Alleigha Botner began crying as she read one of her own messages aloud at Caleb Flynn's murder trial Thursday. "I want to kill her, Caleb," she had written about his wife, Ashley Flynn, in July 2025. Botner told the court she wished she had never said it and insisted she had not meant it. Flynn's reported reply-"That makes two of us"-gave prosecutors another exchange to put before jurors. What will they make of words both participants now have reason to explain?
Flynn, a former American Idol contestant and church music pastor, is charged in Ashley's February death at their Tipp City, Ohio, home. He has pleaded not guilty. Prosecutors allege he shot his wife and staged the scene to look like a break-in; his defense says the state has built a murder theory around an affair without direct evidence tying him to the killing.
Botner's testimony has brought the relationship into sharp focus. She told jurors she met Flynn while working as a church intern and that their relationship became an affair in 2024. The two exchanged an extraordinary volume of messages-more than 100,000 over the year before Ashley's death, according to the evidence described in court. Prosecutors are asking jurors to read those messages as a record of Flynn's feelings and intentions.
Thursday's tearful exchange also exposed a difficult question for Botner herself. She acknowledged writing that she wanted to kill Ashley, then said she did not mean it. The text dates from July 2025, months before the shooting. Its significance depends on how jurors interpret the conversation as a whole, including Flynn's reported response and the later messages prosecutors say he sent.
The messages closest to Ashley's death may prove especially important. Botner testified that her last exchange with Flynn ended around 12:45 a.m. on February 16, the day he later called 911. She has said she understood his earlier promise that "actions will come tomorrow" to mean he intended to discuss divorce with his wife. Prosecutors have offered a darker interpretation, pointing to messages in which Flynn allegedly said he wanted Ashley dead.
The defense disputes that the affair and the texts prove murder. In her opening statement, attorney Emily Smith acknowledged that Flynn betrayed Ashley and said hurtful things, but argued that wrongdoing in his marriage does not establish that he killed her. She also challenged the investigation, saying authorities settled on Flynn after discovering the affair.
By Thursday afternoon, Botner had completed nearly seven hours of testimony across two days. Under questioning from the defense, she said she had not been offered anything in exchange for testifying. She was then excused, and prosecutors called an Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation cybercrimes agent as their next witness. Her testimony has ended, but the trial's central question remains unresolved: how do the messages fit with the physical evidence from Ashley Flynn's death?
