Ahead of Delphi murders trial: A ‘Down the Hill’ conversation
A conversation with ‘Down the Hill’ reporter Barbara MacDonald about what to expect in next five weeks, as the trial starts for Richard Allen in the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German
Jury selection in the trial of Richard Allen starts Monday in Allen County, 95 miles from Delphi and more than 7½ years from the February 2017 murders of Delphi eighth-graders Abby Williams and Libby German near the community’s Monon High Bridge Trail.
And it comes nearly two years after Allen, a 52-year-old former clerk at Delphi’s CVS store, was arrested and charged in late October 2022, a big turn in a case that had gone unsolved for 5½ years despite drawing hundreds of investigators and massive national attention.
Leading up to trial – opening arguments are expected to start Friday in Carroll Circuit Court in Delphi, before a jury brought in from the Fort Wayne area – has been a nearly nonstop jumble of back-and-forth pretrial motions; an attempt by special Judge Fran Gull to boot Allen’s court-appointed attorneys for accusations of “gross negligence and incompetence;” calls for Gull to be removed from the case for bias against Allen; more than 60 alleged confessions Allen made while being held in a state prison; a run at a third-party defense Allen’s team has pushed that contends the real murderers were tied to an old Norse pagan ritual; a gag order; and promises of an appeal before the first witness is called.
“I think everyone can agree, it’s been a lot,” Barbara MacDonald, a CourtTV reporter who helped lead the deep-dive work on the “Down the Hill: The Delphi Murders” podcast in 2020, said.
To trace it all, Fox59/CBS4 in Indianapolis has a solid interactive timeline here.
This week, I spoke with MacDonald about how the past two years have played out and what she expects to see and hear over the next five weeks.
Excerpts from that conversation pick up here, on a trial framed by a refusal by Judge Gull to allow recordings during the trial. A courtroom decorum order for a Carroll Circuit Court sets aside a dozen seats for media and only a handful of other seats left for the public, after seating for Abby and Libby’s families, Richard Allen’s family and space for the prosecution and defense in a courtroom gallery that can accommodate a little more than 70 people. In addition to banning any electronics – no laptops, no cellphones, no smart watches – Gull has resisted pleas to open the trial to a broader audience.
Question: That doesn’t surprise anybody, really, at this point, given Judge Gull’s track record in this case, does it? She allowed cameras for a single hearing a year ago, but banned them from then on.
Barbara MacDonald: I guess it does still kind of surprise me. It’s just that for nearly five years, we had the superintendent of state police, the Carroll County sheriff, the families of these two girls and countless other people traveling the country to speak to anybody who would listen about this case – going to CrimeCon, going on Megyn Kelly's show, Fox News, CNN, HLN, the (Down the Hill) podcast, Dr. Phil. And all that time they were saying, when we catch this guy, we're going to be standing on the rooftops screaming about this. And the complete opposite has happened. They arrest somebody, and it's under the cover of darkness. We don't even know for several days that somebody is in custody and has been charged with these murders. Everything since then has been a fight.
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