DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A former pharmacy worker in the small Indiana community of Delphi was found guilty of murder Monday in the murders of two teenagers who disappeared during an afternoon walk.

Jurors convicted Richard Allen of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the 2017 murders of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14.

Allen was not arrested for another five years, as the case attracted enormous attention from true crime enthusiasts. His trial came after repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the Withdrawal of Allen public defenders. and his reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court.

Reporters inside the courtroom said Allen, 52, showed no reaction when the verdict was pronounced, but at one point looked at his family. Allen is scheduled to be sentenced on December 20. He could face up to 130 years in prison.

Outside the courthouse, people on the sidewalk began cheering as word of the verdict spread.

Capt. Ron Galaviz, a spokesman for the Indiana State Police, told The Associated Press that the judge’s silence order It remains in effect and he believes it will remain that way until Allen is sentenced. Allen’s attorneys left court Monday without commenting.

A special judge oversaw the case: Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, who along with the jurors came from Allen County in northeastern Indiana. The seven women and five men were kidnapped by all the trial, which began on October 18 at Delphi’s headquarters in Carroll County, the girls’ hometown of about 3,000 residents in northwest Indiana, where Allen also lived and worked.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland noted in his closing argument that Allen had repeatedly confessed to the murders, in person, by telephone and in writing. In one of the recordings played for the jury, Allen could be heard telling his wife: “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.”

McLeland also said Allen is the man seen following the teens in grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls as they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called Monon High Bridge.

“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told the jury. “He kidnapped them and then murdered them.”

McLeland said it was Allen’s voice that could be heard on the video telling the teens: ” going down the hill ″after crossing the bridge on February 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, with their throats cut, in a nearby wooded area.

An investigator testified that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens disappeared, he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie, similar clothing to what the man searched at the bridge was wearing.

McLeland said an unspent bullet was found among the teens’ bodies. “had been cycled” Allen’s .40 caliber Sig Sauer pistol. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told jurors that her analysis linked the bullet to Allen’s gun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the analysis, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples to oranges” comparison of the unused bullet with a fired one. with Allen’s gun.

Allen was arrested in October 2022. He had become a suspect after a retired state government worker who volunteered to help police in the case found documentation in September 2022 showing that Allen had contacted authorities two days after The bodies of the girls will be found. According to testimony, those documents indicated that Allen had told an officer that he had been on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls disappeared.

Allen’s defense argued that his confessions are unreliable because he was facing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day and mocked by people imprisoned with him. A psychiatrist called by the defense testified that months of isolation could make a person delusional and psychotic.

But Dr. Monica Wala, Allen’s psychologist at the Westville Correctional Facility, said Allen shared details of the crime in some of the confessions, including telling her that he cut the girls’ throats and placed tree branches over their bodies. She wrote in a report that Allen told her he abandoned his plans to rape the teenage girls when a van drove by. A man whose driveway passes under the Monon High Bridge testified that he was driving home from work in his truck at that time.

That truck, McLeland told the jury in his closing, was a detail that “only the killer would know.”

During cross-examination, Wala acknowledged that she had followed Allen’s case with interest during her personal time even while treating him and that she was a fan of the true crime genre.

Rozzi said in his closing arguments that Allen is innocent. He said no witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared. And he said no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the crime scene.

“He had every chance of running, but he didn’t run because he didn’t run,” Rozzi told jurors.

Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue before the trial that the girls were murdered. in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as the Odinists who follow a Norse pagan religion, but the judge ruled against it, saying the defense “failed to present admissible evidence” of such a connection.

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