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ORAL ARGUMENTS MONDAY IN RICHARD ALLEN’S APPEAL OF DELPHI MURDERS CONVICTION
Richard Allen’s attempt to show that a case built to convict him as the murderer of Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German was a “paper tiger” that pinned the high-profile crimes on an innocent man will go before the Indiana Court of Appeals Monday morning.
A panel of three judges are scheduled to hear oral arguments, starting at 10 a.m. Monday, Sept. 21, at an Indiana Statehouse courtroom, considering Allen’s appeal of a conviction and 130-year prison sentence after four-week trial in fall 2024.
Allen’s attorneys have argued in a series of briefs filed since December 2025 that the trial in Carroll Circuit Court was stacked against the Delphi pharmacy clerk with little opportunity to refute a prosecution built on “superficial inference stacking,” pulled together into “this story of tunnel vision into the wrong man.”
“The State’s case was a paper tiger, and the trial court systematically barred Allen from lighting a match,” Allen’s attorneys, Stacy Uliana and Mark Leeman, wrote in an April filing with the Court of Appeals.
“Had the jury known all the evidence that impeached their timeline, firearms ‘science’ and Allen’s mind at the time he was in solitary, there is more than a possibility the jury would have acquitted him,” they argued. “It has been said that ‘a half-truth masquerading as a whole truth becomes a complete untruth.’ The only way our justice system works is if the jury hears the full truth. Because the jury only heard half of the story, Allen was denied a fair trial.”
A response from the Indiana attorney general’s team in March called many of the claims offered for the appeal “meritless” or technically insufficient, arguing that the initial trial got it right.
A jury pulled from Allen County, more than 90 miles from the Carroll Circuit Court courtroom, deliberated four days before finding Allen guilty in November 2024. Fran Gull, an Allen County Superior Court judge appointed to the case shortly after Allen’s arrest in October 2022, sentenced him a month later to 130 years in prison.
Abby, 13, and Libby, 14, students at Delphi Community Middle School, were killed Feb. 13, 2017, after being dropped off to spend time during a day off from school on the Monon High Bridge Trail, part of Delphi’s trail system. They were found dead in the woods the following day, their necks slashed. Despite video found on Abby’s phone of a man following them on the Monon High Bridge, the case went without an arrest for more than five years until investigators zeroed in on Allen, who admitted to being on the trail that day but denied that he was the “Bridge Guy” in the video or the one who killed the girls.
The trial was built around a prosecution case that said Allen was, in fact, Bridge Guy, linking him through dozens of admissions months after his arrest and – despite no DNA evidence at the scene or in a search of his house five years later – to an unspent bullet found at the crime scene that investigators say had been in a gun later found in a search of Allen’s home.
In briefs filed with the appeal, Allen’s attorneys pinned arguments across three overarching points, including:
