It’s been more than six years since best friends Libby German, 14, and Abby Williams, 13, set off on a walk in their hometown of Delphi, Indiana – never to be seen alive again.
Since then, several local men have fallen under suspicion for their murders.
But no arrests were made, no suspects formally named and one promising lead after the next went cold. Until now.
For the first time, a man has been arrested and charged with the 2017 murders of the teenagers.
Richard Allen, a 50-year-old married Delphi man, was taken into custody on 26 October and booked into Carroll County Jail. He was later moved to a state facility for his own safety.
Indiana State Police announced that he had been charged with two counts of murder. He pleaded not guilty and continues to insist his innocence.
The 50-year-old has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
However, in the latest dramatic twist in the case, it emerged in court on 15 June that Mr Allen has confessed to the 2017 killings multiple times while behind bars.
In an Indiana court hearing, both the accused killer’s defence and prosecutors revealed that Mr Allen had made “incriminating admissions” about the murders in the seven months since he was arrested and jailed awaiting trial.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland said he had “confessed five or six times to killing the girls”, making “multiple confessions to multiple people”.
Mr Allen’s defence attorneys agreed that Mr Allen had “made incriminating statements implicating himself in the crime,” but insisted that the statements were vague, “inconsistent” with his past not guilty plea and denials, and couldn’t be trusted due to their client’s mental state.
The exact nature of the confessions and incriminating statements have not been revealed.
In the hearing, Mr Allen’s attorneys also argued that he should be moved from state prison to a jail ahead of his trial, which has now been scheduled to begin on 8 January 2024. The judge will rule on this and a defence motion seeking to throw out evidence from the case at a later date.
In a motion filed on 13 June, Mr Allen revealed he is trying to have key ballistics evidence ruled inadmissible.
The criminal affidavit, which was partially redacted and released in November, previously revealed that the local man was finally tied to the February 2017 murders through a bullet found at the bloody crime scene.
Ballistics confirmed that an unspent .40 caliber round found close to the bodies of the teenage victims came from Mr Allen’s Sig Sauer Model P226.
It also revealed that he is believed to be the “Bridge Guy” seen in a video that Libby recorded and posted to her Snapchat account on the day she died and that Mr Allen was interviewed by police in 2017 shortly after the murders – confirming he has been on their radar for years.
Officials have not ruled out the possibility that other individuals were also involved in the teenagers’ brutal murders and, if so, vowed that they will also face charges.
Here’s what we know about the case:
What happened to Libby and Abby?
Libby and Abby went missing on 13 February 2017 after they set off on a hike along the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, Indiana.
Their bodies were discovered the next day in a wooded area around half a mile off the trail.
For years, police have refused to say how the girls died and have revealed few details about the crime scene.
However, shocking new details about the murders came to light in a search warrant application obtained by podcast The Murder Sheet and shared with The Independent back in May.
The warrant, filed by an FBI agent investigating the murders back in 2017 and partly redacted, was to carry out a search on the home of a local man Ronald Logan.
In it, the agent revealed that the girls had lost “a lot” of blood during their deaths and that their killer is believed to have moved and staged their bodies, before taking some sort of souvenir from the scene.
For the first time, the warrant also revealed that the teenagers had been killed by some type of weapon. The word for the weapon was redacted in the document.
The murderer would have been covered in the victims’ blood in the aftermath of the slayings due to the “large amount of blood was lost by the victims at the crime scene”, it reads.
“Because of the nature of the victim’s wounds, it is nearly certain the perpetrator of the crime would have gotten blood on his person/clothing.”
Abby and Libby are believed to have been killed in another location, before their murderer then moved their bodies to where they were found, the surfaced documents show.
Chilling footage of suspect
On the day the girls went missing, Libby had posted photos on Snapchat of her and Abby walking along the trail.
The happy image of the two best friends is believed to be the last photo of them before they died.
In a move that propelled the investigation forward, Libby also captured a grainy video on her phone of a man dressed in blue jeans, a blue jacket and a cap walking along the abandoned railroad bridge.
Investigators released a grainy image from the video and a chilling audio of the man telling the two girls: “Go down the hill.”
Investigators have long suspected that this man is the girls’ killer and have praised the girls for documenting the video as evidence.
Up until now, the man has never been identified.
Police gave the description of the man as a white male aged between 16 and 40 years old, between 5’ 6” and 5’ 10” in height and weighing between 180 and 200 pounds.
Two police sketches were circulated of a man matching the description of the man in the footage – one in 2017 and one in 2019. Mr Allen appears to bear a likeness to the sketches.
Who is Richard Allen?
Before his sudden arrest, Mr Allen’s name was never publicly linked to the case.
At the time of the murders, he would have been 44 years old.
He appears to have no prior criminal record though jail records list him as also going by the alias of Craigh Ross Rentfrow.
The 50-year-old is a local resident of Delphi, the small, close-knit town of around 3,000 people.
His family home is less than a five-minute drive away from where the bodies of Libby and Abby were found, residing in a neighborhood southwest of the Monon High Bridge.
According to online records, Mr Allen has lived in Delphi there since at least 2006, and in Indiana his whole adult life.
Married to his wife Kathy with whom he shares an adult daughter, Mr Allen is a trained pharmacy technician, receiving his most recent pharmaceutical licence in February 2018 – one year on from the murders.
At the time of his arrest he was working at the local CVS store – coming into contact with members of the community as part of his job.
Libby’s grandparents Mike and Becky Patty said that they recalled Mr Allen processing photos for them at the store.
CVS offered its condolences to the victim’s families and said it would cooperate with the investigation in any way it can.
“As members of the Carroll County community, we remain devastated by these murders and our hearts go out to the German and Williams families,” the company said in a statement at the time of his arrest.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn that one of our store employees was arrested as a suspect in these crimes. We stand ready to cooperate with the police investigation in any way we can.”
Local residents also reacted with shock when news broke on Friday of his arrest, saying that he seemed “like a normal guy”.
“When I will go into CVS as a customer myself, he would say ‘do you need any help?’ I would be like ‘no’,” Chandler Underhill, the manager of the local Brick & Mortar Pub, where he said Mr Allen was a regular, told Fox59.
“Just like a normal guy that I’ve seen for the last couple years, not really thinking anything.”
Mr Underhill said that Mr Allen always seemed “normal” when he would come into the pub where he works.
“I would talk; he wouldn’t say much. He seems like a normal guy,” he said.
“One of my servers was telling me that he wouldn’t speak much.”
Libby’s grandfather told reporters on Monday that his granddaughter’s accused killer had been “hiding in plain sight” the whole time.
It has also emerged that the accused killer brazenly posed for a smiling selfie in front of one of the police sketches of the murder suspect.
In a chilling photo, posted by Mr Allen’s wife Kathy on Facebook in December 2021, Mr Allen is seen smiling alongside his wife in a local bar in Delphi. On the wall behind him is the 2019 police sketch. Mr Allen bears some likeness to the drawing.
The selfie was posted on social media the same month investigators issued a fresh appeal urging members of the public to come forward with information about an online catfishing account thought to be tied to the murders.
The evidence against Richard Allen
The affidavit released on 29 November revealed prosecutors had tied Mr Allen to a bullet found at the scene of the murder.
The document states that ballistics confirmed that an unspent .40 caliber round found close to the bodies of the teenage victims had come from a Sig Sauer Model P226, belonging to Mr Allen.
The Sig Sauer Model P226, which the suspect owned since 2001, was found during a search of Mr Allen’s home last month.
Both the 50-year-old local man and his wife Kathy allegedly confirmed that he was the only person with access to the firearm.
The affidavit also revealed that Mr Allen spoke with investigators at least twice, including in 2017 – confirming that he was on police radar at the time of the murders.
In the 2017 interview, Mr Allen had confessed to being on the Monon High Bridge Trail on the afternoon of 13 February – placing him on the scene at the same day and time that the victims went on their fateful walk.
At the time, he denied any involvement in the murders and insisted he had never seen the two girls that day.
In another interview on 13 October 2022, Mr Allen had “no explanation” as to how the spent bullet ended up in between the bodies of the two teenage victims, the affidavit states.
The accused killer said he had “not been on the property where the unspent round was found, that he did not know the property owner, and that he had no explanation as to why a round cycled through his firearm would be at that location,” it says. The property owner – Ron Logan – was also previously tied to the case. He died in 2020.
Other names tied to the case
While Mr Allen’s name has never cropped up in connection to the murders before now, over the years, authorities have honed in on several other men.
A 27-year-old Indiana man fell under the spotlight last year when the online account he used to groom underage girls online was tied to the teenage victims. His home had been searched on suspicion of child porn charges just two weeks after the 2017 murders.
In December 2021, Indiana State Police announced that officials had “uncovered” a fake online profile called anthony_shots.
The profile was used from 2016 to 2017 on platforms including Snapchat and Instagram and used photos of a known male model, portraying him as being extremely wealthy and owning numerous sports cars.
Investigators said the person behind the account was Kegan Anthony Kline, 27-year-old man with addresses in Kokomo and Peru, close to Delphi.
According to an affidavit, Kline posed as the model in order to groom underage girls and get them to send nude photos and their addresses and try to get them to meet him. The male model whose photos were used had no connection to the case.
Kline was arrested on charges of child sexual abuse images and child exploitation tied to the account in 2020.
He allegedly admitted to investigators that he groomed underage girls online.
The affidavit said that Indiana State Police and the FBI carried out a search warrant on 25 February 2017 - less than two weeks after Abby and Libby were murdered - at Kline’s home in Peru after tracking down the user of the anthony_shots profile to the property.
Kline allegedly told investigators he would use social media accounts to talk to underage girls and had exchanged messages with and received about 100 sexual photos and about 20 sexually explicit videos from around 15 underage girls.
However, he denied any knowledge or involvement in the two teenagers’ deaths.
Kline was charged with 30 felonies in 2020 over the case. After five charges were dropped, Kline pleaded guilty to 25 counts and is currently awaiting sentencing.
The documents, filed in 2020 and heavily redacted, do not mention the murders of Libby and Abby and he was not accused of involvement in their deaths.
Libby’s grandmother Becky Patty told The Independent in December that the teenager had never mentioned speaking to anyone online prior to her death and that there had never been any indication that the two girls had arranged to meet anyone online the day they were killed.
“Up until last night we were all under the impression that there was no indication and even now, as far as I’m aware, there is no indication that the girls had any plans to meet anyone out there [on the trail],” she said.
Ms Patty, who raised Libby from the age of three along with her husband Mike Patty, also said she had never heard of Kline before investigators released the information about the social media profile to the public.
However, after so many leads had gone cold she said she was not going to get her “hopes up” that it was the breakthrough the families had been waiting for.
Investigators urged anyone who had communicated with, met, or attempted to meet the individual posing as anthony_shots to come forward with information.
Prior to this, Logan had previously been on police radar, according to the 2017 search warrant application.
Logan owned the land on which Libby and Abby’s bodies were found and his home was just 1,400 feet from the crime scene.
The warrant application cites multiple complaints that he was violent towards women and that he owned multiple weapons, including handguns and knives.
Logan also allegedly lied about where he was at the time that the teenagers disappeared.
He told investigators that he was picked up by a friend around 2pm on 13 February and driven to an aquarium store, returning hours later at around 5pm, the document states.
The friend confirmed the alibi – before admitting two days later that Logan had made up the story and asked him to lie.
Instead, cellphone location data placed Mr Logan in the area around the trail at the time Abby and Libby disappeared.
The document also says that his voice was “not inconsistent” with the man captured in the video by Libby.
Logan was never charged and he died in 2020, before the case was solved.
It is not clear if Mr Allen has any connection to Logan or Kline.
Delphi community hopes for closure
More than five years on from the murders, news of an arrest instantly raised hopes among the Delphi community that there would finally be closure in the case.
Local store owner Laura Greene said that the community has never been the same after the murders.
“It’s had a big effect. I mean in the beginning we didn’t trust people we were always looking behind our back,” she told Fox59 following Mr Allen’s arrest.
“For many we spoke to, the worst revelation today was that the suspect was one of their own.
“For those of us who came in contact with this suspect it’s kind of eerie.”
Finally having a breakthrough in the case was a positive day for the community, she said.
“We are very happy. We are very happy as a community. We can all put this behind us and I’m very happy for the family,” she said.
Resident Audrey Wardrip said that the family never gave up hope.
“Despite their grief, and maybe they found that in their grief, to never give up and never quit. I mean they have built softball fields to bring awareness to their children and it’s just a beautiful thing that they are just so strong,” she said.
However, even if the development does bring some closure to the case, the families of Libby and Abby will never have closure from what happened, she said.
“It doesn’t heal the hurt or, you know, change anything for the families, but maybe this will bring some sort of ease to them.”
Suspect may not have acted alone, prosecutors say
During a bail hearing on 22 November, prosecutors asked a judge to keep affidavits in the case sealed as they believed Mr Allen may not have acted alone.
Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland also argued that unsealing the affidavits would open witnesses to harassment, according to Fox59.
Ms Patty had also sought to have sensitive information relating to the case kept out of the public eye, prosecutors said.
Mr Allen penned a handwritten letter from his prison cell claiming that his wife has been forced into hiding and that he is now “at the mercy of the court”.
In the letter, obtained by The Independent, Mr Allen revealed that his wife Kathy has “been forced” to leave both her job and the couple’s home in Delphi “for her own safety”.
He also begged the court to appoint a public defender, after previously informing the court he intended to hire private counsel.
Now, he is seeking to suppress certain evidence from the case.
