Jury begins deliberating the fate of an Indiana man accused of killing two teenage girls in 2017

INDIANAPOLIS — The fate of an Indiana man charged with murder in 2017 murder of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon walk near their small hometown were in the hands of a jury Thursday.

Richard Allen, 52, faces two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the killings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14. He faces up to 130 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weeks-long murder trial. Deliberations ended after about two hours and will resume Friday morning.

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 moments before they disappeared on Feb. 13, 2017.

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

He noted 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 cast doubt on the confessions and produced witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that Allen was delirious and psychotic after months in solitary confinement.

Attorney Bradley Rozzi concluded by saying that Allen is innocent.

No witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the trail or bridge the afternoon the girls went missing, he noted. No fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence connect Allen to the murder scene, Rozzi said.

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

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

The case has attracted inordinate attention from true crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, some of which involved a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and them recovery by the Indiana Supreme Court. It is also the subject to a gag order.

The twelve jurors and alternates were locked up the entire time the trial, which began on October 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small town in northwestern Indiana, where Allen also lived and worked as a pharmacy technician. A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull joined the jurors from Allen County in northeastern Indiana.

In his closing argument, McLeland summarized evidence that an unspent bullet was found among the teens’ bodies “had cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol. A firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police analysis, and Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples to oranges” comparison of the unused bullet to Allen’s.

The prosecutor also said that a state trooper who listened to more than 700 phone calls from Allen identified Allen’s voice on the German cellphone video and told the teens: Down the hill ″after crossing an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge. McLeland showed jurors a digitally enhanced version of the cellphone video and said Allen was the man walking behind Williams.

McLeland said Allen, armed with a gun, forced the youths off the trail and planned to rape them before a passing van forced him to change his plans. Gruesome photos from the crime scene showed the girls 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, saying headphones or an auxiliary cable were plugged into Libby’s cell phone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared, casting doubt on the conviction from investigators that the girls had been murdered and abandoned. the forest around 2:32 pm that day.

Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin argued during the trial that one or more other people must have kidnapped the teens and returned them to where they were found early the next day.

Prosecutors again pointed jurors to Allen’s own words, in confessions he made to his mother and wife as well as to a prison psychologist, correctional officers and the former warden of the Westville Correctional Facility, who said Allen wrote to him claiming to steal the girls murdered with a box cutter that he later threw away.

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

Defense attorneys argued that Allen’s confessions are unreliable because he was dealing with a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being kept in isolation and under 24-hour surveillance. and was taunted by people who were locked up with him. A psychiatrist supported this argument, testifying that months in solitary confinement can cause a person to become delirious and psychotic.

Before the trial began, Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue 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.