Can Your Phone Testify for You When You’re Gone?

Content note: This article discusses murder and domestic abuse.

Courts have accepted text messages as evidence of what a victim feared in her final minutes. Some people now build that kind of record on purpose, in case they aren’t around to explain it themselves.

By Jack Malacat

Police have treated text messages as evidence for about as long as phones have carried them. What happened in a Liverpool courtroom in November 2023 was rarer. In the summer of 2022, Ashley Dale began sending her friends voice notes about a feud between her boyfriend and another man, one that had flared up again after a trip to Glastonbury. That August, a gunman forced his way into her home and shot her. Her boyfriend had been the intended target. Detectives recovered hundreds of recordings from her phone, and many were played for the jury, who heard Ashley describe her growing fear in the weeks before her death. The senior investigating officer said that, in effect, Ashley had narrated her own story.

Ashley never meant those recordings as evidence. Some people do. On June 6, 2012, hours before she drowned in a creek in York County, Pennsylvania, Annemarie Fitzpatrick wrote and signed a note in her planner at work: “If something happens to me—JOE.” That morning she had also emailed herself under the subject line “if something happens to me,” describing problems in her marriage and a log that had nearly fallen on her the night before. Her husband told police they had crashed an ATV into the water, and her death was first treated as an accident. Then her coworkers found the note, and investigators started asking different questions.

The note helped convict her husband of first-degree murder in 2015. Six years later, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ordered a new trial. The justices accepted that a statement like this can show what a victim feared, but this one also named who would be responsible, and prosecutors had used it to prove exactly that. Offered that way, it was inadmissible hearsay, and the court found the error serious enough to undo the verdict. As of this writing, he is awaiting a retrial, and his lawyer maintains that he is innocent. The most deliberate record in this story is the one a court refused to let speak, even though it had already done its first job by turning an accident into an investigation.

A message written with no thought of court fared very differently. On the afternoon of February 9, 2010, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, Christina Mulgrave texted her son at 3:03 that her husband was threatening to kill her and that she was scared. He had told her, she wrote, that he would kill her if she picked up the phone. At 3:09 she called 911 to report that he was stabbing her. She died of her injuries, and her husband was convicted of first-degree murder. On appeal, the state’s Supreme Judicial Court upheld the use of her text as a spontaneous utterance, a statement made under the stress of an unfolding event. No Massachusetts appellate court had approved a text message under that rule before. The justices noted that texting often stands in for speech, and that her message was a single sentence without punctuation.

Read side by side, the two cases suggest something uncomfortable. Evidence law tends to trust words more when they look unplanned, and it is wary of a written accusation prepared for the future, partly because its author can never be cross-examined. The rules differ by state and country, and none of this is legal advice. A court is also only one of the record’s audiences. Investigators decide where to look long before a judge decides what a jury hears, and the advocates who work with people facing abuse tend to recommend a quieter kind of record: what happened and when, written down close to the moment and left unaltered. The National Network to End Domestic Violence says documentation like this can reveal patterns and escalation, and its WomensLaw.org project advises saving evidence quickly, since an abusive partner with access to a device may delete it. Copies matter for the same reason. A message sent to a trusted friend survives even if the phone does not.

The safest evidence may be the evidence that has already left your phone.

That advice changes when the phone itself is being watched. The Safety Net Project’s technology safety plan warns that some abusive partners escalate when they sense they’ve lost access, so pulling out a tracker or changing every password at once can create new danger. Some survivors keep using the monitored phone as usual, partly to keep collecting evidence, while turning to a safer device for the conversations that matter most. It is a quiet kind of ingenuity, and it works best planned with an advocate rather than improvised alone.

If someone had to reconstruct your life tomorrow from what your phone has already sent into the world, what would they actually know? Hopefully nothing in your life feels dangerous, and never will. Every one of us still leaves behind a version of ourselves that other people may someday interpret, and a phone gives us unusual control over that version while we’re here to shape it. Ashley Dale and Christina Mulgrave never planned to testify. Their words reached a courtroom anyway, carrying what those moments meant to them before anyone else could explain it for them.

Your phone may never take the witness stand. Your voice still can.

If you are experiencing abuse, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available 24/7 at 1-800-799-7233, by texting START to 88788, or at thehotline.org. If you think your phone is being monitored, reach out from a safer device.

About the author

Jack Malacat is the creator of Venom Haus and the editor of The Venom Haus Archives, a one-man publication made possible with the help of AI. When he isn’t designing games or dreaming up new products, he’s here, chasing questions about the darker side of being human. He thinks the internet has enough AI slop, and he wants to show what these tools can do in the right hands, with the sources to back it up.

Sources and Further Reading

• ITV News Granada, “How Ashley Dale’s voice recordings helped convict her killers,” November 20, 2023. How detectives used hundreds of recovered voice notes to reconstruct the feud and fear in the weeks before Dale’s murder.
• ITV News Granada, “Four men found guilty of Ashley Dale murder,” November 20, 2023. The verdicts, the Glastonbury trigger, and the intended target.
• Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth v. Fitzpatrick, 255 A.3d 452 (2021), as reported by the Associated Press via FOX 29. The ruling that the planner note was inadmissible hearsay and that a new trial was required.
• Superior Court of Pennsylvania, Commonwealth v. Fitzpatrick memorandum, March 12, 2026. Procedural history, including the Supreme Court’s January 21, 2026, opinion on expert testimony about manner of death.
• ABC27, “Retrial scheduled for central Pennsylvania man accused in wife’s 2012 drowning.” How the note was found and the case’s current status.
• Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, Commonwealth v. Mulgrave, 472 Mass. 170, July 13, 2015. The ruling that admitted Christina Mulgrave’s text as a spontaneous utterance.
• Essex District Attorney’s Office, “SJC Upholds Domestic Murder Conviction,” July 14, 2015. Why the ruling was a first for text messages in Massachusetts.
• Safety Net Project, National Network to End Domestic Violence, “Technology Safety Plan: A Guide for Survivors and Advocates.” Safer devices, documentation, and why removing monitoring can increase risk.
• WomensLaw.org, a project of NNEDV, “Documenting/Saving Evidence.” Practical guidance on logging incidents and preserving digital evidence before it can be deleted.
• National Network to End Domestic Violence, “NNEDV Launches DocuSAFE,” May 7, 2020. On how documentation shows patterns and escalation. The app itself was discontinued in 2023.