Caleb Flynn’s Clean Phone Hid WHAT From Police?!

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:19)

Back in October of 2025, Caleb Flynn sent his girlfriend a message that just kept going. Solid page of it. He laid out everything he was supposedly ready to torch for her. His job, his house, his full-time custody of his daughters. Then came the catch. I need you to do this one thing for me to show that you're willing to do anything for love. The massive favor, unfollowing some random guy from her church run club on Instagram. If she refused, he'd respectfully need to take a step back. And he closed the whole thing with, I love you, I'm not trying to manipulate you.

She didn't unfollow the guy. A week later, Caleb wrote, I was going to leave her sometime before Thanksgiving. And it doesn't matter anymore. Just like that, the whole playbook gets exposed in seven days. A divorce he'd been promising for a full year gets canned over an Instagram follow right after swearing up and down that none of it was a game. Now Caleb Flynn is sitting in a courtroom down in Troy, Ohio, facing aggravated murder charges. Prosecutors say he shot his wife, Ashley, twice in the back of the head as she slept on February 16th of 2025 and then staged a fake break-in. His defense team wants everyone to believe an intruder, did it? And that all those toxic, ugly text messages were just lies he told to keep his girlfriend happy. The state rolled out 34 binders of those messages for a jury. And the girlfriend, Ashley Botner or Alleigha Botner, rather, spent two grueling days reading them out loud. The jury's got to figure out if he actually pulled the trigger on Ashley, but those binders answer a completely different question, one that doesn't even need a verdict. What does it look like when a guy grooms a 20-some year old, like a personal science project for years, until she's literally parroting his sentences back to him? It started with how he referred to her. In those binders, Caleb almost never called his wife Ashley. She always refers to his wife as her, or worse, more commonly, douche. The prosecutor literally had to stop the witness at one point and ask, who's her, when her is in those messages? Giving someone a nickname like that is pure psychological demolition. A woman with a real name is a human being. And it's a lot harder to wish a human being dead in writing if you have to use their actual name. So, he turned her into a word. He dehumanized her in his own mind and in the person he was grooming, Alleigha. Once his wife was just a word, things escalate fast. Alleigha asked him, what do you want me to do? He said, marry me and said, ah, you know, and came back with kill douche. What do you want me to do? Kill my wife.

I believe he was trying to groom Alleigha to actually be the murderer in this story.

When Caleb Flynn calls his wife douche, what he's really saying is she's not a person anymore. So nothing we say about her counts. The actual human behind that label only shows up in his texts a couple of times, usually just doing basic mom stuff. One night, she asked where he'd been with their daughter because it was pitch black and the kid was out on a scooter. He told Alleigha he just told her, relax, walked away from his wife and texted, I hate her. Oh, I know. So horrible, Caleb. Your wife is concerned that your daughter is playing out in the street in a scooter when it's dark. Oh, you hate her. You infantile, eight headed prick.

Another morning, she left a note saying the girls needed lunch and she'd be teaching all day. His reaction, I hate her so much. I hate her so much, just hate her so much. You're such a fucking child. I think that even hearing her voice sets him off. Oh, you're so easily triggered. Thought she was so pretty. Remember American Idol? She got old, got her 30s.

Wasn't that she was old, it's that she was smart. It's that she was wise, that she saw through your shit. And the only person that you could get your hands on to see your shit is a young and dumb 20 year old from your church.

Because your wife grew up, your wife elevated herself with age.

And you regressed further back into your pathetic childhood wants and needs. That phrase, I hate her, is plastered across almost every single page. She wrote it dozens of times. And by March, he threw in a direct order, I hate her, please remember that. Every single time Alleigha got upset. There it was, my clockwork. I hate her so much. I'm not getting away from her. I know you want this relationship with me. And I keep saying, I'm going to get divorced. But I hate her. Believe me, I really, really hate her. I'm going to go on a trip with her, by the way.