A murder trial for the murders of two teenage girls comes to an end in Delphi, Indiana

INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — The fate of an Indiana man charged with the 2017 murders of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon hike near their small hometown was in the hands of a jury Thursday.

Richard Allen, 52, faces two counts of murder for the killings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, and two additional counts of murder for kidnapping or attempted kidnapping. He could be sentenced to up to 130 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

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

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors that Allen was the man seen in a grainy cell phone video taken by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge, shortly before they disappeared on February 13, 2017.

“Richard Allen is a bridge guy,” McLeland told the jury. “He kidnapped her and later murdered her.”

He noted that Allen had repeatedly confessed to the murders – in person, on the telephone and in writing. In one of the recordings he played for the jury, Allen was heard telling his wife: “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.”

Allen's defense cast doubt on the confessions and fielded witnesses, including a psychiatrist, who testified that Allen was delirious and psychotic after months in solitary confinement.

Attorney Bradley Rozzi concluded by saying Allen was innocent.

No witness specifically identified Allen as the man seen on the trail or bridge the afternoon the girls went missing, he noted. No fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the crime scene, Rozzi said.

And more than five years after the teens' murders, Allen was still living in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

“He had every chance to run, but he didn't because he didn't,” he told jurors.

The case has attracted widespread attention from true crime buffs because of repeated delays, some related to the disclosure of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen's public defenders and her reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. It was also the subject of a gag order.

The 12 jurors and their alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls' hometown of Delphi, a small town in northwest Indiana where Allen also lived and worked as a pharmacy technician. A special judge supervised the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull and the jury came from Allen County in northeast Indiana.

In his closing argument, McLeland summarized the evidence that an unspent bullet found between the teens' bodies “passed through Allen's .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun.” A firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police analysis, and Rozzi dismissed it as a “silver bullet” and said investigators compared the unspent cartridge to a cartridge fired from Allen's gun.

The prosecutor also said that a state trooper who listened to more than 700 phone calls made by Allen identified Allen's voice on German's cellphone video telling the teens, “Down the hill,” after they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge had crossed. McLeland showed jurors a digitally enhanced version of the cellphone video and said Allen was the man recorded walking behind Williams.

McLeland said Allen ran the teens off the trail armed with a gun and planned to rape them before a passing van caused him to change his plans. Gruesome crime scene photos showed the girls being found the next day with their throats slit about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.

The defense questioned the state's timeline with witnesses, including a digital forensics expert who said headphones or an auxiliary cable were plugged into Libby's cellphone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared, casting doubt on investigators' assumptions It emerged that the girls were killed and left in the woods at around 2:32 p.m. that day.

Attorney Andrew Baldwin argued during the trial that another person or people must have kidnapped the teenagers and returned them to the location where they were found early the next day.

Prosecutors again referred jurors to Allen's own words in confessions he made to his mother and wife, as well as to a prison psychologist, correctional officer and the former director of Westville Correctional Facility, who said Allen wrote to him claiming the girls having killed with a box cutter, which he later threw away.

Prosecutors said Allen's incriminating statements contained information that only the killer could have known.

Defense attorneys argued that Allen's confessions were unreliable because he was in a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked in isolation, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by people who were incarcerated with him . A psychiatrist supported the argument, testifying that months in solitary confinement could cause a person to become insane and psychotic.

Before the trial began, Allen's lawyers had tried to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as the Odinists, affiliated with a pagan Nordic religion. However, the judge ruled against it, saying the defense had “failed”. to provide “admissible evidence” of such a connection.

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