Richard Allen found guilty of murder of 2 teenage girls in Delphi murder case

DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A jury in the small town of Delphi, Indiana, convicted a man of murder Monday. Murder of two young girls in 2017 who disappeared during an afternoon walk.

Deliberations dragged on 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 found guilty of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder during or attempted kidnapping. Allen, 52, now faces up to 130 years in prison.

12 jurors and their alternates were detained The trial started on October 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwestern Indiana city where Allen also lives and works as a pharmacy technician.

Seven women and five men began negotiations on Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weeks-long murder trial.

A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull traveled with the jurors from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County.

Litigation, repeated delays, evidence leaks and Allen’s public defenders withdraw and their Reinstatement by Indiana Supreme Court. At the same time subject of speech ban.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors in his closing argument that Allen was the man following the teens in grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad pier called the Monon High Bridge. .

“Richard Allen is the Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and then killed them.”

McLeland also said that the voice addressing the teenagers in German’s cell phone video was Allen’s voice: “ down hill After crossing the bridge just before she disappeared on February 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, their throats slit, in a wooded area about a quarter of a mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.

During the trial, an investigator testified that Allen told him and another officer that he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie the day the teens disappeared; These clothes were similar to the person seen in German’s cell phone video.

In his closing statement, McLeland summarized evidence that an unspent bullet was found among the teenagers’ bodies “transformed” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol. A firearms expert with the Indiana State Police told the jury that his analysis linked the bullet to Allen’s gun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police’s bullet analysis, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it in his closing argument, calling it a “magic bullet” and saying investigators were comparing “apples to oranges” between the unspent bullet and the fired bullet. From Allen’s gun.

Allen was arrested in October 2022. A retired state government employee who volunteered to help police with the investigation became a suspect in September 2022 after finding documents showing Allen contacted authorities two days after German and Williams’ bodies were found. Those paperwork show Allen told a police officer he was on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls disappeared, according to testimony.

In his closing statement, McLeland stated that Allen repeatedly confessed to the murders in person, over the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he played back for the jury, Allen can be heard telling his wife, “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.

Allen’s defense argued that Allen’s confessions were unreliable because he was facing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being held in solitary confinement, monitored 24 hours a day, and mocked by people incarcerated with him. The defense called witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that spending months in solitary confinement could cause a person to become delusional and psychotic.

Prosecutors said Allen’s incriminating statements contained information only the killer could have known. McLeland pointed to notes written by Allen’s psychologist at Westville Correctional Facility, in which he said Allen planned to rape the teenagers during one of his sessions but did not do so after seeing a van driving nearby.

A state trooper testified that Allen’s description of the van corroborated the testimony of a man whose driveway passed under the Monon High Bridge and who said he was driving home from work in the van around that time.

That van was a detail “only the killer would know,” McLeland told jurors in his closing statement.

Allen’s prison psychologist, Dr. Monica Wala testified that she began confessing to killing the girls during sessions with him in early 2023. In some of his confessions, he said, he gave details of the crime, including saying he slit the girls’ throats and placed tree branches over their bodies.

During cross-examination, Wala acknowledged that he followed Allen’s case with interest in his personal time, even while treating him, and was a fan of the true crime genre.

In his closing statement, Rozzi said Allen was innocent. He said no witnesses had clearly identified Allen as the man seen on the walkway or bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared. He said no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the murder scene.

For more than five years after the teens were killed, Allen continued to live in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

“He had every chance to escape, but he couldn’t because he didn’t,” Rozzi told jurors.

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