LISBON Prosecutors are fighting to prevent the dismissal of key cell phone location evidence from the upcoming trial of William Long Jr., who is accused of murdering his former wife and Leetonia High School Teacher Michelle Long.

Long is accused of fatally shooting Michelle Long in November 2023 as she got mail from her driveway in Butler Township. In a court filing submitted last week, the prosecuting attorneys objected to the defense's request to exclude cellular location data and the use of a mapping tool called Trax.

The defense for Long filed a motion on November 5 arguing that the Trax program, which law enforcement used to map his movements on the day of the homicide, is unreliable and the evidence should be excluded. The defense asked the court to hold a separate hearing to test the evidence's scientific reliability.

In their response, Assistant County Prosecutors argue the court should overrule the motion and allow the evidence to be used without a preliminary reliability hearing.

The prosecution makes several key points, stating that a full scientific reliability hearing is not required because the investigator isn't an expert.

William Long
William Long  

 The prosecution claims in its motion that Detective Lieutenant Caleb Wycoff, who used Trax, will testify as an investigator, not as a scientific expert on the program. The prosecutors claim that putting location data into a mapping program like Trax is not an expert analysis and does not require specialized knowledge about cellular networks.

The prosecutors also claim that the function of the Trax program—converting cell phone provider data into easy-to-read maps and using cell tower connections to generally determine a phone's location—is generally accepted and not considered "novel scientific evidence". They note that courts have previously admitted similar cellular location evidence without a reliability hearing.

The filing cites several cases, including one from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, to show that evidence generated by the Trax program has been deemed admissible and used in other criminal cases.

The prosecution also denies the defense's claim that they were not given the raw data used to create the location maps. The prosecutors assert that the raw data, which included records from a location-sharing application and other cellular records, was provided to the defense on an external drive in July 2024.

They point out that the defense’s own retained expert, a specialist in digital forensics, appears to have analyzed this data to form his own opinions about Long’s whereabouts.

The State concludes its filing by asking the court to overrule the motion to exclude the evidence.

The case is currently scheduled for a status conference on Dec. 8, before Judge Megan Bickerton, who is scheduled to preside over the jury trial on Feb. 3, 2026.