Allen’s attorney: Hand over inmate’s letters about alleged Delphi murder confessions
Richard Allen’s attorney asks court to preserve and turn over letters an inmate says he sent to Carroll County prosecutor with details about a prison confession about Abby and Libby’s 2017 murders
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ALLEN’S ATTORNEY: HAND OVER INMATE’S LETTERS ABOUT ALLEGED DELPHI MURDER CONFESSIONS
An attorney for Richard Allen filed a motion Friday, demanding that the Carroll County prosecutor preserve and turn over letters that a prison inmate contends he sent ahead of the Allen’s October 2024 trial to detail confessions made by the landowner where Delphi eighth-graders Abby Williams and Libby German were found murdered in February 2017.
Andrew Baldwin, one of the attorneys for Allen, wrote in Friday’s filing that he met Feb. 12 at New Castle Correctional Facility with Ricci Davis, an inmate serving a 50-year sentence at for dealing methamphetamine. Davis is among those named in a motion to correct errors filed in January by Allen’s defense team looking to vacate a November 2024 conviction and 130-year sentence for the murders near the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi.
In it, Allen’s attorneys argued that Ron Logan, who died in 2022, confessed to the murders while talking with Davis when they were serving time in the same Indiana prison in May 2017. According to the defense team’s filing in January, Davis alleged in handwritten notes and summaries collected by an Indiana State Police detective that Logan gave details about killing the girls, saying he’d used a boxcutter to kill Abby and Libby after walking with them in the woods with the pretense of going to see some horses nearby. The filings contend that Logan told Davis two others were involved, without saying who those people were, among “certain details of the crime that only the actual killer would know.”
Allen’s attorneys, in their motion last month, pointed to testimony from Dr. Roland Kohr, a former Vigo County coroner who had led the autopsies on Feb. 15, 2017. On the stand in October 2024, Kohr said he’d come to the conclusion in later years that the weapons used weren’t a combination of a straight edge and a serrated edge – as he’d first concluded – but a boxcutter that could have left serrated-like markings from “something related to the blade or handle.” That changed conclusion took the defense by surprise at trial. Allen’s attorneys argued that the new conclusion could have offered probable cause to arrest and charge Logan.
Earlier in February, Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland argued that Davis had “failed the polygraph miserably” when questioned by investigators about the confession claim. McLeland argued that even with a medical ruling that a boxcutter was used in the crime, other details of the story about the alleged confession were “directly contradicted by the evidence; the others have not evidentiary support.”
But after this week’s meeting with Davis at New Castle, Friday’s filing says, Baldwin contended there could be as many as eight letters Davis sent to McLeland in summer and fall 2024 ahead of Allen’s trial. Baldwin argued that the correspondence Davis said he sent to the prosecutor weren’t passed along to Allen’s defense team.
Friday’s court filing brings Kegan Kline back into the picture.
Kline, a Peru man who was behind the fake “anthony_shots” profile that had been in contact with Libby German, was sentenced in 2023 to 43 years after pleading guilty to 25 counts, including child exploitation, child solicitation, possession of child pornography, synthetic identity deception and obstruction of justice. Kline was never charged in connection with the murders of Abby and Libby and said in a 2022 interview that he didn’t kill the girls.
According to Friday’s filing, Baldwin argued that Davis and Kline met around March 2024, when Kline was placed in the same general area at New Castle. The filing contends that Kline sought out Davis, asking him whether Logan had ever mentioned his name in those conversations years earlier. The filing contends that Kline, in conversations that continued through Allen’s conviction, said he and Logan knew each other through sharing child pornography on burner phones. The filing contends that Kline revealed information to Davis that corroborated details Logan had shared and, after the verdict, Kline had “expressed his relief that he would no longer be a viable suspect in the murders due to Richard Allen’s conviction.” The filing also contends that Kline told Davis that Allen wasn’t involved in the murders.
In Friday’s filing, Baldwin asked the court to have the prosecutor produce any letters received from Davis. Baldwin also requested a video copy of an interview Davis says investigators had with him years earlier.
The motion also contends that the defense “can produce a witness with admissible evidence” that the prosecution received some letters from Davis “and that those letters had been given to the people investigating the case.”
“The approximate eight letters Ricci Davis claims he sent to McLeland in the months leading up to the October 2024 trial would contain multiple layers of exculpatory evidence which the defense could have used to further its investigation as to whether certain facts contained in those letters could be verified through crime scene photographs, digital data and a variety of other means,” Baldwin wrote in Friday’s motion.
Baldwin argued that had the defense known about Davis’ alleged correspondence before the trial, the letters might have been factored into trial strategy and in pre-trial hearings in summer 2024 on third-party suspect theories heard by Judge Fran Gull in Carroll Circuit Court.
During an Aug. 1, 2024, pre-trial hearing, Allen’s attorneys argued to allow evidence in trial that pointed to a group of Odinists as suspects and that the murders were part of an old Norse paganist ritual. Gull rejected that, siding with McLeland’s request to keep those men’s names from coming up during the trial. The ruling also wiped out the defense’s references to Kline and Logan.
Baldwin argued in Friday’s motion that Davis’ letters could still be in play after the verdict through Allen’s motion to correct errors and vacate the conviction.
In that motion, Allen’s defense team also raises questions about:
The legality of the safekeeping order that landed Allen in state prison isolation for most of the two years between his October 2022 arrest and his trial.
About security video that offers timing of a white van arriving in neighbor Brad Weber’s drive and disputes a timeline of the prosecution’s narrative pinning Allen to the crime.
And about testimony suggesting that headphones or a car aux cable were put into Libby German’s iPhone jack port at 5:44 p.m. Feb. 13, 2017, and removed at 10:33 p.m. that same night, which would challenge the prosecution’s timeline of the murder by hours.
And as of Friday, Gull had not ruled or set a hearing date on the motions. And McLeland hadn’t responded to the motion about the letters.
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