The Delphi Murders (Update #2)

We have learned more information about the update in the Delphi Murders. In particular, about the alleged killer, Richard Allen…

The other update today comes from another story that had a recent update, that of the Delphi Murders in Indiana.

If you recall, in that case, 50-year-old Richard Allen was arrested in the waning days of October, a little over one month ago. Despite having lived in the area for some time - and having been present in the area of the crime scene when Abigail Williams and Liberty German were murdered - Allen was not suspected in the crime until recently. In this update, we'll go over how exactly that happened... the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Since his arrest, though, many details about Richard Allen's involvement in this crime have remained closely guarded by public officials in Carroll County, such as what led police to suspect him in the first place, and what new evidence or leads had spurred on his arrest.

Well, this past week, the probable cause affidavit from his arrest was finally released to the public, shining a light on what led to this high-profile arrest more than five years after the murders of Libby and Abby...

As recounted in my original episode on this case, on February 13th, 2017, 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German were dropped by the latter's older sister on County Road 300 North, east of the Hoosier Heartland Highway. There, they were walking along a rural hiking trail just outside of Delphi, Indiana, where they uploaded pictures of them on social media for a little while... before ending abruptly that afternoon. They were supposed to be picked up by family members a little while later, but never showed up.

In the hours to come, a search effort would fail to locate them. Because of the darkness, the search efforts were called off, but resumed again the following morning. The girls' bodies were discovered in an isolated area early the following morning, February 14th.

The case was heavily publicized by public officials and the media, with a lot of the exposure centered around video and audio taken from one of the girl's cell phones. It seemed like, in some of their final moments, they had the presence-of-mind to record their killer before being assaulted, and the footage revealed him to be a middle-aged-looking man wearing a dark jacket and blue jeans. If you recall, there was even a snippet of audio revealing this individual's voice.

Despite that, though, the case remained unsolved for over five years, with speculation running amok on who had done it. On websites like Reddit and Websleuths, multiple suspects were bandied about like trading cards, with anyone that had a passing resemblance to the offender rumored to be "Bridge Guy," the guy recorded by Abby and Libby as they walked along the Monon High Bridge on February 13th, 2017.

The case remained frustratingly unsolved until just last month, October 2022, when police announced the arrest of 50-year-old Richard Allen, a Delphi native that worked at the local CVS. Unlike all of the other alleged suspects, Allen had never been on the radar of investigators or journalists, despite what seem to have been some glaring warning signs... which seem painfully obvious in retrospect.

This week, on Tuesday, November 29th, the probable cause affidavit that resulted in the arrest of Richard Allen was finally unsealed by a county court.

In it, it was revealed that Allen had come forward to police shortly after the murders, volunteering information about himself. He said that he'd been on the hiking trail that the two murdered girls had been on, at around the same time that they'd originally gone missing. He claimed that he'd seen some girls about their age on a trail east of the Freedom Bridge, and had even walking along the Monon High Bridge, the now-infamous bridge where the footage of the killer had been recorded by the girls before their death.

Shockingly, Allen had also claimed to have been wearing jeans and a dark Carhartt jacket that day... the same outfit that the killer had been recorded wearing in the footage recovered from the girls' cell phone.

Yet, for some reason, this information was forgotten about, filed away as irrelevant almost as soon as it'd been documented. More on that later.

Also released in the probable cause affidavit was physical evidence linking Richard Allen to the crime scene, in the form of a .40-caliber round, discovered in between the bodies of the two girls. The round was apparently unfired, but still linked to Allen's pistol, a .40-caliber Sig Sauer, Model P226, which he had owned since 2001 and was still in his possession at the time of his arrest.

The fact that the round was unfired is a little odd, but not really that unusual. To me, this indicates that he likely had a round chambered, and then likely cocked the gun for dramatic effect; likely in an effort to scare or intimidate the two girls, and maybe get them to comply with his demands. In doing so, he would have expelled the chambered round, as another entered the chamber. It's also possible that the gun may have jammed, or it may have been a faulty round. Regardless, we know at one point that the round was in Allen's pistol, and it somehow ended up on the ground between two murder victims.

Whenever a round - or a bullet, in popular vernacular - enters the chamber of a gun, the casing is left with an impression. It's almost like a gun's fingerprint, which links it to the firearm that fired it.

So... while a smoking gun might be the literal opposite of an unspent round, I think the metaphor still applies here.

Police have never revealed the cause of death in Abby or Libby's case, only describing it in various terms such as "gruesome" or "sadistic," so it remains unknown whether or not either of them had been shot. However, in the video that they recorded before their deaths - the same one that captured some footage of their killer - one of the girls can be heard saying "gun," implying that the offender at least approached them with one.

Perhaps Richard Allen tried to shoot the two girls, the gun jammed, and then he ended up using a knife to actually kill them? It's a grisly thought, but one that seems realistic. During the search of Allen's home, investigators reportedly seized his gun and multiple knives.

It was also revealed in the affidavit that a witness reported seeing a man matching Allen's description leaving the area of the bridge just before 4:00 PM, roughly two hours after the girls had arrived. The man she described was wearing a blue-colored jacket and blue jeans, and appeared to have been covered in mud and blood; the woman described him as looking like he'd gotten into a fight.

During his original police interview, Allen reportedly told police that he'd been out there in the area of the high bridge for around two hours, between 1:30 and 3:30 PM, the same time period that the two girls had arrived and subsequently gone missing. The witness reported seeing someone like him leaving the area of the crime scene, covered in mud and blood, approximately 90 minutes later. What he may have done in that time, we can only guess at, as the details of the crime scene remain unknown to the public.

If you recall in my original episode on the case from 2019, police released statements claiming that they were looking for a vehicle that had been seen parked at a nearby building (which had previously been a CPS facility, but wasn't in-use at the time). Well, the affidavit reveals that another witness told police she had seen a suspicious vehicle parked obnoxiously close to the old CPS building, which:

"... appeared as though it was backed in as to conceal the license plate."

This vehicle reportedly matched the description of one of two vehicles Allen owned at the time of the murders. At the time of his original police interview, Allen had admitted to parking there while he was walking along the trial.

So... what the hell happened?

When all of this information is laid out for the world to see, it makes it plainly obvious that Richard Allen should have been a primary suspect in the case from the very beginning. Per his own volunteered information, he was one of the few people near the crime scene when the murders happened (and was the only male presence along the trail, mind you), and not only happened to look exactly like the offender recorded on the girl's cell phone, but was wearing an outfit identical to the offender.

That's not even getting into the physical evidence or witness statements, which make the case against him sound even more damning.

To me, at least, it seems like Richard Allen should have been suspect number one. Yet, he came forward to give some information, was briefly interviewed by detectives just once, and then... just immediately forgotten about. Whatever happened here was an egregious oversight, in a case with national attention, which ABC News contributor Brad Garrett summed up rather well:

"In a small town, in a place where there's a small amount of traffic on this abandoned railroad bridge... your suspect pool is fairly small."

Despite all of this information, police didn't suspect Richard Allen for over five years. Let that sink in. Think about what he other crimes he might have been able to commit - what other children he may have thought about hurting - that he just never got around to out of sheer luck... and all because investigators just, kinda forgot about him.

Some other podcasts are alleging that this is due to an FBI clerical error, but to me, that just sounds like a total cop-out to try and steer suspicion away from the people in charge of this investigation... who had all of this information available to them back in 2017, but either forgot about it or got tunnel vision on other suspects or something.

The sad thing is that roughly half of all murders go unsolved. I know that sounds crazy, but it's not. Despite the advancements of crime-fighting technology, the closure rate for homicide cases in America is currently at its lowest in decades, and this isn't due to a vast increase in murders - while that number did tick up slightly during the pandemic, other violent crimes remained pretty static, and it's basically normalized now - but due to police agencies choosing how to spend their resources. Most police agencies have incredibly few homicide investigators, and for that reason, those who do investigate homicides are often overworked, having to pick and choose the cases they spend their time on carefully.

Of course, murder is a really hard crime to solve; especially in cases like this, where the killer had basically no connection to the victims beforehand. But in this case, investigators had everything they needed shortly after the murders happened: they had Allen's name and face, his description from multiple witnesses, the footage and audio from the girl's cell phone, the circumstantial evidence, Allen putting himself at the crime scene at the time of the murders... but they did nothing with it.

Hell, according to the numerous witness statements in the probable cause affidavit, among the people that were in the area of the crime scene, Richard Allen was the only known male figure. Yet, police never caught onto the fact that he might have been their killer.

In the affidavit, it was revealed that investigators started recently looking at their old tips, and picked up Richard Allen where they'd left him more than five years prior. When they did more than a cursory investigation into him, they finally discovered that all of the pieces fit... but this was after five years. In that time, they'd dedicated entire press conferences to different leads they were working on at the time, when they had this guy in their original notes just waiting to be discovered. It's honestly baffling.

To me, this update reveals some serious ineptitude on behalf of the investigators handling this case, who had all of this information available to them for five years and did nothing with it.

I get that solving homicides is hard work. I've never done it, but I've spoken to many of those who do. It's a hard job and I'm not critiquing the effort that investigators put into their profession, but at the same time, we expect them to put in that work and get results. It's literally what keeps society from falling apart; if we don't have faith in our institutions, then what do we have?

Sadly, events like this encourage me to lose a tiny bit of faith in those institutions. Sure, yeah, at the end of the day they got their guy, but he had more than five years to enjoy the freedoms that Abby and Libby were deprived of, continuing to live in the same town as their family members and friends with no one the wiser. If Richard Allen had the presence of mind, he could have used those five years to get rid of evidence and/or disappear, making this case truly unsolvable. Yet it's by a stroke of absolute luck that he seems to be every bit as dumb as he is evil.

I'm sorry for ranting, but everything about this update just pisses me off. The answers were right in front of us the entire time, but the people we trust to figure it out failed at their jobs for more than half-a-decade. A killer seemingly just slipped through the cracks and didn't even have to hide, he just lived out his life in plain sight for five years.

Despite the case against Richard Allen seeming to pick up some serious steam, and him being the only person charged or alleged to have committed the crime, Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland recently said in court that he had:

"... good reason to believe that Richard Allen is not the only actor in this heinous crime."

Maybe this is something vaguely threatening meant to indicate that certain people likely knew about Allen's involvement and said nothing, but maybe it's more than that. For months, suspicion swirled around a man named Kegan Kline, who was accused of chatting with the two victims through social media, using a fake persona he had adopted called "Anthony_shots."

Investigators dedicated an untold amount of resources looking into Kline and he was ultimately charged with possession of child pornography, but there's been a lot of online speculation about possible acquaintances of Kegan Kline that were also involved in sharing his social media account to talk to or groom underage girls. Maybe there's a connection there? After all, we don't know what brought Richard Allen to the high bridge that afternoon, and if he had been waiting to attack the two girls, or if he was just an opportunistic killer that saw an opportunity. That is something we'll just have to wait and learn in the future, as his trial approaches.

The next court session for Richard Allen is scheduled for January 13th, 2023. Like the Toyah Cordingley story, this is one that I'll be keeping a careful eye on moving forward, but I likely won't be updating it regularly. Cases like this are often plodding and move at a glacial pace, so if you have an interest in keeping tabs on it, I encourage you to do just that. However, I will try and release more updates in the case should any major revelations break or anything like that.

I hope you all stay safe, and I will talk to you later.