When Suffolk County detectives finally pried open Austin Lynch’s cracked iPhone 14 Pro on December 12, 2025, they weren’t prepared for the digital descent into a jealous mind that had already turned lethal.

Hidden behind a passcode Lynch had whispered to a nurse in the ICU, investigators uncovered a private voice-memo diary titled simply “E.” — more than forty rambling recordings made in the two weeks after the breakup, each one darker than the last.

In the final memo, recorded at 2:13 a.m. on November 26, seven hours before he allegedly executed Emily, Lynch’s voice is low, trembling, almost childlike:

“She thinks she can just walk away. She thinks college makes her better than me. I’m going to her tomorrow. If I can’t have her, nobody will.”

Then came the phone call that prosecutors now call the smoking gun.

At 9:47 a.m. on November 26, three minutes before Emily Finn pulled into the driveway, Lynch dialed her from the house landline. The call lasted exactly 41 seconds and was automatically recorded by the Finn family’s Verizon cloud backup.

Emily’s voice is calm at first, pleading: “Austin, please, we’re done. I’m just coming to give your stuff back and say goodbye in person.”

Lynch’s reply was ice-cold:

“I love you, but you’re never leaving me alive.”

Three minutes later she was dead.

The rest of the iPhone was a shrine to obsession:

312 unsent text drafts in the Notes app, some as long as 2,000 words, alternating between suicidal threats and graphic fantasies of revenge.
A hidden photo album labeled “Forever” containing 180 screenshots of Emily’s Instagram stories, each annotated with timestamps and jealous captions (“Who is this guy in the background?” / “She’s wearing the hoodie I gave her for someone else”).
A Maps pin dropped on her Oneonta dorm with the note “Visit #3 — she can’t hide.”
A voice memo from the night after his second uninvited campus trip: “She cried when she saw me. Good. She should be scared. That’s still love.”

Detectives also recovered a deleted 17-second video filmed the morning of the murder: Lynch, shirtless in his bedroom mirror, loading the family shotgun while staring straight into the lens and whispering, “This is for us, Em.”

When confronted with the evidence during a second interrogation on December 12, Lynch reportedly folded. Handcuffed to his hospital bed, face still swathed in bandages, he allegedly wept and said, “I warned her. I told her exactly what would happen if she left.”

Suffolk County District Attorney Ray Tierney, visibly shaken, told reporters outside the courthouse:

“This wasn’t a crime of passion. This was a crime of possession. Every piece of digital evidence shows weeks of planning, stalking, and rehearsal. The defendant left us a road map straight to premeditated murder.”

Emily’s father, who had never heard the 41-second call until yesterday, spoke through tears on the courthouse steps:

“She was trying to be kind. She went there to be decent and close the door gently. And he answered with a shotgun. Eleven words. That’s all she got. Eleven words before he stole the rest of her life.”

The iPhone and its contents will be entered as State’s Exhibit 1 when Lynch’s trial begins (psychiatric evaluation outcome pending).

For the Finn family and the Long Island community still wearing pink ribbons in December, those eleven words are now etched deeper than any gravestone:

“I love you, but you’re never leaving me alive.”