Murder trial to begin in small Indiana town in 2017 killings of two teenage girls
DELPHI, Ind. — A murder case in the 2017 murders of two teenage girls will begin Friday in the small Indiana town where the teens and the man accused of killing them all lived.
Richard Allen, 52, is accused of killing 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German. Their deaths had remained unsolved for more than five years when Allen, then a pharmacy worker, was arrested in the case that drew outsized attention from true crime enthusiasts.
Allen had been there the entire time in Delphi, where he lived and worked in a community of about 3,000 people in northwestern Indiana. He faces two counts of murder and two counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping. If convicted, Allen faces up to 130 years in prison.
Almost two years later his arrest in October 2022opening statements are expected to begin before a special judge at the Carroll County Courthouse, just blocks from the pharmacy where Allen had worked. A panel of judges came from nearly 100 miles away. They will be locked up during a trial expected to last a month, banned from watching the news and restricted from using their mobile phones to call relatives, under the supervision of bailiffs.
Prosecutors said this during jury selection this week in Fort Wayne that they plan to call about 50 witnesses. Allen’s attorneys expect to call about 120 people. The 12 jurors and four alternates will receive preliminary instructions Friday morning before hearing opening statements.
The case suffered repeated delays, some surrounding a leak of evidence withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and their later ones recovery by the Indiana Supreme Court. It is also the subject of a gag order.
The teens, known as Abby and Libby, were found dead on Feb. 14, 2017, in a rugged, wooded area about a quarter-mile from the Monon High Bridge Trail. The girls went missing the day before while hiking that trail just outside their hometown. Within days the police were released files found on Libby’s cell phone that they thought captured the killer’s image and voice: two grainy photos and audio of a man saying so “down the hill.”
Investigators also released a sketch of a suspect in July 2017 and another in April 2019. And they released a short video showing a suspect walking across an abandoned railroad bridge known as the Monon High Bridge. After more years passed without a suspect being identified, investigators said they went back and looked at “previous tips.”
Investigators discovered that Allen had been interviewed in 2017. He told an officer that he had been walking on the trail the day Abby and Libby went missing and had seen three “females” near a bridge called the Freedom Bridge, but he did not speak to them, according to an affidavit.
Allen told the officer that as he walked from that bridge to the Monon High Bridge, he saw no one but was distracted “while looking at a stock quote on his phone.”
Police interviewed Allen again on October 13, 2022, when he said he saw three “juvenile girls” during his walk in 2017. Investigators searched Allen’s home and seized a .40-caliber handgun. Prosecutors said tests showed that an unspent bullet found between Abby and Libby’s bodies had “cycled through Allen’s gun.”
According to the affidavit, Allen said he had never been to the scene and “had no explanation as to why a bullet would have cycled through his firearm at that location.”
Allen County Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, who is now overseeing the trial against Carroll County, has ruled that prosecutors can present evidence of dozens of incriminating statements they say Allen made during conversations with correctional officers, inmates, law enforcement officers and family members. That evidence includes a recording of a phone conversation between Allen and his wife, in which prosecutors say: he confesses to the murders.
Allen’s attorneys have tried to argue that the girls were murdered in a ritual sacrifice by members of a pagan Norse religion and white nationalist group known as the Odinists.
Prosecutors have not disclosed how the teens were killed. But a filing by Allen’s lawyers in support of their ritual sacrifice theory shows that their throats had been slit.