A video and an unused bullet prove a man’s guilt in the killing of girls in Indiana, prosecutors say

DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A man charged with murdering two teenage girls in a small Indiana community forced them off a hiking trail before cutting their throats, a prosecutor said Friday, sharing told the jury that the evidence included an unused bullet and a video captured on the oldest girl’s phone.

“The last thing the girls saw was Richard Allen’s face,” said Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland.

And they heard his “terrifying words: ‘Girls, down the hill,'” while Allen brandished a gun, McLeland said. “The girls obeyed out of fear.”

52-year-old Richard Allen is charged with two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder during the commission or attempt of kidnapping. The trial is a spectacle in Delphi, a town of 3,000, with people lining up in the morning chill to secure a seat in the courtroom.

Allen, a pharmacy technician, was arrested in October 2022, more than five years after the deaths of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German, a case that had angered police and spurred much speculation among true-crime enthusiasts. The outsized media attention in the small community prompted a specially appointed judge to select a jury in Fort Wayne, nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.

They are being held for what could be a month-long trial, banned from watching the news and restricted in using their phones to call relatives while under surveillance.

In his opening statement, McLeland described the crime scene: a rugged wooded area near the Monon High Bridge Trail, just outside Delphi, the Carroll County seat.

He said an unused bullet discovered between the girls’ bodies at the “gruesome” scene came from a gun belonging to Allen and that his grainy image and voice were recorded by German on her phone.

A short video released in 2019, also from German’s phone, showed a suspect walking across the Monon High Bridge. McLeland said that man was Allen.

Investigators searched Allen’s home in 2022 and seized a .40-caliber handgun. In court documents released several weeks after his arrest, prosecutors announced that tests showed that an unspent bullet found between Williams and German “flew” through Allen’s pistol.

McLeland told jurors that in addition to the exhibits, they would also hear incriminating statements Allen made to correctional officers, inmates, law enforcement and even his wife.

“They had details that only the murderer would know,” the prosecutor said. “Richard Allen is the man on the bridge.”

Allen shook his head at times as McLeland spoke, and his wife, sitting in the gallery, did the same as the prosecutor said her husband confessed to her.

Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin told jurors there was a lot of reasonable doubt.

He said Allen’s statements were made under the stress of being under constant surveillance in a tiny cell after his arrest. Baldwin noted that Allen mentioned that he shot the girls in the back, even though they didn’t die as a result.

He said some police officers believed that one person could not have committed the murders alone.

“Richard Allen is innocent,” Baldwin told the jury. “He’s really innocent.”

The teenagers, known as Abby and Libby, were found dead on February 14, 2017. They went missing a day earlier while hiking the trail on a mild school-free winter day. Within a few days, the police published the files found on the German’s cell phone. Investigators also released a sketch of a suspect in July 2017 and another in April 2019 along with the bridge video.

After more years passed without a suspect being identified, investigators said they went back and reviewed previous leads.

Investigators discovered that Allen had been interviewed in 2017. He told an officer he was on the trail the day Williams and German went missing and saw three “women” at a bridge called the Freedom Bridge but did not speak to them, an affidavit states.

Allen also told the officer that when he walked from that bridge to the Monon High Bridge, he didn’t see anyone but was distracted and “watching a stock ticker on his cell phone as he walked.”

Police interviewed Allen again on October 13, 2022, when he said he saw three “juvenile girls” during his walk in 2017. Investigators searched his house within a few days, and a search led to the discovery of the .40 caliber pistol.

At previous hearings, Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a pagan Nordic religion and a white nationalist group called the Odinists.

Several of the girls’ relatives testified Friday afternoon, including German’s grandmother Becky Patty, who told jurors the two friends were so close that Williams once accompanied her family on a trip to Florida. She choked as she remembered her last conversation with her granddaughter the morning the girls left for their hiking trip to the Monon High Bridge, where German’s older sister Kelsi had dropped them off.

Patty said she told her granddaughter to dress warmly for the trip, despite the mild weather.

“The last thing she said to me was, ‘Grandma, we’ll be fine,'” Patty said.

Judge Fran Gull bans news media from reporting directly from the courtroom using electronic devices. The judge also set strict rules for photo or video coverage outside the courthouse. Police seized cameras from several journalists outside the building on Friday morning before the trial began, including two cameras from a photographer from The Associated Press.

Rick Callahan, The Associated Press