Ashley died. It had the relationship with Alleigha beginning in March 2024. Ashley discovering messages on an iPad in October 2024. Caleb telling her he had been hacked. And then, read aloud to the jury exactly as written, the words that everything else Monday has to be measured against.

Between February and June 2025, in one message: "if I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat."

On August 22, 2025, a message about being up until four in the morning the night before, crying "and literally trying to think of ways to kill her and not go to jail."

I am printing those lines as they were read in open court because that is what this jury heard, and they are the heart of the State's case. The defense's cross on Monday never went after the words themselves.

The timeline kept going. On September 2, 2025, Alleigha talked Caleb through deleting his WhatsApp, iCloud and Instagram data. In January 2026, the hub that connected the Blink cameras at the Flynn home went offline. On February 14, Ashley searched for a Bible verse about "God restoring what was lost." In the messages that weekend, Caleb told Alleigha he was "becoming free in a way that protects them." And Reeb read the line the State built the whole exhibit toward: Caleb "tells Alleigha that he knows she needs actions instead of words and that he's taking actions on February 16th."

Then the overnight log, minute by minute. Ashley's phone plugged in and locked at 11:20 p.m. Caleb's phone still active. His last outgoing message to Alleigha at 12:45 a.m. GroupMe and Instagram removed at 1:01 and 1:02. His phone plugged in at 1:06 and locked at 1:07. His Apple Watch logging steps at 1:19, 1:22 and 1:23, and more between 1:52 and 1:56. His AirPods connecting at 2:17. His watch logging 105 steps between 2:18 and 2:28. His phone's audio switching between the AirPods and the speaker eight times between 2:23 and 2:30. And at 2:30, the phone unlocked and 911 called.

The State moved in its exhibits and passed the witness. As a piece of prosecution, it was the strongest stretch of this trial. What the State calls motive and intent, in his own words. A date, in his own words. And a phone and a watch that were awake and moving in the hour before the call. The State will set that log against his account of falling asleep beside his daughter. The defense will point out that he never told police what time the dog woke him.

What She Chose

The cross was conducted by a woman on the defense team who was not named on the record. She did not try to make the messages go away. She could not. What she went after was the one thing Reeb controlled: which pieces the jury got to see.

She started with Ashley's phone, and with Ashley's own words, through Defense Exhibit D, a set of notes saved on Ashley's iPhone that Reeb herself had pulled. A to-do list from August 2025, with "coffee with Alleigha" on it. Was there a check mark next to it? "There is not." A note from December 2025 listing things to do that year, ending with "get on the same page with Caleb." And a note from September 2023: "now I would say our marriage is struggling. Zero intimacy, respect, fondness, appreciation, nothing. We really need Jesus to intervene."

Were those in her timeline? "I think at least maybe one was, but some of it was redacted."

Then Defense Exhibit E, images saved on Ashley's phone. A screenshot of texts Ashley had sent: "I just feel overwhelmed, don't know what to think, I can't read you and just don't know." The screenshot was taken January 25, 2026, but that is not when the conversation happened, and Reeb agreed: "I would have no way of knowing exactly when that conversation would have taken place." A screenshot from February 2, 2026 that Reeb said looked "digitally drawn on." Were those images in her timeline? "I don't think so." Why not? "I'm not sure."

Then the defense turned to the GroupMe report itself. How did she decide what to include? She said she pulled everything from February 14 and 15 first, then keyword searched for anything about Caleb hating his wife, wanting her dead or planning a murder, and then went back and read all of the messages to make sure she had what was relevant. "And these are only 719 messages out of 107,000." "Yes."

The defense showed her a page in the "hating Ashley" section where the messages jumped from September 30 to October 3 to October 8 to November 3 and November 11. They were texting far more often than that, she agreed. The conversation around each message was not in that section, she agreed. The defense called it cherry picked. Reeb's answer: "Those were only the messages where Caleb says that he hates his wife."

Then the highlighting. In the section where she did include longer stretches of conversation, one message in each stretch is highlighted, the one about wanting Ashley dead or gone. Was that highlighting done by the keyword search? "That was done by me manually." And those conversations are between both of them. Alleigha's messages about hating Ashley are in there too, and they are not highlighted. Reeb said that section was only about wanting Ashley dead. So the defense asked about that. "I believe there are several messages about her hating Ashley. I think there's one about her wanting Ashley dead." Not highlighted.

The airline screenshot from Botner's phone carried four different dates: created, accessed, modified and changed. What do the differences mean? "That I can't speak to."

Who were these summaries made for, originally? "The investigative team and whoever else needs to see it." They were made months ago, she agreed, from the evidence the State gathered.

And the last questions. Did she prepare any report on the Flock camera data? No. Does she know who pulled it? No. Did she ever review any of it? "I did not."

The defense moved in Exhibits D and E. The State had no redirect. Reeb stepped down, the State's last witness.

Just the Data

This is the question I cannot put down after Monday, and I want to be careful with it, because it is easy to make it into something it is not.

That morning, Reeb told the jury her visuals "do not reflect any of my opinions, just the data." By the afternoon, the jury had learned that the data was 719 messages chosen out of 107,000, chosen by keyword and by her reading, organized into categories she named, with one message in each stretch highlighted by her hand, and the other side of the same conversations left in plain type. At least some of Ashley's own saved images did not make the timeline, and she was not sure why. The summaries were built for the investigative team. She had never looked at the Flock camera data at all.

None of that makes her dishonest, and none of it makes the messages false. Every analyst selects. A jury cannot read 107,000 messages, and nobody expects the State to hand them all over as a printout and walk away. The defense's cross did not touch a single word Caleb wrote. The lines about killing her and not going to hell, about ways to kill her and not go to jail, about taking actions on February 16th, are still in the record, and they are his.

But "just the data" is a promise about neutrality, and a selection is not neutral. It is somebody's judgment about what matters. So the fair question is this: when a jury is handed a summary instead of the source, who decides what the summary leaves out? Here, the answer is the State's analyst, working for the investigative team, months before trial. The woman on the other end of the "kill her" conversations said something similar about Ashley at least once, by the analyst's own account, and the jury got it unhighlighted. Ashley's notes about a struggling marriage came to the jury through the defense, and some of her saved images never made the timeline at all. That does not mean the jury got a false picture. It means the jury got the State's picture, and was told it was just the data.

The defense will ask the jury Tuesday to see the selection for what it is. The State will ask the jury to read what was selected. Both are fair asks. What the jury should not do is forget that the first one exists.

Both Sides Rest

When Reeb stepped down, Judge Pratt asked Watkins whether he had any further witnesses. He asked to approach. The court called the afternoon recess.

Then something happened that you should know about, even though almost none of it was seen. With the jury out, the lawyers were arguing over the evidence-tampering charges Caleb Flynn also faces. The public courtroom feed carried about 40 seconds of it. In that stretch, the prosecutor was reading the language of Ohio's tampering statute, about altering, destroying or concealing a record with the purpose of impairing its availability, against the emails the State says were deleted after Caleb's police interviews, and telling the judge "that's exactly what he did." Mulligan had just begun his answer, about the tampering charges tied to the email, when the feed cut away.

When the court came back on the record about twenty minutes later, Judge Pratt described the break as time spent on "some administrative issues with regard to the case" and the admission of the State's exhibits, and said the State had rested and the defense would rest without presenting a case.

I want to be precise, because this is exactly the kind of place where speculation fills a vacuum. I do not know what motion, if any, was being argued, and I do not know how the court ruled. Nobody said on the public record. But these are counts the jury will be asked to decide, and the argument over whether the State's evidence on them is enough happened, for the public, almost entirely off camera. The public was shown the start of that argument and the judge's summary afterward. It was not shown the answer. That is a question worth asking Tuesday, when the jury instructions come out and we see which charges go to the jury and how.

Then the jury came back in. "How does the State wish to proceed?" the judge asked. The State rested, subject to the admission of its exhibits; the judge noted the defense had already made its objections to those and she would not go through "the litany." Did the defense wish to present a case? "Uh no, your honor, we would rest subject to the admission of our exhibits." The court admitted defense exhibits A, C, D and E.

No defense witness was called. Caleb Flynn did not testify. There was no colloquy on the record in that stretch about his decision.

That decision is his right, and it is worth saying clearly why. The Fifth Amendment says no one can be forced to be a witness against himself. A defendant does not have to testify, does not have to call anyone, does not have to prove anything. The judge will instruct this jury that it cannot hold his silence against him in any way. The burden of proof never moves off the State. What the defense did Monday was a deliberate bet: that the concessions it got from the State's own lead detective and the State's own analyst are enough, and that anything it put on would only give the State something new to cross.

Judge Pratt told the jury that closing arguments and her instructions on the law come next. Since it was 3 p.m., she released them for the day, with the standard warnings not to discuss the case or do any outside research, and told them closings and instructions should take most of Tuesday morning. After they left, she set a charging conference in chambers for 3:15. That is the meeting where the judge and the lawyers go through the exact wording of the instructions the jury will get, including which offenses and which definitions go to them. It happens in chambers. What comes out of it, the public will hear when she reads it Tuesday.

The Three Interviews, Each in Full

Because the defendant never took the stand, the only account the jury has from Caleb Flynn himself is on three recordings police made in the days after Ashley died, and in his messages. We have put each interview up whole, as it was played in court, so you can hear his account in his own voice and judge it the way the jury has to: the first, from 4:28 that morning, where he told police the door was wide open; the second, from later that day, on the side door and his truck gun; and the third, from February 19, the drawing.

What the Jury Has to Decide

Here is where seven days of testimony left this case.

The State's case is motive, timeline and the defendant's own words. A husband in a long affair who promised to leave and kept not leaving. A woman who gave him a last deadline and walked away. Messages, in his hand, about wanting his wife dead and not going to jail for it. A message the afternoon before about going to a house and practicing what he would say, and a phone that shows no trip near the house the State pointed at. A line about taking actions on February 16th. Two apps removed around one in the morning, and a phone and a watch moving through the dark hour before a 911 call in which he said he woke to gunshots.

The defense's case is what is not there. No blood on him. No gun. No tool match. No spatter. No residue test, because police chose not to run one. An arrest before a single lab result, on an affair that was still a rumor, with the prosecutor having the final say, and no reassessment when the labs came back without naming a shooter. Leads that went unchecked. And a digital case assembled by the State's own analyst from 719 of 107,000 messages, highlighted by hand, with the other side of the conversation left plain and some of the victim's own saved images left out.

Those two lists do not cancel each other. Words are evidence. Missing forensics are not proof of innocence. The question for the jury is whether the State's list proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Caleb Flynn fired the shots that killed his wife, or whether the defense's list leaves a doubt that a reasonable person would hesitate over. Those are different questions from whether the messages are ugly. They are. The jury is not being asked to decide whether he was a faithful husband. It is being asked who fired the gun.

And there are questions for the process, too, that I do not think Monday answered. Why was the one test that could have spoken directly to the shooting never run, on a morning when the man was sitting with police and willing to talk? Why did the arrest not wait for anything the labs could tell them, and why did nothing change when the labs came back? Why did the jury get a summary of the messages that highlights one side of a two-person conversation? And what happened, in that argument over the tampering charges, that the public mostly did not get to see?

Closings are Tuesday at 8:30 in the morning, and then Judge Pratt instructs the jury on the law. We will be live for all of it. Watch it with us, and watch how each side answers the other side's list. The one who answers it better is probably the one this jury believes.

Every Case Story Part of this trial lives in one place, in order, as a podcast you can take with you: the Staged Scene Case Story Trial Podcast. And if you missed any of Monday, the full day, start to finish with the breaks taken out, is in the No Breaks Edition above. Monday's live broadcast is here.