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A GoFundMe that raised over $175,000. More than 1,400 individual donors. T-shirt sales, benefit dinners, local businesses redirecting profits. A church that had to cancel a public memorial because the man charged with killing Ashley had served as its worship pastor. And a family that went to court  --  not for criminal charges, but to build a financial wall around two little girls before the system had even set a trial date.

That's what happened in Tipp City, Ohio after Ashley Flynn was killed. Not just grief. Infrastructure. A community deciding, collectively, that two elementary-age daughters would not face this alone.

Ashley was a Tipp City native who came home after college and never left. She taught, she coached volleyball, she served at church, she raised her girls. The school district called her warm and kind. Her neighbors called the family wonderful. She was 37 and eight days from her birthday.

Part 3 of our four-part pre-trial series on the Caleb Flynn case is about the woman at the center of everything  --  who she was, what was lost, and the community that decided to hold the line for her daughters.

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For over a year, this case lived behind sealed doors and unnamed sources. That's over now.

The People's Brief filed by Deputy DA Beth Silverman puts the prosecution's entire case on the public record for the first time — and what it alleges David Anthony Burke did to fourteen-year-old Celeste Rivas Hernandez is staggering in its detail and its darkness.

Tony Brueski reads the full nine-page filing and breaks down every allegation. A child allegedly groomed from age eleven. A sexual relationship prosecutors say began at thirteen. An argument over text the night before Celeste allegedly died — where she threatened to expose everything. An Uber ride to Burke's Hollywood Hills home. Texts allegedly sent to her phone minutes after prosecutors say she was already dead. Chainsaws and a body bag ordered on Amazon. Three midnight trips to a remote highway. Forensic matches between evidence in Burke's garage and Celeste's remains. And months of an alleged cover-up while Burke went on a world tour.

The defense tried to bury this filing. The judge let the public see it. Now you can hear every word.

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Rex Heuermann told the therapist working with his family that the dark thoughts started in high school. He knew they weren't healthy. He couldn't name what they were. But he knew something inside him wasn't right. He said he started reading books about death — one in particular called Death Scenes, filled with images of mutilated bodies, severed limbs, pure carnage. That's what was feeding his mind during the years when most teenagers are figuring out who they want to be. For Rex, sex and violence were merging into something that would eventually become unstoppable. He said one thought fed another fed another, deeper and deeper, until it consumed him. He said he couldn't put the brakes on it. He said his outlet was to kill. 

The Peacock documentary gave the world something no courtroom or police interrogation ever would have produced — extended therapy sessions with one of the most methodical serial killers in American history. Rex described a four-day kill cycle. He timed his body dumps with a stopwatch. He built his kill room in the bedroom where he grew up. And John Douglas — the FBI profiler who wrote Mindhunter, a book Rex himself referenced in his planning document — called him a malignant narcissistic sadistic psychopath and said he believes there are more victims. 

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to dissect what the documentary revealed about Rex Heuermann's psychological development — from the adolescent origins of his violent fantasies to the question Douglas raised that hangs over this entire case: did Rex really stop at eight?

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The Duggar family curriculum taught children that the French Revolution was caused by rejecting authority — not poverty, not inequality, not tyranny. The Wisdom Booklets framed the separation of church and state as a spiritual failure and taught Old Testament law as binding civil code. The Character First program carried Gothard’s authority doctrine into public schools. Arkansas prisons adopted his material. And Bill Gothard — who demanded absolute submission — answered to no seminary, no denomination, and functionally no board. We go inside the history and government teachings and show how the curriculum turned obedience into a weapon.

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Victoria Heuermann asked her father a question that took more courage than most people will ever need in their entire lives. She looked at the man who raised her — handcuffed, shackled, sitting in a jailhouse room — and asked him: when you were killing those women, did you ever think about me? Rex Heuermann's answer was one word. No. He said the two worlds never crossed. He said he never thought about his family while he was carrying out the murders. Not once. Not ever. And Victoria had to sit with that answer, process it, and somehow figure out how to keep living. She also asked him if he saw the women as human beings. He said he didn't even see them as people. That's what Victoria Heuermann is carrying. The knowledge that her father could love her — genuinely love her, she believes — and simultaneously view other women as subhuman objects to be used and discarded. The knowledge that women were murdered and dismembered ten feet from where she sat as a child. The knowledge that her father confirmed one of his victims was killed in her parents' bed. And after hearing all of it, she forgave him. She said she has to in order to move forward. 

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott joins me to examine the psychological devastation facing Victoria Heuermann — what it means to carry a serial killer's legacy as your identity, how the brain processes the revelation that your safe childhood was a lie, and whether Victoria's path through this is as healthy as it appears or whether the hardest part of her journey hasn't started yet.

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It's the question everyone keeps asking. How did she not know? She lived in the same house. She slept in the same bed. And for nearly thirty years, Rex Heuermann was strangling and dismembering women in their basement while Asa Ellerup went about her life as if nothing was wrong. The easy answer is that she had to have known. The comfortable answer is that she looked the other way. 

But the real answer — the one the Peacock documentary just made impossible to ignore — is far more complicated, and far more disturbing. Asa Ellerup didn't come into this marriage as a woman with solid ground under her feet. She was adopted into a family where she never felt she belonged. She was assaulted as a teenager. She tried to end her own life. By the time Rex entered the picture, she wasn't looking for love — she was looking for someone to make the world stop hurting. He became that person. He became everything. And that's exactly why she couldn't see what he was. 

The therapist who worked with their family for more than two years put it this way: anything Rex said overwrote everything else. It wasn't that Asa chose not to believe the evidence. It's that Rex's voice was the only channel her brain could receive. 

Psychotherapist Shavaun Scott sits down with me to unpack every dimension of Asa Ellerup's story — the trauma that made her vulnerable, the mechanisms that kept her blind, and whether any of us would have done anything different if we'd lived her life before Rex Heuermann ever walked into it. You might come in with judgment. You might leave with something else entirely.

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At 9:27 PM on February 1, 2021, Matthew Farwell entered Sandra Birchmore’s apartment building. At 9:56 PM, he left. Twenty-nine minutes. Sandra was never seen alive again. When her body was found three days later, she was wearing the same clothes. Federal prosecutors allege that inside those twenty-nine minutes, Farwell strangled Sandra and her unborn son, then staged the scene.

The forensic evidence prosecutors have assembled is devastating. Farwell’s DNA was found on the duffel bag strap used to strangle Sandra. His sperm cells were found in her underwear, contradicting his claim that he hadn’t been intimate with her in months. Sandra’s right clavicle showed an injury that occurred while she was alive, matching the buckle behind her head — evidence prosecutors say proves she could not have died in the position she was found. A broken pink flamingo necklace Sandra regularly wore was discovered tangled with her hair on the bedroom floor. Her phone recorded its final movements while Farwell was still inside the apartment.

Then there’s the reenactment. At a private gathering after Sandra’s death, an inebriated Farwell demonstrated how she supposedly died, positioning himself beneath a doorknob. The details he described had not been publicly revealed. He knew because, prosecutors allege, he staged the scene himself.

DNA testing later confirmed Farwell was not the biological father of Sandra’s unborn son. But both he and Sandra believed he was — and prosecutors say that belief is what drove him to kill her. Every piece of physical evidence points to homicide. And yet, for years, it was ruled something else entirely.

This is Part 3 of a five-part series on the Sandra Birchmore case.

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Sixteen months. Over a hundred hours of phone calls. Multiple trips to rural Iowa. An FBI dig infiltrated in a rental car. A Gacy connection nobody saw coming. Alleged mob ties. An unsolved robbery. 

Two sisters telling opposite stories. And a case that refuses to die. Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta — host of the Defense Diaries podcast and the man behind the most comprehensive John Wayne Gacy investigation ever produced — tells the full story of his time inside the Don Studey case for the first time.

Don Studey is the alleged Green Hollow Killer — accused by his own daughter Lucy Studey-McKiddy of killing dozens of women and burying them in wells on the family's property near Thurman in Fremont County, Iowa. Bob drove to Green Hollow when the FBI moved on the property, got waved past a checkpoint, watched the dig from the fence line, and discovered that Gacy's first victim Tim McCoy was from the area and related to the Studey family. 

In the nearby towns, locals shared decades of stories about the man their parents warned them never to go near. Bob uncovered alleged connections to the Kansas City mob and an unsolved violent crime. Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake provides the behavioral analysis — real trauma, credible childhood outcry, possible memory exaggeration in the numbers. After three days the agencies closed the case. Lucy says they drilled the wrong well. 

The Paramount+ documentary My Killer Father: The Green Hollow Murders is streaming now. Full conversation with Tony Brueski, Robin Drake, and Bob Motta.

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He told American Idol cameras in 2013 that music was all he knew. That he loved his wife more than anything. That she nudged him to audition. Caleb Flynn got the golden ticket, went to Hollywood, and was cut before the televised rounds. He went back to Ohio and kept leading worship.

But by 2021, the worship career was over. A brief stint selling life insurance. Then a role as VP of Sales at a Tipp City company owned by Ashley's family. The man who built his identity around leading congregations in song was now selling commercial flooring for his in-laws.

After the arrest, court filings from Ashley's family painted a new picture. A life insurance policy with Caleb as the primary beneficiary. A demand for financial transparency. A domestic violence protection order to freeze accounts. The family's words in court: he had "the motive, opportunity, and means."

His bond was raised to $3.5 million. No contact with his children. Part 2 of our pre-trial series explores the man behind the public persona  --  from the church stage to the courtroom, and everything that shifted in between.

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Criminal defense attorney Bob Motta spent sixteen months doing what he does in every case — looking for the lie. He had over a hundred hours of phone conversations with Lucy Studey-McKiddy, the woman who alleges her father Don Studey was the Green Hollow Killer, responsible for the deaths of dozens of women buried in wells near Thurman, Iowa. He drove to Green Hollow. He watched the FBI dig. 

He interviewed dozens of locals. And through all of it, he was cross-examining Lucy's story the same way he'd cross-examine a witness on the stand. Her accounts were repetitive but never changed — the same stories, the same details, always consistent. Meanwhile her sister Susan was texting Bob throughout, insisting their father was strict but not a killer. Retired FBI Special Agent Robin Drake weighs in with the behavioral analysis — Lucy's trauma responses are real, and her childhood outcry gives her credibility significant weight. 

But Robin flags that trauma can produce memory exaggeration, and the statistical rarity of serial killers involving family in their operations makes Lucy's account an outlier worth noting. The biggest gap in the case — no families of missing persons have come forward, and database searches haven't produced matches. Lucy derived her estimate of fifty alleged victims from a calculation of roughly two per year over twenty-five years. 

Bob also reveals a lead that still haunts him — Lucy's claim that a car with a body inside was buried on the Studey side of the property, in a location that could be searched without dealing with the mystery wells. 

The Paramount+ documentary My Killer Father is streaming now. Part three of the conversation.

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