A former Ohio music pastor who once appeared on the TV talent competition American Idol has been found guilty of murdering his wife. Caleb Flynn, 40, fatally shot Ashley Flynn twice in the back of the head while she slept at their Ohio home on 16 February this year, then tried to claim that intruders had shot her. Flynn wept in court as the jury delivered its verdict after deliberating for less than three hours. He also was found guilty of the other eight charges against him, which included aggravated murder and tampering with evidence.
He faces life in prison without parole. Closing arguments ended on Tuesday in Flynn’s trial after eight days of testimony, which included a song played in court that prosecutors say he wrote and dedicated to the woman with whom he was having an affair. Throughout the trial, the prosecution presented evidence including police body camera footage, and activity on Flynn’s iPhone and Apple Watch around the time of the murder, which took place in Tipp City, a suburb of Dayton. They also called dozens of witnesses, including his former mistress Alleigha Botner, whom he met while she was an intern at his church.
Some of their 100,000 exchanged text messages were read aloud in court. The defence called no witnesses. “I was up until 4am last night crying, literally thinking of ways to kill her and not go to jail,” Flynn wrote in a message to Botner, 24, in August 2025. In another message, he wrote: “I just want her dead and gone.” Testifying in court, Botner said she now hates Flynn “because I believe that he murdered his wife”.
During closing arguments on Tuesday, prosecuting attorney Paul Watkins leaned heavily into Flynn’s text exchanges, which he said demonstrated the defendant’s “hatred” for his wife. He described Flynn as being afraid to lose custody of his daughters in a divorce, as well as his job with his wife’s family business and his job at the church. An emotional Flynn was seen in court at times sniffling and wiping tears from his eyes. Watkins also said that when police arrived at the family home in the early hours on 16 February, Flynn told police he had been in his daughters’ bedroom when he heard gunfire.
Flynn said he found his 37-year-old wife dead in the bedroom, after noticing the garage side door was open. Watkins said Flynn later told investigators he had not been to the garage, contradicting his earlier statement. Flynn’s defence lawyer Patrick Mulligan, meanwhile, told the court there was no concrete evidence, saying: “Connecting a couple of meaningless dots doesn’t solve the case.” Mulligan said the issue was not whether Flynn was a good husband to his wife, a schoolteacher and volleyball coach, and that evidence of infidelity was not evidence of murder. “They can’t find the gun, therefore they blame it on him?” Mulligan questioned, referring to the charge of tampering with evidence that Flynn also faced.
Flynn’s gun, which had been kept in the console of his truck, has been missing since investigators arrived at the scene and found the truck’s centre console open. Earlier in the trial, Botner took the stand as a witness for two days, offering testimony about her nearly 18-month relationship with Flynn. In addition to reading some of their text exchanges, she also explained the lyrics line by line from an AI-generated song. Video of the jury’s reaction to the song, including what looked like laughter, went viral.
Prosecutors also called Joseph Wilhelm, a special agent from Ohio’s Bureau of Criminal Investigations, as a witness. He said multiple apps were uninstalled from Flynn’s phone before his wife’s death, including Instagram and an AI-music generating app. The music-generating app, Wilhelm said, “related to his relationship with Alleigha Botner”. Flynn appeared in 2013 on the 12th series of American Idol, and sang before judges Mariah Carey, Nicki Minaj and Randy Jackson.
He was featured in televised auditions, and was given a “golden ticket” to go to Hollywood, but he never reached the main competition. “Music is all I know, it’s what I live to do and I love to sing, so that’s why I auditioned,” he said in videos shown on the programme. “Maybe my wife kinda nudged me a little, too.” He is due to be sentenced on 5 October.
