Indiana jury finds man guilty of high-profile murders of two teenage girls in 2017 | US crime

A jury in the small town of Delphi, Indiana, convicted a man Monday of the 2017 murders of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon hike.

Deliberations continued for a fourth day before jurors found Richard Allen guilty of the murders of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German. The former drugstore employee was convicted of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder related to the commission or attempt to commit kidnapping. The 52-year-old Allen now faces up to 130 years in prison.

The 12 jurors and their alternates were sequestered during 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.

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

A special judge supervised the case. Chief Judge Fran Gull and the jury came from Allen County in northeast Indiana.

The case has attracted widespread attention from true crime enthusiasts due to repeated delays, leaks of evidence, removal of Allen's public defenders, and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. It was also the subject of a gag order.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors in his closing argument that Allen was the man who followed the teens in a grainy cell phone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they were one abandoned railroad trestle called Monon High bridge.

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

McLeland also said it was Allen's voice that was captured on German's cellphone video as he told the teens they were “down the hill” after crossing the bridge just before they disappeared on Feb. 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, with their throats slit, in a wooded area about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) from this bridge.

An investigator testified during the trial that Allen told him and another officer that on the day of the teen's disappearance he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a hat – similar clothing to the person seen in Germans Cell phone video could be seen.

McLeland summarized the evidence in his closing that an unspent bullet found between the teens' bodies “passed through Allen's .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun.” An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury that her analysis linked the cartridge to Allen's handgun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police's analysis of the bullets, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed them as a “silver bullet” in his closing argument, saying investigators compared the unspent cartridge to a cartridge fired from Allen's gun.

Allen was arrested in October 2022. He became a suspect after a retired state government employee who had volunteered to help police with the investigation found documents in September 2022 showing that Allen had died two days after the bodies of German and Williams were found had contacted the authorities. Those documents showed that Allen told an officer that he had been on the trail the afternoon the girls went missing, according to a witness statement.

McLeland concluded by pointing out that Allen had repeatedly confessed to the murders – in person, on the phone 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 argued that Allen's confessions were unreliable because he was in a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being held in isolation, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by those imprisoned with him. The defense called witnesses, including a psychiatrist, who testified that months in solitary confinement could cause a person to become insane and psychotic.