Local pharmacy technician Richard Allen found guilty in the Delphi murder trial. Photo courtesy of People.
PIPER BAILEY | MULTIMEDIA EDITOR | pcbailey1@butler.edu
Content warning: This article contains references to sexual assault and explicit references to the murders of children.
Richard Allen, the suspect arrested for the Delphi, Indiana murders, will be sentenced on Dec. 20, following the conclusion of his trial on Nov. 11.
Jurors found Allen guilty of killing 13-year-old Abigail “Abby” Williams and 14-year-old Liberty “Libby” German.
Allen’s trial began on Oct. 18 nearly two years after his initial arrest due to a variety of delays involving the first judge’s recusal, his attorneys’ withdrawal and eventual reinstatement and issues involving the credibility of evidence. Jurors found Allen guilty after approximately 20 hours of deliberation following the three weeks of trial proceedings.
The crime
Williams and German were dropped off by German’s older sister outside the Monon High Bridge trail on Feb. 13, 2017, around 1:49 p.m. to enjoy a hike on their day off from school. German’s dad was asked to pick the girls up later that afternoon on his way back from a business meeting.
Upon his arrival, he could not contact German and began to search for the girls, calling relatives and friends to see if they were with them. By 5:15 p.m. local law enforcement was called to report the girls missing. Search parties were assigned specific areas to search based on a grid system that evening. No one would find anything until the following day.
Several people recounted and testified that they had originally believed that the girls were injured somehow and stuck in the woods unable to get help. This theory began to morph into something more worrisome when search party volunteers found a tie-dye shirt — an item German was last seen in — in Deer Creek and called another volunteer to help them search the area.
The volunteer was north of the creek when he headed south and found the girls’ bodies.
Crime scene photos shown at the trial depicted Williams was seen in damp clothes, whereas German was completely unclothed. Both girls had fatal lacerations on their necks.
Between the girls was an unspent bullet two feet from Williams’ body, despite neither having gunshot wounds.
First-year economics major Mallory O’Brien lives about 15 minutes from Delphi and remembers how her family reacted to the case.
“I remember my mom pulling me up to the room,” O’Brien said. “[She said] ‘You’re not going anywhere by yourself. Your dad or I will go with you … use the buddy system, don’t go to places without a male figure with you’ … We were pretty on edge.”
“Bridge Guy”
German’s cell phone was found underneath her body but had run out of battery. When investigators charged the device and were given access by her family, they found a photo of Williams walking across the bridge on German’s Snapchat account and a 35-40 second video saved to her camera roll.
A clip of the video was shared with the public in February 2017, where a grainy image of a man was seen and then heard saying “Guys, down the hill.” The video was recorded at 2:13 p.m. and is the last time the girls were seen alive.
Eyewitnesses on the trail that day testified that they saw “Bridge Guy” leaving Freedom Bridge — less than a mile from the Monon High Bridge — around 1:26 p.m. Another witness said she saw him around 1:49 p.m. entering the Monon High Bridge Trail.
Later, a different witness said she saw a man covered in muddy, bloody clothing that matched “Bridge Guy’s” description on her way past the trail. Surveillance footage showed her car leaving around 3:57 p.m.
Multiple witnesses remembered seeing a vehicle parked facing outward near the back corner of an abandoned Child Protective Services building close to the trails, but no one on the trail that day ever claimed ownership.
Senior lecturer of English, Angela Hofstetter, often frequents trails near her own small town and believes the time of the crime is impactful on solo, female hikers everywhere.
“We all have ideas about what a danger time is, and it’s not in the afternoon,” Hofstetter said. “It doesn’t mean that it would have been easier if it was midnight, but to think on a sunny afternoon that something like this could happen to these two girls, it just makes it even more heartbreaking.”
Uncovering a suspect
The case went cold without any substantial leads until September 2022 when a volunteer digitizing paperwork on the case found a self-report from local CVS pharmacy technician, Richard Allen.
Allen called the tip line in February 2017 to tell officers he had been on the trail that day. When he was interviewed, he claimed that he had been on the trail from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. Notes on his interview were wrongly placed in a box marked “CLEARED,” leading police to never investigate him.
In October 2022, when he was interviewed again, he recalled that he wore a blue jacket, skullcap, boots or tennis shoes and blue jeans. This description matched the man in the video. Allen also recalled passing the three witnesses on Freedom Bridge, but one of the witnesses testified that they only saw the one man on the bridge that day.
Allen told investigators that the reason they had not seen one of the two vehicles he owned was because he parked next to an old farm bureau building. The only structure nearby that could be confused with a farm bureau building was the abandoned Child Protective Services facility.
With this information, investigators obtained a warrant to search his home. They seized 30 knives, clothes matching “Bridge Guy’s” description, firearms and ammunition.
Five days later, tests conducted on the ammunition and firearms resulted in a match with a .40 caliber handgun that was purchased and registered in Allen’s name in 2001.
Allen was arrested on Oct. 28, 2022. He was appointed defense attorneys — Andrew Baldwin and Brad Rozzi — by the state due to his financial situation, and Judge Benjamin Diener was selected for the case.
The delays
Court records involving the case — such as the now-released affidavit confirming the information needed for the first search warrant — were sealed in October 2022.
In November 2022, Diener recused himself and Superior Court Judge Fran Gull was appointed.
Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland motioned for a gag order on the case in December to keep the already rampant social media presence the case had from growing any further and protect witnesses from harassment. After two motions and a hearing, Judge Gull agreed and implemented the order. This forbade anyone involved in the case — from both professional and personal perspectives — from speaking publicly about it.
Gabi Mathus, a senior criminology and psychology double major, met German’s older sister in 2022 — before the gag order was in effect — when she guest spoke for Butler’s Student Sociology and Criminology Association.
“We wanted to be able to get a perspective from someone who is a bit more nuanced in their understanding of the case,” Mathus said. “Who’s going to understand it more than someone whose sister was one of the victims?”
Mathus disagrees with the gag order on the families of the victims but believes the records being sealed and the gag order on law enforcement was for the best.
“I feel like [the family] should be able to talk about like what happened to their loved ones openly, whether they disagree with the result of the trial or not,” Mathus said. “Regarding the investigators … I think it was probably in the best interest because true crime is a very sensational area … These are real people’s lives, and I think it’s really easy to get desensitized from that.”
Allen’s attorneys withdrew from the case on Oct. 19, 2023, due to an evidence leak from Baldwin’s office. Allen wrote to the court asking for his representation to be kept despite the incident, but Judge Gull denied this request, and the state started searching for new legal counsel.
However, Baldwin and Rozzi would be reinstated by January 2024 after appealing to the Indiana Supreme Court. The appeal also called for the removal of Gull and the trial to be held within 70 days, but both motions were denied.
In September 2024, the defense held a hearing that sought to use their claim that Allen was innocent and Odinism — a pagan cult with white supremacist ideologies — ritual sacrifices were the cause behind the girls’ deaths. The defense used the shapes of branches found on top of and near the girls’ bodies and the laceration marks on their necks as evidence.
Judge Gull denied this 132-page request due to a lack of substantial evidence, banned the use of anything relating or alluding to Odinism in the trial and denied their following request for more time to prepare a separate defense.
The trial
Allen’s trial began on Oct. 18 and was led heavily by the prosecution. The defense did not have much to fight with after their Odinism approach was denied, and therefore stuck to refuting and exposing flaws in the prosecution’s witnesses.
Dr. Monica Wala, the lead psychologist at the Westville Correctional Facility — where Allen was held as he awaited his trial — testified for the prosecution that Allen had confessed multiple times to killing the girls and his original intentions to sexually assault them.
In their cross-examination, Allen’s defense brought Wala’s passion for true crime and fixation on the Delphi case to the jury’s attention. Wala’s notes and journals’ credibility were questioned after she admitted to having used a Department of Corrections computer with access to files she did not have the credentials for to gain more information on the case.
The defense also pointed out that Wala was no longer an employee of the Department of Corrections and drove over an hour to work to discover more information related to the case not released to the public.
The credibility of the forensic testing on the bullet found at the crime scene was also called into question. The prosecution called a forensic firearms examiner to the stand to explain how a bullet could have left the gun without being fired.
Allen’s defense countered this testimony by questioning the examiner’s qualifications and asking if there could have been errors in the testing that matched the bullet to Allen’s firearm. The examiner admitted to omitting information about her credentials and that while there were similarities, she was unsure if the bullet was an exact match.
Another firearms expert was later called to the stand by the defense to point out flaws in the testing. Indiana State Police forensic labs had used shell casings and fired ammunition to test against the found bullet. The expert testified that the markings in the two should be and were vastly different from each other because they were not handled the same way.
The trial lasted for about three weeks before the jury began to deliberate on Allen’s innocence. Jurors found him guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder.
Allen is set to be sentenced by Judge Gull on Dec. 20, 2024.
