The refrigerator
A large refrigerator stood in front of the side door.
“As we were looking at the door we noticed the door had a large fridge in front of it that would’ve had to be pushed to open the door,” the officer wrote in his supplemental report.
That was the way in and out that Caleb Flynn had described to the 911 dispatcher and to the officers: the door that was “wide open” when he came out of his daughters’ room.
The door itself had more to say. An agent from the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s crime scene unit spent hours in the house that day. He focused on the garage side door, where the handle lock had been broken, and he testified that the damage “just didn’t look right.”
“The damage was just inconsistent with any of the other burglaries that I’ve worked on as a crime scene investigator,” he told the jury. In a typical burglary, he said, the latch bolt is pushed outward.
An FBI agent who examined the door testified that she found no pry marks, kick marks or ram marks on the outside of it. The gouge marks were on the inside trim of the frame, not the outside, where a break-in would leave them. She said she had seen about 75 forced doors. This one was not consistent with a forced entry.
By the end of the day the crime scene agent had come to a conclusion: Ashley’s killing had been staged to look like a burglary.
Arrested within 82 hours
That afternoon Flynn went to the police station to give a statement. Detectives took his fingerprints, telling him it was only for comparison, and kept his phone.
He told an investigator that he and Ashley had no marital problems “whatsoever.”
Then he was free to leave. Three days later, on February 19, Tipp City police came for him. Released video shows him being handcuffed, swabbed for DNA and booked into the Miami County Jail, where he was held on a $2 million bond that later rose to $3.5 million.
The charging documents said officers had at first been “led astray” by the staging of the crime scene. His lawyer, Patrick Mulligan, called the arrest a rush to judgment.
100,000 messages
The rest came out at his trial in September 2026.
Flynn had been having an affair. Alleigha Botner was 24. She had met him when she was 21 and an intern at his church, and she later became a worship leader there herself. In an affair that lasted well over a year, they exchanged roughly 100,000 messages.
Prosecutors read his words to the jury.
“I need her to die, to cheat again, to leave,” he wrote about Ashley in February 2025, almost exactly a year before she was shot.
When Botner asked, “What can I do?” in March 2025, he answered: “Kill her.”
“I was up until 4 a.m. last night crying, literally trying to think of ways to kill her and not go to jail,” he wrote in August 2025. “If I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat.”
Botner had given him one deadline after another to leave his wife. When he missed the last one, she cut off contact until February 14, two days before the killing.
On the night of February 15, he texted her again. “It’s happening.” “Actions will come tomorrow.” “I choose you.” “About to be free.” The next day, he told her, would be “a day I never forget.”
Botner testified that she took “actions” to mean a divorce. She was not charged. Ring camera video showed she was at home when Ashley was killed.
“It didn’t happen the way we thought it would”
The next morning, a member of the church told Botner that Ashley was dead. Her heart started pounding. “It seemed like too much of a coincidence that the day he’s divorcing her, she’s just dead all of a sudden,” she testified.
Hours later, church members gathered at Ashley’s parents’ house. Flynn was there. So was Botner. He hugged her.
“It didn’t happen the way we thought it would, did it?” he said, according to her testimony.
He told her he had been asleep on the couch when he heard a gunshot and ran straight to the garage, where he saw the side door open, and only then found Ashley in the bedroom. It was not the story he had told the police.
The prosecution laid out the rest. A digital forensics examiner testified that Flynn’s devices recorded about 200 steps at intermittent times in the hour before he called 911, the hour in which he said he had been asleep and then lying still in his daughters’ room. Around the time of the call, they recorded another 346. “Caleb said he was sleeping,” prosecutor Paul Watkins told the jury. “His devices say he was awake and moving.”
The bullets were the same caliber as Flynn’s 9mm handgun. The gun has never been found.
Ashley’s father, Todd Smith, put it simply on the stand. “Why would somebody break in, go in and get into the truck, go walk in there, shoot my daughter, and then run out? If it was a burglary, why weren’t they going around the whole house?”
The verdict
Flynn did not testify, and his lawyers called no witnesses. “A man can fail as a husband without being a murderer,” defense attorney Emily Smith told the jury. Without a gun, an eyewitness or forensic evidence tying him to the shooting, they said, the state had only a theory.
The jury deliberated for about two hours. On September 29, 2026, it found Caleb Flynn guilty on all nine counts, including aggravated murder, murder, felonious assault and tampering with evidence.
On October 5, Judge Jeannine Pratt sentenced him to life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus consecutive prison terms for tampering with evidence and the firearm specifications.
“The layers of deceit, manipulation, and cruelty that you have shown are quite obviously impossible to fathom,” she told him. “You could have walked away.”
Ashley’s family read statements in court. One of her daughters had written to her father. “Mommy was the perfect person, the absolute perfect person,” she wrote. “What did she ever do to make you hate her so much?”
Flynn cried. He apologized for the hateful things he had written about his wife and admitted he had lied about many things. But not this. “As I stand here before God, who is my ultimate judge, I am not lying,” he said. “I did not kill my wife.” His lawyers have said he will appeal.
Ashley’s family says she will not be remembered for how she died. In Tipp City, red and white ribbons went up along Main Street after her death, and so did T-shirts with three words on them: Live Like Ashley.
