The Helmet the State Promised on Day 1, and the DNA Answer That Changed by Day 5

On the first morning of this trial the State stood up and told twelve people from Belmont County what it was going to show them. A phone bought for cash in Illinois that made the trip to Trails End Drive and back. A motorcycle bought in Texas. A toll-bridge photograph. A best friend who would say what he knew. And a helmet, the State said, with Andrew Griffin's DNA inside it.

Four court days later, on Friday, the jury finally got the helmet. What it got was not quite what it was promised on Monday, and the distance between those two days is where I want to spend this piece.

Tom and Angela Strussion were found in their burning house near Belmont on the morning of September 21, 2021. Tom was the face of the Salsa Joe's restaurants, the man in the kitchen and out front shaking hands. Angela kept the books and ran payroll on top of a full-time job, and her birthday was two days away. Andrew Griffin, the man from Oklahoma who became Tom's partner in the Elm Grove Salsa Joe's that spring, is on trial for their murders. Prosecutors allege he came back from Oklahoma, killed them both and set the house on fire. He has pleaded not guilty, and nothing in this article is meant to say otherwise. What I am asking here is a different question, the one this channel exists to ask: is the State proving what it promised, and is the way it is proving it fair?

Our Days 2 through 4 article covered the middle of the week: the partnership, the autopsies, the cash-bought phone and the deal the jury never heard about. This one folds together the two days on either side of it. Day 1, Monday, October 26, is the day the promises were made. Day 5, Friday, October 30, is the day the biggest of them came due.

Before a juror walked in, the death penalty was gone

Court had been called for half past eight on Monday. The case was not called until about a quarter past nine, and before a single juror came into the room, the trial the community had been told about for a year and a half changed shape.

Assistant prosecutor Joe Vavra told Judge Chris Berhalter that during jury selection the week before, the State had moved to drop the death penalty specifications. Now, to match, it was dropping what it called duplicate counts: three through six, nine through twelve, and fourteen. That left five of the original fourteen. Defense lawyer Samuel Shamansky said the defense was in favor of it, that it made sense to streamline the case, and the judge granted it on the spot.

So here is what Andrew Griffin is actually charged with now, and it matters, because people are charged with acts, not with a death. 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. Aggravated burglary, the count that would have required the State to prove he trespassed into that house to commit a crime, is gone.

In Ohio, aggravated murder can be proved two ways. One is that the killer caused the death on purpose and planned it ahead, what the statute calls prior calculation and design. The other is that he caused it on purpose while committing another serious felony, such as arson. Which theory each surviving count carries was not said on the record Monday; the jury instructions at the end of the trial will settle it. The most natural reading of two counts per victim is one of each. Aggravated arson means knowingly setting a fire that creates a substantial risk of serious harm to a person, and the house on Trails End, with two people inside it, is the definition of an occupied structure.

What the dismissal means in plain terms: there is no penalty phase and no death sentence. If this jury convicts, the judge sentences, from life without parole down to life with parole eligibility after twenty years. The jurors who sat through days of questions about whether they could vote for death last week will never be asked that question.

I want to stop on this, because it went by fast and nobody in the room seemed to think it needed explaining. For eighteen months this was a capital case. Jurors were questioned about the death penalty. And then on the morning of opening statements the State took it off the table, and the defense agreed in a sentence. I do not know why the State made that call, and the record does not say. I can tell you what a decision like that does. A capital case carries a heavier process at every step: a second trial on punishment, an automatic appeal to the state's highest court, the trial judge weighing the death verdict independently. In a case with no eyewitness and no confession, the death question can also make a jury more careful about guilt itself. Removing it lightens the weight on the jurors' shoulders. Whether that is a fair trade for the people of Belmont County or a tactical one for the prosecution is a question the State has not answered in public, and I think it is a fair one to ask.

Two smaller rulings came before the jury that morning. The judge ruled against the State on a motion about a witness: the State had wanted something kept from the jury, and the judge said a witness's relationships, circumstances and anything influencing that witness are fair game and the jury should hear them. Good. That is how it should work. And a second State motion, about a witness who has his own lawyer, was put off until the day that witness is called, which the State expects to be Monday, November 2. That witness is very likely Brett Cole. Hold onto both rulings. They are about the same thing: what the jury gets to hear about the people the State needs.

The jury was sworn at about twenty past nine. The judge gave them the speech every jury gets, and three parts of it mattered for this case more than most. He told them a fact can be proved directly, by someone who saw Johnny eat the cherry pie, or circumstantially, by someone who walks in to find Johnny holding the empty tin with cherry on his face, and that the law treats the two the same. In a case with no eyewitness and no confession, that is the most important sentence the jurors heard all week. He told them they may believe all, part or none of any witness, and that a witness who has wilfully lied about something that matters may be distrusted on everything. And he told them that after the openings they would be taken to see the house, without the lawyers and without Andrew Griffin, who had given up his right to be there.

WATCH: PT 1Griffin's Salsa Joe's Murders Trial Opens on a Mystery Phone and a Witness Serving Life

What the State promised

Joe Vavra, not his boss, the elected prosecutor Kevin Flanagan, gave the State's opening, and it ran a little over forty minutes. It was a good opening. It was honest about its own weak spots in a way prosecutors rarely are, and it promised a great deal.

He started with the fire: three 911 calls, neighbors pounding on a locked front door, an unlocked back door, an off-duty firefighter crawling in with his phone's flashlight. He told the jury the coroner saw what looked like bullet holes, that the fire marshal found several places where someone had started or tried to start a fire, and then he made his first concession. The sheriff's office and the state crime lab, BCI, swabbed and tested and looked for DNA and fingerprints in that house, and came up empty.

He told the jury the bad things about his own victim before the defense could. Tom Strussion was not faithful to his wife, he said, and not the most honest business partner. You may not like him for that, and that is fine; it does not mean he deserved to be murdered. That is right, and it is the kind of thing I respect hearing from a prosecutor.

He told them Andrew Griffin was a person of interest early, and that when detectives pulled his phone records, his phone was in Oklahoma when the killings happened, so he was set aside. Then he told them how he came back: a 2023 disappearance in which Griffin drove a work truck into Mexico, an estranged wife, and through her a best friend named Brett Cole. And here the prosecutor drew the sting a second time. You will hear a lot about Brett Cole, he said, and he is not a nice man. He is serving life in prison for the rape of a child.

Then the heart of the State's case, which is not Griffin's phone at all. An FBI analyst going through Brett Cole's records found one number unlike anything else in them, a call to Cole at 7:03 in the morning Central time on September 21, 2021, from around Jackson, Tennessee, twenty-four seconds long. When an FBI agent ran that number, it had been hitting the towers near the Strussions' house the night before. A phone bought for cash at a Walmart in Marion, Illinois, at 5:05 in the evening on September 19, registered to a name and an address that led nowhere. It went straight to Belmont County, sat there through September 20, left at 11:37 that night, and went quiet for good at 10:40 the next morning in Benton, Arkansas, about three hours from Griffin's home in Whitesboro, Oklahoma. Forty hours, first signal to last.

And Griffin's own phone? On the 19th and 20th it made no calls at all. Calls came in and went to voicemail. Then at 1:48 in the afternoon on the 21st, back at his home, it came back to life. The State's story, in one line, is that Griffin left his phone in Oklahoma with Brett Cole and made the trip with the other one.

CLIPState Traces a 40-Hour Mystery Phone That Called Griffin's Best Friend in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

He promised more. A motorcycle bought for three thousand dollars cash in Texas on September 13, 2021, by Brett Cole and a man named Dalton Ray, while Cole and Griffin spoke by phone four times, with a title naming a buyer nobody could ever find and a phone number one digit off Griffin's own. A toll-bridge photograph of a helmeted rider crossing from Indiana into Kentucky at 10:52 at night. A woman named Amy Chase, who was seeing Brett Cole then, and who would testify that she caught Cole with two phones and learned the second one was Andrew Griffin's. Griffin's estranged wife, who found a phone and a GPS tracker in his truck. Arthur Cole, Brett's grandfather, recorded on video, who would say he overheard Griffin on the phone saying he had to go get his money. And Brett Cole himself, given immunity in December 2024 while serving his life sentence, who, the prosecutor told the jury, the investigators' evidence shows never left Oklahoma.

Then the helmet. Cole told detectives he still had the motorcycle helmet at his mother's house. They got it, sent it to a lab in California, and the results went on to a DNA firm in Pittsburgh, Cybergenetics, which, the prosecutor told the jury, will say Andrew Griffin's DNA was inside it. So the case the public had been told had no forensic evidence had one: not in the house, but in the helmet.

CLIPProsecutor Links Griffin to a $3,000 Cash Motorcycle Buy in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Last came the why, which the State had never said in public. A written fifty-fifty partnership signed March 17, 2021. About a hundred and six thousand dollars Griffin put in. About ninety thousand dollars in restaurant cash that Tom controlled and, the State says, never deposited. A meeting on August 23 where Tom told Griffin they were done, and the next day Griffin taken off the company's bank account without being told. "Money and revenge," Mr. Vavra called it.

CLIPProsecutor Says Griffin's Phone Was in Oklahoma but He Wasn't in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial CLIPProsecutors Say Griffin's Surrogate Grandfather Overheard a Phone Call in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

What the defense promised back

Samuel Shamansky was on his feet for about five minutes, and he did not contest one fact about the fire or the gunshots. He reminded the jury the defense carries no burden, then promised them something anyway: the evidence points to a conspiracy, he said, but one that does not include Andrew Griffin.

He went straight at the two witnesses the State needs most. Brett Cole, he said, is "one of the lowest, most unreliable" people on earth, a man who raped a child, got life, and then made a deal with the government to save himself. And then he told the jury something it had not heard from the State: Griffin's estranged wife has also been given immunity, and on the government's own version of events, he said, she would be as guilty as her husband.

The rest was a list of what the State does not have. No forensic proof of who was inside, who pulled the trigger or who set the fire. A scene not properly worked, and "when BCI came up with snake eyes," nothing more done about it. "This is a case built on innuendo," he said, "and it's a case built on bought and paid for testimony." He told the jury they would hear it from Brett Cole's own mouth: what's in it for me, and then the promises coming fast. And he asked the question this trial will come down to: "are you going to bet the farm on the likes of a Brett Cole" and his client's estranged wife, in a case without one piece of direct evidence tying Andrew Griffin to these murders?

CLIPMoney and Revenge or Bought Testimony? Griffin's Defense Fires Back in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Notice the shape of what both sides told the jury on Monday. The State has two witnesses who were given immunity. The State told the jury about one of them. The defense told the jury about the other. By the end of Day 4, as our last article laid out, the jury had heard the estranged wife testify without hearing a word about the deal she testifies under. I raised that then and I am raising it again, because Day 1 is where it started: the jury was told in opening that both of the State's insiders have deals, and only one side said so about her.

The afternoon: the people who were there

After the jury came back from seeing the house, the State began where prosecutors usually do, with family.

Eddie Cutrer is Angela's father. Asked to tell the jury about his daughter, he said it was difficult, and the prosecutor walked him through it gently instead: born in Louisiana, raised mostly in Texas, a career in the payments business, a team leader with salespeople under her, then her own business, then a job with a payments firm once she and Tom moved to Ohio. He met Andrew Griffin once before the murders, in March 2021, when Griffin pulled up the drive towing a smoker on a trailer and slept on the Strussions' couch because Cutrer already had the spare room.

The part of his testimony about Griffin came after the deaths. Back home in Arkansas, looking for anything to hand the detectives, he reached out to Griffin, who had been inside the business and might know of someone with a grudge. Over three or four months of calls and texts, Griffin's answer kept coming back to the same place: it looked like a mob hit. A family in West Virginia, a man on its payroll with special skills. More than once Griffin said he feared for his own life, and that was why he had left Ohio. Then the calls stopped being answered.

WATCH: PT 2Angela's Father Testifies Griffin Pointed Him to a Mob Hit in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

He told the jury about the cash too: red bank bags from the restaurant sitting at the house overnight, and Tom with a big roll of hundred-dollar bills in his right front pocket every time he ever saw him. Mr. Shamansky's cross took about a minute and a half and wanted only that. Tom pulled out thousands of dollars nearly every time Mr. Cutrer was with him, and was never shy about it. The point was planted, and it is the defense's quiet theme for the whole trial: a man who showed his money to everyone had more than one person who might want it.

CLIPVictim's Father Testifies Griffin Kept Talking About a Mob Hit in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial FULL TESTIMONYEddie Cutrer: Full Testimony, Angela's Father on the Stand

The investigator, and the phone nobody can trace

The State's second witness was Detective Sergeant Jordan Blumling of the Belmont County Sheriff's Office, and he was less a storyteller than a filing cabinet: the warrants, the subpoenas, the phones, the tower records. The jury heard the three 911 calls and watched drone video showing how close the house sits to Interstate 70 and to the towers the phone experts would talk about later.

Then two admissions the State chose to bring out itself. Everything sent from inside the house to the state crime lab for DNA and fingerprints came back negative. And the phone the State says Brett Cole was using, on an account in his mother's name, has no location records at all, because by the time detectives asked for them, the carrier no longer kept them.

Mr. Shamansky's cross took seven minutes and was the most important cross of the day. He had the sergeant agree that DNA, fingerprints, hair and footprints are what put a person at a scene, and the jury had just heard the lab found none of it. Then he went back to Cole's phone. In a cobweb of phones and people, he said, the job is to rely on data rather than on somebody's word, because detectives are lied to all the time. The sergeant agreed. The point was left for later, and I will say it now: for Brett Cole, the man the State says never left Oklahoma, the jury will have only his word. The State told the jury in opening that the investigators' evidence shows Cole stayed home. The State's own records man told the jury that afternoon that the one record that could check it does not exist.

The lawyer turned to the phones the estranged wife handed over. No one ever told her to take her time, the sergeant agreed, and yet phones the State described in its opening reached detectives only about three weeks before trial, after sitting in her home the whole time. And his last question: for all the bank records the sergeant subpoenaed, he never tried to get a photograph of the person at the counter or the machine. That reaches a debit card of Griffin's used at a Shell station in Hugo, Oklahoma, on September 20, the day the State says Griffin was on his way to Ohio. Nobody looked to see who was holding it.

FULL TESTIMONYJordan Blumling: Full Testimony, the Phone Records Detective

The State reserved the right to call the sergeant back, and it did on Day 4. Our full release of his testimony across both days goes up on the channel soon.

FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE NOV 3, 11:00 AM ETJordan Blumling: Full Testimony, the Phone Trail and the Wiretap

The morning of September 21, told by the people who lived it

The rest of Monday afternoon belonged to the people who ran toward that house.

Captain Jeremy Wright Jr. of the Cumberland Trail Fire District and his crew were on Trails End about ten minutes after the call, as the sky was just getting light. What he saw from the road he called lazy smoke, light and slow, drifting from under the eaves. He and another firefighter went around to the back deck and found a woman there, plainly dead, with heavy bleeding and trauma to her head. They crawled in through an unlocked back door into smoke so thick they had to keep a hand on the right-hand wall, and ten or twelve feet in they found a man face down in the living room beside a burnt couch. They carried him out. Outside, in the light, he could see the head wounds. Then they went back in and searched the whole house. Two dogs dead in the garage, a cat upstairs. No one else.

Randy Stonebreaker runs the towing garage down the road and lived across the street then. He and one of his workers drove up, leaned on the horn, beat on the doors, found the front door locked, broke a window and shouted. The back door was unlocked. He crawled in two or three feet yelling for them, with no gear, and got no answer.

And John Phillips Jr., an off-duty volunteer firefighter who worked in that garage, answered the question the firefighter's testimony left open: how Angela came to be on the back deck. She had not died there. Phillips went around the back, got down low with a flashlight, went in four or five feet and saw a foot in the beam. He did not yet know whether she could be saved, so he took hold of it and pulled her out onto the porch.

WATCH: PT 3Off-Duty Firefighter Testifies He Pulled Angela From the Fire in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial FULL TESTIMONYJohn Phillips Jr.: Full Testimony, Into the Burning House

I want to give those men their due, because it is easy in a trial about phones and towers to forget that real people crawled into that smoke without masks to try to save two neighbors. They did. The defense asked none of them a single question.

But the record they built has a second use, and the defense will use it. Both bodies were moved, one by a neighbor and one by firefighters. At least a dozen firefighters came through, with two hoses and, Phillips guessed, at least three thousand gallons of water. A window was broken and the roof was vented. That is a crime scene altered by rescue, through no fault of anyone who did the rescuing, and it is part of why the lab found nothing.

Deputy Chad Nixon was the first officer there. He held the scene, kept the sign-in log for a while, and canvassed for cameras and witnesses. Only one house had cameras, the one directly across the street, and the woman there told him they did not work. Nobody saw anybody. And off the side of the road by the garage he found a blue latex glove, the medical kind, lying where it seemed out of place. The prosecutor then asked the question that took the air out of it: police and medics wear gloves like that all the time, and there were plenty of both at the scene that day.

CLIPFirst Deputy Testifies He Found a Blue Glove Near the Scene in Griffin's Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Our Days 2 through 4 article picks up that glove again: on Day 4 the State's own lab excluded Andrew Griffin from it.

The last witness Monday was Captain Douglas Cruse, who sat with the family. Late that first evening, detectives went to the Elm Grove Salsa Joe's for its surveillance video, and nobody had the passcode. Tom's sister called Andrew Griffin, and Griffin gave it to them. The defense asked nothing. The jury went home before three.

The first day ended with the State's case barely begun, by design. The defense had cross-examined two of seven witnesses and let five go without a question. Its fight, Mr. Shamansky made plain, is not over what happened in that house. It is over who made the trip.

My own reflection on Day 1 is up as Part 4.

WATCH: PT 4Salsa Joe's Murders Trial: The State's Phone Story and the Link It Still Has to Prove NO BREAKS: DAY 1Salsa Joe's Murders Trial Day 1, No Breaks Edition: Openings and Seven Witnesses TOP MOMENTS: DAY 1The Salsa Joe's Murders: Griffin Trial Day 1 Top Moments

Friday: the helmet comes due

Now jump four court days ahead. By Friday morning the jury had heard that both Strussions were shot before the fire, that the fire was set in several places, that a cash-bought phone sat on the towers near their home, that a motorcycle and a helmeted rider crossed a toll bridge at 10:52 at night, and that Andrew Griffin's estranged wife found a tracker and a strange phone in his truck. It had also heard the State's own lab exclude him from the one fingerprint and the glove. What it had not heard was anything that puts his body on that motorcycle.

The helmet was supposed to be that thing. Here is how it actually came in.

The State's first witness Friday works at Pure Gold Forensics, a private DNA lab in Southern California of five people, three of them scientists. The courtroom feed gave her name as Lacombe; our names record has her as Marissa Licon. She earned a forensic chemistry degree in 2022 and was signed off for DNA casework in February 2024. Mr. Shamansky's two questions on her qualifications made two points and sat down: she had been qualified for DNA work for only about eleven months when she wrote her first report in this case, and she had never been qualified as an expert in Ohio. He did not object, and the judge declared her an expert.

She gave the jury a patient lesson in how DNA work is done. Some evidence arrives as an object, some as a filter from a device called an M-Vac, a wet vacuum that "essentially acts like a carpet cleaner," spraying sterile liquid onto a surface and sucking it back up. One person's DNA shows at most two peaks at each location the lab reads; more than two means a mixture of people. And the lab's software reports a likelihood ratio: how many times more likely the DNA is if a given person contributed to it than if he did not. A result of one tells you nothing. Above one leans toward inclusion. Toward zero leans toward exclusion.

Before the helmet, she walked the jury through other reports from her lab, including one that matters. The bundle of receipts found in the master bedroom near where a fire was set, the bundle that on Day 4 carried the one fingerprint nobody has ever matched, held a mixture of at least three people. Angela was very strongly supported as one of them. Every man compared was excluded. Andrew Griffin was excluded too.

The first answer, and the second

Then the helmet, Exhibit 123, still in its box with her own initials on it. The inside held DNA from at least four people, readable at all twenty-four locations. Her January 2025 report compared them. And for Andrew Griffin, the mixture was 266 times more likely to have come from four unknown people than from Griffin and three unknown people. Her lab's scale calls that "limited support for exclusion." Not an exclusion, she agreed, and not an inclusion.

Stop there and think about what the jury was told on Monday. Cybergenetics will say Andrew Griffin's DNA was inside the helmet. What the first lab to touch the helmet actually reported, in writing, was that the DNA leaned away from him.

Then the turn. Another analyst in her lab told her that a different program, TrueAllele, the software Cybergenetics sells, had included a person of interest she had reported as leaning toward exclusion. That sent her back to her file, where she found a note. In her words: "a note was made by the technical reviewer that the exclusion for Andrew Griffin may not have been intuitive." Meaning the number the software produced did not seem to fit the profile she was looking at.

CLIPDNA Analyst Testifies Her Re-Run Flipped the Helmet DNA on Griffin in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

So she looked again. She decided her software had put too much weight on one location, and had not allowed for what scientists call dropout, a person's marker falling below the lab's reporting line because the DNA is small, old or broken down. Her analogy was a student with nine A's and one F whose grade sinks to a B. She threw that one location out entirely and reran everything on one fewer.

Her amended report is dated May 18, 2026, five months before this trial. With the same DNA, Andrew Griffin moved from one side of the scale to the other: the helmet mixture was now 8,700 times more likely if it came from Griffin and three unknown people than from four unknown people. Her lab calls that "moderate support for inclusion."

One location. From 266 to one against him to 8,700 to one for him. That is a swing of more than two million times, and it turned on a judgment call.

WATCH: PT 19DNA Analyst Defends Dropping One Marker From Griffin's Helmet Test in Salsa Joe's Trial

The order of events

Mr. Shamansky's cross of this witness was the best cross of a State expert in the trial so far, and the heart of it was not an accusation. It was a sequence, taken one step at a time. She wrote her report in January 2025 with Griffin on the exclusion side. After that, the lab's data went out to Cybergenetics. She did not know what passed between Cybergenetics and her boss. Then someone told her to look again. She insisted she never saw the Cybergenetics result herself; another analyst told her about it. He said he was not suggesting she had. She agreed with every step. So, he put it, she did not rework this independently of Cybergenetics.

Then he made the number do his work. On her own lab's scale, "very strong support" for inclusion means a likelihood ratio over a million. A cheek swab compared to the same man's blood would come out at something like three times ten to the twenty-seventh power. Griffin on the helmet, after the redo, was 8,700, and "moderate" on her table runs from 100 to 9,999. And she agreed with the point that matters most for anyone repeating this number: 8,700 does not mean a one-in-8,700 chance the DNA is his. "So these numbers are really confusing, aren't they?" he asked. "It is difficult," she said.

He asked how many people are in the population database her statistics rest on. She did not know. A hundred thousand? She would assume more. "I don't want assumptions," he said, and asked her to define the scientific method. She could not give the specific definition.

Then the redo itself. He said she started to manipulate the numbers. No, she said: the raw data never changed; she chose to leave out one location and used less information. Because the result was not making sense to people in her lab or in another company? Correct. How does she know the F is the wrong grade? Because she is looking at the profile, she said, and at how the software weighed that location. And he ended where he wanted to: whatever the reason, neither her first result nor her second ever reached very strong support. She was "never ever, ever able to approach the threshold of strong likelihood," he put it. "That's correct."

CLIP · LIVE NOV 1, 10:20 AM ETDefense Accuses DNA Analyst of Manipulating the Helmet DNA Numbers in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial CLIP · LIVE NOV 1, 12:20 PM ETDNA Analyst Agrees She Doesn't Know if the Helmet Data Is Reliable in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial FULL TESTIMONYThe Pure Gold DNA Analyst: Full Testimony, the Helmet Rerun

Here is where I come down, and I want to be precise about it, because this is opinion and it rests on facts I can point to. I do not think this witness lied, and nothing in the record says she did. An analyst is allowed to decide that one location's data is unreliable. But she made that decision after learning another program had included the man the police suspected, about the one location that pushed him toward exclusion, and she reworked it with the same technical reviewer whose note started it. The jury is entitled to weigh that, and I think a careful juror weighs it heavily. Forensic scientists have a name for this risk, contextual bias: an examiner who knows which answer another method gave is no longer looking at the evidence with fresh eyes. The State's answer is that two methods now agree. My answer is that the second one is not independent of the first, and her own testimony is why.

The company that sells the software

The State's next witness was the one the morning had pointed to. Jennifer Bracamontes is a DNA analyst and casework manager at Cybergenetics, the Pittsburgh company that makes TrueAllele. Her credentials were deep, and the contrast with the morning was hard to miss: a master's in forensic science, fourteen years at the company, co-author of peer-reviewed validation studies, seventy-nine times on the witness stand, about sixty-five of them for the prosecution and fourteen for the defense.

When the State asked that she be declared an expert, Mr. Shamansky asked to question her first, and his quarrel was not with her résumé but with the program. TrueAllele belongs to her company. He asked her to tell the judge "what independent scientific agency has validated, independently validated your proprietary software." She pointed to validation studies and to crime labs that tested it before buying it. Those are law enforcement labs that bought the software, he said. He wanted names of scientists or agencies, apart from police customers, who had independently evaluated it. "I do not know," she said. He told the judge, in front of the jury, that the reliability standard for expert testimony had not been met.

In Ohio, the rule that lets an expert testify requires that the testimony rest on reliable scientific methods, reliably applied. The prosecutor rebuilt her foundation: peer-reviewed journals, published error rates, national standards. The judge declared her an expert in DNA evidence interpretation, and the defense's objection to her slides and her report was noted and preserved. That matters for an appeal if there is ever a conviction.

CLIPDefense Presses DNA Analyst on Who Independently Tested Her Software in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

Then she explained the difference between her answer and the morning's. Labs like Pure Gold draw a line through the data and set aside everything below it as possible noise. TrueAllele, she said, uses all of the DNA information "essentially all the way down to zero," including the faint peaks the other lab would throw out. And almost in passing: in her example, she had the program separate the helmet's DNA into five people. The morning witness counted at least four.

And then the number. A match between the motorcycle helmet and Andrew Griffin is 1.52 million times more probable than a coincidental match to an unrelated person. Every other person compared, including Tom and Angela and the two men convicted of extorting Tom, was excluded.

WATCH: PT 20Second DNA Analyst Puts the Helmet Match to Griffin at 1.52 Million in Salsa Joe's Trial

Her report is dated April 8, 2025. That date settles something the morning left vague, and I think it is the most important date of the day. TrueAllele's inclusion of Griffin existed in April 2025. The first lab's amended report, the one that moved Griffin from exclusion to inclusion, came thirteen months later. When the State tells this jury in closing that two labs agree, the jury should know which came first.

Mr. Shamansky's cross went to money, code and the sample. The company has been paid at least ten thousand dollars so far, and four hundred an hour for her testimony. The code is the company's own; since 2023 outside experts can review it at the company's office under its terms, on a computer the company supplies, without running their own tools against it. And the part I think matters most: Cybergenetics never touched the helmet. It reads the data a lab sends it. She did not know who at Pure Gold took the sample, with what training, and she agreed she could not vouch for the reliability of the very data she relied on. On redirect, the prosecutor established that the defense never asked to review the code. Fair point for the State. The defense, on recross, read the terms aloud.

FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE NOV 4, 11:00 AM ETJennifer Bracamontes: Full Testimony, the Helmet DNA Software Under Fire

The lab the State never used

The most telling question about the helmet came at the very end of the day, from a witness who had nothing to do with DNA. Jennifer Dillion has worked for Ohio's Bureau of Criminal Investigation for twenty-nine years. On cross, Mr. Shamansky asked her whether her agency runs its own laboratory, accredited, that does DNA work for prosecutors all over the state. After a conference at the bench, she agreed, adding that she works on the investigation side.

He did not need to say the rest out loud, so I will. Ohio has a state crime lab. It is the lab that tested everything from inside the Strussions' house and came up empty. The State of Ohio took this helmet, the one piece of physical evidence it says ties Andrew Griffin to the trip, not to its own accredited lab but to a five-person private company in California, whose first written answer leaned toward excluding him, and then to a second private company that sells the software it used. The record does not say why. Maybe there is a good reason; the morning's analyst said she did not know whether the state lab processes M-Vac filters, which could be one. But the jury has not been told one, and I think on a piece of evidence this important, it is a fair question: why did the State's own lab never look at the helmet?

And there is the question the DNA cannot answer in either version. DNA on a helmet says, at most, that a person's DNA got onto the helmet at some point. It does not say when. It does not put the helmet on a road in Kentucky at 10:52 on the night of September 19, 2021. It does not tell you whether Andrew Griffin ever wore his best friend's helmet on any other day. That link, from this helmet to the rider in the toll photograph, is a separate chain, and the man who held the helmet before the police did is the one the State says will testify Monday.

A tracker named "Tom"

After lunch the State went back to a thread it has been pulling since the estranged wife testified on Day 3. Timothy Doolen, who for almost three years answered legal requests for the GPS tracker company Tracki, explained the records. The defense stipulated that Griffin subscribed to the service.

The account carried Griffin's phone number. The subscription cost $239.40, the exact sum on Griffin's bank card on May 17, 2021. The device first sent data on May 15, 2021. And the owner had given the tracker a nickname, something only the account holder can do. The nickname was "Tom."

CLIPGPS Witness Says Tracker on Griffin's Account Went Dark in Wheeling in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

That afternoon, the State's analyst put the tracker's points on a map, and the picture was plain. In May 2021, the device on Griffin's account went where Tom Strussion went: both restaurants, Columbus on the day Tom's phone went to Columbus, and the Strussion home, while Griffin's own phone stayed around Wheeling. On May 23 it sent one last point from the house on Trails End with its battery at five percent, and went silent. When it spoke again, on June 3, it was at Griffin's own house in Wheeling, still at five percent, and the next day it read a hundred. Someone charged it there.

CLIPAnalyst Says Silent Tracker Resurfaced at Griffin's Home 11 Days Later in Salsa Joe's Murders Trial

I will give this to the State plainly: this is the strongest evidence it has put on of planning, and planning is what prior calculation and design means. A tracker bought on Griffin's account, paid for with his card, named after the victim, following him home, and turning up next at Griffin's house. That is a hard fact for the defense.

But keep the dates in front of you. The tracker's last signal of any kind came on June 16, 2021, in Wheeling, three months before the killings. Whatever was being tracked, nothing was being tracked in the weeks before September 20. Tracking a business partner who, the State says, was keeping the cash is not the same thing as tracking a man you mean to kill, and the jury will have to decide which this was. The defense asked Mr. Doolen nothing.

FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE NOV 3, 1:00 PM ETTimothy Doolen: Full Testimony, the Tracker Records

What Griffin told his friend

Justin Monroe has known Andrew Griffin about thirteen years, from the Oklahoma oil fields. He was the other voice on a July 2024 wiretap call the jury already heard. He told the jury what Griffin told him: that Tom always had a lot of cash, that Griffin had concerns about what Tom did in his spare time, that when Griffin left the business it was not working out. In late summer 2023, Griffin vanished for a little under two months and called from a Costa Rican number with two stories in one call: first that men had shot at him at a stop sign in Texas, then that it was not true and he had had a breakdown.

And then the line the State brought him for. Before he disappeared, Griffin told Monroe what his estranged wife was threatening: to turn him in for the Ohio murders. And what did Griffin say she was telling police? That he had ridden a motorcycle up here and left his phone with a friend.

CLIPFriend Testifies Griffin Said His Wife Told Police He Rode a Motorcycle to Ohio in Salsa Joe's Trial

Be careful with what that is. It is the State's whole theory of the trip, the bike and the phone left behind, and the jury heard it as Griffin's report of his wife's accusation, years before trial. It is not Griffin saying he did it. Mr. Shamansky's short cross made sure of that: Monroe was his confidant, and Griffin never once told him he killed anybody. Then one more question. The estranged wife's reputation in the community for truthfulness? "Not great," Monroe said.

WATCH: PT 21Friend Recalls Griffin's Costa Rica Call as BCI Maps the Prepaid Phone in Salsa Joe's Trial FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE NOV 4, 1:00 PM ETJustin Monroe: Full Testimony, the Oil Field Friend

The map, and what the map left out

The afternoon belonged to Jennifer Dillion and her slides, and it was the State's best hour of the week. She put the whole phone case on one map.

On September 13, 2021, while Brett Cole was buying the motorcycle in Texas, Cole called Griffin four times, and every call reached Griffin's phone at his home in Whitesboro. On September 19, Griffin's phone moved south to Hugo, where Brett Cole lives, and stayed there into the night; at 7:20 that evening, the minute Cole's debit card was used at the Hugo Walmart, Griffin's phone was on a tower serving that part of town. At 5:05 that same afternoon, hundreds of miles northeast, someone paid $93.73 in cash at the Walmart in Marion, Illinois, for a prepaid phone, a power bank and an activation card, registered to "James Jobe" of Knoxville. From Griffin's house to that Walmart is about eight hours.

The prepaid phone went northeast. It reached the toll bridge at 10:52 that night, the minute of the photograph of the rider on the motorcycle. It reached the towers around the Strussion home at 3:43 in the morning on the 20th, and it did not leave. It used the towers that serve Trails End, on the sides facing the house, from before dawn until 11:18 that night. Both victims' phones were on that same sector at 10:18 and 11:18. At 11:37 it was gone west on Interstate 70. Near Jackson, Tennessee, at 7:03 the next morning, it made its one outgoing call ever, to Brett Cole. Its last trace was Benton, Arkansas, at 10:40, two hours and fifty minutes from Griffin's front door. And Griffin's own phone, silent through the 19th and 20th, made its first outgoing call at 1:48 that afternoon from home: a twenty-six-minute call to Tom's sister, Lisa Balog.

CLIP · LIVE NOV 1, 2:20 PM ETAnalyst Testifies Griffin's Phone Took the Prepaid Phone's Route Weeks Earlier in Salsa Joe's Trial

That is a powerful picture, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If you accept that Andrew Griffin carried that prepaid phone, the timing does an enormous amount of work for the State.

But the same maps carried the defense's best facts of the day, and the State's own summary slide stepped around them. Dillion showed the jury a slide built to make one point: through Sunday the 19th and Monday the 20th, Griffin's phone had not a single conversation, no call made and no call answered. What the slide did not count were texts. On the morning of the 21st, while Griffin's phone sat in Hugo, someone used it to text his estranged wife twice: at 12:24 in the morning and again at 7:05. Seven-oh-five in Hugo is two minutes after the prepaid phone, six hundred miles away near Jackson, Tennessee, made its one call to Brett Cole.

And then Griffin's phone left Hugo at 8:30 that morning and was at his home in Whitesboro by ten, while the prepaid phone was still near Little Rock, almost three hours away. Whoever made the trip, the State's own maps now say Griffin's phone did not travel with him that morning either. Someone carried it home and someone was texting on it. The State's theory needs that person to be someone other than Andrew Griffin. The State has not told the jury who.

On cross, Mr. Shamansky got the concession that frames all of it: Dillion was not there for any call, she does not know who was using any of these phones, and what her slides call Griffin's phone is only the name on the account. The FBI agent said the same on Day 4. And she had looked at Brett Cole's phone records, and made no slides from them.

FULL TESTIMONY · LIVE NOV 5, 11:00 AM ETJennifer Dillion: Full Testimony, a Prepaid Phone's Trip to Ohio

I think that slide deserves to be named for what it was. A summary chart is supposed to summarize the records. A chart titled around silence that leaves out two outgoing texts, one of them sent two minutes after the call the whole case turns on, is not a neutral summary. It is an argument. The jury is entitled to argument from the State in closing. I do not think it should arrive dressed as a summary of the records, and the defense let it in without objection.

Promised against delivered

Lay Monday's opening next to Friday's evidence and you can see the shape of the State's case as it actually stands.

The phone: promised, and delivered in detail. The State has proved, I think, that a cash-bought phone went from Illinois to Trails End and back, and that it sat near the Strussion home through the day and night they died. What it has not proved is who carried it. Two of its own analysts have now told the jury they cannot say.

The motorcycle and the bridge: delivered as a photograph of a helmeted rider at 10:52. Nobody has put a name on the rider.

The helmet: promised as Andrew Griffin's DNA inside it. Delivered as a four-or-five-person mixture that the first lab read as leaning away from him, then toward him after a judgment call made in the shadow of the second lab's answer, and that a company selling its own software read at 1.52 million. Not tested by the State's own accredited lab. Not dated. That is real evidence, and the jury may find it persuasive. It is not what the jury was told on Monday it would be.

Amy Chase, the woman the State said caught Brett Cole with Griffin's phone: through Day 5, she has not taken the stand.

And Brett Cole, the man the State told the jury never left Oklahoma, whose phone has no location data, who is the only number the prepaid phone ever called, and whose immunity the jury has heard about only from the defense: Monday.

Where do I stand on the charges? On counts 1, 2, 7 and 8, the aggravated murders, and count 13, the arson, every element but one is effectively proved. Tom and Angela were shot before the fire, on purpose, and the fire was set. The planning case grew on Friday with the tracker. The one element still open is the one the whole trial has been about from the first sentence: that it was Andrew Griffin. As of Friday, my opinion is that the State has built a strong circumstantial road from Illinois to Trails End and back, and has not yet put him on it. The helmet is its nearest approach, and its history is exactly the kind of thing a juror is told to weigh. I can't prove what the jury will make of it, and I would not want to. That is theirs. But they were promised a helmet with his DNA in it, and what they got was a number that changed after the police had a suspect.

What Monday has to answer

Court comes back Monday, November 2, with the jury at 8:45. The State has not rested. The motion the judge put off on Day 1, about a witness with a lawyer of his own, comes up that day. If that witness is Brett Cole, the jury will finally hear from the man at the center of all of it: the 7:03 call, the 8:18 call to Dalton Ray, the helmet at his mother's house, and the deal.

Three questions I will be watching. Who carried Andrew Griffin's phone from Hugo to Whitesboro, and who sent those texts at 12:24 and 7:05? Will the jury hear the terms of Brett Cole's immunity from the State, or only from the defense, the way it heard about the estranged wife's? And when the State tells the jury in closing that two DNA labs agree, will anyone tell them that one agreed after hearing the other?

The judge told these jurors on Monday that a fact can be proved by the tin and the cherry on the face. That is true. But the law also says every link in that chain has to hold, and it says the jury decides whether it does, not the prosecution, not the defense and not me. Ours is one opinion among many. Theirs is the one that counts.

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