What Caleb Flynn's 10-Year-Old Asked Him at Sentencing

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

This is Hidden Killers With Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:11)

Caleb Flynn stood at his set and sang on October 5th, convicted on all nine counts and said this, I did not kill my wife or something like that. I'm not going to drag you through the approximately like 15, 20 minutes of Caleb Flynn lying to everyone in the room and then ministering to them and witnessing to them.

SPEAKER_3 (0:43)

And, Jesus, I love you and oh my God.

Tony Brueski (0:48)

It was one of the most pathetic sentencing I've ever seen in my life. Caleb, Jesus Christ, literally, literally. Minutes earlier, his daughter's victim impact statements had been read to the courtroom.

Ava, who was 10, wrote that she prays every single night for her father to confess. Alyssa 12 addressed him as Caleb, not daddy, and closed her letter with this. I don't plan on coming to see you.

SPEAKER_4 (1:39)

Woo! Burn!

Tony Brueski (1:43)

Prosecutors alleged in their sentencing memo that after the murder, Flynn pulled each daughter aside privately. Both girls were 9 and 11 at the time. And this is new. This never was part of the trial portion of this. You know that it was one of those things that the prosecution had in their back pocket. And they said, hey, we don't need to use that. Same with making the girls testify. The other thing in their back pocket, yeah, we don't need to use that. But it's so good. This can't just not see the light of day.

So they got it into this. The memo says, he told them their statements to investigators.

And follow me on this here, because this is what a father is telling his 9 and 11 year old daughters. The amount of pressure in this following statement on a 9 and 11 year old daughter. It could be the difference between life and death for daddy.

Coach them on what to say and instructed them to deny the conversation happened. Say this, but don't say I told you to say that.

The defense objected to the inclusion of those statements. Judge Jeannine Pratt overruled it. Ashley's mother, Jill Smith, had already testified at trial that the girls appeared nervous after a private walk with their father in the days after the murder. After all of that, a verdict on every count, his own children pleading with him. Flynn still had the nerve to stand up in court and go, It wasn't me! But they saw you in the kitchen. It wasn't me! And then they saw you in the bathroom. It wasn't me! And then you were in the bedroom. It wasn't me! Then you had two bullet shots. It wasn't me.

We'll make a new version of the song. Hey, wouldn't that be a great version of the song? Oh, everybody was saying that we need to make another Caleb Flynn music video, which by the way, if you've not seen the Caleb Flynn music video that we've made, please do check out Caleb Flynn music video in our feed, on our channel, on YouTube.

It's moving up a notch to number 28 on American Top 40 It's actually kind of a catchy little tune, by the way. So how does a man hear his daughter's beg for the truth and choose to lie? Well, the answer was written across everything that happened in that courtroom, in what he said, in what his parents wrote to the judge, and in what Ashley's family said right back. Flynn's sentencing statement was the first chance to speak in eight months, and he used it to talk about himself. He addressed his daughter's first, called them, my greatest joy. And he got that pastor is kind of, I'm going to add a little air underneath my voice, because when I do that and I speak slightly meekly and with a little bit of air and this sort of tone, which every evangelical pastor speaks in from their, from their stage in the defunct piggly wiggly, at which they call a new church, a cross church, a Jesus Church, a pathway church, a light church, a this church, a that church, so oh, we're being real creative here, church name. Hey, he's standing right where the deli used to be.

I've actually said that in a church that I've been to. I'm like, it's where the deli was, wasn't it? I remember getting cookies there when I was a child. Anyway, he said his dreams of raising them, seeing them grow up to be mighty women of God in that voice. He didn't acknowledge that he's the reason they might have some difficulty doing it. A jury determined he shot their mother twice in the back of the head while she slept, 50 feet from the children's bedroom, standing in an orange jumpsuit because of that verdict. But in his version of the events, he's not a convicted killer. Addressing the children he orphaned, he's a loving father separated from his girls by circumstances he won't name. His framing was precise. I want there. I want to be there for you most, your most important moments, he said.