MIAMI COUNTY — How was a tip about a murder-for-hire plot investigated?
This was the focus of the first half of the day of Caleb Flynn’s murder trial in Miami County.
Testimony in the case just finished for the week.
Flynn is accused of shooting and killing his wife, Ashley, inside their Tipp City home earlier this year as she and their two young daughters slept.
He told police someone broke into his home, murdered his wife, and escaped.
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News Center 7’s John Bedell has been following this case since February.
Friday morning, we heard more detail about a tip someone called into police about Caleb Flynn hiring a hit man to kill his wife.
In the playbook, this falls under what’s called the alternate suspect defense. It’s where the defense works to create doubt among jurors that, “hey, our guy didn’t do it...no, someone else did.”
Questions about the tip about this supposed murder-for-hire plot came up earlier during the trial, but the jury got a deeper dive on Friday.
The jury spent Friday morning hearing from Special Agent Andrea Kinzig with the Dayton Office of the FBI.
She helped investigate Ashley Flynn’s murder.
Prosecutors asked her about some of the tips she worked on.
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“Did you have involvement in following up on a tip that came in in reference to the Wright-Patterson and Air Force Base?” asked Miami County Prosecuting Attorney Paul Watkins.
“Yes,” Kinzig answered.
Kinzig testified a man called investigators and said another guy had told him…
“... That somebody by the name of Christopher Hill had been hired to kill Caleb Flynn’s wife,” Kinzig told the court.
Kinzig said the tipster reported that the guy he heard it from, Christopher Hill, and Caleb Flynn, all knew each other through working on jobs at Wright-Patt.
The FBI confirmed Hill and Flynn did work together on a housing rehab project on base.
But Kinzig testified that the FBI was never able to get a hold of the original tipster.
But they did interview the man whom the tipster said he heard about the supposed murder-for-hire plot from.
During that FBI interview, Kinzig said he…
“Made it very clear that -- he did not believe that to be true, that nobody told him that, that he was just offering that up, I guess, conjecture,” Kinzig said. “And that he had no reason to believe that it was true, had no reason to belief that Chris Hill had any personal relationship or knowledge of Caleb or Ashley Flynn or their family or their residence.”
The defense did something we’ve seen from them throughout trial, and that is questioning the competency of the investigation.
“So, you were provided with the name of a person who allegedly committed a homicide. Did anyone do a record check on that fellow?” Patrick Mulligan, Caleb Flynn’s attorney, asked.
“His name is very generic, and so we don’t even know who the correct Chris Hill is,” Kinzig said.
“Okay, and did anyone attempt to contact him?” Mulligan asked.
“Based on the information that was provided by (the source of the information), no,” Kinzig continued.
The jury also heard from an Ohio BCI Special Agent with the Cybercrimes Unit.
He talked about the movement and heart rate data recorded by Caleb Flynn’s Apple Watch, iPhone and AirPods.
The devices showed Flynn was moving around at the time he said he was sleeping at home between the time he stopped responding to messages from his mistress at 12:45 a.m. and when he called 911 around 2:30 that same morning about Ashley’s murder.
The defense tried to poke holes in the credibility of the data.
Prosecutors also played the first two times they interviewed Flynn after his wife’s murder and that was the first time we’ve seen them.
We’ve previously requested and received copies of the 911 call and sections of body cam video that we’ve reported on before trial.
Mike Campbell did extensive reporting on that in the weeks that followed Ashley’s murder, but this was the first time those police interviews with Flynn have been made public.
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