Prosecutor pushes to keep prison confessions in Delphi murder trial

Carroll County prosecutor also questions ‘credibility’ of investigator tied to defense team’s alternate Odin-worshipping killer contention. Plus, West Side’s Nobel Prize winner back in town this week

Apr 24, 2024

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PROSECUTOR PUSHES TO KEEP PRISON CONFESSIONS IN DELPHI MURDER TRIAL

Less than three weeks from the scheduled start of the trial of Richard Allen, the 51-year-old Delphi man accused in the 2017 murders of Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German, the jockeying continued in court filings this week.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland, on the day in October 2022 officials announced the arrest of Richard Allen. (Photo: Frank Oliver for Based in Lafayette)

On Tuesday, Prosecutor Nick McLeland answered a motion earlier this month by Allen’s attorneys, who’d asked Judge Fran Gull to suppress incriminating statements the former CVS clerk told to fellow inmates, guards and others since he was arrested in October 2022. Allen’s court-appointed attorneys said isolation and other conditions while being held at a state prison since Allen’s arrest led to instability in his mental health and amounted to coerced confessions to the murders. His attorneys argued in the motion that Allen’s alleged confessions didn’t square up with evidence from the crime scene, anyway, and should be considered coerced given the conditions in a cell in a state prison where, for a time, he’d “slipped into a state of psychosis plagued with grossly disorganized, delusional, paranoid and highly dysfunctional behavior.” McLeland came back this week with a filing that argued that Allen’s admissions were voluntary. (Dating to June 2023, McLeland had told the judge that Allen had implicated himself, offering confessions “five or six times that he killed the girls.”) McLeland argued that considering Allen’s comments off limits in the trial would require “an assumption that pre-trial detention in (Indiana Department of Correction) by its very nature is coercive interrogation by a state actor.” He called the motion to suppress the admissions “another attempt by the defense to derail this case with conspiracy theories and inflame the public to believe the government has unjustly pursued charges” against Allen.
On Tuesday, McLeland filed a motion to get documents about the work record of Todd Click, a former assistant police chief in Rushville who was central to a defense contention that a group of people tied to a Norse religious group, not Allen, were tied to the girls’ murders. (See: “Allen’s attorneys suggest Abby, Libby were ‘ritualistically sacrificed’ in 2017 Delphi murders.”) In court documents, Allen’s attorneys wrote that the Odin angle came to light in May 2023, when Click sent a letter to McLeland, revisiting pieces of the Delphi case he and others had pursued involving people who lived in his town 120 miles away. Allen’s attorneys say the former police chief “was concerned that for some reason the leadership of the investigative team had failed to share” with the prosecutor the evidence they’d found, which he considered stronger than the probable cause carrying the charges against Allen. In Tuesday’s motion, McLeland wrote that the defense team had listed Click “as a witness they intend to call during their case in chief to express his belief that other people were involved in this crime.” McLeland’s motion asks for employee records he contends “could call into question (Click’s) credibility.”
Also on Tuesday, Allen’s attorneys Brad Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin called for sanctions against McLeland, calling out the prosecutor for holding back evidence at various stages since that arrest that affected how the defense team could prepare for trial.

As of Tuesday evening, Gull had not ruled on any of this week’s filings.

Libby German and Abby Williams (Photos provided)

Allen was charged in late October 2022, more than 5 years after the murders. Court documents laid out that investigators believed Allen was the man shown in Libby German’s cellphone footage walking across the Monon High Bridge on Feb. 13, 2017, and kidnapping the girls, telling them, “Guys … down the hill,” and leading them to where their murders occurred near Deer Creek. Court documents filed with the charges pointed to the discovery of an unspent bullet that investigators say they found near the girls’ bodies and that matched a handgun Allen owned.

Allen’s trial is scheduled to start May 13 with jury selection in Allen County. Those jurors are expected to start hearing opening statements on May 16 in the Carroll County Courthouse in Delphi. The trial is scheduled to run three weeks.

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NOBEL WINNER MOUNGI BAWENDI RETURNS TO WEST LAFAYETTE FOR TALK AT PURDUE

Thursday will be a homecoming of sorts for Moungi Bawendi, a West Lafayette High School graduate who was among three people awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023, when he joins Purdue President Mung Chiang at Elliott Hall of Music for a Q&A.

The visit on campus is two-fer in Purdue’s Presidential Lecture Series, with a conversation earlier in the day between Chiang and U.S. Sen. Todd Young and Sethuraman Panchanathan, director of the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Bawendi graduated from West Side in 1978. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023, along with Louis Brus, a professor at Columbia University; and Alexei Ekimov, who is with Nanocrystals Technology Inc. in New York. The prize recognized the discovery and advancement of quantum dots in research that stretched back to 1980.

Quantum dots are nanoparticles so small that their size determines their properties, according to the Nobel committee. The technology was key in the development of computer and television screens, LED lighting and medical devices used to remove cancerous tissue, to name a few.

Bawendi, the Lester Wolfe Professor of Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was born in Paris and came to West Lafayette during his school years. During his time in West Lafayette, Bawendi’s father, Mohammed Salah Baouendi, was a mathematician and professor at Purdue from 1971 to 1990, where he was department head from 1980-87.

Bawendi and Chiang will be on the Elliott Hall stage at 6 p.m. Thursday. Admission is free with a ticket, available here: www.purdue.edu/president/lecture-series

Sethuraman Panchanathan and Sen. Todd Young

Earlier in the day: Panchanathan and Young, who had to postponed a campus visit initially planned for Feb. 13, will take part in a conversation with Chiang at 11 a.m. Thursday at Fowler Hall in the Stewart Center. The event is free, though registration is required via this link.

THIS AND THAT …

DATES SET FOR MOSEY DOWN MAIN STREET: Hard to believe that Mosey Down Main Street is entering its 16^th summer. Lafayette’s board of works on Tuesday approved the schedule for this season’s downtown street festivals, held between Sixth and 11^th streets in downtown Lafayette. Ken McCammon, a Mosey founder with Friends of Downtown, said organizers have bands lined up on three spots for the first night, along with more than 80 vendors. In case you’re marking your calendar, lineup of Saturdays is: May 18, June 8, July 13, Aug. 10 and Aug. 31.

Based in Lafayette, Indiana

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