INDIANAPOLIS — The first full day of jury deliberations ended without a verdict on Friday in the trial of Richard Allen, who is accused in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who had vanished during a hike in Delphi, Indiana, in 2017.
Jurors began their deliberations Thursday afternoon, spending two hours deliberating before wrapping up for the day. They then spent seven hours on Friday deliberating without reaching a verdict, and will return Saturday morning.
Allen had pleaded not guilty to two murder and two felony murder charges in connection with the 2017 deaths of Liberty “Libby” German and Abigail “Abby” Williams, who were 14 and 13, respectively.
He could be sentenced to up to 130 years in prison if convicted of all the charges.
The seven women and five men continued their deliberations Friday after hearing closing arguments in the weekslong murder trial. Deliberations ended after about two hours and will resume Friday morning. They will deliberate from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Saturday until they reach a verdict, CNN reports.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors that Allen is the man seen in a grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge just before they vanished on Feb. 13, 2017.
“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and later murdered them.”
He noted that Allen had confessed repeatedly to the killings — in person, on the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he replayed for the jury, Allen could be heard telling his wife, “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.”
Allen’s defense cast doubt on the confessions, putting up witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that Allen was delirious and psychotic after months in solitary confinement. The defense further argued there is no physical evidence tying Allen to the murders and said confessions he made in the past were “involuntary” and stemmed from being in solitary confinement for months.
No witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or the bridge the afternoon the girls went missing, he noted. No fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the murder scene, Rozzi said.
And for more than five years after the teens were killed, Allen still lived in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.
“He had every chance to run, but he did not because he didn’t do it,” he told the jurors.
Before the trial began, Allen’s lawyers had sought to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as the Odinists who follow a pagan Norse religion, but the judge ruled against that, saying the defense “failed to produce admissible evidence” of such a connection.
Timeline of events surrounding Delphi murders
The Delphi murder case goes back to February 13, 2017, when “Abby” and “Libby” went for a hike on the Monon High Bridge in Delphi. The two girls were reported missing after they failed to meet Libby’s father that afternoon. The next day, their bodies were found, both dead from cuts to the throat, partially covered by sticks.
The case attracted public attention in part because of a photo and audio recording of the suspect taken from Libby’s smartphone. The image shows a man walking on the bridge with his hands in his pockets, and the audio includes a man’s muffled voice saying, “Guys, down the hill.” Although police circulated the photo and audio just days after the killings and identified the “Bridge Guy” as their prime suspect, the case ran cold for more than five years until Allen was arrested in 2022.
Allen had seemingly evaded police notice, staying in the small town of Delphi and working at a local CVS pharmacy, until a clerk digitizing tips related to the investigation in September 2022 noticed he had placed himself at the scene of the crime. Just days after the bodies were discovered, Allen told police he had been on that trail during the timeframe the girls were thought to have been killed.
Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett said despite the tip, Allen “got lost in the cracks,” according to CNN affiliate WLFI. Around a month after the tip was rediscovered, Allen was arrested after police matched an unspent cartridge found between the girls’ bodies to a pistol recovered from his home during a police search.
After Allen was arrested on October 26, 2022, he was charged with two counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit a kidnapping five days later. Prosecutors later amended the charges to include two additional counts of murder.
Over the course of the trial, which began October 18, the prosecution highlighted Allen’s dozens of confessions while incarcerated: He confessed to the crime more than 60 times, prosecutors say, including to his wife, his mother, the psychologist who treated him, the warden and other prison employees and inmates. They played audio recordings of some of the confessions for the jury.
Monica Wala, the former lead psychologist at Westville Correctional Facility where Allen was housed, testified he initially told her he was innocent, but began confessing to the crimes in April 2023, around the time he was placed back on suicide watch.
Wala testified that Allen had told her, “I killed Abby and Libby. I’m sorry,” according to WTHR. He said he originally planned to sexually assault the victims but ran away when he saw a van nearby, and that he had cut the girls’ throats and covered their bodies with sticks, she testified.
contributed to this report.
