A murder trial in the small Indiana town of Delphi was wrapping up Thursday after weeks of testimony and evidence surrounding the fate of two teenage girls who vanished during a winter hike in 2017. Their killings went unsolved for years before police arrested a man who lived and worked in the same town.
Richard Allen, 52, faces two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the killings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14. He could be sentenced to up to 130 years in prison if convicted of all the charges in the killings of the girls, known as Abby and Libby.
Closing arguments began Thursday morning following the weekslong trial.
Jurors heard evidence including the recording of a phone call in which Allen told his wife, “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.” Defense witnesses said Allen was delirious and psychotic while behind bars and made the confession while under mental stress.
Prosecutors also showed gruesome crime scene photos showing the girls with their throats cut, and a grainy cellphone video they said German recorded just before they vanished which shows a man walking behind Williams as they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge. The defense argued that someone else may have kidnapped the teens and returned them early the next day to where they were found dead.
The 12 jurors along with alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, where Allen also lived and worked as a pharmacy technician. A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, along with the jurors, came from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County.
The case has drawn outsized attention from true-crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, some surrounding a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. It has also been the subject of a gag order.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland opened the trial by saying it was Allen who forced the youths off the Monon High Bridge and into a secluded area while armed with a gun. He said Allen had planned to rape them before he cut their throats on Feb. 13, 2017. The teens were found dead the next day, about a quarter-mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.
Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin told jurors in his opening statement that Allen was not the killer. He said the state’s timeline does not match the evidence, arguing that one or more other people must have kidnapped the teens and returned them early the next day to the spot where they were found.
Defense witnesses included a digital forensics expert who said headphones or an auxiliary cable were plugged into Libby’s cellphone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared. Her testimony called into question the investigators’ belief that the girls were killed and left in the woods around 2:32 p.m. on Feb. 13, 2017.
Other evidence included an unspent bullet found between the girls’ bodies. An Indiana State Police firearms expert called by prosecutors said her analysis determined that the bullet “had been cycled through” Allen’s Sig Sauer, a .40-caliber handgun. A defense firearms expert questioned the state police analysis of the unspent round.
The jury also heard testimony about Allen's confessions — made to his wife and others, including a prison psychologist, correctional officers and the former warden of the Westville Correctional Facility, who told the court that Allen claimed to have killed the girls with a box cutter that he later discarded. Prosecutors argued that some of these incriminating statements contained information that only the killer could have known.
Defense attorneys argued that Allen's confessions are unreliable because he was facing a severe mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked up in isolation, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by people incarcerated with him. A psychiatrist supported the argument, testifying that months in solitary confinement could cause a person to become delirious and psychotic.
Prosecutors also presented a prison psychologist's report that said Allen told her he gave up his plan to rape the teens after spotting a van traveling nearby. A state trooper testified that Allen’s remark corroborated the statement of a nearby homeowner whose driveway passes near where the bodies were found and said he was driving home in his van around that time. Allen's attorneys cast doubt on when that man’s van passed through the area.
Jurors also viewed an enhanced version of the cellphone video, showing Williams and a man wearing a blue jacket and jeans nearing the end of the bridge. One of the girls could be heard saying, “There’s no path so we have to go down here.” Just before the video ends, prosecutors said, the man told the teens, “ Down the hill.”
The defense rested its case on Wednesday after presenting less than a week of testimony and evidence.
Allen's lawyers had sought to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as the Odinists who follow a pagan Norse religion, but the judge ruled against that, saying the defense “failed to produce admissible evidence” of such a connection.
