A former music pastor and American Idol contestant who told the show’s panel of judges that he loves his wife “more than anything” was arrested in Ohio on Friday after Ashley Flynn was found dead earlier this week in their bed with two gunshot wounds to her head.
Caleb Flynn was arrested on Thursday and charged with murder and two counts each of felonious assault and tampering with evidence in Miami County Municipal Court. Flynn pleaded not guilty on Friday while appearing for a video-arraignment from Miami County Jail.
On Monday, Ashley Flynn’s body was found by police who were responding to a frantic 911 call from a home in nearby Tipp City. Authorities said that the 37-year-old was shot with a 9mm handgun. Around 2:30 a.m., Caleb Flynn placed a frantic phone call to 911; in audio posted online, he tells the dispatcher that his wife was bleeding and unresponsive. A home intruder, he told the dispatcher, might still be in the house.
“Oh my God, somebody broke into my home,” the caller tells the dispatcher. “Somebody broke into my home and shot my wife.”
On the nearly eight-minute 911 call, released to the public on Friday, the caller tells the dispatcher that his daughters are asleep inside the home and that he was in their bedroom with the girls before he discovered her shot dead. Sounding frantic, he tells the dispatcher that it’s pitch black in the house and that he found the door leading into the garage wide open. Minutes into the call, the dispatcher tells the caller to place a cloth over the gunshot wounds.
“There’s blood everywhere,” he said.
Caleb Flynn owned a 9mm handgun, according to court documents filed in the case against him in Miami County Municipal Court. According to the police report, two shell casings were found in the bedroom where Ashley Flynn’s body was discovered; Caleb Flynn told police at the scene of the crime that he kept the firearm in the empty console of the truck that was parked in the garage.
Court documents in the case state that Flynn intentionally “led astray” the officers investigating the murder to make the home seem to have been burglarized.
In 2013, Caleb Flynn auditioned in Chicago for American Idol and received the national talent show’s golden ticket to Hollywood. In Tipp City, he worked as a music pastor and worship leader at the Christian Life Center church, where he was tasked with bringing the congregation together through music.
Flynn appeared in an American Idol “Road to Hollywood” interview in 2013, where he said that “music is all I know.” He added, in the footage from 13 years ago, that he’d been encouraged to audition for the talent show by his wife.
“I absolutely love the Lord, and I love my wife more than anything,” he said in the interview. ”She is very, very pretty. I love her. I’m just a normal person who absolutely loves to sing more than anything in the world.”
In a public statement earlier this week, Tipp City Police Chief Greg Adkins told the public to “rest assured that we are doing everything in our power and the resources that we have available” and that the department had reached out to the Miami County Sheriff’s Office, the Miami County prosecutor’s office and the Dayton FBI office to work with local police on the investigation.
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