A former US pharmacy worker in the small Indiana community of Delphi has been found guilty of murder in the killings of two teenage girls who vanished during an afternoon hike.
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 killings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German.
Allen wasn’t arrested for five more years, while the case drew outsized attention from true-crime enthusiasts.
READ MORE: ‘Hero’ killed when truck smashed into kindergarten revealed
His trial followed repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court.
Reporters inside the courtroom said Allen, 52, showed no reaction as the verdict was delivered, but he looked back at his family at one point.
Allen is scheduled to be sentenced on December 20.
He could face up to 130 years in prison.
A crowd appeared outside the courthouse as word of the verdict spread, and people on the sidewalk began to cheer when a handful of people spilled outside.
Indiana State Police spokesman Captain Ron Galaviz told The Associated Press that the judge’s gag order remains in place and he believes it will until Allen is sentenced.
Allen’s lawyers left the courthouse Monday without making statements.
A special judge oversaw the case — Superior Court Judge Fran Gull who along with the jurors, came from north-eastern Indiana’s Allen County.
The seven women and five men were sequestered throughout the trial, which began October 18 in the Carroll County seat of Delphi, the girls’ hometown of about 3000 residents in northwest Indiana where Allen also lived and worked.
READ MORE: ‘Read the tea leaves’: When will the next federal election be held?
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland noted in his closing argument that Allen had repeatedly confessed to the killings — in person, on the phone and in writing.
In one of the recordings he replayed 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 a grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls as they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge.
“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors.
“He kidnapped them and later murdered them.”
McLeland said it was Allen’s voice could be heard on the video telling the teens, ” Down the hill ″ after they had crossed the bridge on February 13, 2017.
Their bodies were found the next day, their throats cut, in a nearby wooded area.
READ MORE: High inflation helped Trump win the White House. He could be about to make it even worse
An investigator testified that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens vanished, he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — clothing similar to what the man recorded on the bridge wore.
McLeland said an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun.
An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury her analysis tied the round to Allen’s handgun.
But a firearms expert called by the defence questioned the state police bullet analysis, and attorney Bradley Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators had made an “apples to oranges” comparison of the unspent round to one fired from 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 found paperwork in September 2022 showing that Allen had contacted authorities two days after their bodies were found.
READ MORE: What happens now US election day is over? All the key dates you need to know about
That paperwork indicated that Allen had told an officer he had been on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls went missing, according to testimony.
Allen’s defence argued that Allen’s confessions are unreliable because he was facing a severe mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked up in isolation, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by people incarcerated with him.
A psychiatrist called by the defence testified that months in solitary confinement could make a person delirious and psychotic.
Allen’s psychologist at the Westville Correctional Facility said Allen told her he had planned to rape the teens but did not do so after a van passed nearby.
A man whose driveway passes under the Monon High Bridge said he was driving home from work in his van around that time.
That van, McLeland told jurors in his closing, was a detail “only the killer would know”.
Allen’s prison psychologist, Dr Monica Wala, testified that he provided details of the crime in some of the confessions, including telling her he slashed the girls’ throats and put tree branches over their bodies.
READ MORE: Emperor penguin spotted on Australian shores for first time
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 witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or the bridge the afternoon the girls went missing.
And he said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence links Allen to the murder scene.
“He had every chance to run, but he did not because he didn’t do it,” Rozzi told the jurors.
Before the trial began, Allen’s lawyers had sought to argue that the girls were killed in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as the Odinists who follow a pagan Norse religion, but the judge ruled against that, saying the defence “failed to produce admissible evidence” of such a connection.