DELPHI, Ind. — It’s been more than seven years since Abby Williams and Libby German disappeared after a walk along the Monon High Bridge outside of Delphi on a day off from school. Their bodies were found the next day along the north bank of Deer Creek, their throats slashed.
It’s been more than two years since investigators, after a volunteer clerical worker found a long-lost police interview, arrested Richard Allen and charged him with the killings.
By Friday or Saturday, a jury of seven women and five men from the Fort Wayne area may be delivering a verdict in the case. That verdict could result in a finding of guilty or not guilty.
Also possible is a hung jury with a divided panel finding serious reservations of reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the man the State charged because he confessed and allegedly knew confidential details of the crime while defense attorneys argue their client is a victim of shoddy police work and mental illness that caused him to make false confessions.
The prosecution rested late last week after playing audio tapes of Allen’s phone calls home from a maximum security prison, where he was held in solitary confinement for the better part of two years for his own safety. In those recordings, Allen admitted to his wife that he killed Abby and Libby.
Those calls bolstered a prison psychiatrist’s report that Allen gave her a more complete step-by-step account of the abduction and murders, including confidential information about a van that drove down a nearby road and scared him into forcing the girls across the creek to where their bodies were found.
A crime scene reconstruction specialist explained to jurors how the girls died, and an Indiana State Police forensics firearms examiner determined that an unfired bullet discovered near the bodies came from a gun seized from Allen’s house.
But that same examiner said there was no DNA evidence linking Allen to the crime scene or the murders. No DNA from the girls was found on any of the items taken from Allen’s house either.
Defense attorneys have been on the offensive from the start and stepped up their pushback this past Friday and Saturday as police officers admitted there have been mistakes made and evidence lost during the investigation. Allen’s team is preparing to discredit a key witness who testified that it was his van driving up a county road at about 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 13, 2017, at the same time detectives said Allen was preparing to sexually assault Abby and Libby.
Videotaped evidence, some of it lost and some of it played in court, has been key to the jurors’ understanding of the case.
Several key interviews with potential witnesses in 2017 were lost due to a DVR glitch at the Delphi Police Department.
The State and the defense have taken opposite sides as circumstances dictate when it comes to videos of Allen in custody.
On Saturday, over the objections of Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland, the defense team played nearly two hours of silent videos for jurors of Allen’s incarceration at the Westville Correctional Facility.
Only jurors, lawyers and court personnel were permitted to view the videos due to respect for Allen’s dignity, however, some reporters were able to catch glimpses of the images of Allen, sometimes naked, sometimes hooded, sometimes strapped to a chair, always in shackles and accompanied by at least two prison guards, sometimes dragged down a hallway, sometimes transported in a van to a location where he was scrubbed clean after a mental illness crisis in the spring of 2023 left him unable or unwilling to take care of himself and resulted in rubbing of feces on his body.
More videos of Allen’s alleged inappropriate behavior while in his prison cell may be shown this week.
Conversely, last week, it was the State that wanted to show videos of Allen supposedly cursing and beating on a cell door at the Cass County Jail, where he is being held during this trial. That evidence, however, was thwarted by a defense objection upheld by Special Judge Fran Gull.
The court has overruled defense objections and denied motions at a significantly higher rate than those of the prosecutor throughout the trial and over two years of trial prep.
Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin was mystified about Gull’s decision to deny Allen’s attorneys the option to seek the testimony of an FBI agent remotely from Texas regarding a report he wrote questioning the accuracy of the timeline provided by Brad Weber, the man who said he was driving near the south end of the Monon High Bridge the day of the killings.
It is likely that Allen’s team will recall Weber to the stand as it seeks to convince jurors that someone besides the defendant was responsible for the murders.
And while it is doubtful that Allen will take the stand in his own defense as jurors have already viewed two videotaped police interviews where he insisted on his innocence and heard seven phone calls where he makes various claims about his alleged involvement, its possible that Mrs. Allen could be called to the stand in an attempt to humanize her husband for the jury.
Though one alternate juror dropped out due to a family emergency, 12 jurors and three alternates remain attentive if not somewhat disturbed by the evidence they have seen.
Some were seen shaking their heads at testimony about investigative mistakes while others appeared squeamish during an expert’s account of the crime scene and while viewing the video of Allen in custody.
The defense team is attempting to portray their client as a family man ripped away from his home after volunteering at least three times to talk with law enforcement and then forced to live in a prison designed for convicted felons, not defendants presumed innocent awaiting trial.
The jury was drawn from Allen County due to concerns about pre-trial media publicity and have been housed in a Lafayette hotel, more than two hours away from their homes and families, for more than two weeks, their downtime activities, phone calls and online access overseen by bailiffs, their transportation back-and-forth to court six days a week inside a pair of vans with tinted windows.
The jurors include health and counseling professionals who, the defense would hope, might empathize with Allen or his treatment behind bars or consider his deteriorating mental condition when combined with examination of the investigation might result in a finding of reasonable doubt, which would be enough to either result in a not guilty verdict or a hung jury, at which point the State would need to determine if it would seek to refile charges for a second trial.
Judge Gull has the Carroll County Circuit Court booked through Nov. 15.
