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The Doorknob That Unraveled a Husband’s Murder Story · Both Things Are True Crime

• ashley flynn: There is a house on a cul de sac in Tip City, Ohio, two stories, attached garage, a pickup truck in the driveway, and upstairs there's a bedroom where a husband and wife are asleep. Down the hall there's a room with a bunk bed in it where two little girls are asleep. And on the night of february fifteenth, two thousand twenty six there were four people and two dogs in that house. And according to the man who lived there, one more person nobody's ever found. And at two thirty one in the morning, Tip city police were called to that house. Ashley Flynn was upstairs in her own bedroom and she was thirty seven years old. She coached volleyball at the middle school and she had been shot twice in the back of the head. The girls never woke up and I think that's the only mercy anywhere in this story, to be honest with you. Her husband told the dispatcher that somebody broke in and killed his wife. And seven months later, a jury of twelve people in Miami County, Ohio Sat down through eight days of evidence, went back into a room, and came out in about two hours and ten minutes with nine guilty verdicts, all of them against him. And the thing that undid him was a doorknob. We're gonna talk about it. But before we get into it, we have four things to go over really quick. I am not a lawyer. I want to go back to school and maybe law eventually. The reason I do the legal part of the show is that almost nobody covering these cases actually explains the legality and the outcome. And the law to me is the most interesting thing in the room. Second thing, this case is not over. He was convicted on September twenty ninth and sentence on October fifth. And October seventh, as we were not surprised, his attorney filed a notice of appeal to Ohio's Second District Court of Appeals. So everything I say about what he did is going to carry the word convicted in it because this is accurate and because the appellate record is still open from what I can see. Third, their daughters. I'm not saying their names and I'm not saying their ages. They were in the house and they were asleep. Their statements were read out loud in a courtroom by adults, and I'm going to use one line from that and I'm going to credit it to the family. And fourth, this one is about a woman who's not on trial. There was an affair. The woman involved testified for the state, Aaliy Botner, for two days, and she has not been charged with anything. But I'm going to tell you exactly what she said under oath, including the parts that were ugly, and then I'm gonna stop. I'm not gonna speculate about what she knew or where she was, not even as a question, not even as a joke. I have done that before with the previous trial, the Chris Watts trial, where I gave my opinion and I didn't feel so good afterwards because I was just speculating and I don't want to speculate about what she knew or where she was. So that's my feel on that. And later in this episode, I'm gonna tell you about something that happened to me because it's the reason I don't really come to this case neutral and I'd rather say something than pretend. I'm not gonna be graphic about it. And I'm not asking y'all for anything, I'm just gonna talk about it. So, first we're gonna talk about who's important right now. And it is Ashley Flynn. And she was born in February 1988. She graduated from Tip City High School in 2006 and from Lee University in 2010. And she met Caleb in college, unfortunately. They got married in 2010, the same year she graduated, and they were about 15 years in. And a part that I keep turning over is that she built her whole adult life inside of the town that raised her. She taught elementary school for Tip City Schools, the same district she had been a kid in. Then she substituted, and in the last year of her life, she was teaching for Likewise Academy in Tip City. And she coached volleyball at Tippi Canoe Middle School. And I want to sit on that for a second because I think of middle school volleyball coach as a specific kind of beautiful person. This is not a job you take for the money. There is no money. You take it because you want to be in a gym on a Tuesday night with twelve, twelve year olds who cannot serve yet. And there are kids in that town right now who knew Ashley Flynn as the loving woman with the whistle and the clipboard and possibly Ride Holmes, you know? She also volunteered at the church where her husband was the worship pastor. And her family also ran a business. Her sister testified at trial that it's a pretty good business projected somewhere between 300 and 400 300. And $4,000 a year, and Caleb Flynn, the husband, worked inside of it. So remember that number because we're gonna come back to it, okay, you guys? But eight days after she was killed, her friends and family got together anyway and celebrated the birthday she did not get to have. So that's who we're talking about. We're not just talking about a case, we're talking about a coach who went back to her own hometown to teach other people's kids and then got up on a Monday morning and she did it again. Now This part is me. Cause I keep snagging on the fact that she went home. She finished college, went back to Tip City, and taught in the same district that taught her, and then she coached and then volunteered at her husband's church on top of all of that. I know women like that. I'm related to women like that. And the thing nobody ever says about them is that staying is not the same as settling. I think she picked a small life on purpose and then she filled it all the way up with her love and with her acts. And I think he is the one. Who decided that that was a cage. Now, before I tell you one thing the state proved, I want to walk you through that night the way Caleb Flyn described it himself, okay? Because he talked to the detectives voluntarily three times, and two of those interviews were played for the jury. So this is his own story in his own words in order, okay? So what he said was him and Ashley went to bed around 11 o'clock. Then he got up, went downstairs to sleep on the couch, and in a second interview he actually said he moved because he was coughing and Ashley wanted him to leave the room. Then he said he was on that couch when he heard one of the dogs moving around, so he gets up, he checks on his daughters, and he said he laid down with his youngest one in her room on the bottom bunk bed of the girl's bunk bed. And he said that is where he was when he heard two gunshots. So he said he came out of the girl's room. He goes on his way to the bedroom. He notices the door to the garage standing open. And he says he goes in, he tries to wake Ashley. He grabs her foot. He calls her name twice. Ashley. Ashley, but she didn't answer him. And his phone was downstairs in the living room. So he left her there, went down, got the phone, called 911 at 231 in the morning. Now, let's hold on real quick to three things out of that, because the entire case lives inside of his own account. So one By his own statement, he was in his daughter's room, in a bedroom with one of his children, when the shots went off down the hall. Not the couch, but the girls' room. Two, he noticed an open garage door downstairs while walking down a dark hallway at two in the morning on the way to find out why he just heard gunfire. And then three, he found his wife shot in the head and then he walked away from her to go get a phone. Nom listen, listen, listen. Telling y'all that any of these is a lie. I'm telling you, those three things are what the state spent eight days taking apart. And when you hear them laid out like that, you already know which one they started with. And listen, this part is me. I'm be saying it's a lot because I cannot read that account without stopping on one thing. He said he found his wife shot in the head and he went downstairs to get his phone. And I don't know what I would do. Nobody knows. People do the strangest things in the worst minutes of their life, and I'm not gonna stand here and pretend there's a correct way to behave in a room like that. But he would have to have walked past her twice. And there's this is the part of the case nobody talks about. And it's another part. There's a lot of parts I just cannot stop thinking about. This is another one. She was killed on the 16th. He was not arrested until the 19th. And for three days, Tip City held a vigil. The church puts out a statement. So does the city. The schools. People are standing outside praying for a family. And the man they are praying for had already been taken down to the police station at 428 that first morning and talked to the detectives. And on the 17th. The chief announced that the FBI was helping. So them so was also the Miami County Sheriff's Office and the county prosecutor. And on the 18th, police were still standing guard on the house. And Chief Atkins had to put out another release telling people to stop repeating a rumor that a suspect was in custody had confessed. So just just stop with me for a second. Think about what kind of three days that is, right? For a town that small trying to figure out whether a burglar is still just walking around amongst y'all. And the actual answer is sitting in the same pews that they are in. And hold on to those three days because they're not just sad. They're a crime we're gonna come back to. Three of the nine counts he was convicted on are tampering with evidence. Those three counts actually exist because of what those three days were. He pointed an entire count at a stranger who was never there. And the law has a name for that. And we're gonna get back to it. So on the 19th. At 5 07 in the evening, Caleb Flynn gets booked into the Miami County jail. The next morning, charges were filed in Miami County Municipal Court and he was arraigned over video and bond was set at $2 million. That same day, the 911 call was released, and so was the initial police report. The family, they canceled the public celebration of life, and instead they planned a private funeral, which tells you everything about what that week turned into for them. And then on March 18th, the Miami County grand jury held up an 11-count indictment. He pleaded not guilty the next day, and the judge raised his bond from two million to three and a half. And then the case did what real cases do, which is loudly nothing for six months. The state filed a witness list with 172 names on it, and the defense filed one with 128. And then the trial got pushed from April to May, and then from May to September, and the second time because the defense hired an expert and they needed time. And also the judge did let the jury go walk through the house. And then finally on September 17th, the trial started. Now, one woman died, and the jury came back with nine guilty verdicts. And I want to explain why, because when you understand, I think you'll never read a headline the same way again, because I know I can't. So nine verdicts is not nine crimes. Here's what he's convicted of: one count of aggravated murder, three counts of murder, two counts of felonious assault, three counts of tampering with evidence. And there are also two misdemeanor accounts of intimidating a witness in the original indictment, and those are not in the nine. Now, I really think that the legal spine that this is this is interesting and important information for us all to know as regular human beings, not that any of us have any intention on unaliving anybody, hopefully not. murder is bad, you guys, if you didn't know. But what I think is interesting is I think that we all should know exactly what kind of actions begets certain charges. Does that make any sense? So let's talk about why charge one killing four different ways. Because a prosecutor does not get to see inside the jury room. If the state charges only aggravated murder and the jury decides it cannot agree on the planning, the state gets to walk away with nothing on a man who shot his wife. So they charge the same conduct under every theory that the facts will carry, and then they let the jury pick, basically, is how it goes. And Before I start throwing numbers at you, let me tell you how to hear them because I had to learn it myself and nobody explains this either. Ohio revised code 2903.02 just means chapter 2903, section two. The chapter is the neighborhood, and the section is basically the house from what I'm understanding. And chapter 2903 is where Ohio keeps their homicide laws. So everything inside of it is some version of one person killing another. And the section number tells you which version. So that's the whole trick. Chapter, then section. And I'm pretty sure that's how to read a statue. So murder in Ohio is revised code 2903.02, purposely causing another person's death. And aggravated murder is 2903.01, same chapter, just one section up the street. And it adds four words that are this whole entire case: prior calculation and design. That phrase is why he ain't never getting out. And Ohio has actually told us how to test for it. So for what about what I can understand. In 1997, the Ohio Supreme Court decided a case called State versus Taylor, and they laid out three questions. And the court came back to them in 2016 in State versus Walker, where it threw out an aggravated murder conviction because the state had proved a purposeful killing and had not proved any planning at all. So it was a brawl that turned fatal, and that is murder. But it's not aggravated murder. So these are the three questions. One, did the accused and the victim actually know each other? And if they did, was the relationship strained? Two. Did the accused give thought or preparation to choosing the murder weapon or the murder site? And three, was it drawn out or was it an instantaneous eruption of events? Now let's put Caleb Flynn up against those three questions. Did they know each other and was it restrained? Well, 15 years of marriage and prosecutors put on more than 107,000 messages between him and another woman in front of that jury. And 140 of them referenced his wife being dead or gone. And 95 of them said that he hated her. Did he give thought to the weapon or site? Well, the gun was the one he kept in his own trunk console, and the site was his own house. And twenty days before she died, the security camera just kind of came off of the house. And was it drawn out or instantaneous? Well, the messages ran for about a year and a half. The woman he was seeing testified and gave him a final divorce deadline. She said, You gotta get the d get it done, get it done. By January the 11th, and Ashley was killed on February 16th. So three for three, that's not a brawl. That is the thing that State versus Taylor is basically describing. Now, here's the part that actually answers the headline, and it's my favorite doctrine, if there could be one in the whole Ohio code. So Ohio revised code 2941.25. So chapter 2941, section twenty five, and chapter twenty nine forty one is not crimes at all, it's indictments, which tells you. This is a rule about how you charge something and not a rule about what the crime is, I believed. So allied offenses of similar import. And from what I can understand, it basically says that when the conduct can be constructed as two more offenses, the defendant may be charged with all of them, but convicted of only one. So one act, one punishment, basically saying you cannot stack four homicide sentences on one death. And in 2015, the Ohio Supreme Court, they actually cleaned up how the courts apply it in states versus rough. So the site for that, from what I can understand, is 2015 Ohio 995. And that 995 is not a page number, I believe it means that it was the 995th opinion of Ohio handed down that year. And in rough, they give you the same three questions again. Are the offenses dissimilar in importance or significance? Were they committed separately? Were they committed with a separate animus, which is a legal word for a separate state of mind? If the answer to any of those is yes, the offenses don't merge and the defendant actually gets sentenced on each. So, I know I said a lot, but let's just like run that nine counts through rough and watch what basically happens. The three murder counts and the two felonious assault counts all describe the same act against the same person at the same moment, same victim. Harm and state of mind. So they merge and they fold into the aggravated murder and the sentence lands on count one. I think I'm saying that right. But from what I can understand, the three tampering counts don't merge. And I honestly think that's kind of an elegant part, right? Because if you were to stage a burglary, that's a different act at a different time against a different victim. But the victim of tampering with evidence is not Ashley. Instead, it's the investigation. It is everybody who was going to have to find out what happened to her. And the state of mind is not killing, it's hiding. Isn't that kind of elegant? So those survive, and Judge Janine Pratt ran every one of them consecutively. So the state they call about 40 witnesses over eight days. And they did it without a murder weapon, without a confession, and without a single eyewitness. Prosecutor Paul Watkins opened up with one word that the defense spent eight days trying to get about that room execution. Because she was executed. Shot in the middle of the night, twice in the back of her head. Now, let's talk about the door. Okay? Let's talk about the door. I'm gonna go slow with this. So there is a side door on that garage, and that is the door he said he saw standing open. And the first thing police found on it was that the doorknob on the outside of that door had been knocked completely off. And the knob and the metal piece that sits behind it were lying on the floor on the inside of the garage. So if you just like really just picture that with me for a second, right? If you're standing outside a door and you knock the handle off that door, the pieces fall at your feet outside, maybe in the grass, on the step. And that's not forensics, that's just gravity. But those pieces were inside of the house. And then you guys, it gets worse. And I think every piece of this is very simple. The deadbolt was unlocked. The latch was unlocked. Neither of them was damaged. So nobody had to break into that door at all. It wasn't locked. You could have turned the handle and walked in. There are no tool marks on the outside of that door, no kick marks, no shoe prints, nothing. And an investigator testified that the damage to the door looked like it happened while the door was already standing open. And I need to say that again because I think that sentence is the entire case, right, y'all? Somebody beat up a door. That was already open. That's not a break in. There's nothing to break. A door that's hanging open is just a hole in a wall. That's a person standing there damaging a door so it will look damaged to somebody who showed up later. You ain't slick. And you only reach that side of it if you're already inside the house. So several officers who've already worked burglaries, they told the jury that same thing in their own words that this is not looking like a break-in. No tool recovered from that house could be conclusively matched the marks that were put on that door. The defense made something of that. And yeah, you know what? They're entitled to. But it doesn't matter because the knob was on the floor inside. And now, this part is me, okay? Everything about that door is slow. You have to go find a tool, then you have to go find another one, and then you have to stand there and decide to knock the handle off a door that's not even locked. Because you apparently have never seen an actual burglary and you think that's what one looks like. And that's not panic, right? Because panic is fast and stupid. And it leaves behind a mess that would make sense. No, no, no, no, no. This is a man who was doing a craft project at two o'clock in the morning in a house where his wife was laying dead upstairs, and his two daughters are asleep down the hall, in my opinion. And then the gun, okay, because his story was that the nine millimeter was stolen out of his trunk console, right? And the console was open. But the gun wasn't in it. So what? Ashley was shot with nine millimeter rounds and two nine millimeter casings were on her bedroom floor. And detectives contacted roughly 24 gun stores in South Carolina pulling his federal purchase records. And I think that's the unglamorous kind of work that nobody cares to talk about, but is amazing police work. Good policing. The gun has never been found. And assistant prosecutor Matthew Joseph told the jury the plain truth about that in closing. The state does not have to produce the weapon in order to prove the shooting. But then the phone. Let's talk about the phone. Let's talk about the devices, okay? Cause this is where the case stopped being just about a door. An FBI special agent named Joseph Willem, he walked the jury through the extraction of Flynn's phone. he showed us apps unstalled, then his Apple Watch, then his AirPods, and the other phones in the house. And a forensic analysis named Samantha Reeb, she testified about Apple Watch step counts and audio routing changes during the exact hours he was asleep on the couch. She also identified a fake Instagram account on a device matching his login. under a name that was not his. And twenty days before Ashley died, the security cameras came off that house. And the day she died, the apps came up off that phone. and then there are the songs. And I want you to understand that I'm not telling you this part because it's strange. I'm telling you because of what it says, okay? But also it is strange. Flynn used AI, artificial intelligence, to generate love songs about the woman he was seeing. And William he authenticated the files off his phone and a courtroom in Miami County, Ohio had to sit down and listen to a minor A and minor B version of the song. Now, if y'all didn't know, this is the man who also auditioned for American Items 2013, and he was a worship pastor. So writing a song for a woman is the one thing the man should actually know how to do. But he outsourced it. And then there's the tattoo, which might be the most single-telling thing in this entire case, okay? Aliyah Bottner, the mistress, she testified that the two of them got matching tattoos. Lightning bolt, Harry Potter, which is a thing they both liked. And she showed hers to the jury. It's on her arm. Calebs is in his armpit. She testified that he picked that spot so his wife could not see it. Now we know we're going back to me. This part is me, okay? I want to sit down in the armpit for a second because people laugh at that detail and they move on from it. I don't think they should. You should laugh at it, but don't move on from it. 15 years of marriage, right? That woman has seen every inch of that man. And he went and found the one square of himself that she would never think to look at. And he put another woman's matching tattoo there. That's not sneaking around. Sneaking around is a text you delete. That's a man to me taking inventory of his own body looking for a hiding place. The state also argued money, and I'm gonna be honest with you, because this piece is probably the weakest thing in a strong case. They told the jury he stand to good gain insur life insurance from it, and that the policy was ten thousand dollars. He also kept his job by staying married into her family's business. The one who testified was projecting about three to four hundred thousand dollars a year. And an FBI agent named Andrea, she testified that she found no evidence Ashley was having an affair and no evidence that Ashley ever feared for her safety. And also the church pastor, Jordan Hansen, testified to a fact I cannot still fully hold, which is the fact that Flynn was sitting, was seeing, the woman that Flynn was seeing was house sitting for the Flynn the night the Ashley was killed. I'm not completely sure about that. but Closing arguments were September twenty ninth, and Matthew Joseph went first, and the evidence does not tell the story of an intruder. Paul Watkins, he had the rebuttal and he spent it on the twenty days of the camera removal, the deleted apps, and the messages, and he gave them three words. He hated her. And like I said, two hours and nine, ten minutes later, nine guilty verdicts late came later. So I don't want to pretend that the other side had nothing. So let me give their case a little credence for a second. Cause they didn't just have zero out the wazoo, okay? The lead attorney was L. Patrick Mulligan out of Dayton with Emily Smith as second chair. And the defense, they called zero witnesses. Caleb Flynn also never took a stand, which hey, is this right under the Fifth Amendment and that ain't evidence and not a thing. If you remember that, remember that, okay? But Smith conceded that the affair in her opening statement, and then she drew the line that she held for eight days. She said Caleb is not on trial for being a bad husband. He's not on trial for cheating. All right, we got it. But here's what they had. There was no murder weapon, not in the house, not in the truck, not anywhere, not then and not now. There was no gunshot residue test was performed on him. Not negative, just never done. There was no victim blood that was found on him or on his clothing. And Detective Sergeant Morgan confirmed that on cross examination, Ashley was actually excluded from some of the stings that were on his clothes. the first responding officer's body camera, it also failed to record. And there's no time of death established in this case. And the device evidence, which is a lot of what hung him, it does run on consumer sensors. The defense, they got the state's own expert to acknowledge on cross that Apple heart rate, step count, and in-air detection can produce false positives. And he also did talk to the detectives voluntarily. he consented the searches, he gave them his fingerprints. And so Smith's whole theory, the second chair of the investigation. Was that the police found out about the fair and that they worked backwards from it. And she said they reached their conclusion first and then just shoehorned the evidence in afterwards. And so Mulligan closed on what circumstantial means, which is connecting a couple meaningless meaningless dots that doesn't solve the case. That's how she defined it. And this is one point I think the defense, there's another point that they could have pushed harder, and I'm gonna make it for them because the state didn't put it on the table. So the state argued that he gained financially, right? The policy was ten thousand dollars, his paycheck came from her family's business. I think you could argue that her death took the income away from him. It didn't hand him anything. I think if this man did it for the money, that that would be a pretty bad financial decision available to him, right? So on October seventh, two days after sentencing, a Dayton firm filed a notice of appeal to Ohio's Second District Courts of Appeals, and no grounds have been stated on the record yet. Mulligan told the court that neither he nor his firm would be handling it and that a fresh set of eyes should look at the record and Flynn is asking for court appointed counsel. So when somebody in your comments want to be like, This cares this case is airtight, I think the honest answer is that it's overwhelming and entirely circumstantial. But I don't think those words are opposites because circumstantial doesn't mean weak. It just means that nobody watched it happen. I I think almost every murder conviction in this country is kind of built that way. But one more thing from me. I did used to think that circumstantial meant flimsy, because that's what the word sounds like. It does almost to me at least sound like almost, but it doesn't mean that the more I'm learning about it. It means that nobody watched it happen. That's all it's ever meant. A fingerprint is circumstantial. DNA is circumstantial. A security camera is circumstantial. Almost every murder conviction in this country, from what I can see, is built out of circumstantial evidence because people who kill somebody generally do not do it in front of an audience. So the jury did not convict the man on a feeling in two and a half. In two hours and ten minutes. They he didn't get two and a half an hour. They convicted him on a doorknob lying on the wrong side of the door and a gun that lived in a truck console right up till it didn't. And a watch that said he was up and moving while he said he was asleep and a hundred and seven thousand messages. Now this part is me. No psychologist testified at this trial. Nobody diagnosed Caleb Flynn with anything, and I'm not about to. I'm not qualified, and it wouldn't be true if it came from me. What I do want to do is read a documented record out loud and tell you what I think it shows. And you are free to think something else. But here's what I think it shows. I don't think this is a man that snaps. I don't think he started out hating his wife either. I think it reclassified. There can't be a moment in a marriage where I think a man can stop filing a woman under wife and start filing her under obstacle or enemy. And everything that happens after that is administrative. He told the woman he was seeing that he stayed because of the girls. And that's not a feeling. I think that's a filing. Once Ashley was the reason he could not have the life he decided he was owed, he wasn't making decisions about his wife anymore. I think he was managing a problem. And look at that sequence and just tell me where the passion is, right? In 2022, a 20-year-old interns at this church. He's the pastor. In March 2024, the affair starts, right? And then in and then in March 2024, after the affair starts, there's up to 300 messages a day, y'all. 300 messages. 140 of them about his wife being dead or gone, and 95 about him just hating. He promises divorce for a year and a half and he never files anything. Then january eleventh, two thousand twenty six, the deadline she gives him comes and goes, and twenty days before Ashley dies, those cameras come off the house, and the day she dies the apps come off the phone. The night before, he's texting I choose you. Actions will come tomorrow, I'm free, and then two hundred thirty one in the morning and nine one call about a burglar and on a broken door from the inside. None of that is rage. Rage is loud and stupid and it leaves evidence in every room. And juries forgive it a little, which is the entire reason Ohio separates murder from aggravated murder in the first place. Rage is what State versus Walker was about and Walker won. No. This was project management. He took those cameras down three weeks out. That's a man doing prep work on his own house. And the thing I can't get passed by is the songs. He had a machine write the love songs, and he was a working musician, and he outsourced the one gesture he was actually equipped to make. That's the same instinct running through the whole case. He wanted to be free without filing. He wanted the congregation's version of himself without being that man on a Tuesday. And he wanted her gone without being somebody who did that. Now, the part that makes this different from every other man that kills his wife is Caleb Flynn's job was accountability, not as a metaphor. People in that building bought him their marriages, and he stood in front of a room every single week as the person who was supposed to have this figured out. And the whole time he was sending 300 messages a day to a girl who he met when she was interning for him. And church language has a category for Ashley, in my opinion. By every account, from everybody who knew her, she is what the world and the church calls a good woman. A Proverbs 31 woman, if I'm remembering that verse correctly. She's a church. She's a teacher. She's volunteered. She has two kids 15 years put into the game. That vocabulary grades women on their character and it hands men a position. One of those is a test you have to keep passing, and the other is a title you keep until somebody takes. But nobody audits the man in the position the way they audit the good woman. So he held the title and he failed the test for two solid years. And the structure's not built to catch that. And a twenty-year-old intern, I think, is exactly who falls through that gap. And now the honest part, because I don't want to say it without that, wanting somebody dead is not killing them. There are hundreds of thousands of people of type something as ugly as us those hundred and forty one messages into a phone at two in the morning and have gotten up and made breakfast and stayed married another decade. Emily Smith was absolutely right about that. An affair makes a man a liar or a woman. But it doesn't make them a murderer. What moved Caleb Flynn from wanting to doing is not in those texts. Nobody put it in front of a jury because I don't think anybody can. And also, the state didn't really have to. The only thing they had to prove was he did it. And prior calculation design does not require anybody to explain why. So the why is missing and it's gonna stay missing. I'd rather tell you that than hand up a motive that I made up. But I wanna stop there. And I wanna tell you something about me because I'm not gonna stand here and pretend I came into this case neutral because I didn't. I was married. And during my first separation, The first thing he said to me is we were more like brother and sister. And then later on he came back to the apartment to try work it out, I guess. We had been to counseling that same day, if you could call it that. And one of his standing complaints about me as his wife was that I kept my bedroom door locked and stayed in there by myself. Which was true. And the reason of that was a lot of time I didn't want to deal with the grown man throwing a controller at the wall 'cause he couldn't control his impulses. So that night I left the bedroom door open. All night. If he wanted to come in. He was welcome to come in. He never came in. Not in the way he was supposed to. Instead, he sat up in the living room the entire night, upright, facing my in open bedroom door, not one eye closed. I know because I had to be up at four in the morning for work. And I peeked my head out, and he was still sitting there just staring at the door. So I sat down at my desk and I started working. This day I'm talking about in my life. And then my ex-husband comes over into the room. And he's holding a hammer and a trash bag and he's wanting to know if I would like to get over hit over the head with the hammer. Then he put the hammer down, put the trash bag over his own face, and screamed at me that I was making him come back and work on our marriage, and that was me killing him. So at the moment I ripped the bag off his head. And duh, now I know a trash bag was never gonna suffocate him. I think I just needed to do something with my hands after that scary hammer sentence. So I run into my closet and he was on the other side of the door banging it. And I heard the hammer hit something and afterwards his hand looked wrong, so I think he hit himself with it. I was inside the closet so I couldn't see that. But he pushed his way in and he said he needed it. Sex obviously. I said no more than once, but it happened anyway. And that morning he left and he leaves with the drawstring backpack on and that's the part I'll never be over. My daughter was in the house, in the apartment, and she slept through all of it. A couple weeks later, I posted the hammer in the bag situation on Facebook. Cause he was telling people I was abusing him and I believe that Facebook is his church. His image is the only thing that I feel like he's ever actually protected. And he's never denied that this situation happened. Not once. Not to anybody. He just does not answer it. What he did instead was he let everybody land on the idea that my craziness as a woman is what made him do it. And that is the version that let him keep walking around. And not one person, at least that I know, ever went to him and asked him, How did that night happen? Because I only told people about the hammer in the bag, never about the closet. The closet took me years to say. And I know that's the R word. But I don't like that word for what happened in there. Mostly because he was my husband and my brain. still file those in two separate drawers and I've never fully gotten them into the same one. And you know what? I don't think I'm required to name it. I think that the facts of what happened hold up fine without the label. And when I finally did put that second part out there about what he did in that closet, the reaction I got wasn't about him. It was about me. Whether I should have said it, whether I had proof, whether I was making a s bad situation worse by opening my mouth. And still I don't think anyone ever asked him anything. Not one person went to that man and said, Okay, so after you did the hammer in the bag, what happened? Now I'm not a lawyer, but there is something a whole lot of people I think are quietly unsure about, and I want to answer it. There's no marriage expectation in Florida. The word spouse does not appear anywhere in the sexual battery statute. Seventy seven ninety four point zero eleven, which is chapter seven ninety four, section zero one one, and chapter seven ninety four is the whole sexual battery chapter. What does appear is a definition of consent. And Florida says it has to be intelligent, knowing, and voluntary. And then it says right there in the text that it does not include coerced submission. That is the law written down. And reporting's not an element of anything either. Nobody has to report in order for it to have happened. And delayed disclosure is so ordinary that there are experts who get paid to stand in front of juries and explain it to them. But The part that actually did the damage is not about the closet, you guys. Everybody was more upset that I talked about it than it that it happened. That's the sentence. That's the whole thing. And every single one of them that happened. Just sucks. So here's why I told you all of that. Am I glad he divorced me instead? Hell yeah. Obviously, I walked out of a marriage. Ashley Flynn was shot twice in the back of the head with her own kids down the hall. And I'm not gonna insult that woman by acting like those are the same thing. They're not. She's dead, and I'm talking to you. But to me, it's the same sentence, more like brother and sister. I only stayed because of the girls. That's the man telling you he's already moved you into a different file. And once you are in that file, every single thing that happens after that. It's him just handling it, handling the obstacle. Some of them hand you papers, mine set up all night, facing a door. Caleb Flynn was convicted of walking through. So four of them about both things being true. I mean I'm not resolving any of them for you. The case against him was overwhelming and a jury took two hours and ten minutes to decide nine counts in a case with no murder weapon, no blood on him, and no gunshot residue test ever performed, and both of those things are true. And the second is the entire reason the secret second district court of appeals exists, and his notice is already filed. The juries told the state that he gained financially and the life insurance policy was ten thousand dollars while his paycheck came out of her family's business. Both things are true, which means the weakest argument in this case is the one that sounds the most like emotive. He's a man who's convicted of executing his wife, and he stood in open court and apologized to his daughters for lying before he told the room he didn't kill her. Both of those things are true, and I don't think either cancels out the other. And the woman he was seeing that he wrote That he wanted Ashley dead. She was 20 years old interning for her pastor when he started it. And both of those things are true. She answered for the first one under oath in two days in a public courtroom, and nobody has had to answer for the second one. And this is another thing that won't leave me alone. At the sentencing, Ashley's father, Todd Smith, he told the court that his family forgives the man who took his daughter. And in the statement, he also said he wants the maximum sentence. And I think both of those things are true. The man held both of them at once. In a courtroom, eight months after his daughter was shot in the head and he didn't pick and he didn't soften one to make the other land. And that's the whole show. And it came out of the mouth of a man who will never hear this podcast. So on October 5th, Miami County comment, please, Judge Janine Pratt sentenced him. Life in prison without the possibility of parole plus sixteen years he has to serve before that even begins. Seven years on the firearms specification and three years on each of the three tampering counts, every one of them consecutive. $20,000 to Todd and Jill Smith for their daughter's funeral, and 229 days of jail credit. And Pratt found on the record that he obtained. Poses an extreme risk to the public. In fact, she said the highest of risk. And I want to explain something really quick about that 16 years because that's the last piece of law in this episode, and it's one that I find beautiful. This man is never getting out. Life without the parole means life without parole. So the 16 years changes nothing about his release date because he doesn't have one. Haha. It's a court putting a record on the line that was his own crime, that the stage door and the deleted apps and the three days that the town spent praying for a burglar were an offense against every single person in that room who's gonna have to find out what actually happened to Ashley Flan. And that it would cost him sixteen years even if he never fired the gun. That's what the tampering counts are for. And that is why they did not merge. And then the room belonged to her family. And I'm gonna give them more than a sentence because this is the part that tells you who she actually was. Her sister Kayla stood up and said that we trusted you to Caleb. We believed in you. We honestly would have laid down our lives for you. And then she said that if Ashley could speak, what Ashley would say is please do not turn away from Jesus. And Kayla told that the courtroom that she intends to spend the rest of her life doing what her sister would have wanted, which she described is as making to help make heaven crowded. Think that's beautiful. Then her brother in law, Matthew, he stood up next and he said the thing I've not been able to put down since I've read it. He said that the girls often lie on the ground in front of her tombstone because they imagine they'll bring them closer to their mother. He said Ashley's absence will always be felt, and then he said that Caleb's decision created permanent loss that has created permanent consequences. Her father, Todd Smith, said that Ashley had a profound impact on the world and that she brought so much life to her family. And he said no words can express the depth of our pain, and then he forgave the man who took her out loud in open court, and he said he won't that maximum sentence anyway. And then the adults in that room read out loud what her daughters had written because the girls did not have to sit in there and say it themselves. One of them wrote that their dad had the best life ever. He decided to throw it away for a girl who was half his age. A child wrote that sentence. A child sat down. And she did the math. One of them wrote that Ashley Flynn was the best thing that ever happened to him. One of them wrote, She loved you. She was my best friend. You chose to kill the only mother I ever had. I miss her so much. You have And then one of them. Mommy was the perfect person, the absolute perfect person. What did she ever do to make you hate her so much? I'm so sorry, my love, because nobody in that courtroom could ever answer that question. And Caleb Flynn, he had the floor last and he didn't try. He just said he didn't kill his wife. After the verdict came in, her family put out a statement and the line from it I want y'all to keep it. It was that she loved people well and that she found joy beyond her circumstances and that she prayed boldly for her family. So let me tell y'all what she did. She went back to the town she grew up in. She taught other people's children in the same district that taught her. She stood in the middle school gym on weeknights with girls who couldn't serve the ball over the net yet. She kept just showing up until they freaking could. And she was only eight days or days away. Sorry, sh She was only days away from her 38th birthday, you guys. And eight days after she died, the people who got together We got together 'cause they loved her and they had that party for her anyway. Anyway, it just always stuck a Thursday. Y'all know I always say that just I'm just really ha sad that this happened to her family and her kids and I know I told you guys a lot of those personal stuff, but it just does make like I'm happy that I'm like here to be with my daughter. And I just I feel for their family and I wish there was more I could do about it than just talk about it. But talking about it is also important.