‘Safekeeping’ order ends for Richard Allen. Pivotal pretrial testimony in play in Delphi murders
Sometimes chilling testimony Thursday gave differing views of the scene where Abby Williams and Libby German were killed in 2017
Richard Allen, the Delphi man accused in the 2017 murders of Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German, will be moved into custody of the Carroll County sheriff, after Judge Fran Gull vacated a safekeeping order that had kept him in a series of cells in the state prison system.
Gull’s ruling Thursday came at the end of an 11½-hour day of testimony, wrapping up three marathon days of pre-trial hearings meant to settle pivotal matters about evidence that will or won’t be allowed in a five-week jury trial scheduled to start in mid-October.
In play: Whether more than 60 confessions Indiana State Police say Allen made about the murders along the Monon High Bridge Trail and the prosecution’s attempt to block mentions of the defense team’s alternative theory that pins the crime on a group of Norse pagan worshippers involved in a ritualistic sacrifice. Gull is expected to rule on those questions later, after the three days of hearings this week.
On Thursday, Allen’s attorneys won one battle they’d been fighting – and losing – since shortly after Allen was arrested in November 2022, working to get him out of holding in Department of Corrections facilities and into a county jail closer to his family and his attorneys as they prep for the trial. The motion argued Tuesday was the latest effort to get Allen out of an isolated cell in a prison, most recently at the Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Carlisle, 140 miles from Delphi.
Gull said Thursday from the bench in Carroll Circuit Court that she would issue a formal order later this week. But she told Allen that he was being put back into custody of the Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett and leaving it up to the sheriff to make arrangements.
The initial order, signed by former Carroll Circuit Judge Benjamin Diener, when former Sheriff Tobe Leazenby had asked the court to allow him to move Allen to a state prison “for safekeeping.” Leazenby had said the Carroll County Jail wasn’t equipped to handle the situation, saying that the high-profile case created “potential safety and security concerns because of extensive coverage from an array of various media platforms, both mainstream and social, throughout the state, the United States and the world.”
During testimony this week, Liggett said he was open to moving Allen to the Cass County Jail, one county away to the northeast. That’s where Allen was being held this week during the three days of hearings. Liggett said on the stand that he understood Cass County Sheriff Ed Schroder was open to the idea. Liggett’s concern was that if Allen became a problem in Cass County, he was anxious about taking Allen back to Carroll County, which he said wasn’t equipped with a cell that could keep him out of the general jail population.
Thursday evening, as Allen was escorted from the courtroom and to a waiting transport van, Liggett declined to say where Allen would go.
TESTIMONY THURSDAY: WHAT CAN, CAN’T BE SAID IN TRIAL
The bulk of Thursday’s hearing – running from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. – gathered assorted pieces of Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland’s request to limit words, phrases and implied references during the trial.
McLeland’s “in limine” motion included requests to block trial references to Odinism, cult or ritualistic killing, along with the names of six men tied to a third-party defense attorneys Brad Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin have been floating.
Baldwin and Rozzi have filed extensive court documents that have attempted to say it would have been impossible for Allen to work alone to abduct Abby and Libby from the Monon High Bridge Trail, get them to go into the woods along Deer Creek and kill them in the timeframe investigators have laid out.
Instead, the defense team say Abby and Libby could have been victims of Odinists, headed by a Logansport man whose son knew the girls. They argued several ways this week that the Logansport man – one prosecutors contend had an alibi that allowed investigators to clear him – had posted drawings and pictures on Facebook that were eerily similar to the crime scene. (The man’s name and others accused in the third-party defense aren’t being named here, because they have not been arrested, charged or testified in connection with the murders.)
McLeland argued Thursday that the defense couldn’t just toss out any theory during the trial, unless there was evidence. And he said the prosecution “is going to be able to debunk” the ones the defense team has offered and that Allen’s attorneys don’t have evidence that connects someone else to the crime.
A series of witnesses Thursday gave very different looks at the crime scene, looking to tilt Gull’s view on the lengths she’ll accept on theories that someone other than Richard Allen told the girls, “Guys … down the hill.”
The ritualistic crimes expert: Dawn Perlmutter, director of the Symbol Intelligence Group and a subject matter expert in ritualistic crimes, testified that based on crime scene photos, a presentation of Facebook posts from suspected Odinists and defense team depictions, “This was a textbook ritualistic murder. It has all the characteristics.”
She pointed to the arrangement of sticks left on the girls that Allen’s attorneys have contended were Norse runes. She pointed to the way the girls’ bodies were arranged; that they were killed in a small clearing in the woods, given Odinists’ connection with nature; a marking made with Libby German’s blood on a nearby tree in what she said appeared to be a symbol (“In my opinion, it was an intentional mark,” Perlmutter said); and how they were killed with cuts to their necks, in what could have been ritualistic style.
McLeland challenged Perlmutter’s testimony, asking whether she’d seen or heard other evidence in the case, including against Allen, or whether she’d just looked at angles spoon fed to her by the defense attorneys. He also questions why Odinists, who she placed among white supremacist groups, would pick two white girls to kill if race-based acts were their thing. McLeland also pointed to a September 2023 appearance on Court TV, where she’d made a similar proclamation about the crime scene before she’d seen things the defense team was preparing for trial.
“If you change your mind now, would that hurt your business?” McLeland asked.
“That’s not what happened,” Perlmutter said about her review of the crime scene evidence.
McLeland asked her if her assessment would change if she was told the deaths were caused not by a ceremonial knife of some kind, but a box cutter.
Perlmutter said that wouldn’t change her mind, either.
The Delphi-Rushville thread: Allen’s attorneys brought back to the stand Kevin Murphy, a former ISP detective. Murphy testified earlier in the week that he and other investigators “thought there was an undeniable connection” between the Logansport man, another from the Delphi area and three men from Rushville who were wrapped up in a Norse pagan religion. Murphy testified again Thursday that one of the men from Rushville asked him after an interview in early 2018 whether, if traces of his spit were found on one of the girls but he could explain why, would he still be in trouble.
“I was stunned,” Murphy said.
Murphy said he made a mistake that day with the Rushville man by not getting him back in the car, grabbing lunch with him and finding out more right away. Still, Murphy testified Thursday that he immediately started to chase that lead and connecting the dots between the men. Murphy said the working theory in the early days of the Delphi murders investigation was that, based on the scene and timelines, the crime likely needed two or three people, possibly five or six, to pull it off. And this seemed to fit.
Murphy testified that investigators he was working with had monitored social media accounts of the men and that “they seemed to know things that no one else would know unless they were involved or were there.”
When Baldwin had him compare crime scene photos with Facebook posts by one of the men they had been investigating, Murphy held his head in his hands and wept.
“That’s hard for you?” Baldwin asked.
“It sucks,” Murphy said, wiping his eyes. “It sucks.”
Todd Click, a former Rushville police officer, testified that he’d worked with Murphy on the Rushville angles of the investigation. He gave his theory on the crime from the stand Thursday: That the girls had met the son of the Logansport man on the trail that day, found themselves at a Norse pagan ritual and made fun of it. That, Click said, likely angered those there, who killed them.
McLeland asked Click if it was fair to say “your belief is just a theory.” Click testified that he had uncovered no direct evidence.
McLeland argued that the Logansport man had an alibi – clock out time of 2:45 p.m. at the Liberty Landfill in Buffalo, about a half-hour north of Delphi, and check-in at a fitness center in Logansport at 4:08 p.m. – that investigators say cleared him from being at the Monon High Bridge Trail when the girls were killed between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m.
Pressed by McLeland, Murphy also said the leads didn’t land on hard evidence and admitted to the prosecutor that he’d once said he thought the man in Rushville had been playing him.
The blood stain pattern expert: Major Patrick Cicero, of the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Office, gave sober, chilling testimony about the blood found at the crime scene and what he said it told about how the girls were killed.
Based on his review of crime scene photos and documentation, Cicero testified that Abby Williams was killed while lying down. He testified that Libby German was standing at some point after being cut, eventually sitting down, based on patterns of the blood found. Cicero testified that the position of Libby’s body suggested that she’d been dragged by one arm to where the killer eventually left her. How Libby was positioned, he said, was more about how she’d been moved than some sort of staging.
A defense memorandum, filed in September 2023, contended that an Ansuz rune – shaped similarly to a sort of “F,” and made of Libby German’s blood – found on a tree near the crime scene was evidence of the Odinist ritual theory.
Cicero testified Thursday that he found the mark on the tree to be akin to an upside down “L.” He said the mark, 3.4 x 7 inches, showed signs of flow after the blood wound up on the tree. Cicero said he ran tests to see how the mark got there.
Using his own blood drawn by an Indiana State Police phlebotomist – “We needed the blood right away,” Cicero said – he testified that he tried to recreate the mark using a stick and then using his fingers. Each time he found that he had to reapply the blood on the rough bark several times to come close to the safe effect.
But a 5-foot-4 test subject was able to make a similar, upside-down “L” mark with the base of her palm on her left hand, turned pinky finger up and reaching back at the tree. Cicero said Libby had blood on her hands after being cut and would have been in a similar position.
Asked by McLeland, Cicero also said he’d seen other incidents were killers tried to conceal a crime scene with sticks. He said he thought that’s what had happened in the Delphi case. Defense attorney Jennifer Jones Auger asked him if he thought it was odd that the sticks covered maybe 3% of the girls’ bodies and had been arranged in certain ways. Cicero acknowledged that it might not have been a good job of concealing the crime.
Libby German’s phone: ISP 1st Sgt. Chris Cecil testified that new tests were being run on Libby German’s phone, the one she used to capture a man walking across the Monon High Bridge and telling them to go down the hill. Cecil said technology is better now than it was in 2019, the last time it was checked for data.
Testimony Thursday also revealed that her cellphone was still working at 4:33 a.m. Feb. 14, which is more than 14 hours after the girls went missing. The phone, found at the crime scene, connected to a tower at that time and started collecting at least 14 text messages, after it had been out of service or out of range the rest of that night.
Baldwin argued that the new information about the phone poked potential holes in the Logansport man’s alibi, suggesting that the girls might have been taken somewhere out of cell range and returned the next morning.
A Kegan Kline connection: Kegan Kline, a Peru man who was behind the fake “anthony_shots” profile that had been in contact with Libby German, came up in Thursday’s hearing. McLeland is trying to keep his name out of the trial, too.
Kline 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.
ISP Detective David Vido testified that Kline had told investigators that he and his father, Tony, had been at a cemetery near the crime scene in Delphi on the day of the murders. Kline told investigators that his father had gone into the woods for an hour and came back with blood on his clothes. On the way home, Kline told investigators, they had stopped so his father could toss a cellphone and a knife into the Wabash River.
Vido said ISP spent time in August 2022 systematically searching the river. Vido said police found other cellphones, knives and firearms, but not what Kline told them would be there.
Vido said the investigation later found that Kline lied and hadn’t been at the cemetery near Delphi the way he said.
Gull took the motion under advisement, as she’d done with others this week.
Here are highlights from Tuesday’s day in court, when the court looked at a motion to dismiss and an attempt to modify Allen’s safekeeping order and move him from a state prison cell to one at the nearby Cass County Jail: “3 days of Delphi murder hearings open with accusations, move to dismiss.”
And this is from Wednesday: “ISP detective: Allen confessed ‘60-plus’ times to Delphi murders. Defense looks to toss it all.”
Also of note, on jury selection: On Wednesday, Judge Fran Gull said 600 jury questionnaires were going out in the coming week to potential jurors in Allen County. Jurors in the Delphi murder case will come from the Fort Wayne area, nearly two hours away. The court made that move in hopes of finding a pool of people who aren’t familiar with the case in ways they in Carroll County, where the story of Abby Williams and Libby German’s murders have been all-consuming for more than seven years and where many people in the community have ties to the case. Gull said jury selection will take three days, starting Oct. 14, with 100 potential jurors called at a time. Once selected, the jurors will be brought to the Delphi area and stay for the duration of what is scheduled to be a five-week trial.
About the case and the arrest: Abby Williams and Libby German, eighth-graders at Delphi Community Middle School, were killed Feb. 13, 2017, while on the town’s Monon High Bridge Trail. That day, Libby and Abby had taken advantage of a day off school and an unseasonably warm, winter afternoon to hike Delphi’s trails, taking off near the Freedom Bridge over Indiana 25/Hoosier Heartland Highway. When the girls didn’t show up that evening to meet their ride home, family and friends combed Delphi’s popular trail system, crossed an abandoned rail trestle called Monon High Bridge and brought in people to walk the woods that lined Deer Creek. The next morning, Feb. 14, 2017, a group of volunteers in a search party found the girls’ bodies, about a half-mile upstream from the Monon High Bridge.
Allen was charged in late October 2022, a big turn in a case that had gone unsolved for 5½ years and that hadn’t seen an arrest in that time. Investigators tied Allen to the scene after revisiting an interview with him in the days after the murders, when he told police he’d been on the trail that day, going to look at fish from the bridge, but had not seen the girls. Investigators say witness descriptions put Allen there. They also pointed to the discovery of an unspent bullet that they say they found near the girls’ bodies in February 2017 and that matched a handgun Allen owned, according to a probable cause affidavit made public months ago.
Court documents laid out that investigators believed Allen was the man shown in Libby German’s cellphone footage walking across the Monon High Bridge and kidnapping the girls, telling them, “Guys … down the hill,” and leading them to where their murders occurred near Deer Creek. Court documents indicate that investigators “believe they hear the sound of a gun being cycled and one of the victims mentioning ‘gun.’”
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Even money that Perry Mason or Ben Matlock bring up Odinism in front of the jury in a deliberate attempt to get a mistrial. An innocent person doesn't confess more than 60 times to a double murder.