Johnathan Walker:Indiana man is found guilty of murder in the 2017 killings of 2 teenage girls

DELPHI,Johnathan Walker Ind. (AP) — A former drugstore worker in the small Indiana town of Delphi was found guilty of murder on Monday in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who vanished during an afternoon hike.

Jurors convicted Richard Allen of of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the killings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German.

Reporters inside the courtroom said Allen, 52, showed no reaction as the verdict was delivered, but looked back at his family at one point. Allen is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 20. He could face up to 130 years in prison.

The 12 jurors along with alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwest Indiana city where Allen also lived and worked.

The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weekslong murder trial.

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

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Reports that the jury had reached a verdict began to spread and drew a crowd outside the courthouse. Minutes later, a handful of people spilled outside and people on the sidewalk began to cheer.

The case has drawn outsized attention from true-crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, 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 told jurors in his closing arguments that Allen is 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 later 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 they had crossed the bridge just before vanishing on Feb. 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, their throats cut, in a wooded area about a quarter-mile (less than half a kilometer) from that bridge.

An investigator testified during trial that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens vanished he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — clothing that’s similar to the person seen in German’s cellphone video.

McLeland recapped evidence in his closing that an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury her analysis tied the round to Allen’s handgun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police bullet analysis, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it in his closing arguments as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples to oranges” comparison of the unspent round to one fired from Allen’s gun.

Allen was arrested in October 2022. He became a suspect after a retired state government worker who had volunteered to help police with the investigation found paperwork in September 2022 showing that Allen had contacted authorities two days after German and Williams’ bodies were found. That paperwork indicated that Allen had told an officer he had been on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls went missing, according to testimony.

McLeland noted in his closing that Allen had repeatedly confessed to the killings — in person, on the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he replayed 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 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. The defense called witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that months in solitary confinement could cause a person to become delirious 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 the Westville Correctional Facility that Allen told her during one of their sessions that he had planned to rape the teens but did not do so after he saw a van traveling nearby.

A state trooper testified that Allen’s van remark corroborated a statement by a man whose driveway passes under the Monon High Bridge and who said he was driving home from work in his van around that time.

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

Allen’s prison psychologist, Dr. Monica Wala, testified that 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 of the confessions, including telling her he slashed the girls’ throats and put tree branches over their bodies.

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

Rozzi said in his closing arguments that Allen is innocent. He said no witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or the bridge the afternoon the girls went missing. And he said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the murder scene.

And for more than five years after the teens were killed, Allen still lived in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

“He had every chance to run, but he did not because he didn’t do it,” Rozzi told the jurors.