INDIANAPOLIS — The fate of an Indiana man charged with murder in 2017 murders of two teenagers who disappeared during an afternoon walk near his small hometown was left in the hands of a jury Thursday.

Richard Allen, 52, faces two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the slayings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14. He could be sentenced to up to 130 years. of prison if convicted on all charges.

The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weeklong murder trial. Deliberations ended after about two hours and will resume Friday morning.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors that Allen is the man seen in grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge just before they disappeared. on February 13, 2017.

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

He noted 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.”

Allen’s defense cast doubt on the confessions and presented witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that Allen was delusional and psychotic after months in solitary confinement.

Attorney Bradley Rozzi closed by saying Allen is innocent.

No witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or on the bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared, he said. No fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the crime scene, Rozzi said.

And for more than five years after the teens’ deaths, Allen still lived in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

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

The case has attracted enormous attention from true crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, some related to a leak of evidence, the Withdrawal of Allen public defenders. and his reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. It has also been the subject of a gag order.

The 12 jurors along with their alternates were sequestered throughout the the trial, which began on October 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwest Indiana town where Allen also lived and worked as a pharmacy technician. A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, along with the jurors, came from Allen County in northeastern Indiana.

In his closing argument, McLeland summarized the evidence that an unspent bullet found among the teens’ bodies “had been cycled” Allen’s .40 caliber Sig Sauer pistol. A firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police analysis, and Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples to oranges” comparison of the unused bullet with one. shot with Allen’s gun.

The prosecutor also said that a state trooper who had listened to more than 700 phone calls made by Allen had identified Allen’s voice on German’s cell phone video telling the teens: ” going down the hill ″after crossing an abandoned railroad trestle called Monon High Bridge. McLeland showed the jury a digitally enhanced version of the cellphone video and said Allen was the man recorded walking behind Williams.

McLeland said Allen, armed with a gun, forced the youths off the road and had planned to rape them before a passing pickup truck caused him to change his plans. Gruesome crime scene photographs showed how the girls were found with their throats slit the next day, about a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.

The defense questioned the state’s timeline with witnesses, including a digital forensics expert, who said headphones or an auxiliary cable were connected to Libby’s cell phone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared, raising questions about the investigators’ belief that the girls were killed and abandoned in the woods around 2:32 p.m. that day.

Attorney Andrew Baldwin argued during the trial that one or more people must have kidnapped the teens and returned them early the next day to the location where they were found.

Prosecutors again directed the jury to Allen’s own words, in confessions he made to his mother and wife and also to a prison psychologist, corrections officials and the former warden of the Westville Correctional Facility, who said Allen wrote to him claiming to have killed the girls with a box cutter which he later discarded.

Prosecutors said Allen’s incriminating statements contained information that only the killer could know.

Defense attorneys argued that Allen’s 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 supported the argument, testifying that months of solitary confinement could cause a person to become delusional and psychotic.

Before the trial began, Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue 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.