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Caleb Flynn's attorney filed the appeal and said he was finished. Alleigha Botner deleted her texts the morning Ashley Flynn died, lied to the FBI, and investigators skipped her home. Matthew Farwell's defense attorney called a relationship that prosecutors allege started at 15 an affair. Sandra Birchmore told friends Farwell turned kind twelve days before she died. Four listener Q&A segments covering both cases in one episode. Flynn's appeal challenges jury instructions and venue. Botner's investigation gaps include no DNA collection, no Flock cameras, and a parked-car alibi. Farwell's prosecution rests on a 180 and a masked entry. The defense rests on a phone that shows Sandra searching the suicide ribbon the same day she planned a celebration for the baby. Robin Dreeke takes the Birchmore questions. Your letters carry the rest.
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When Christa Pike sat across from a Knoxville police investigator in January 1995 and explained why Colleen Slemmer was dead, she said the girl who'd hovered over her bed at night with a knife was Colleen. She'd told her mother the same story at Christmas, nineteen days before the murder. The story has one source. Chapter one of Satan's Helper: The Christa Pike Story, the Hidden Killers documentary on the Colleen Slemmer case, is the eighteen years that produced the girl who told it.
The file on her starts early. At twelve, after her grandmother died, she went after her mother's boyfriend, by her mother's 1996 account, with a butcher knife; at a 2007 hearing her mother called it a butter knife. A school friend saw her come running out of a room with a knife in her hand. Orange County child protective services opened a file and closed it when the boyfriend moved out. She ran away and skipped school until the county placed her in a group home called Shaeffer House, the first of two.
Her probation counselor described a smart girl with a lot of potential who was drinking and huffing aerosol fumes, and who was not aggressive. Her lawyer recommended a program; the judge sent her to Swannanoa, where she could have had about sixty family visits in fifteen months and got eight. Her teacher noticed she could make herself look happy when she wasn't. She left with a GED, and her juvenile file would be destroyed when she turned eighteen.
Less than two years later she told a friend at Job Corps that she intended to kill Colleen Slemmer because she'd just felt mean that day. Tony puts every chance on the table, in order. Chapter two is the walk to the steam plant.
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In the Delphi case, the only physical evidence the state presented connecting Richard Allen to the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German was a single unfired .40-caliber bullet found between the girls' bodies. Not fired from Allen's gun. Not found with DNA, fingerprints, or blood. Linked to his Sig Sauer through a forensic method called toolmark analysis — a discipline the Innocence Project has called "not settled science."
No physical evidence. No witness who saw Allen harm anyone. One unspent round and microscopic scratches on brass.
Meanwhile, the investigation had found other leads it chose not to follow. Kegan Kline ran a catfish account that communicated with Libby German. Someone using his account allegedly told one of Libby's friends that "shots" was supposed to meet her the day she was killed. Dual device logins showed two phones accessing the same account from Kline's residence that morning. After failing a polygraph about the case, Kline searched his phone for a question that suggests he knew what investigators might find.
Police knew about the account by 2017. They did not tell the public about it until December 2021.
Allen's defense filed a hundred-and-thirty-six-page document naming men with alleged ties to Norse paganism who the defense says the evidence pointed to. One allegedly confessed to his own sisters. His sister passed a polygraph. Another man's car allegedly came back from Delphi with dried blood. The FBI's behavioral analysts allegedly concluded those responsible held "Nordic beliefs."
A retired police chief who worked the case wrote to prosecutors that the evidence against Allen was "far less compelling" than the evidence gathered on these individuals.
The trial judge excluded all of it. The jury heard only the bullet.
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Federal prosecutors say Stoughton police detective Matthew Farwell strangled Sandra Birchmore in her Canton apartment and staged the scene as a suicide. Massachusetts called it a suicide for three and a half years. Prosecutor Cummings told a jury Farwell met Sandra through a police youth program when she was a child and was allegedly with her by 15. When a friend called Stoughton police and disclosed the relationship, prosecutors say Farwell did a 180. Turned nice. Asked for a key. Sandra told friends he had changed. Twelve days later she was dead. He allegedly walked into her building that night hooded and masked. The prosecution told the jury he was vocally opposed to masks. Robin Dreeke, retired FBI behavioral expert, takes listener questions on the behavioral evidence and on what a jury does when the government asking for a conviction admits its own police failed Sandra.
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Matthew Farwell's murder trial opened in Boston on October 9 with a fight over one phone. Prosecutor Torey Cummings read the jury Sandra Birchmore's final text, sent to Farwell seven minutes before he reached her building on February 1, 2021. Defense attorney Kimberly Stevens answered with a search from Sandra's phone that afternoon, about the color of the suicide ribbon. The first describes a 23-year-old opening her door to a man she trusted. The second describes a woman the defense says took her own life after he broke up with her.
The government's story starts in a Stoughton police youth program, where Cummings said Farwell found the littlest girl in the group photo, started tutoring her at the library, and was with her by the time she was 15. It runs through a pregnancy both of them believed was his, a $248 phone call that exposed the relationship, and a change in him that Sandra described to friends as a complete 180. Cummings told the jury he lulled her into feeling safe so he could kill her.
The defense's story starts with the word affair and builds a different Sandra: psychiatric medication from age six, an attempt as a teenager, Thanksgiving and Christmas alone, $2.90 in the bank, spotting and scared. Stevens told the jury more than one person's DNA was on the strap and that mixture evidence is never evidence. The state's own medical examiner called it suicide, she said, before changing the certificate to undetermined this spring.
No cameras were allowed. This is the full opening day, rebuilt from the reporters in the room, and it closes on the question the judge is still weighing after the jury went home.
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