A former mistress told an Ohio jury that ex-"American Idol" contestant Caleb Flynn sent her months of messages fantasizing about killing his wife Ashley, and that the pair scrambled to delete evidence the night before the 37-year-old mother was found shot dead in her home.

Alleigha Botner returned to the witness stand Thursday at Miami County Common Pleas Court in Troy, Ohio, for a second day of testimony that prosecutors are using to build their motive case against Flynn, 49, who is charged with aggravated murder, felonious assault, and tampering with evidence in the February 16 killing of his wife inside their Tipp City home. Flynn has pleaded not guilty. Fox News Digital reported that Botner read jurors a string of messages in which Flynn allegedly expressed escalating desires for Ashley to die, and in which Botner herself participated in the conversation before later turning on Flynn.

The testimony is the prosecution's clearest attempt so far to answer the central question in a case built almost entirely on circumstantial evidence: why would a husband and father gun down his wife in the back of the head while their daughters slept across the hall?

107,000 messages and a trail of deleted conversations

Prosecutors told jurors that Flynn and Botner exchanged roughly 107,000 messages while carrying on their affair, and routinely deleted their conversations. Botner testified she advised Flynn how to wipe data from his devices "multiple times," including the night before Ashley was killed.

That night, February 15, Botner used ChatGPT to research whether affair messages could be permanently erased. She sent Flynn screenshots of the results at approximately 5:47 p.m., hours before Ashley's death. The pair also discussed Flynn's plan to buy a burner phone with cash so the purchase would not appear in his bank records.

Flynn allegedly wrote to Botner that evening: "I think I should pay cash for this so it's not in my bank account." Shortly after midnight, he sent another message: "It's happening, Ilya." Then: "February 16th day I'll never forget." Botner responded, "You're about to be free." Flynn replied, "I choose you."

By 7:50 the next morning, Botner had sent Flynn her own burner phone number and told him to contact her there once he obtained his. She later deleted that message.

Months of messages showed Flynn's alleged fixation on his wife's death

The messages read to jurors stretched back months. In May 2025, Flynn allegedly wrote that he was "literally thinking of ways to kill" his wife "and not go to jail." In a follow-up message, he allegedly told Botner: "If I could literally kill her and not go to hell, I would do it in a heartbeat." Days later, another message: "I hate her, loathe her. I want her dead."

By June, the tone shifted from venting to solicitation, according to the testimony. Flynn allegedly wrote to Botner: "Please hire someone to take [her] out. I need you in my life, I need you." Breitbart reported that prosecutors introduced the texts as the backbone of their murder case, arguing Flynn's words went far beyond frustration.

Botner was not a passive recipient. She told jurors she responded to the "hire someone" message: "So tempting. I can't live without you. And I've had this thought so often lately. How do we figure this out?" In an August exchange, Botner wrote, "I want to kill her, Caleb." She became visibly emotional before reading that message aloud. Flynn allegedly responded, "That makes two of us," and added that he had been "literally trying to find a way to get rid of her, to be rid of her." Botner followed up by writing she was "not asking that you take her life, obviously" and said divorce "would change everything."

The case echoes a disturbing pattern in other spousal murder prosecutions where romantic entanglements provided both the motive and the evidence trail that ultimately exposed the crime.

Former prosecutor and Fox News contributor Josh Ritter said Botner's value to the prosecution is straightforward.

"Motive. She provides motive. She gives jurors a reason for why would this man murder his wife."

Ritter added that the content of the messages goes well beyond the kind of venting someone might do in a troubled marriage:

"He went as far as to saying I literally would kill her. That's far beyond someone voicing their frustrations and venting to a lover."

Botner gave Flynn a January deadline, he missed it

Botner testified that she eventually gave Flynn an ultimatum: leave Ashley by January 11 or the affair was over. Flynn did not leave. Botner cut off contact.

The silence lasted about a month. On Valentine's Day, February 14, two days before Ashley's death, Flynn reached back out. He told Botner he was "filing [for divorce] from Ashley" and was "actually leaving her this time." The pair resumed planning, including the burner phone discussion and the data-deletion research that followed the next evening.

Botner also testified that at some point during their relationship, Flynn showed her a gun he kept in the center console of his truck. Prosecutors allege Ashley was shot in the back of the head inside the couple's home, and that Flynn staged the scene to look like a break-in. Investigators have never recovered the weapon.

That staging claim took a hit on the first day of trial. The New York Post reported that a police canine named Haze found no outgoing scent trail of any intruder leaving the scene, only a trail leading back into the house from the garage. FBI agents who canvassed the neighborhood for two days found no witnesses or evidence supporting Flynn's claim that an intruder broke in.

Cases involving spouses who fabricate stories to cover domestic killings have drawn increasing public scrutiny. In one recent case, a former youth pastor was charged in his wife's cliff death after witnesses reported his alleged mistress attended the memorial service.

'Were you behind this?'

Botner told jurors she learned Ashley was dead when a fellow church congregant sent her a news story the morning of February 16. Her reaction, she said, was immediate suspicion.

"My heart started pounding. It just seemed like too much of a coincidence that the day he's divorcing her, she's just dead all of a sudden."

She messaged Flynn: "What is going on right now? Were you behind this?" Then she deleted the message. Later that day, she saw Flynn at Ashley's parents' home, where family members and church staff had gathered.

What Flynn allegedly said to her there may be the most damaging single line prosecutors have introduced. Botner testified:

"The first thing he said to me was, 'It didn't happen the way we thought it would, did it?'"

Botner admitted she initially lied to the FBI when agents interviewed her days after the killing, denying her relationship with Flynn. She said she began cooperating more fully only after investigators told her they had found messages on Ashley's phone.

"I was selfishly afraid that my reputation was going to be ruined and that I was going to lose my job. And now that there was a murder attached, I didn't want to be attached to that in any way."

Flynn was arraigned February 20 and has maintained his innocence. Fox News Digital reached out to his attorney for comment but received no response. At his arraignment, Just The News reported that Flynn told the court by video from jail: "I just want to take care of my daughters. I'm not a risk."

No weapon, no residue, no eyewitness, but 107,000 messages

The defense faces a prosecution case built on volume rather than forensic certainty. No murder weapon has been recovered. No gunshot residue was found on Flynn. No one saw the killing. Ritter acknowledged those gaps give the defense room to maneuver.

"In an ideal world, would the prosecution want the murder weapon? Sure. But... it's something that the defense is obviously going to lean into."

But prosecutors appear to be betting that the sheer weight of the messaging record, 107,000 texts, months of alleged fantasies about killing Ashley, a coordinated effort to erase the digital trail, and Botner's account of Flynn's behavior in the hours before and after the killing, will be enough to convince a jury without a smoking gun.

Botner finished her testimony Thursday afternoon after cross-examination by the defense. Prosecutors asked her one final question: how she feels about Flynn today.

"I hate him," she said. "Because I believe that he murdered his wife."

Ashley Flynn was 37 years old, a substitute teacher and volleyball coach at Tipp City Schools, and a mother of two. Domestic tragedies like hers, where the people closest to the victim become the prime suspects, continue to surface with grim regularity, as seen in a recent Michigan case where a father killed his wife and six children.

A man who once auditioned for "American Idol" now sits in an Ohio courtroom while jurors read his own words back to him. The weapon is missing. But the motive, if the prosecution is right, was written out in 107,000 messages, and the woman on the other end of those messages just told the jury everything.