A Red Phone, a Plateless Bike, and the Deal the Jury Never Heard About

Tom and Angela Strussion spent the last Monday of their lives planning. Tom wanted ten pounds of ground meat taken to his father in the morning so the old man could make meatballs for a pasta night at the Elm Grove restaurant on Wednesday. Angela was working out what to do with a rehearsal dinner booked for the week after they got back from Florida, where they were going for her fiftieth birthday. At about half past nine that night she called Tom's sister, Lisa, and they talked for half an hour about homecoming and the parade car and who would cover what at the restaurants while she was gone. At ten o'clock exactly she said, "I gotta go, I gotta go," and hung up. Nobody on this record ever spoke to either of them again.

By seven the next morning their house on Trails End Drive outside Belmont, Ohio was on fire, and by Thursday of this week the jury in State of Ohio v. Andrew Isaac Griffin had heard how they died: Tom shot three times, Angela three times in the head, both of them dead before a single breath of smoke reached their lungs, and the house set alight afterward in three separate places, with oil left on a stove burner turned up high to make a fourth.

The man on trial is the one Tom brought through the front door of his Belmont Salsa Joe's in the fall of 2020, taught to cook his recipes, let sleep on his couch, and made his partner in a second restaurant in Elm Grove. Prosecutors allege that Andrew Griffin came back to Ohio from Oklahoma on a motorcycle in September 2021, carrying a phone bought for cash under a name that does not exist, killed Tom and Angela over the money he had sunk into that partnership, burned the house, and rode home. He has pleaded not guilty. He is presumed innocent. Nothing in this piece is a finding.

This is the editorial for three court days, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, October 27, 28 and 29, because I owed you Tuesday's and Wednesday's and I would rather give you the whole stretch in one piece than three thin ones. It is the right shape anyway. These three days are where the State stopped telling the jury what happened inside that house and started trying to prove who made the trip to it. By Thursday afternoon it had built a trail with real weight: a receipt, a motorcycle, a toll camera, a phone that went from a Walmart in Illinois to the tower nearest Trails End and back again. What it had not done, by the time the jury went home, was put a name on the hand holding that phone. The State's own FBI agent said so from the witness stand, in so many words.

And along the way, the jury heard some things it should not have, and did not hear some things I think it should have. That is what this piece is about.

If you are coming to the case fresh, start with the case background report.

What the State has to prove, now that the case got smaller

Something changed before a single witness took the stand on Monday, and it changes how you should read everything below. Outside the jury's presence on Day 1, the State told the judge it had already moved to dismiss the death penalty specifications, and it moved to dismiss nine of the fourteen counts as duplicates. The defense agreed. Judge Chris Berhalter granted it. Aggravated burglary is gone. The death penalty is gone. There will be no penalty phase, and if this jury convicts on aggravated murder, the judge sets the sentence.

What is left are five counts. Counts 1 and 2 are aggravated murder of Tom Strussion. Counts 7 and 8 are aggravated murder of Angela Strussion. Count 13 is aggravated arson. Under Ohio law aggravated murder can be proved two ways: purposely causing a death with prior calculation and design, meaning a plan formed ahead of time, or purposely causing a death while committing certain other serious felonies. The most natural reading of a pair of counts for each victim is one of each theory, but the jury instructions have not been read yet and that is not confirmed. Aggravated arson needs a fire set knowingly that created a substantial risk of serious physical harm to another person, or that caused physical harm to an occupied structure.

Here is the part that matters. On every one of those counts, the State has to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Andrew Griffin is the person who did it. Nobody in that courtroom is contesting that Tom and Angela were murdered. Nobody is contesting that the fire was set on purpose. The defense said almost nothing to the firefighters, the fire investigator or the crime scene investigator, and let two of them go without a question. The whole trial is one element, identity, and the question I am asking after every witness is the same one: did that witness move the State closer to proving it was him, or not?

The partnership, from the inside

Day 2 opened with Lisa Danielle Balog, Tom's younger sister, and she gave the jury the business the State says is the motive, from inside the family.

Tom was a restaurant man his whole life: a hot dog stand, Las Vegas, two places in Tennessee, smoked meat in Texas, then home to the Ohio Valley. The Belmont Salsa Joe's opened the first week of June 2020, with Tom at the smoker and Angela running the money from an upstairs office on Trails End while holding down a full-time job with Fiserv. Every night the servers' black bags of cash and receipts went into a bank bag, and Tom carried that bank bag home so Angela could reconcile the day. Everyone in the family knew Tom kept a lot of cash, in his pocket, in his truck and in the house. She called it a family habit, learned from her grandfather and her father.

Then Andrew Griffin. Tom brought him in around October or November 2020. He learned the bar, the register, the kitchen. Early in 2021 Tom announced a second Salsa Joe's in Elm Grove with Griffin to run it, and Griffin moved in with Tom and Angela for about a month that March while he painted and cleaned the old building. In the State's own direct, before the defense could get to it, Lisa told the jury that she and Griffin had an intimate relationship from about the end of April until June 2021. No hard feelings, she said, and it ended before he left Ohio.

He left the July 4th weekend to pick up a smoker in Tennessee and take it to Oklahoma, where he planned his own Salsa Joe's. It was supposed to be a week. It was nearly seven, until August 23. Angela grew more and more upset about vendors and bills going unpaid that Lisa understood Griffin was supposed to cover, and Tom and Angela caught them up themselves.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 5 Tom's Sister Testifies Griffin Knew Tom Carried Cash in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial / Pt 5

August 23 is the date the State's opening hung its motive on, and Lisa gave the jury the conversation. Tom and Griffin met on the Elm Grove porch. She was not part of it. Afterward she asked Griffin how it went and he shook his head. He told her he had offered to buy Tom out, keep Elm Grove going as a Salsa Joe's under his own company, and leave whatever was in the bank account for Tom. Tom said no, and told him it was best he go back to Oklahoma. How did Griffin seem? Calm, she said. Collected. Not much emotion. He never came back to the restaurant after that day.

WATCH THE CLIP Victim's Sister Testifies Tom Turned Down Griffin's Buyout in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Two short questions closed her direct, and I think the State meant them to land hard. After Tom and Angela were dead, did Griffin ever try to collect any property from the Elm Grove restaurant? No. Did he ever ask for his share of the proceeds? No. The man who the State says killed over this money never asked for a dollar of it afterward.

Read that both ways, because it goes both ways. The State's version: a man who had already taken what he came for had no reason to ask. The other version: a man who had nothing to do with the deaths of his former partners, and who had been told to go home, went home. That fact alone does not choose between them.

Then the banker, Pam McKim of Belmont Savings Bank, put the money on paper. The Elm Grove account belonged to Tom and Angela's company, AJS Holdings. On March 11, 2021 all three of them came in together and Griffin was added as a signer, not an owner. When she asked him for his deposit that day he did not have it, and Tom and Angela looked at each other a while and then told her to put him on anyway. Then the checks came, from Griffin's own bank: forty thousand on March 11, memo "Salsa Joe's." Twenty thousand on May 12, "start up money." Ten thousand on June 7 and five thousand on June 11, memo "50-50 money." About seventy-five thousand dollars in three months. And then a phone call from Angela in August asking McKim to cut off Griffin's access. New signature cards dated August 24, the day after the porch. That same day Griffin called the bank, confused, thinking he was locked out. She told him to talk to Angela and Tommy. She never heard from him again.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 6 Banker Testifies Angela Cut Griffin Off the Business Account in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial / Pt 6

Samuel Shamansky's cross of the banker took two minutes and made the contrast the defense wanted: every dollar Griffin put in arrived by check with his name on it, and Tom's deposits were cash large enough that the bank had to report them to the IRS.

The cross that was about Tom

The defense's cross of Lisa Balog never asked her about Andrew Griffin. Not once. Every question was about Tom.

Mr. Shamansky was gentle with her, and he should have been. She lost Tom, Angela and her other brother Chris inside a month, and more family after that. But he walked her through what she had told detectives. That Tom carried and kept large amounts of cash that never went to the bank, a hundred thousand dollars at one point in her telling, perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand at another; she had never counted it, she was ballparking. That Tom made trips to Columbus that kept him away for days. That he was drinking heavily after Chris died. That he had told their father he was being blackmailed. That a group of people came to the house in the weeks before the murders, tore up the yard, and screamed that it was "for Tom." That the DJ nights Tom brought in to save Elm Grove drew a different crowd, and she gave detectives two names of regulars who played the gambling machines all day and tipped very well.

WATCH THE CLIP Defense Confronts Tom's Sister on a $250,000 Cash Claim in Griffin's Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

That is the defense's case in one cross: a man with a great deal of cash in his house, an unexplained blackmail claim, a yard trashed in his name, and company his own family did not know. More people than one had a reason to come to Trails End.

The State's redirect tried to turn it back. After the murders, she said, it was Griffin who kept suggesting other people: drug dealers at Elm Grove, the people who tore up the yard, something like mob activity tied to Chris's death. Angela's father told the jury on Day 1 that Griffin called it a mob hit too. Pointing elsewhere is what the State wants the jury to see. What the jury also heard is that the names of those regulars came from Lisa herself, not from Griffin.

Three fires, no accelerant, and what a fire does to proof

John Weber, retired from the Ohio State Fire Marshal's office after twenty-one years and about eighteen hundred fires, gave the jury the arson count, and I think he proved it. The couch in the living room burned almost to its frame. A closet in the hallway burned badly inside. A pile of receipts and linens at the foot of the bed in the master bedroom burned into the mattress. No path connected any of them; each was its own fire. And on the stove, a pan and a bottle of oil, every burner glowing red on high when the first firefighter came in, which Weber read as an attempt at a fourth fire that never caught.

His accelerant dog, Max, went through the house twice and never alerted. Whoever set those fires used an open flame and paper. And Weber explained why the fires could burn for hours unseen: in a shut house they flare, run out of air, and fall back to smouldering. The defense asked him nothing.

WATCH THE CLIP Fire Investigator Testifies Three Separate Fires Were Set in Griffin's Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

The more important thing Weber did was set up the State's answer to the hole in its case. On Day 1 the State's own investigator agreed the crime lab found no DNA and no fingerprints in that house that led anywhere. Weber told the jury that fire changes and destroys evidence, and that firefighters, through no fault of their own, wash it away. Matthew Austin, the crime scene investigator from Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation, said the same thing that afternoon and added a detail I did not expect: the house smelled faintly of bleach, and at first he took that as a cleanup. Then the firefighters told him that tankers drawing their own water often add bleach to keep it clean. In his words, the fire department put this fire out with bleach and a pressure washer.

Then Austin walked the jury room by room through more than a hundred photographs, and the house told a story the State and the defense will both use.

The only blood in the house was in the living room, between the burnt couch and the back door, with drag marks through it toward the porch where Tom and Angela were found. Under the couch, in clotted blood, two suspected bullets. Beside the blood, a heap of currency, some burned and some not, and a burnt wallet with both their names. Drawers standing open in a bedroom that was otherwise clean and orderly. A walk-in closet in disarray. A bedside table with its drawer open and two handguns inside, one a silver revolver, fully loaded, not recently fired. In the garage, Tom's truck with its glove box open.

And the bank bags. There were blue zippered bank bags all through that house, on the kitchen island, at the foot of the bed, in the closet. Austin photographed each one opened. Empty. Empty. Coins and a paper band marked for a thousand dollars. Not one bill in any of them.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 8 Investigator Finds Suspected Bullets Beside the Burnt Cash in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial / Pt 8

No door was forced. No pry marks, no tool marks, no damage to either latch plate.

Think about what that scene does for each side. The State says someone who knew that house and knew where the cash went at night walked in, took what he thought he was owed, and left the guns and the money on the floor. The defense says the same picture is a robbery in the house of a man everyone knew kept cash, with a blackmail claim hanging over him and a yard torn up in his name. The bags are evidence of a taking. They are not, by themselves, evidence of who took.

WATCH THE CLIP Crime Scene Investigator Testifies to Empty Money Bags in Griffin's Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Austin also told the jury how the testing works, and I want you to hold onto it for Thursday. BCI's scene team collects. The sheriff's office decides what the lab tests. A team may collect fifty items and the lab may test eight. He swabbed the glove box latch, the inside handle of the back door, the cupboard door left open by the stove, the dresser knobs, the nightstand drawer. He lifted three prints from the doors. Those results were still sealed in their envelopes on Tuesday. On Thursday the jury found out what was in them.

A receipt with no face

After lunch on Tuesday the State turned to the thread its whole case hangs on. Christina Logwood, an asset protection manager for Walmart, read the jury a receipt from store 216 in Marion, Illinois. Register 67, an electronics register. A Cricket Vision 3 prepaid phone for $39.88, a thirty-dollar card of minutes, and a ten-thousand-milliamp power bank for $14.88. Total $93.73, paid with a hundred-dollar bill, at 5:05 in the afternoon on September 19, 2021.

No name was needed. No ID. The store's cameras recorded, but in 2021 the video was kept about ninety days, and nobody came looking for that sale until years later. The State has the receipt, the time, the cash, and a kind of battery that matches one in evidence. It has no picture of who stood at register 67. Mr. Shamansky's one-minute cross made the battery point: a store chain with about forty-six hundred stores, selling that charger by the hundreds of thousands.

WATCH THE CLIP Walmart Manager Testifies a Cash Prepaid Phone Needs No Name or ID in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

A friend on a screen, and two things the jury was told to forget

Then Tommy Williamson, Griffin's friend from the Oklahoma oil fields, appeared by video from a vehicle in Broken Arrow, on oxygen, and asked not to be filmed. The judge honored that. He had known Griffin since about 2011, "until he ran off," and the defense objected to those words before they were out of his mouth.

What he gave the State was small and pointed. Griffin once told him he had put a "score" into the Ohio restaurant, around ninety thousand dollars. And when Williamson asked Griffin whether he had done what the rumors said about the Ohio murders, Griffin answered: "Tommy, I can't talk to you about it over the telephone, they're listening to every word I say." That, Williamson said, is when he blocked Griffin's number.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 7 Griffin's Friend Testifies Griffin Said They're Listening to Every Word in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 7

The cross took three minutes and set up one question. Was he completely thorough with the detective? Yes. Then Mr. Shamansky read him what he told the detective about that call: "he said, quote, I can't talk about it on the phone." Nothing about anyone listening. The second half of the sentence the jury heard on direct was not in what he gave police. A jury can weigh that.

WATCH THE CLIP Friend Testifies Griffin Said He Couldn't Discuss the Salsa Joe's Murders Over the Phone

Here is what bothers me about Williamson's testimony. Twice in about fifteen minutes, this witness said things about Andrew Griffin the jury should never have heard. First, that Griffin called him after getting out of jail in Houston. The lawyers went to the bench, and the judge told the jurors that at the request of both sides that was struck and they were not to consider it for any purpose. Then, after the judge asked him directly whether he personally knew anything about Griffin leaving the country, Williamson kept talking, and the judge struck a second thing: that Griffin ran off and went to Mexico for several months. He had no firsthand knowledge of it.

Courts presume juries follow those instructions. I understand why. But I have sat in a jury box, and I will tell you what I think: you do not un-hear "jail in Houston" and "Mexico" about a man accused of a double murder. Neither side asked for more than the instruction on this record. The defense now has two struck remarks it can point to later if it argues the damage added up. What I want to know is whether anyone warned this witness off those subjects before he sat down in front of that camera.

Dead before the fire

Day 3 opened with the coroner, and the defense finally stood up to fight a State witness at length.

Dr. Amanda Fisher is the elected Belmont County coroner. She is a chiropractor by profession, and she does not perform autopsies. She got to Trails End at 8:12 that morning, found Tom and Angela on the back deck where the firefighters had carried them, and was struck immediately by how much blood there was for a fire death. Following it into Angela's hair she found what looked like a bullet entry wound, then a second, then one in Tom's head. She stopped, called it a probable homicide, and sent them to Licking County for autopsy. From the stiffness in their jaws and arms and not yet their legs, she told detectives that day she believed they died between eleven at night and two in the morning.

WATCH THE CLIP Coroner Puts Tom and Angela's Time of Death Between 11 PM and 2 AM in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Mr. Shamansky went at her standing and her clock. A doctor of chiropractic, not a medical doctor. Her own chief investigator's report put the window at 10:30 p.m. to 7 a.m., not eleven to two. She explained that report is deliberately broad, written before the bodies leave the scene, but she wrote no report of her own and never examined them again. Then, an hour later, the defense got the State's own pathologist to agree that in Ohio a chiropractor is not qualified to give an opinion on the time of death.

WATCH THE CLIP (LIVE OCT 31, 10:00 AM ET) Coroner Fires Back When Defense Says She's Not a Medical Doctor in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Hold that eleven-to-two window. It is going to matter Thursday, and not in the direction the State wanted.

Dr. Charles Jeffrey Lee, the Licking County forensic pathologist with more than seven thousand autopsies behind him, was the State's strongest medical witness, and the defense agreed he was an expert on the spot. Tom had three bullet paths. One went in front of his left ear and out his right cheek, a wound he could have lived with for an hour or two. One went into his right upper back, broke a rib, passed through his lung and stopped under the skin of his chest. One went into the back of his head and through his brain stem, and killed him within a couple of seconds.

The order of those shots is the most important thing Dr. Lee said. There were 375 cc of blood in Tom's chest from the lung wound, ten or twelve ounces, and blood only collects like that while the heart is still pumping. So Tom was alive and bleeding when he was shot in the back, maybe a minute, maybe less, before the shot through his brain stem. Angela was shot three times in the head, twice fatally within seconds. Neither of them had soot anywhere in the airway. Angela had soot on her face and none inside her. They were dead before the fire.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 10 Pathologist Testifies Tom Was Still Bleeding Before the Fatal Wound in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 10 WATCH THE CLIP Pathologist Testifies Tom's Back Wound Came Before the Brainstem Shot in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

On the aggravated murder counts, that sequence matters beyond the horror of it. A shot to the back and then a finishing shot through the brain stem is the kind of fact the State will argue shows purpose and design, an execution and not a struggle. On "purposely," I think the medicine proves it. On "prior calculation and design," the medicine helps. None of it touches identity.

The number on the sticky note, and the bike

Then the case turned from how to who. Brian Warcholak, an FBI investigative analyst, was handed Brett Cole's phone records around November 2023, more than two years after the murders, and went looking for anything out of place. He found one line: a call at 7:02 on the morning of September 21, 2021, lasting a minute or less, to Cole's phone from a Tennessee number that appeared nowhere else in those records. He wrote it on a sticky note and left it on his agent's desk. Everything on Thursday grew out of that sticky note.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 11 FBI Analyst Flags a Tennessee Call to Brett Cole's Phone in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial / Pt 11

Who is Brett Cole? The jury has not heard him yet. According to the State's opening on Day 1, he is serving a life sentence in a federal prison, was given immunity in December 2024 to talk, and the State says its evidence shows he never left Oklahoma. According to the defense's opening, he is a man serving life for raping a child who made a deal to save himself. Neither opening is evidence. What is in evidence about Cole so far is that he and Griffin were, in his own grandfather's words, "like two black-eyed peas," and that he and another young man named Dalton Ray lived in a camper on Griffin's land in Whitesboro, Oklahoma, cutting pulpwood.

Then Cory White, a handyman from Grand Saline, Texas, told the jury he sold a 2005 cruiser for three thousand dollars cash on September 13, 2021, a week before the murders, to a Facebook buyer named Brett Cole. Cole's messages asked him one question in writing: "will it make a long trip?" Two men came in a green Chevy pickup with a trailer, haggled once more, paid cash, and never test-rode it. White had bought five motorcycles in his life and ridden every one first. He filled out the title with whatever they told him to write: James Fisher, an address in Flowood, Mississippi, and the phone number 918-318-0228.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 12 Texas Seller Testifies Brett Cole Wrote 'I Really Need a Bike Today' in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 12 WATCH THE CLIP Motorcycle Seller Testifies the Buyer Dictated the Name on the Title in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Shown night photographs of a motorcycle on a road at 10:52 p.m. on September 19, White pointed out his saddlebags with their white shields, his highway bars, his pulled-baffle dual pipes, and his windshield, which the prosecutor held up beside the screen. On cross he agreed riveted saddlebags and loud pipes are common on big cruisers, and the phone mount he put on the left handlebar was not visible in the picture. "Looks very similar," he said. Not "that's my bike." On redirect, nothing in the pictures told him it was not his.

The ex-wife, and the deal the jury never heard about

This is the part of the three days I want you to read twice.

Wednesday afternoon the State called Andrew Griffin's ex-wife. They married in September 2020 and divorced in May 2025, so through everything this trial is about, she was his wife. She told the jury she did not see him on September 19 or September 20, 2021; she was at their house in Mena, Arkansas. She saw him the evening of the 21st. A few days later they left for Yellowstone on their first anniversary trip.

Then the things she found. When she cleaned out a white Dodge pickup he used to drive, she found in the console a GPS tracker, a battery pack, some papers, and a phone she did not recognize, its screen showing a picture of a horse. Later, when a detective asked her to look for a phone charger, without showing her a picture, she found one in a moving box and he came and got it. This spring she found more trackers in a storage container, the same brand. And this past summer, while moving, she found two more phones and a 2021 pocket calendar in a box of his things nobody had ever come for.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 13 Griffin's Ex-Wife Testifies She Found a Tracker and Phone in His Truck in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 13

Then the prosecutor slowed down and asked a series of short questions. In September 2021, did she see Andrew with an injury to his arm? Yes. Was there a time he tried to harm her with a pillow? Yes. The lawyers went to the bench for nearly three minutes. Had she told him, more than once, during the worst of the marriage, that she was going to be his "third victim"? Yes. And was there a time Griffin said something to her about a thing only she and Brett Cole knew? Yes. What did he say? In her words: "that if word gets out that this happened, that he had done this, then he knows that Brett wouldn't say anything, so he knew it would come from me, and I can disappear whether or not he was in jail."

The State sat down on that sentence.

WATCH THE CLIP Ex-Wife Recalls Griffin Saying She Could Disappear if Word Got Out in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Then the jury was sent out, and the lawyers stayed with the judge for about forty minutes. When the record came back, still without the jury, Mr. Shamansky said this: he understood the court's ruling, of course, and for the record he was proffering State's Exhibit 159, the immunity agreement, and he was ready for a very short cross.

A proffer is how a lawyer puts excluded evidence in the record so an appeals court can see what the jury did not. The ruling itself happened off our feed, so I cannot tell you whether the judge kept out the paper, kept out questions about it, or both. What I can tell you is what the jury heard when the questioning resumed. Mr. Shamansky asked one subject: hadn't she suspected, and then learned, that her husband was unfaithful, around the fall of 2021? Incorrect, she said. Not in 2021, not in early 2022, never, at any time in the marriage. No redirect. She was excused.

So twelve jurors heard a woman tell them her ex-husband threatened that she could disappear if word got out that he had done this, and from the witness stand they heard nothing about the deal she testifies under. The only time this jury has heard the word immunity beside her name was in the defense's opening statement on Monday, and an opening statement is not evidence.

I want to be careful here, because the ruling is not on our record. But here is why this is the most important legal issue of the trial so far. A witness's bias is always fair game. An immunity deal is the textbook example: it is the reason a jury might think a witness has something to gain or lose by what she says. Ohio's own evidence rule says bias, interest or motive can be shown by questioning or by outside evidence, and on Day 1 this same judge relied on that rule to overrule a State motion. The jury first heard that she had been given immunity from the defense, in its opening on Monday. If the jury was then kept from hearing the agreement during her testimony, I do not see how the jury weighs her "you could disappear" sentence the way the law says it is entitled to. If the ruling left the door open to questions and the defense chose not to walk through it, that is a defense choice, and I would want to know why.

Her credibility matters for another reason. Look at where the things she found came from: a truck she had been driving, a moving box, a storage container, a closet, each one years after the killings, several after a detective's call. She is the witness who handed the State the tracker, the charger, Brett Cole's phone and the "Andrew iPhone" we will get to on Thursday. And her flat denial that she ever suspected infidelity sits in the same record where Tom's sister told the jury, on the State's own direct, that she had an intimate relationship with Griffin in the spring of 2021. Whether the defense ever connects those two pieces of testimony in front of this jury is something to watch.

WATCH THE CLIP (LIVE OCT 30, 1:20 PM ET) Ex-Wife Tells Griffin's Defense She Never Suspected He Was Unfaithful in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial WATCH THE FULL TESTIMONY (LIVE NOV 1, 1:00 PM ET) Stacey Griffin: Full Testimony of Griffin's Ex-Wife in the Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

An old man on a screen

The last witness Wednesday was not in the room. Arthur Cole is 77, Brett Cole's grandfather, and the State played his video deposition. His wife helped deliver Andrew Griffin at home, four hundred yards down a county road, when the midwife ran late. Griffin called him Papa. To Arthur he was almost a son.

Arthur said Griffin told him he had gone into business with a man in a restaurant "up in West Virginia," that it went bad, and that the man owed him his money. After that, Griffin changed "from daylight till dark," drinking and using like his own father. Then the line the State played the deposition for. On a drive through the national forest, with Griffin half or two-thirds drunk, Griffin took a phone call, not on speaker, and Arthur heard him say: "Well, I had to go get my money and I killed two people." No name. No place. No date. Arthur could not hear who was on the other end and could not say what season it was.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 14 Griffin's Surrogate Grandfather Recalls 'I Had to Go Get My Money' Call in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 14

He told no one. When he heard it, he said, he thought Griffin was lying, "like always, just like my grandson." On another day, Griffin told him: "who would ever expect that a little boy like me, grown up out here in the country, could ever do what I would do." And at a fire on Griffin's land, Arthur heard Griffin, Brett and another young man talk about Griffin giving Brett the money for a motorcycle, ditching it in the quicksand of the Red River, and selling it for parts.

WATCH THE CLIP Brett Cole's Grandfather Recalls Talk of Ditching the Bike in Quicksand in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Mr. Shamansky's cross at the deposition was all about time, and it worked. Every one of those conversations, the phone call, the "little boy" remark, the motorcycle talk at the fire, fell in the last weeks before Griffin left Oklahoma, about two years after the bike was bought and the murders happened. A motorcycle conversation two years after the fact is either men talking about a bike they already had, or something else entirely, and Arthur himself said he could not tie it together.

Now the process question. After the jury left Wednesday, the defense renewed its written objection that playing a deposition instead of bringing Arthur Cole into the courtroom violates Andrew Griffin's right to confront the witnesses against him. The judge noted he had already ruled and overruled it again. The Constitution allows a deposition in place of live testimony when the witness is truly unavailable and the defense had its chance to cross-examine. The defense did cross him. The fight, if there is one on appeal, will be whether an oxygen-dependent 77-year-old was truly unable to come, or to testify live by video the way Tommy Williamson did the day before. That question has not been answered on our record, and it was preserved.

Here is my read on the two admissions. They are the first words in this trial from Andrew Griffin's own mouth that sound like guilt, and the State will lean on them hard in closing. Both come through people tied to Brett Cole: his grandfather, and an ex-wife who messaged Cole about gas and feed and testifies under a deal the jury did not hear about. One is half of a drunk man's phone call to an unknown person on an unknown date, from a witness who said you could not believe anything Griffin said. The other is a threat recounted by a woman in a bitter divorce. A jury could believe both. A jury could also decide that neither, alone or together, carries the weight of "beyond a reasonable doubt." That is exactly the kind of evidence a juror has to sit with.

Thursday morning: a photograph found in 2026

Day 4 began with Karen McComas, a project manager for the company that runs electronic tolling on the RiverLink bridges between Louisville and southern Indiana. Her job was to make a photograph a business record, and she did. In August 2024 Belmont County detectives subpoenaed every crossing in a twenty-minute window on the eastbound Lewis and Clark Bridge, and got 152 rows: every car whose plate the system could read and bill. A motorcycle with no readable plate does not get billed, so it was not in those rows.

This January, preparing for trial, her team realized the old operator's unreadable-plate images had been stored all along, in a place nobody in 2024 knew to look. They pulled the same window again and found seven more crossings. The fourth was a motorcycle, from behind, from the front and from overhead, at 10:52 p.m. on September 19, 2021. Why did it not register? "There's no visible license plate."

WATCH THE CLIP Toll Manager Reveals Motorcycle Photos the First Records Missed in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

The defense asked her nothing. I think that was a judgment that the photograph is what it is, a dark image of a plateless motorcycle and a helmeted rider, and that the fight is over who was on it, which no toll gantry can answer.

The red phone

Then FBI Special Agent Bryan Lacy, a member of the Bureau's cellular analysis team, qualified as an expert without objection and walked the jury through his report, phone by phone, map by map. It was the longest and most important testimony of the three days, and he was careful in a way I respect. Before any defense lawyer could ask, he said it himself on direct: these records cannot tell you precisely where a phone was. A tower log tells you the tower and the sector, the slice of compass the antenna faces, and that puts a phone in a general area. It is not GPS.

Here is what his records show, as he presented them.

The red phone, ending in 4775, the one his report labels "attributed to the subject," came alive on the network in the five o'clock hour, Central time, on September 19, a few minutes after the Marion Walmart sale, and its serial number matches the one Walmart printed on the receipt. From there his map follows it east across the country. At 10:52 p.m. it touched a tower on the west side of the Ohio River at the I-265 bridge; at 10:53, a tower on the east side. Between those two pings, at 10:52:44, the toll camera caught the plateless motorcycle. Near Cincinnati after midnight. Belmont County, Ohio, at 3:43 in the morning on September 20.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 15 FBI Agent Puts the Motorcycle Photo Between the Prepaid Phone's Pings in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 15 WATCH THE CLIP (LIVE OCT 31, 7:00 PM ET) FBI Agent Maps the Mystery Phone's Activation Near an Illinois Walmart in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

The red phone spent all of September 20 in the general area of Belmont and St. Clairsville, data only, not a single call. That night Tom's phone called Angela's at 9:54 for sixteen minutes, Tom in Wheeling and Angela near home, and Tom's phone then moved west along I-70 until both their phones sat on the same tower. Then the hour this case is about. Tom's phone had a data session. The red phone had one at 10:18. Angela's at 11:01. The red phone again at 11:18. All three on the same tower, the one nearest the house, in the sector pointing toward the house. At 11:37 the red phone touched a different tower just west of the house, near I-70, and then it went southwest: Columbus, Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, and at 7:03 the next morning, from Jackson, Tennessee, it made the only call it ever made, twenty-four seconds to the number the jury had already been told belongs to Brett Cole. Its last appearance on any tower was 10:40 that morning in Benton, Arkansas.

Then the other half. Griffin's own phone, the orange one, spent the same days in Oklahoma. On the afternoon of the 19th it looped toward Brett Cole's address in Hugo, and from that evening until the next morning it sat in the Hugo area beside the phone of Amy Chase, who the State says was seeing Cole. It sent and received texts, almost all with his wife's number, and ran data sessions, including two at exactly 12:20:30 and 1:20:30, which Lacy explained is AT&T restarting a data session on the hour: a phone streaming or running a map, which nobody needs to be holding. It answered no calls. From 8:27 p.m. on the 18th until 1:48 p.m. on the 21st, Griffin's phone did not make a single outgoing call. Nine calls came in on the morning of the 21st, several from Ohio and West Virginia numbers after the fire was found, and every one went to voicemail. Then at 1:48 that afternoon, from near Whitesboro, it called a southeastern Ohio number and talked for twenty-six minutes, called Cole's number at 2:15, and called his wife at 2:19.

WATCH: CASE STORY PT 16 FBI Agent Testifies Griffin's Phone Made No Outgoing Calls for Days in Salsa Joe's Trial / Pt 16

That is the State's case in its strongest form: a phone bought for cash that made one trip and one call, a bike on a bridge between its pings, and Griffin's own phone behaving like a phone left behind on purpose. I take it seriously. It is careful work, and a juror could find it powerful.

Now listen to what the same agent said on cross. If you want to know who was carrying that red phone, can these records tell you? "No, I can't say who's utilizing the device from this information." Not for the red phone, and not for Griffin's orange one either. The State's theory needs the orange phone to be in Oklahoma without its owner and the red phone to be in Ohio with him. The records show two phones in two places. They do not show a person.

And one word in Lacy's direct got struck. He described the 3870 number, Cole's, as belonging to "another associate in this case." The defense objected, and after a recess the State agreed to strike it. The judge told the jury those words were not to be considered for any purpose. A small win for the defense on form. It matters because it is the same move as "attributed to the subject" on the red phone, which went by without objection: the agent repeating what the sheriff told him about who owns a number. Who owns 3870 was proved another way on Thursday afternoon. Who used 4775 is still the whole question.

Another man's phone near the house, and an informant nobody heard about

Then Mr. Shamansky put a name in front of the jury it had never heard. Lacy's own tower-dump work showed a phone belonging to a Jeremy Evans, a West Virginia number, near the Strussion home from about midnight on September 21 until almost three in the morning, and Lacy had reported that to the sheriff.

WATCH THE CLIP FBI Agent Confirms Another Man's Phone Hit the Tower Dump in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Put that next to Wednesday. The coroner the State called put the deaths between eleven at night and two in the morning. The red phone, on the State's own map, left the house's tower at 11:37. So on the State's own clock, most of the time-of-death window falls after the red phone is gone, and another man's phone is in the area for about three hours of it. The State did not ask Lacy one question on redirect. The same limit applies to Evans's phone: a tower sector is a general area, not a living room. But it is the same kind of evidence the State is asking the jury to convict on, and the jury has heard nothing about who Jeremy Evans is, why his phone was there, or whether he was ever cleared. The State owes that answer, and I will be watching for it.

Then Mr. Shamansky asked whether Lacy had told the sheriff's office in November 2022 about information from a paid FBI informant known as "Reaper." That sounds familiar, Lacy said. And the informant indicated there was a rumor, "to be fair, within criminal circles," and the State objected before the sentence was finished. After more than three minutes at the bench, the defense dropped the line. The ruling was not audible on our feed, but a rumor relayed by an informant through an agent is hearsay twice over, and I expect that is why. What I want to know is whether the defense put the substance of that rumor on the record outside the jury's presence, the way it did with the immunity agreement. If it did not, nobody reviewing this case will ever know what the jury did not hear.

The money, from both sides

After lunch Thursday the State called Dave McKinzie, a retired IRS special agent who now does fraud work and volunteers with the Cold Case Foundation, and he brought a spreadsheet that I think helped the defense as much as the State.

His headline: in the whole life of the Elm Grove restaurant, there was not a single cash deposit. The register processor's records showed $89,975 in cash sales. None of it reached the bank. Griffin put in $106,466, every dollar by check, and was paid a thousand dollars a week. Tom put in about $154,000, much of it in round-number cash deposits and a $49,465 loan, and drew out $43,950 in checks and withdrawals beyond his pay. Counting the missing cash, McKinzie put the distributions at $133,925 to Tom and zero to Griffin. "Thomas took a lot of money out of that business."

The State wanted that for motive, and it is a motive: a man who was owed six figures and had been cut off. McKinzie added that by the end of August 2021 Griffin had about $16,000 left across his accounts, and that he withdrew $12,000 in cash in four slips between August 31 and September 18. The jury already knows that on September 13 someone paid $3,000 cash for a motorcycle, and on September 19 someone paid cash for a phone.

Mr. Shamansky did not fight a single number. He took them. The Strussions took about $106,000 from Mr. Griffin, opened the doors, paid him "some measly salary," and cannot account for eighty-five thousand dollars or more in cash. What did Tom do with it? "No, you can't trace cash." Could he have split it with Griffin? "That's possible." And the $16,000 was cash on hand, not Griffin's net worth, which would count his land.

So the defense's position is now plain: it concedes Griffin was wronged. It makes him a victim of the Strussions' money practices, and it widens the circle of people who might have been angry with a partner skimming cash in a cash business. The risk for the defense is that twelve people hear "he was owed six figures" and stop there. That is the State's motive, conceded on cross.

What the lab found, and whom it excluded

Then the State recalled its lead detective, Detective Sergeant Jordan Blumling, and this is where the forensic envelopes from Tuesday were opened.

He started with Griffin's own iCloud backup, which came in after the defense noted it was standing on an objection made in chambers and ruled on there. In the contacts: "Lisa, Salsa Joe's, Tommy's sister." "Brad Hunter next door," who lived next door to the Strussions. Dalton Ray. And Brett Cole, saved at 580-372-3870, the number the red phone called at 7:03 the morning after. The billing record for that number is in the name of Carolyn Babcock, who Blumling identified as Cole's mother. That closes the question of whose number 3870 is, by Griffin's own phone this time, and it is a real link. It still says nothing about who dialed it from the red phone.

Then the lab, by stipulation. One fingerprint of value from the whole scene, on a bundle of receipts from the Budweiser box in the closet, and it was not Tom's. Over the years the sheriff kept sending people's prints to compare against it, and the list of names read aloud was, in effect, the investigation's list of persons of interest: Angela Strussion, the two people prosecuted for extorting Tom, Jeremy Evans, and about a dozen others. And Andrew Griffin. And Brett Cole and Dalton Ray. Every one excluded. The print has never been matched to anyone.

The swabs from the glove box latch, the cabinet knob by the stove, the dresser knobs, the money bags: no hits. The firearms report: bullets compared against guns seized in the investigation, with no match. And the blue rubber glove the jury heard about on Day 1, found by a deputy on the ground near the house, did yield a DNA profile. It was compared against Tom, Angela, the two extortion defendants, Jeremy Evans and others. Then, Exhibit 14, Andrew Griffin. Excluded.

Was the forensic evidence leading anywhere, the prosecutor asked. "Fair to say" it was not, the detective agreed. I want to say this plainly because it is easy to lose in a day full of maps. The State's own lab has a fingerprint at the scene and a DNA profile on a glove near the scene, and neither one is Andrew Griffin's. Maybe the glove has nothing to do with the killings. Maybe the print was left by a server months before. But the State told this jury on Day 1 that the house gave up no DNA or prints that led anywhere, and Thursday the jury learned the house gave up two things that point at someone, and that someone has never been identified.

James Jobe, one digit, and a Shell station in Hugo

The rest of Blumling's afternoon was the State building the bridge from the records to the man, and some of it is strong.

Cricket's registration for the red phone named its owner as James Jobe of 1622 Washington Avenue in Knoxville, Tennessee, a person the State says does not exist; another detective went to Tennessee to knock on that door. Then the two phones Griffin's ex-wife found in a closet this summer: one held nothing; the other, with the device name "Andrew iPhone" and a matching serial on its SIM tray, had a contact carried in from Facebook named James Jobe. The motorcycle title White filled out carried the number 918-318-0228. Griffin's own number at the time was 918-318-0229. One digit off.

The defense's cross of Blumling was short and aimed at those two links. Can anyone tell who typed a name into a contact list? No. You only know the electronic record exists. And the one trip to Knoxville looking for James Jobe was the extent of that search, by his account.

There was something for the defense by agreement, too. The parties stipulated that between September 19 and 21, 2021, there was exactly one transaction on any of Griffin's bank accounts: on September 20, at a Shell station in Hugo, Oklahoma. Griffin's own card, in Oklahoma, on the day the State says the red phone sat in Belmont County. The State's answer, which it previewed in its opening, is that the card and the phone stayed behind on purpose. Then the State showed Brett Cole's own bank statement: gas in Hugo on September 13, the day of the bike, and a purchase at the Walmart Supercenter in Hugo at 7:20 p.m. on September 19, about two hours after the red phone was bought in Illinois. That fits the State's claim that Cole stayed home. It also means the State is asking the jury to read Cole's card as Cole and Griffin's card as not Griffin.

And on the trackers, the State's opening promised a GPS tracker on Tom's car in May and June of 2021. Thursday the jury learned that Griffin's account paid Amazon $121.99 on May 13 and Tracki $239.40 on May 17, 2021. The detective said Tracki answered his warrant with records, and the prosecutor told him he would not ask about them, and did not. On cross, the detective agreed that Tom was not being tracked in the days or weeks before he and Angela died. If there is a tracker on Tom's car in the spring, the jury has not been shown it through a witness yet.

His voice, his anger, and his lawyer's advice

The last hour of Thursday was the wiretap. In July 2024 the sheriff's office got a court order to listen to Griffin's phone, and the jury heard Andrew Griffin's voice for the first time in this trial.

What it heard was a man in a divorce, furious at the woman who had gone to the FBI. He told a woman on one call that his wife had accused him of killing "multiple, multiple people" and of crimes against her, that the FBI took his DNA and cleared him. He told his mother he prayed his wife would hit a train, that he would never be seen again if he went to prison for things he did not do. After detectives showed up at his divorce hearing in Oklahoma, he told a friend that the police had his DNA and his fingerprints, and that he felt better leaving that place. The day after, he told another man what his lawyer had advised: never talk to the police, because even an innocent man can say something wrong, and they are "trying to put a name in a book." The defense did not object to any of it on the record; every call was played "no objection," apparently on a ruling made in chambers.

Not one word on any call the jury heard Thursday was about Tom Strussion, Angela Strussion, Belmont County, a motorcycle or a burner phone. Several lines on the feed were too garbled for me to tell you who said what, and I am not going to quote them as if I could. The jury heard the recordings, not our transcript.

Here is where I think the process deserves a hard look. A person's choice to get a lawyer and not talk to police cannot be used as evidence of guilt. That is a constitutional line, and Ohio follows it. The State did not argue anything about it Thursday; it played the calls. But the jury has now heard, twice, Andrew Griffin agreeing he will not talk to detectives without a lawyer, and once his lawyer's reasons why. If that comes up in the State's closing as "he would not talk to us," it is a real appellate issue. If it never does, the risk sits in twelve people's heads with nothing to answer it, unless the judge gives them an instruction. I will be listening for one.

And the anger. A man praying that his ex-wife is killed by a train is ugly to hear. It is also anger at a different person, in a different year, in a divorce, and the law does not let a jury convict a man because he seems like the type. The phrase for that in the rules is unfair prejudice. The defense's silence suggests the judge already balanced it in chambers. The jury instructions will tell us whether the jury gets told what it may and may not use those calls for.

Where the State stands after Day 4, count by count

Aggravated arson, Count 13. The fire was set deliberately, in three places with a fourth attempt, in an occupied house with two dogs and a cat inside, after the people in it were dead. That element is proved. The only open question is who set it, the same question as the murders.

Aggravated murder of Tom, Counts 1 and 2, and of Angela, Counts 7 and 8. That they were killed by another person is proved. That whoever did it acted purposely is, in my view, proved by the medicine: head shots, a shot in the back and a finishing shot. Prior calculation and design, if that is the theory on one count for each, is strongly supported by the sequence and by a phone bought for cash two days before, if the jury connects that phone to the killer.

Identity, on every count, is where the trial is. After three days, here is what the State has: a strong motive, conceded on cross; a cash-bought phone that, by tower and sector, went from Illinois to the tower nearest the house during the hour Angela's last call ended and came home, with one call to Brett Cole; a plateless bike on a toll camera between two of its pings; Griffin's own phone silent of outgoing calls through the whole window; a near-match phone number on a bike title; a "James Jobe" contact on a phone found in his things; and two remembered admissions from people tied to Brett Cole.

Here is what the State does not have yet: anyone who saw Andrew Griffin in Ohio on September 20; any forensic trace of him at Trails End; an explanation for the glove and the print that exclude him; an answer to another man's phone near the house from midnight to three, inside the window the State's own coroner gave; and a record that can say who held the red phone, which its own expert says this one cannot.

My opinion, and it is only mine: tonight the State has proved a terrible crime and built a trail with real weight, and it has not yet closed the gap between that trail and the man in the chair. Every link that carries a name still runs through Brett Cole, or through people around him, or through a witness whose deal the jury did not get to hear about. The State told this jury on Day 1 where it plans to close that gap: a motorcycle helmet Brett Cole kept at his mother's house, with DNA a Pittsburgh firm says is Griffin's, and Cole himself on the stand under immunity. If that evidence holds up, this looks very different. If it does not, I think the State is asking the jury to fill the last mile with suspicion, and the law does not let it.

I could be wrong about where this goes. Twelve people who heard every word and saw every face will decide it, and theirs is the verdict that counts. But I watched these three days the way I would from that box, and that is where I am.

What comes next

Court resumes Friday, October 30, with the jury due at 8:45 a.m. Eastern. The State is still in its case. Still to come, on the State's own promises: Amy Chase, who the State says caught Brett Cole with a second phone that was Griffin's; the helmet and the DNA analysis behind it; Brett Cole; and Dalton Ray, who the case record says was convicted of obstruction in this investigation. A defense motion about a witness with his own lawyer was put off until that witness's day, expected Monday. And somewhere ahead, the State's answer about Jeremy Evans, the jury instructions that tell us which theory each murder count carries, and whether the jury is ever told what it may and may not do with those wiretap calls.

Andrew Griffin is presumed innocent tonight, as he was Monday. Tom and Angela Strussion were planning a pasta night and a birthday trip. Both of those things are true at once, and a fair process is the only thing that honors both.

WATCH: DAY 3 NO BREAKS EDITION Salsa Joe's Murders Trial Day 3, No Breaks Edition: Shot Before the Fire WATCH: DAY 3 TOP MOMENTS The Salsa Joe's Murders: Griffin Trial Day 3 Top Moments / Bullet Holes, Bike, Overheard Call WATCH: MY DAY 2 REFLECTION Salsa Joe's Murders Trial: The State's Best Day on Why Still Doesn't Put Griffin in Ohio / Pt 9