Prosecutor disputes call to vacate Delphi murders conviction of Richard Allen
Court filing this week challenges additional evidence and claims of errors that Richard Allen’s attorneys argue warrant a new look at who killed Abby Williams and Libby German in 2017
Support for today’s edition come from the Purdue Presidential Lecture Series. Purdue invites you to a special evening with Stephanie White, head coach of the Indiana Fever and member of the Leroy Keyes Purdue Athletics Hall of Fame, at 6 p.m. Feb. 11 in Stewart Center’s Loeb Playhouse. From leading the Boilermakers to an NCAA championship to earning WNBA Coach of the Year, White has experienced success at every level of basketball as both a player and coach. This Presidential Lecture Series event is free and open to the public. Reserve your seat today: https://www.purdue.edu/president/lecture-series/a-conversation-with-stephanie-white/.
CARROLL COUNTY PROSECUTOR DISPUTES CALL TO VACATE DELPHI MURDERS CONVICTION OF RICHARD ALLEN
The Carroll County prosecutor this week asked the court to deny, without a hearing, a request filed by Richard Allen’s attorneys to consider what they called errors in his trial that warrant vacating the November 2024 conviction in the 2017 murders of Delphi eighth-graders Abby Williams and Libby German.
Prosecutor Nick McLeland, in a motion filed Tuesday, disputed four points raised by Allen’s defense team two weeks earlier about new evidence pointing to holes in the prosecution’s timeline of the murders; an alleged confession by another man; and the process that landed the 52-year-old clerk at the Delphi CVS in a state prison under a “safekeeping” order – a situation they called pivotal in the case and that led to a state of psychosis between his arrest and his trial.
Judge Fran Gull had not responded to the motion to correct errors or set a hearing, as of Thursday. Gull sentenced Allen on Dec. 20 to 130 years in prison, the maximum allowed for the two murders, after a four weeks of testimony and jury deliberations in a trial that started in October.
Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, were found dead, with slashed necks, in the woods near Delphi’s Monon High Bridge Trail on Feb. 14, 2017, a day after they’d been dropped off to spend an afternoon hiking to the Monon High Bridge. Allen was arrested in October 2022, 5½ years after the murders – tied to the scene through a revisited case file related to his self-reported information to investigators in the days after the murders that he’d been on the Monon High Bridge Trail the day the girls went missing. The case against him was built around his admission about being on the bridge that day; an unspent round found at the crime scene that state police technicians determined came from a handgun Allen owned; a video of a man – dubbed “Bridge Guy” – found on Libby’s phone; and what prosecutors detailed as more than 60 confessions while Allen was awaiting trial.
Here were the issues raised by Allen’s attorneys – and why McLeland said this week that the court should deny them.
Representation during ‘safekeeping’ order procedures
The defense argument: Allen’s motion contends that his wife, Kathy, had hired attorney Brett Gibson to represent him a day after he was arrested on Oct. 26, 2022. The motion says that Gibson met with Allen at the Carroll County Jail, where Allen was being held under a pseudonym. According to the filing, then-Carroll Circuit Judge Benjamin Diener held an initial hearing on Oct. 28 without Allen or his attorney present, before Allen “was whisked away from Carroll County Jail to the White County Jail without a safekeeping order authorizing the transfer.” (Public announcement of Allen’s arrest came Oct. 31, 2022.) Diener granted a safekeeping order then-Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby requested on Nov. 3, 2022. Allen’s motion argues that he wasn’t present for the safekeeping order hearing, he had no representation at the hearing and claimed that Diener had a hand in helping craft the order. Allen wound up at Westville Correctional Facility on the grounds that Carroll County couldn’t guarantee his safety in its jail, given the high profile of the case. Allen’s attorneys also argued that he could have rejected the safekeeping order but wasn’t given that opportunity. “The safekeeping proceeding was plainly illegal from start to finish,” Allen’s attorneys wrote, saying Allen’s Sixth Amendment rights were violated.
The prosecutor’s response: McLeland wrote in this week’s filing that Allen told the court during his Oct. 28, 2022, hearing that he planned to hire an attorney and didn’t tell Diener that he had legal counsel at that point. McLeland also argued “that a motion for safekeeping is not considered a critical stage of the proceedings, where the defendant is required to be present with counsel.” McLeland argued that in later proceedings in 2023 Gull ruled on the validity of the safekeeping order, considering it reasonable and necessary to protect Allen. “The motion for safekeeping does not touch on matters of guilt or impact the ability to have a fair trial,” McLeland wrote in this week’s filing.
The timing of the white van
The defense argument: During the trial, prosecutors focused testimony of Dr. Monica Wala, a psychologist at Westville, about a confession she said Allen made to her. Wala had testified that Allen described details about forcing the girls off the Monon High Bridge with the intent of raping them, only to get scared when he spotted a passing white van – a piece of the timeline investigators later said was something only the killer would know. Wala testified that Allen told her that after he saw the van go by, he’d crossed to the north side of Deer Creek and killed the girls there.
During the trial, Brad Weber, a Delphi resident who lives just southeast of the south end of the Monon High Bridge, testified that he got off his shift at the Lafayette Subaru plant at 2:02 p.m. Feb. 13, 2017 – the day of the murders – and drove home. He said it took 20 to 25 minutes to get home. That put him home, based on his testimony, “about 2:30.”
Libby German shot a final video – the one capturing the image and voice of a suspect known as Bridge Guy – at the southwest end of the Monon High Bridge at 2:13 p.m. Feb. 13, 2017. Prosecutors marked the final movement of Libby’s phone at 2:32 p.m. that day, based on tracking data logged by the phone’s Apple Health app.
In the defense filing, Allen’s attorneys included security video footage of a white van pulling into Weber’s lane at 2:44 p.m. that day. They also contend that Weber’s cellphone started to ping at the property at 2:50 p.m. that day and continued deep into that night. They said the footage, collected from a neighbor’s security camera by state investigators, suggest that prosecutors knew Weber’s testimony didn’t fit the timeline and didn’t correct it.
“His arrival at ‘about 2:30’ could not have been a detail only the killer would know, because it did not happen,” Allen’s attorneys wrote in this week’s motion.
The prosecutor’s response: McLeland argued that the YouTube link was “unverified by legitimate means as to date and time.” McLeland noted that Allen’s attorneys acknowledged that the security footage had its AM and PM designations flipped, and he questioned other assumptions about the timestamps. McLeland also argued that the footage was not new but that “the defense chose not to present it at trial as part of their trial strategy. … Brad Weber was put on the stand multiple times and the defense had every opportunity to cross examine him. If anything, this evidence is not more than impeachment evidence that the defense chose not to use. The defense is not permitted to request a new trial to change strategy when their chosen path fails.”
Another potential confession
The defense argument: Allen’s attorneys argued that another Delphi man confessed to the murders while talking with a fellow inmate in May 2017. According to handwritten notes and summaries collected by an Indiana State Police detective, the inmate alleged that the Delphi man said he’d used a boxcutter to kill the girls after walking with them in the woods with the pretense of going to see some horses nearby. Allen’s attorneys, in their motion, 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, 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.
The prosecutor’s response: McLeland argued that the inmate in question, in prison for dealing methamphetamine, “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.”
Evidence from Libby’s phone
The defense argument: During the trial, Stacy Eldridge, a digital forensics consultant for Richard Allen’s defense team, testified that Libby’s iPhone 6S logged an audio output deep in the phone’s software, suggesting that headphones or a car aux cable was put into the phone’s jack port at 5:44 p.m. Feb. 13, 2017. She testified that data showed that someone removed the headphone jack at 10:33 p.m. that same night. That testimony challenged the prosecution’s timeline of the murder by hours. That day at trial, Sgt. Chris Cecil, an Indiana State Police phone expert, testified that during a break in the trial he’d Googled possible reasons for the headphone jack issue. He testified that he found reasons on Apple troubleshooting sites including moisture and dirt. Allen’s attorneys, in this week’s motion, offered an affidavit in which Eldridge says there was no evidence of water or dirt damage and was “unaware of any scientific or technological research suggesting that water or dirt damage to an iPhone 6s would cause the phone to inaccurately log wired headphones in or wired headphones out.” Allen’s attorneys argued: “Someone other than Richard Allen was handling (Libby’s) phone multiple times long after the state contended Mr. Allen left the scene before 4 p.m. on Feb. 13, 2017.”
The prosecutor’s response: McLeland challenged Eldridge’s credentials, saying that she “had only done one other forensic phone analysis and had only testified one time prior about a forensic phone analysis.” McLeland offered three photos of Libby’s phone found at the crime scene, showing that water and dirt could have found their way into the headphone jack. McLeland also argued that Allen’s attorneys had the opportunity to recall Eldridge to the stand to rebut Cecil’s testimony but didn’t take it.
THIS AND THAT/OTHER READS …
And then there’s the one where Dick Van Dyke – making a bit of a resurgence, turning 99 and dancing his way through the video for Coldplay’s “All My Love” in 2024 – popped up in an interview telling about the time that he was a high school freshman in Crawfordsville – 27 miles south of Lafayette – asked to sub in as anchor in a track relay at a meet between Wabash College and Purdue. The actor, who tells Ted Danson in the interview, that he was living in Crawfordsville because his dad had been transferred there. (Van Dyke eventually went to high school in Danville, Illinois, leaving as a senior in 1944 to enlist during World War II.) The upshot of the clip: Van Dyke says he ran the anchor leg of a relay that beat Purdue … all while running barefoot. Get me somebody in records at Purdue Athletics …
In case you missed it, here’s the latest Tim’s Picks, with five idea of things to do in Greater Lafayette this weekend.
Thanks, again, for support for today’s edition from the Purdue Presidential Lecture Series, presenting an evening with Stephanie White, head coach of the Indiana Fever and member of the Leroy Keyes Purdue Athletics Hall of Fame, at 6 p.m. Feb. 11 in Stewart Center’s Loeb Playhouse. Reserve your seat today: https://www.purdue.edu/president/lecture-series/a-conversation-with-stephanie-white/
Thank you for supporting Based in Lafayette, an independent, local reporting project. Free and full-ride subscription options are ready for you here.
Tips, story ideas? I’m at davebangert1@gmail.com.