State responds to Richard Allen’s appeal in Delphi murders of Abby and Libby
Attorney General Rokita: ‘We are fighting to uphold justice for Abby and Libby’
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STATE RESPONDS TO RICHARD ALLEN’S APPEAL IN DELPHI MURDERS OF ABBY AND LIBBY
The state attorney general argued in court documents filed Wednesday that the Indiana Court of Appeals should stand by a jury’s 2024 conviction of Richard Allen, a 52-year-old Delphi man, for the 2017 murders of Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German.
“Today, our appeals team filed a brief firmly defending Richard Allen’s convictions for the brutal murders of two young Hoosier girls,” Attorney General Todd Rokita said in a statement Wednesday afternoon. “We are fighting to uphold justice for Abby and Libby, standing with their families and every Hoosier who demands accountability and closure for this horrific crime.”
Attorneys leading an appeal for Allen filed a 113-page brief in December, arguing that the court made a series of errors during and leading up his trial that tamped down evidence Allen’s defense team wanted to offer.
The brief filed by Allen’s attorneys, Stacy Uliana and Mark Leeman, argued that Judge Fran Gull erred in several ways, including by allowing “false statements and reckless omissions” by investigators when they asked a county judge for a warrant to search Allen’s Delphi home in the weeks leading up to his October 2022 arrest. They also argued that Gull should not have allowed the jury to hear a series of statements Allen made that he was the killer, ignoring that the admissions were made “while gravely ill” and broken by months of “unprecedented pretrial solitary confinement” in an Indiana prison.
The state’s 94-page response was posted on the Indiana Court of Appeals docket Wednesday morning. No hearings have been set in the case beyond that.
Allen was convicted in November 2024 after a trial that lasted nearly five weeks, including selection of a jury from Allen County due to the high-profile coverage of a case that took 5½ years to produce an arrest.
Gull, an Allen County Superior Court judge appointed to the case shortly after Allen’s arrest, sentenced him in December 2024 to 130 years in prison.
Abby, 13, and Libby, 14, each eighth-graders 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 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.
Allen’s defense team was frustrated during the trial and by a series of pre-trial rulings by Gull that they said hamstrung the case.
On the warrant to search Allen’s home
The state’s response filed Wednesday called Allen’s argument that Gull should have held a hearing on a pretrial motion to consider whether investigators offered false statements to get a search warrant from his home was “meritless.”
