Indiana prosecutors allege a man confessed to killing two teenagers on a hiking trail in 2017 | Indiana

Prosecutors in the trial of Richard Allen, accused of killing two teenage girls in Indiana, further built their case this week with testimony from a prison psychologist and law enforcement officials that added credence to the claim that Allen confessed to the prison killings awarded prison in 2023.

Allen's alleged confessions came after investigators struggled for years to find the person who killed Liberty “Libby” German, 14, and Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, in 2017 on a hiking trail outside the small town of Delphi.

According to the Indianapolis Star, attorneys, police officers and victims' families were barred from commenting publicly on the case due, among other things, to a confidentiality agreement imposed by the judge in the case nearly two years ago.

That meant the public only learned of some of the evidence in the case this week. The revelations have since attracted national attention as the brutal murders remained unsolved for years.

In recent days, several witnesses spoke in court about Allen's admission to murdering Abby and Libby, as well as his state of mind while incarcerated.

Investigators had not made much progress in finding a suspect until 2022, when a volunteer caseworker found a document detailing a police interview with Allen three days after the teenagers disappeared. In that interview, Allen said he was on the trail the day the girls were killed.

“I thought there might be a connection,” Kathy Shank, a retired government employee who wanted to help investigators in the case, testified last week, the Star reported.

Police, who cleared Allen after the 2017 interview, arrested him about a month after Shanks' discovery.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland argued at the opening of the trial that Allen, who was facing two counts of murder and two counts of murder during the kidnapping, forced Abby and Libby down a hill near the trail with a gun and then killed them. The next day, a search party found their bodies with their throats slit in the woods near a stream.

Allen, who worked at a CVS, then “hid in plain sight,” McLeland said.

“For five years he lived in this community,” he told jurors. “He worked in his community.”

Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin responded that Allen was “truly innocent”; that the investigation “was muddled from the start”; that important evidence was destroyed; and that Allen was not on the trail at the same time as Abby and Libby, according to the Star.

“There is reasonable doubt in this case,” Baldwin said.

After Allen became a suspect, he maintained his innocence for months, but then he began confessing in March 2023, according to staff at the Westville Correctional Facility in Indiana.

A correctional officer testified that Allen said he had intended to rape Abby and Libby but was afraid and killed them instead, the Star reported.

According to Dr. Monica Wala, a prison psychologist, said Allen, who had been held in solitary confinement for 13 months, was exhibiting unusual behavior around the time he allegedly began confessing.

In a report, Wala wrote that Allen was clapping and hitting something in his cell. The next day she wrote that he defecated on himself and ate his own feces.

The doctor said she believes Allen behaved in bizarre ways to get a visit from his wife and a transfer to another facility. Wala also pointed out that prisoners should only be in solitary confinement for 30 days and that the longer than one year sentence may have had an impact on his mental health. He was frequently under suicide watch.

A state trooper also testified this week that the voice in a video Libby recorded on her phone during her abduction – in which a man can be heard saying, “Go down the hill” – matched the voice he heard in phone calls Allen had heard that his family was on the phone from prison. Allen repeatedly confessed to his wife during these calls, the Star reported.

“Honey, I did it. I killed Abby and Libby,” Allen said during a call to his wife in April 2023, NBC affiliate WTHR reported. Kathy Allen told him not to say that.

In a call about a month later, Allen told her, “I think I've lost my mind.”

In cross-examination, the defense focused on Wala's interest in true crime stories, which included visiting the crime scene and following Allen's case on podcasts, YouTube and Facebook, ABC7 reported.

On Friday, the defense began calling witnesses, including Dr. Deanna Dwenger, executive director of mental health services for the Indiana Department of Corrections. She testified that she thought it was “unusual” for Wala to visit a crime scene associated with someone she worked with, but that the trip occurred before Wala began treating Allen.

Dwenger also testified that Allen was not diagnosed with a serious mental illness when he was admitted to prison, but that he became mentally ill around the time he began confessing to the murders. He also noted that psychiatric staff had diagnosed Allen with a “severe disability,” the Star reported.

A juror asked how a psychiatrist could tell if someone was faking psychosis.

Dwenger said the doctor listens to body language and the chain of history; If it's organized, the person is likely faking psychosis, ABC7 reported.

If it is disorganized and not in chronological order, the person is more likely to be psychotic or delusional, Dwenger said.