GUILTY: Caleb Flynn Convicted in Ashley Flynn's Murder, Jury Out Under Three Hours, Lindsay Clancy Hearing Ends With No Decision

0:03 Good morning. This is Daily Crime and Justice from Calaroga Media, powered by AI. I'm Garrett Fisher. It's Wednesday, September 30th, 2026. It took an Ohio jury two and a half hours to convict Caleb Flynn of murdering his wife. We have covered that trial for two weeks. Yesterday afternoon it ended. His lip quivered and he cried as the verdict was read, and he is now facing the rest of his life in prison. Lindsay Clancy was also back in a courtroom yesterday for the first time since a jury deadlocked and a judge declared a mistrial. She left with nothing decided, no trial date, no ruling on the motion to throw the case out, and no answer from the district attorney about whether he intends to try her again or.

0:52 On what charges. 25 days after the mistrial, the answer from the Commonwealth is that they are doing their due diligence. And in Polk County, Florida, prosecutors gave their closing argument in a death penalty case and told the jury that the letter a man wrote his brother from jail was a warning to change his story. We covered that brother last week when he took the stand and took everything back. Let's get into it. Cora Clancy was five years old. Dawson Clancy was three. Callan Clancy was eight months old. Their mother strangled them in the basement of their house in Duxbury, Massachusetts on January 24th, 2023. On September 4th, after seven days of deliberation, a jury split 11 to 1 in favor of finding her not criminally responsible, and Judge William Sullivan declared a mistrial. Yesterday was the hearing everybody has been waiting for, and almost nothing happened.

1:50 Here's what we got. District Attorney Tim Cruz told reporters as he left the courthouse that no determination has been made about whether to retry the case or what charges he would bring if he does. He said his office is doing its due diligence. Judge Sullivan set the next hearing for November 2nd and told both sides to come prepared to schedule a trial. He said his goal is to get this thing tried as soon as possible. Reddington told him he cannot go to trial before June because his schedule is jammed with other cases. So put those together. The judge wants speed. The defense wants June of next year at the earliest. And the prosecutor has not decided whether there is going to be a trial at all. No motions were ruled on.

2:36 The motion to dismiss on double jeopardy grounds is still pending. The one substantive fight yesterday was about disclosure. Martin Weinberg, the appellate attorney the defense brought in, argued that the jury notes and the sidebar conversations should be made public. Those notes are the ones describing what was happening in that room with the holdout juror. Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague opposed it. Her argument was that releasing that material would have a chilling effect on future jurors, who would be afraid to serve and afraid to send notes to a judge if they knew those notes might end up public. That is a serious argument, and I think it is probably right. A juror who believes a note might end up in a newspaper is a juror who stops writing notes.

3:22 And jury notes are how a judge finds out there is a problem in the first place. Sullivan took it under advisement. Reddington also argued a required finding, which is a motion that the evidence was insufficient as a matter of law. He told the judge the Commonwealth cannot even establish probable cause. And he accused prosecutors of shifting their theory, saying they started out arguing Clancy faked her suicide attempt and killed her children because she did not want to be a mother, and then, after the experts testified, backed off that, in his words, like a poodle on a linoleum floor. Now, the part of yesterday that is going to get the most attention and where I want to be careful. Reddington went after politicians. He told the court that laypeople struggle with the concept of criminal responsibility and that when they hear a defendant admitted the act, they go somewhere else entirely. He said people think she is a demon, that she is possessed, that she should be executed.

4:19 And he said that is coming from politicians, from the president on down. Outside court, he named names, including a congresswoman, and made a dismissive reference to a senator from Houston that reporters took to mean Ted Cruz. He said he does not need any gag orders. He also pushed back hard on the suggestion that he has been persecuting the holdout juror. He said he filed one motion, weeks ago, based on what was reported by the forelady, and that everything else he has said has been a response to public figures calling for his client's execution. I have two things to say about that, and they point in different directions. The first is that he is right about the substance.

5:01 Criminal responsibility is genuinely hard. Most people do not understand it. And a politician telling a national audience that a woman should be executed while she is awaiting a decision on a retrial is not commentary. It is pressure on a process that is supposed to be insulated from exactly that. The second is that Kevin Reddington is not a bystander in the noise. He went on national television and asked the president to pardon his client, which is not legally possible for a state charge, and which was itself an appeal to a politician. You do not get to summon that weather and then complain about the rain. There was one more thing outside that courthouse. The holdout juror now has a Massachusetts attorney, Heather O'Connor, who told reporters her client is worried about.

5:47 His safety and security. She also said the money raised for him online is paying her legal fees, and that given how things have gone, he is going to need money for protection. That is where we are. A man who was ordered to appear for jury duty now has a lawyer and a security budget. November 2nd, someone has to say their names. When we come back, a man tells detectives he did not touch his wife, and his phone tells them something else. Ashley Flynn was 37 years old. She was a middle school volleyball coach and an educator in Tip City, Ohio, north of Dayton. She was the mother of two daughters, who were 9 and 11. On the morning of February 16th, she was shot twice in the back of the head as she slept in her own bed. Her daughters were in the house. Yesterday afternoon, after a trial that ran about two weeks, a Miami County jury deliberated for two and a half hours and convicted her husband of murdering her.

6:52 Caleb Flynn is 40. He was a worship pastor and a contestant on the 12th season of American Idol, where he told viewers his wife had encouraged him to chase his dreams. He now faces life in prison. As the judge read the verdict, reporters in the room described his lip quivering and tears running down his face. Two and a half hours. That is the number I keep looking at. This was not a short trial. The jury heard from dozens of witnesses across two weeks, sat through forensic testimony, interrogation video, and digital analysis. And they were back before dinner. So let me tell you what the state actually built, because the speed of that verdict says it worked.

7:34 Flynn's account was an intruder. He told a 911 dispatcher somebody had broken into the house and shot his wife. He told detectives he had fallen asleep in bed, been asked to move downstairs because of his coughing, slept on the couch, been woken by the dogs, gone up and fallen asleep next to one of his daughters, and then been woken by gunshots. The state took that apart piece by piece. The garage door he said was forced showed damage only on the inside, with wood chips inside the garage. His own 9mm handgun, normally kept in the console of his truck in that garage, was missing and has never been found. He told police he was asleep, and a digital analyst testified his devices showed constant activity during those hours. And investigators found no evidence supporting his claim that.

8:20 His wife had been unfaithful. Then there were the messages, more than 100,000 of them with Aaliyah Botner, a worship leader at their church, over about 18 months. In one, he wrote that he had been up until four in the morning thinking of ways to kill her and not go to jail. In another, he said that unless she died, cheated again, or they found a way to get rid of her, she would be around. Botner, to her credit, told him not to. She wrote that she was not asking him to take his wife's life, that it was not what he should do, and that she knew he actually would not. His answer was that he would work on getting rid of her, and that until then, he loved her. And then the night before Ashley died, shortly before midnight, he sent Botner a last message. He said goodnight, that tomorrow was a big day, and that he had to get to bed.

9:14 I choose you, he wrote. I'm about to be free. Hours later, his wife was dead. Botner testified she messaged him that morning asking what was going on, whether he had been involved, whether. It was real. Then she deleted it because she was afraid investigators would search his phone and find the affair. She said the timing just seemed like too much of a coincidence. Now, the defense, because Patrick Mulligan made the only argument available, and he made it well. He told the jury investigators never found the gun and never found evidence that his client fired one. He said the messages about the marriage were meant to make a mistress feel good. And he told them the issue was not whether Caleb Flynn was a good husband, because being unfaithful does not equal murder.

10:01 That is correct as a matter of law. And it is why we spent two weeks on this show saying the texts were not the case. The staging was the case. And that is what the jury apparently agreed on in an afternoon. Not that he was a bad husband. that a door damaged from the inside, a missing gun from his own truck, and a phone that was awake when he said he was asleep do not add up to a stranger. One more thing, and it is the part I cannot shake. In September of last year, Flynn wrote out for Botner what he was prepared to give up to be with her. He listed his. Daughters first, then a quarter million dollar salary, a place to live, the church he served at, and public shame.

10:44 He wrote that list, and five months later, the thing he actually gave up was his children's mother. Those girls were 9 and 11. They lost their mother in February and their father yesterday, and they will spend the rest of their lives. Explaining this to people. Aaliyah Botner has resigned from the church and moved to North Carolina. She has not been charged with anything. Ashley Flynn was 37. She coached volleyball. She was asleep in her own bed. Someone has to say her name. Damian Tillman was 23. Kevin Springfield was 30. Brandon Rollins was 27.

11:30 On the night of July 17, 2020, the three friends were heading out to go catfishing near Frost Proof, Florida. They were ambushed and shot. All three died. Tony Lee Wiggins Jr., who goes by TJ, has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder, tampering with evidence, and possession of a weapon by a felon. He is presumed innocent and prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. We covered this case last Thursday for one reason. His younger brother William had told detectives he watched TJ shoot all three men. He said it again to a grand jury under oath. He pleaded guilty to accessory charges under an agreement to testify. And then he took the stand, said none of it was true, said they were never there, and said he had just told investigators whatever they wanted to hear. Prosecutors never called him. We asked on this show which of his two sworn accounts was false and said we could not know from outside. This week, prosecutors gave the jury their answer. In closing argument, Assistant State Attorney Ralph Guerra pointed to letters found in T.J.

12:35 Wiggins' cell. He told the jury that in one of them, the defendant instructed his brother to stop snitching and to deny. What he had told police. And he told the jury about a second letter, filled with images, which he said T.J. Wiggins later had tattooed onto his own body. A stop sign reading, stop snitching. A rat hanging from a noose. A skull with three tally marks. And a highway sign with the number 27 on it, wrapped in crime scene tape. Which Guerra said refers to the road where those three men were killed. Guerra's argument to the jury was that all of that imagery amounted to a warning to his brother. You had better change your story. Now, the jury never heard from William Wiggins. He was not called. So they are being asked to understand that the state's eyewitness recanted and to conclude from a letter and a set of tattoos that he recanted because he was threatened. That is a real argument and I want to be clear that it is also exactly what a defense attorney would call speculation. Nobody has proven why William Wiggins changed his account. Prosecutors have a theory. He gave the court a different one about a plea deal he believed included time served on other cases.

13:49 The rest of the state's case does not depend on him. Prosecutors point to surveillance video showing the defendant inside a Dollar General at the same time as Tillman and following him out. Blood matching one victim's DNA found in a vehicle, a missing 12-minute window on the night of the killings. The defense has attacked the reliability of the forensic work. If the jury. Convicts on the top charges, it moves to a penalty phase, where those same jurors recommend life without parole or death. And this is where our own last two weeks collide in a way I did not plan. In Pinellas County, a man convicted of murder has refused to present any mitigation at all, and a judge will decide next month whether he lives. In Lake County, a jury heard a woman's schizophrenia and spared her. And in Polk County, a jury may soon be asked the same question about a man whose own brother swore two contradictory things under oath.

14:45 Three Florida counties, one punishment. Completely different processes for arriving at it. Damien Tillman was 23. Kevin Springfield was 30. Brandon Rollins was 27. They were going fishing on a Friday night. Someone has to say their names. That's the show for Wednesday, September 30th. If you listen on Apple, look at the top of your screen for the button that says listen uninterrupted. $ 5 a month, no ads, thousands of shows from Calaroga Media, and 30 days free to try it. Everybody who already subscribes, thank you. And on Spotify, drop a comment on the Massachusetts case. The judge wants this tried as soon as possible. The defense says June at the earliest. The district attorney will not say whether he is trying it at all. Who do you think is running out the clock and why? Next hearing in Plymouth County is November 2nd. Caleb Flynn will be sentenced in Ohio, and a jury in Polk County could have a death penalty case in its hands within days.

15:52 I'm Garrett Fisher. Do better. A few notes on sourcing. On the Massachusetts case, no rulings were issued at Tuesday's hearing. The motion to dismiss remains pending, and the district attorney has not announced whether he will seek a retrial. Kevin Reddington's characterization of what the public believes about his client was his own description of public commentary, not his view of the evidence. Outside court, he referred dismissively to a senator from Houston. Reporters understood that to mean Senator Ted Cruz, but he did not name him. Michael Desrenville has not been found by any court to have done anything improper.

16:33 On the Ohio case, Caleb Flynn was convicted on Tuesday and retains the right to appeal. Reporting has listed the counts differently across outlets, and prosecutors move before the verdict to dismiss two misdemeanor intimidation counts. He has not yet been sentenced. Alaya Botner has not been charged with any offense, and her testimony was given under oath at trial. On the Polk County case, Tony Wiggins has pleaded not guilty and is presumed innocent. The characterization of the letters and tattoos comes from the prosecutor's closing argument, which is argument and not evidence. No court has found why William Wiggins changed his account, and he has not been charged with perjury.

17:15 Reporting has differed on some details of the co-defendants' relationships. This episode discusses the deaths of children, domestic homicide, and the death penalty. If you are struggling, you can call or text 988 in the United States to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.