Caleb Flynn Murder Trial Part 2: Ashley Flynn's Murder, the Intruder Story & Guilty Verdict

Tyrella (0:01)

Caleb Flynn says he was asleep in his daughter's bunk bed when two gunshots woke him up, but his Apple Watch recorded 105 steps in the minutes before his 911 call. His AirPods were connecting and disconnecting, and when police arrived, the side garage door was open, the handgun Caleb said that he kept in his truck was missing, and Ashley had been shot twice in the back of the head.

The defense argued that none of those things individually proved Caleb was the person who shot her, and that's true. A watch can register movement if you're not walking, a missing gun isn't a ballistics match, and investigators never recovered the weapon. But here's what makes this case so interesting. Caleb gave police an account of what he was doing while all of this was happening, and investigators had more than just his account to examine. They had his phone, his watch, his AirPods, the physical evidence inside the house, and his own recorded interviews. So, in part two, we're going to put Caleb's version of those final hours beside the evidence, and we're going to look at what fits, what doesn't, and what investigators still could not establish.

Nikita (1:09)

I'm Nikita.

Tyrella (1:10)

And I'm Tyrella.

Nikita (1:11)

And this is This Feels Criminal.

Did you ever hear a story and think, we're not getting the full picture? That's where we start. On This Feels Criminal, we unpack crime, corruption, and conspiracy with curiosity, context, and just a touch of chaos.

Tyrella (1:29)

We step outside the timelines and ask better questions and explore the systems behind the story, all in a voice that feels more like a friend than a reporter. Because when you identify the patterns, you can't unsee how often they show up.

Nikita (1:44)

This is part two of the Caleb Flynn murder trial. And so if you have not listened to part one, go ahead and go back and do that. You're gonna wanna hear all of that information so that you're ready to compare facts and stories.

And without further ado, I guess, Tyrella, take it away. Let's do it.

Tyrella (2:03)

All right, let's do it. So we already kind of gave you all the background, the history and all that kind of stuff. This episode will be laid out a little differently in the fact that like, or in the sense that we're gonna go through some of the information and then we're gonna see how the defense and the state characterize that, what does it match and what does it not match and things like that. So that night, Caleb says that he'd been sick for weeks. He'd been coughing. He'd had a doctor's visit on February the 12th. He got a steroid and an inhaler. This is all in his text with Ashley. It seems to be corroborated. At 11 p.m. that night, he says that he was coughing for about an hour. So sometime between 11 and 1140 or something. He says he wasn't like watching the clock necessarily, but he'd been laying there. He'd been coughing for probably about an hour. And Ashley was like, hey, can you please go sleep on the couch? Like I can't sleep like this. And he tells his sister-in-law, Kayla, we had been doing that for the past couple of weeks. I've been coughing a lot. So he takes some nighttime cough medicine, and then he says he falls asleep on the couch with the dogs. He says the dog's collars wake him up. He hears the dogs scratching or shaking their collars or whatever. And he assumed that that meant that one of the girls maybe had gotten up to go to the bathroom or something. So he was like, let me go check on the girls.

So he fixes Ava's blanket.

He prays over them.

Nikita (3:26)

Okay.

Tyrella (3:27)

Because of course he does. And he lays down next to Ava on the bottom bunk and falls asleep. Now, we're going to put a picture up of what this bunk bed looks like, because it is in evidence. The police took pictures of that.

Now, anyone who has a small child knows that stuffies are life.

Nikita (3:45)

Oh my god, yes.

Tyrella (3:46)

We live for stuffies. Stuffies are everywhere. We have buckets and bins and bags of stuffies.

And this little girl's bunk bed was, I mean, covered.

Nikita (3:58)

Okay.

Tyrella (3:59)

Covered. And the only place that appears to be available is a spot for a little girl's body. So was he in the bed? Was he not? I don't know. Could he have moved him? Sure. Whatever. But that's what it looks like when the police are there.

So he says he gets in that bottom bunk with Ava and he falls asleep. And he says two loud bangs wake him and they are pretty back to back. And he says, now all these stories are going to change a bunch of time. So he says that he freezes for a few seconds.