DELPHI, Ind. — A jury in the small town of Delphi, Indiana, convicted a man Monday in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon hike .
Deliberations stretched into a fourth day before jurors found Richard Allen guilty of the murders of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German. The former pharmacy employee was convicted of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping. Allen, 52, now faces up to 130 years in prison.
The 12 jurors and their alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small town in northwest Indiana where Allen also lived and worked as a judge. pharmacy technician.
The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weeks-long murder trial.
A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, as well as the jurors, were from Allen County in northeastern Indiana.
The case attracted considerable attention from true crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, leaking of evidence, removal of Allen’s public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. He was also the subject of a gag order.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors in closing arguments that Allen was the man seen following the teens in a grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge. .
“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and then murdered them.”
McLeland also said it was Allen’s voice that was captured on German’s cellphone video telling the teens, “Down the hill” after crossing the bridge just before he disappeared on Feb. 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, their throats slit. , in a wooded area about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) from this bridge.
An investigator testified during the trial that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens disappeared, he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — similar items of clothing to the person seen in German’s cellphone video.
McLeland summarized the evidence in his conclusion that an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been passed through” by Allen’s Sig Sauer .40-caliber handgun. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury his analysis linked the bullet to Allen’s handgun.
But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police’s analysis of the bullets, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it in his closing arguments as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators made an “apples to oranges” comparison between the unspent bullet and the fired one. of Allen’s gun.
Allen was arrested in October 2022. He became a suspect after a retired state government official who had volunteered to help police with the investigation found documents in September 2022 showing that Allen contacted authorities two days after the bodies of German and Williams were discovered. Those documents said Allen told an officer he was on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls disappeared, according to testimony.
McLeland pointed out in his conclusion that Allen repeatedly confessed to the murders – in person, on the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he played back for the jury, Allen could be heard telling his wife: “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.
Allen’s defense argued that Allen’s confession was unreliable because he was facing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked in solitary confinement, monitored 24 hours a day and taunted by people incarcerated with him. The defense called witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that months of solitary confinement could cause a person to become delirious and psychotic.
Prosecutors said Allen’s incriminating statements contained information only the killer could know. McLeland pointed to notes written by Allen’s psychologist at the Westville Correctional Center that Allen told him during one of their sessions that he had planned to rape the teenage girls, but did not do so. after seeing a van driving nearby.
A state trooper testified that Allen’s remark about the van corroborated the statement of a man whose driveway goes under the Monon High Bridge who said he was going home from work in his van at that time.
That van, McLeland told jurors during his closing, was a detail that “only the killer could know.”
Allen’s prison psychologist, Dr. Monica Wala, said he began confessing to killing the girls in early 2023 during his sessions with her. She said he provided details of the crime in some confessions, including telling her that he slit the girls’ throats and put tree branches on their bodies.
Under cross-examination, Wala acknowledged that she had followed Allen’s case with interest in her free time, even while treating him, and that she was a fan of the true crime genre.
Rozzi said in his closing arguments that Allen was innocent. He said no witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared. And he said no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the murder scene.
And for more than five years after the teens’ murder, Allen still lived in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.
“He had every chance to run, but he didn’t because he didn’t,” Rozzi told jurors.
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