An Indiana man has been found guilty of murder in the 2017 slayings of two teenage girls

DELPHI, Ind. (AP) – A former drugstore worker in the small Indiana community of Delphi was found guilty Monday of murder in the murder of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon walk.

Jurors convicted Richard Allen of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while he committed or attempted to commit kidnapping in the 2017 murders of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14.

Allen was not arrested for another five years, while the case attracted excessive attention from true crime enthusiasts. His trial followed repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and them recovery by the Indiana Supreme Court.

Reporters in the courtroom said Allen, 52, showed no reaction as the sentence was handed down, but at one point he looked back at his family. Allen is expected to be sentenced on December 20. He could face a maximum of 130 years in prison.

Outside the courthouse, people on the sidewalk began cheering as news of the verdict spread.

Indiana State Police spokesman Capt. Ron Galaviz told the Associated Press the judge’s gag order remains in place and he believes it will remain so until Allen is convicted. Allen’s attorneys left the courthouse Monday without making statements.

A special judge oversaw the case: Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, who along with the jurors came from Allen County in northeastern Indiana. The seven women and five men were locked up everywhere the trial, which began on October 18 in the Carroll County seat of Delphi, the girls’ hometown of about 3,000 in northwestern Indiana, where Allen also lived and worked.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland noted in his closing arguments 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.”

McLeland also said Allen is the man following the teens in a grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls as they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge.

“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told the judges. “He kidnapped them and later killed them.”

McLeland said it was Allen’s voice heard on the video and told the teens: Down the hill ″after crossing the bridge on February 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, with their throats slit, in a nearby wooded area.

An investigator testified that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens disappeared, he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — clothing similar to what the man on the bridge was wearing.

McLeland said an unspent bullet was found among the teens’ bodies “had cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury that her analysis linked the round to Allen’s gun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the analysis, and defense attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples and oranges” comparison of the unspent round to that of Allen’s gun .

Allen was arrested in October 2022. He had become a suspect after a retired government official who had volunteered to help police in the case found paperwork in September 2022 showing that Allen had contacted authorities two days after the girls’ bodies were found. That paperwork shows Allen told an officer he had been on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls went missing, according to testimony.

Allen’s defense argued that his confessions are unreliable because he faced a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being kept in isolation, under 24-hour surveillance and taunted by people who were locked up with him. A psychiatrist called by the defense testified that months in solitary confinement can make a person delirious and psychotic.

But Dr. Monica Wala, Allen’s psychologist at the Westville Correctional Facility, said Allen shared details of the crime in some confessions, including telling her he had slit the girls’ throats and placed tree branches over their bodies. She wrote in a report that Allen told her he gave up his plans to rape the teens when a van passed nearby. A man whose driveway runs under the Monon High Bridge testified that he was driving home from work in his van around that time.

That van, McLeland told jurors in his closing remarks, was a detail “only the killer would know.”

During cross-examination, Wala acknowledged that she had followed Allen’s case with interest during her personal time, even while treating him, and that she was a fan of the true-crime genre.

Rozzi said in his closing argument that Allen is innocent. He said no witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the trail or bridge the afternoon the girls went missing. And he said no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the murder scene.

“He had every opportunity to run, but he didn’t because he didn’t do it,” Rozzi told jurors.

Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue before the trial that the girls had been murdered 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 provide admissible evidence” of such a connection.