DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A man charged with killing two teenage girls in a small Indiana community forced them off a hiking trail before cutting their throats, a prosecutor said Friday, telling jurors that the evidence includes an unused bullet and video recorded on the eldest girl’s phone.
“The last thing the girls saw was Richard Allen’s face,” Carroll County prosecutor Nicholas McLeland said.
And they heard his “chilling words: ‘Girls, down the hill,’” while Allen was wielding a gun, McLeland said. “Out of fear the girls complied.”
Richard Allen, 52, is charged with two counts of murder as well as two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit 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 vexed police and inspired much speculation by true-crime enthusiasts. The outsized media attention in the small community prompted a specially appointed judge to pick jurors in Fort Wayne, nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) away.
They’ll be sequestered for what could be a monthlong trial, banned from watching the news and allowed only limited use of their phones to call relatives while monitored.
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 at the “gruesome” scene between the girls’ bodies came from a gun that belonged to Allen, and that his grainy image and voice were captured by German on her phone.
A short video released in 2019 that also came from German’s phone showed a suspect walking on Monon High Bridge. McLeland said that man was Allen.
Investigators searched Allen’s home in 2022 and seized a .40-caliber pistol. Prosecutors disclosed in court documents released several weeks after his arrest that testing determined that an unspent bullet found between Williams and German “had been cycled through” Allen’s pistol.
McLeland told jurors that in addition to the bullet evidence, they would also hear incriminating statements Allen made to correctional officers, inmates, law enforcement, and even his wife.
“They had details that only the killer would know,” the prosecutor said. “Richard Allen is the man on the bridge.”
Allen shook his head at times while McLeland spoke, and his wife, seated in the gallery, did the same when the prosecutor said her husband had confessed to her.
Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin told the jury there’s plenty of reasonable doubt.
He said Allen’s statements were made under the stress of being in a tiny cell while under constant watch following his arrest. Baldwin noted that Allen mentioned shooting the girls in the back, though that wasn’t how they died.
He said some police officers had believed that one person could not have committed the homicides alone.
“Richard Allen is innocent,” Baldwin told the jury. “He is truly innocent.”
The teens, known as Abby and Libby, were found dead Feb. 14, 2017. They went missing a day earlier while hiking the trail on a mild winter’s day off school. Within days, police released files found on German’s cellphone. Investigators also released one sketch of a suspect in July 2017 and another in April 2019, along with the bridge video.
After more years passed without a suspect identified, investigators said they went back and reviewed prior tips.
Investigators found that Allen had been interviewed in 2017. He told an officer he had been walking on the trail the day Williams and German went missing and had seen three “females” at a bridge called the Freedom Bridge but did not speak to them, according to an affidavit.
Allen also told the officer that as he walked from that bridge to the Monon High Bridge he did not see anyone but was distracted, “watching a stock ticker on his phone as he walked.”
Police interviewed Allen again Oct. 13, 2022, when he said he had seen three “juvenile girls” during his walk in 2017. Investigators searched his home within days, a search the led to the discovery of the .40-caliber pistol.
At earlier hearings, Allen’s attorneys had sought to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a pagan Norse religion and white nationalist group known as the Odinists.
Several relatives of the girls testified Friday afternoon, including German’s grandmother, Becky Patty, who told jurors the two friends were so close that Williams once joined their family on a trip to Florida. She choked up as she recalled her last conversation with her granddaughter on the morning the girls left for their hiking trip to the Monon High Bridge, dropped off there by German’s older sister, Kelsi.
Patty said she told her granddaughter to dress warmly for their excursion despite the mild weather.
“The last thing she said to me was, ‘Grandma, we’ll be OK,’” Patty said.
News media are barred by Judge Fran Gull from reporting directly from the courtroom with electronic devices. The judge also set strict rules for photo or video coverage outside the courthouse. Police confiscated cameras from several journalists outside the building on Friday morning before court proceedings began, including 2 cameras from a photographer with The Associated Press.