Caleb Flynn's Staged Scene and the Towel Over Ashley

Tony Brueski (0:01)

This is HiddenKillers Live with Tony Brueski and Robin Dreeke.

Tony Brueski (0:08)

The defense of Caleb Flynn opened up with, I think, probably the most cliché thing you could think you could do when the pastor is on trial for murder. Open with a verse from the Bible. He started with proverbs, and within the first two minutes, looked the jury in the eye and admitted Caleb had an affair. The argument, a man can fail as a husband without being a murderer. The defense is leaning hard on the lack of physical evidence. No gunshot residue, no time of death and no murder weapon. Okay, fair points, but also to some of those points, because I even had this question, I was doing a piece on the radio in Wisconsin this morning about this.

It was brought up that the no gunshot residue, yeah, they also didn't test for it. So it's not that it wasn't there, there was no testing done for it. So omission is not evidence in this case, it's just one of those things where you look back and go, cross your T's and dot your I's guys, because it's going to matter.

And reasonable doubt is at play here, but the gun. The gun is the big thing, Robin Dreeke, retired FBI Special Agent, Chief of the Counterintelligence Behavioral Analysis Program, and Master Class Instructor, my co-host, with us as always, as we continue to break this down.

Tony Brueski (1:29)

No gun. They looked.

Tony Brueski (1:31)

They did like, I don't know the names of the equipment, but it's shit that like tries to detect metal, like magnetically. They looked in the attic. They looked under the installation. They went everywhere. No gun found. If this guy did it and he never left the property, where the hell is the gun?

Robin Dreeke (1:52)

Yeah, I don't know. Again, I think he watched one Hallmark movie and said, if you don't have a weapon, you don't have a crime.

Tony Brueski (1:59)

If that's the only when he's got here is there's no gun, I think.

Robin Dreeke (2:02)

Yeah, and I know a lot of people put in the chat, I haven't seen any of the testimony about why they don't have time of death and things like that. But to your point, what's interesting as I'm going through and recalling what I was watching on the body cam footage from the testimony I was watching yesterday and last night, it's interesting to me that you had, and the cops on the scene had some experience, especially the really senior patrolmen that showed up first, had a lot of experience and some of them actually had been like the female testifying, she'd been a cop in Chicago and patrol and everything. What was interesting to me was that they didn't test for things like that, or red flags weren't going off because, think about this, they're called on a break, on a BNE, breaking and entering, burglary call, and yet, I didn't hear any of the cops asking what was taken.

Yeah, so it was interesting that they go up on a call, a 911 call for a break and entering or burglary and his wife was murdered. So my mind would have been going to, so what was that person doing here? What's missing?

And then if not, my first question would be, so why would someone want to murder your wife? I mean, so those are the first things that I saw weren't in, granted, they were not the detectives, they were the patrol people, that their first responders is not their role to do that. Maybe detectives were doing that on scene. I haven't seen the testimony, I know one of them was testifying before he came on the show, so I probably missed it and I apologize for that. That wasn't correct me on it. I will go back and watch that one as it comes out and I watch it, but it was interesting to me that we didn't catch any of that yet. Maybe it is in there.

Tony Brueski (3:35)

Well, I'm gonna, sometimes when it comes down to it, the reality is reps and especially if we're talking about a smaller town or department that doesn't necessarily deal with a lot of homicides, you know what you know. I mean, you know what you're trained, but you also know what you know. You know what's gonna be second instinct because you're exercising it all the time. If you learned it once in training a long time ago, it's probably not just gonna come out to you, oh yeah, we need to do this right now and that right now. I mean, unless you're a big true crime buff and are always immersed in the worst of the worst, which most cops are not, they may not necessarily think to do some of those things. Now you can call it an oversight without a doubt, it is, but it's also just kind of a reflection of what it is to without, you know, trying to, I'm not trying to crucify the cops for not doing it, but all those things are certainly important.