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Delphi murders trial: Defense did ‘excellent job’ explaining murder suspect’s ‘psychiatric issues,’ attorney says
Attorney Sam Bassett of Minton, Bassett, Flores and Carsey explains the strengths and weaknesses of the prosecution and defense in Richard Allen’s double murder trial.
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WARNING: GRAPHIC
Richard Allen, the Indiana man recently found guilty of brutally murdering two teen girls on a hiking trail in 2017, is asking a Carroll County court to overturn his conviction, according to court documents obtained by Fox News Digital.
Allen’s attorneys recently filed a motion asking a Carroll County Circuit Court judge to either vacate his murder convictions or schedule a hearing to discuss four specific issues that they say could prove Allen innocent in the murders of 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams.
“It’s natural for a convicted murderer to want his murder conviction overturned,” Áine Cain, co-host of the “Murder Sheet” podcast, which has been covering the Delphi murders for five years, told Fox News Digital. “It’s the job of the defense attorneys and his ability to try to help them accomplish that. … And his appellate team will probably be looking at things more from a legal perspective or his rights violated at any point — was the trial run properly, things like that.”
Cain and co-host Kevin Greenlee, an attorney, attended Allen’s trial and described the prosecution’s performance as “solid.”
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Officers escort Richard Allen out of the Carroll County courthouse in Delphi, Indiana, following a hearing on Nov. 22, 2022. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)
He was sentenced to serve 130 years in prison after a four-week-long trial. Prosecutors said Allen lured the girls, who were hiking together on Feb. 13, 2017, away from the High Monon Trail and into a secluded wooded area where he slit their necks and then covered their bodies with twigs and leaves.
“After the trial, I believe we felt … while there were issues with this investigation and while certainly the misplacement of the tip around Richard Allen was unfortunate, we felt that the investigative team and the prosecutors did a good job proving their case in court based on the evidence and that they successfully convicted the man who murdered Liberty German and Abigail Williams,” Cain said.
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Still, Allen’s attorneys are pointing to four pieces of evidence they say should allow Allen to get his convictions overturned.
White van
During his trial, prosecutors heard from a prison psychologist who testified that Allen, now 52, admitted wanting to sexually assault the girls but was spooked when a van apparently drove by the wooded area of the High Monon Trail in Delphi where he lured and attacked them.
The van’s driver testified during Allen’s trial that he drove by the crime scene around 2:30 p.m. that day — just two minutes before prosecutors said German’s phone turned off at 2:32 p.m. — and arrived at his parents’ home at 2:44 p.m., according to the court documents.
Prosecutors argued that seeing the white van was a detail “only the killer would know” during Allen’s trial.
Allen’s attorneys are now disputing testimony from the van driver, saying “his arrival at ‘about 2:30’ could not have been a detail only the killer would know, because it did not happen.”
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They wrote in their motion that surveillance footage showing what appears to be a white van matching a description of that man’s white van was spotted driving along an access road at 2:44 p.m. that day. They argue the footage shows the van driver could not have passed by the crime scene at 2:30 p.m. and would have arrived at his parents’ home later than 2:44, thus throwing off the prosecution’s timeline.
Delphi police recovered Libby German’s cellphone beneath her body on Feb. 14, 2017. The phone had a 43-second video showing Abigail Williams walking on the Monon High Bridge in Delphi toward German while a man wearing a dark jacket and jeans walks behind her. (FOX Nation)
FBI evidence further shows that van driver’s phone at his parents’ home at 2:50 p.m., Allen’s attorney said.
Other man’s confession
The convicted killer’s defense is also highlighting an alleged confession from a now-deceased man named Ron Logan, who apparently admitted to killing German and Williams to another inmate in prison sometime before May 15, 2017.
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His attorneys said the confession is “newly discovered evidence.”
Snow covers the water of Deer Creek as the Monon High Bridge towers above in Delphi, Indiana, on Feb. 9, 2022. (Nikos Frazier/Journal & Courier/USA TODAY NETWORK)
An investigator’s handwritten notes detailing the other inmate’s retelling of Logan’s confession are included in the recent motion. Logan allegedly told the other inmate that he lured the two victims to a wooded area of the trail and killed them with a boxcutter — a weapon forensic pathologist Dr. Roland Kohr testified during Allen’s trial that the killer may have used, according to FOX 59.
The FBI searched Logan’s home not far from the High Monon Trail on May 17, 2017, according to FOX 59.
“Ron Logan’s confession exculpates Mr. Allen and would probably produce a different result at a retrial.”
“Ron Logan’s confession exculpates Mr. Allen and would probably produce a different result at a retrial,” Allen’s attorneys wrote in their motion. “Accordingly, the Court should either vacate Mr. Allen’s convictions or set this motion for a hearing.”
Supt. Doug Carter of the Indiana State Police speaks during a press conference on an update on the Delphi murders investigation at the Canal Center in Delphi, Indiana, on April 22, 2019. (Nikos Frazier/Journal & Courier/USA TODAY NETWORK)
Logan died in 2022.
Prison transfer
Allen’s attorneys further argue that the then-suspect was “whisked away” from Carroll County Jail to an Indiana Department of Corrections facility in 2022 without a proper safekeeping proceeding — the legal process for moving an inmate from one detention center to another.
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“This should be particularly disturbing because, had he been given the opportunity to do so, Mr. Allen had an absolute personal right to refuse the transfer to the Department’s custody,” his attorneys wrote in the Monday motion.
Delphi murder suspect Richard Allen was improperly transferred from Carroll County Jail to an Indiana Department of Corrections facility, his lawyers argue. (FOX 59 Indianapolis )
They further say Allen “had no opportunity to exercise his right to refuse the transfer to the Indiana Department of Corrections’ custody or to make any of the objections set out above to the entire course of the proceeding” because he and his counsel “had no notice of the legal skullduggery that would land him in solitary confinement” for 23 months before his trial.
Headphone jack on German’s phone
Near the conclusion of Allen’s trial, the defense presented testimony from a former FBI forensic expert who said it appeared as though someone plugged headphones into German’s phone, which was discovered near the girls’ bodies on Feb. 14, at 5:45 p.m on Feb. 13, hours after they were last seen.
The headphones were then removed from the phone at 10:32, Stacey Eldridge testified, presenting a possible challenge to the prosecution’s timeline that they were killed around 2:30 p.m. on Feb. 13, according to FOX 59.
Grainy cellphone video footage and a sketch of a prime suspect in the murder of Delphi girls Abigail Williams and Liberty German on the office wall of Tobe Leazenby, Sheriff of Carroll County, Indiana. (Robert Scheer/IndyStar/USA TODAY NETWORK)
An expert presented by the state testified at trial that the headphone evidence may have been the result of water or dirt getting into the headphone jack, and Allen’s attorneys say they never got a chance to dispute that testimony in court.
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“If Ms. Eldridge’s actual expert opinion that wired headphones were plugged into L.G.’s auxiliary port at 5:44 p.m. on February 13, 2017, and unplugged almost 5 hours later were credited by a jury, the State’s narrative is impossible,” the motion states. “Someone other than Richard Allen was handling L.G.’s phone multiple times long after the State contended Mr. Allen left the scene before 4:00 p.m. on February 13, 2017.”
Prosecutors pointed to various evidence that placed Allen at the scene at the time of the crime, including an unspent bullet at the crime scene matching a firearm recovered from Allen’s home in 2022, as well as the dozens of confessions he made in prison, as FOX 59 Indianapolis reported at the time.
On Feb. 14, 2017, Libby German, 14, and Abby Williams, 13, were killed while biking on trails near Delphi, Indiana, about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis. (Indiana State Police)
Allen’s defense leaned largely on expert analysis showing Allen’s unhealthy mental state after his 2022 arrest, which took the Delphi community as a surprise at the time. Allen had been a longtime CVS employee in the small Indiana town when police took him into custody five years after the murders.
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For the first time since the girls were reported missing, jurors got to watch 43 seconds of the crucial video in court on Oct. 22. The video shows German and Williams walking with an unknown man wearing a hat and blue utility jacket who has become known over the last five years as “Bridge Guy.” German captured the video at 2:13 p.m., less than 25 minutes after she and Williams’ family members dropped them off at the trail.
“Guys, down the hill,” the man can be heard saying to the girls in the video.
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Cain, who has a book about the Delphi murders called “Shadow of the Bridge” set to be published in August, and Greenlee believe Allen’s confessions played in court were believable.
“I think it is worth noting that his voice as he spoke to them, it sounded identical to the voice on the recording of ‘Bridge Guy’ saying ‘down the hill,’” Cain said. “I’m not sure you could do a scientifically valid test, but the reactions of everyone in that courtroom, or almost everyone in the courtroom, were: This is the same man.'”
Allen’s attorneys did not immediately respond to inquiries from Fox News Digital.
Audrey Conklin is a digital reporter for Fox News Digital and FOX Business. Email tips to [email protected] or on Twitter at @audpants.