Prosecutor: Video, unused bullet proves man’s guilt in Delphi murders

DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A man charged with murdering two teenage girls in a small Indiana community forced them off a hiking trail before slitting their throats, a prosecutor said Friday, sharing told the jury that the evidence included images and audio recorded on a victim’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,'” 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 the town of 3,000, with people lining up in the morning chill to get a seat in the courtroom.

Allen, a local pharmacy technician, was arrested in 2022, five years after the deaths of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German, a case that had angered police and sparked much speculation among true crime lovers. 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 a trial that could last a month, are not allowed to watch the news and have limited use of their phones to call relatives under the supervision of bailiffs.

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

He said an unused bullet discovered at the scene came from a gun that belonged to Allen and that his grainy image and voice were recorded by Libby on her phone. A video showed a man walking behind her on the abandoned railway bridge.

He also told jurors that they would listen to incriminating statements made by Allen 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.

When it was defense attorney Andrew Baldwin’s turn, he told the jury 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.

And he said police believed one person could not have committed the murders.

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

The teenagers were found dead on February 14, 2017. They went missing a day earlier while hiking on the trail. Within days, police released the files found on Libby’s cellphone. 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 Abby and Libby went missing and saw three “women” at a bridge called the Freedom Bridge but did not speak to them, an affidavit states.

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.

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.