Jury and families likely to get details on Delphi murder scene on Monday

DELPHI, Ind. — When she dispatched the jury just before noon on Saturday, Special Judge Fran Gull told the Delphi double murder panel that the prosecution’s next witness was likely to offer lengthy testimony, so she was calling it quits for the weekend.

Judge Gull told reporters Thursday that she expected there would be some “rough days” in court, so she was inclined to give jurors sometimes shorter days, sometimes longer lunch hours, to allow them to reflect on what they had heard from the witness stand, what they had seen in evidence and catch their breath before the case moved on.

Monday expects to be one of those days.

Richard Allen is accused of killing Libby German and Abby Williams below the Monon High Bridge outside of Delphi along Deer Creek on Feb. 13, 2017.

Saturday’s testimony featured Jacob Johns and Pat Brown, two community members who came out the morning after best friends Libby and Abby disappeared while walking on the bridge during a day off from school.

Johns said he found clothing belonging to one of the girls hung up on tree roots in Deer Creek minutes before Brown discovered their bodies on the far bank the day after the disappearances.

Brown choked up as he told jurors that, upon his discovery, he announced to other searchers, “We found ‘em.”

After calling police on a cell phone, Brown said he turned away from the bodies which were located just five feet behind him.

“I thought they were mannequins.”

Monday morning, jurors may hear from the first responders who arrived on the scene and will likely describe not only what they saw but what was done to preserve the location for investigators.

It’s assumed that testimony will be accompanied by the introduction of crime scene photographs into evidence.

Investigators have described the girls as possibly posed with their throats slashed and Libby disrobed and Abby wearing her clothes.

There is dispute between the prosecution and the defense as to whether sticks were specifically arrayed on the bodies, either in an attempt to disguise the site or as the result of the Nordic pagan ritual, Odinism, which has elements of blood sacrifice.

The defense has floated that second alternate theory as to the motive in the girls’ deaths, though Judge Gull has denied the attempt of Allen’s lawyers to make that argument before the jury.

Defense Attorney Andrew Baldwin, in opening statements, told jurors that he believes Bridge Guy — the man seen on a photograph captured on Libby’s cell phone — stalked the girls as they walked across the bridge at 2:13 p.m. that Monday afternoon. Bridge guy also announced, “Guys, down the hill,” forcing Libby and Abby off the south end of the bridge onto private property.

A county road, which essentially serves as a driveway for that property owner in the otherwise non-accessible location, crosses under the south end of the bridge, and that’s where Baldwin theorized the killer forced the girls into a vehicle and they were driven away. The girls’ bodies were discovered 22 hours later on the other side of Deer Creek.

Witnesses are expected to testify later that they spotted a man suspected as the killer walking along County Road 300 North, less than a hundred yards from the location of the bodies, on the afternoon when the girls disappeared. Witnesses are expected to say the man was wearing bloody or muddy clothes, as if he had just killed something or slogged across a creek.

Baldwin said, though Allen admitted to being on the bridge that day, he was gone by the time the witnesses saw the suspected killer presumably walking back to his vehicle after the killings.

Johns and Brown were proceeded to the stand by Steve Mullin, chief investigator for Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland, who described to the jury the former Delphi Police Chief as his “tech guy.”

As chief investigator, it is Mullin’s responsibility to maintain and provide all the evidence in the case.

In 2017, Mullin was the police chief in Delphi, a town of roughly 2,500 people that makes up more than 10% of the total population in Carroll County.

Even though Delphi was swamped with investigators and law enforcement volunteers in the days after the murders, and the investigation was headed up by the FBI and Indiana State Police, Mullin’s headquarters was the only location that included a DVR system in its interview room to record conversations between detectives, persons of interest and witnesses in the case.

In the early days, investigators questioned Abby’s boyfriend Logan Holder and his father Brad Holder.

During hearings in July, Allen’s defense team argued that a trio of investigators working for ISP tracked down information linking Brad Holder to the practice of Odinism, even though he provided an alibi for his whereabouts on the Monday afternoon when the girls disappeared and the next day when their bodies were found.

Spurred on by an internal ISP report written on the potential Odinism link, Allen’s defense team sought the video and audio of the Holder interviews.

Mullin testified that, during his tenure as Chief of Delphi Police, he became aware in August 2017 — six months after the murders and the Holder interviews — that the DPD DVR system was somehow engaged in a permanent record mode, either through human error or technical malfunction, and that recordings of all the interviews conducted at his headquarters were erased.

When questioned by Baldwin, Mullin admitted that the interviews could not be retrieved, nor did detectives seek to redo the interviews, nor did they attempt recreate a detailed narrative based on rudimentary notes.

When Baldwin asked if it would have been prudent to reconstruct the lost interviews as soon as the erasure of the recordings was discovered, Mullin answered that, “Hindsight being 20/20, yes.”

The defense team has told jurors there were multiple examples of misplaced evidence and infighting between ISP and the FBI.

One of those misplaced pieces of evidence was Allen’s original interview with a DNR officer the week of the killings.

Dan Dulin said he met Allen in the parking lot of a grocery store, and Allen told him he was on the bridge that day if anyone should mention his name, or, if he could provide more information to investigators.

Dulin, who is not a trained detective, wrote up a short summary of his conversation and turned it over to the investigators, including lead Carroll County Sheriff’s Detective Tony Liggett, who was elected Sheriff in November 2022.

FOX59 and CBS4 have been told that the original interview was misfiled in the case system, perhaps by an investigator who believed Allen’s name was Richard Allen Whiteman.

It was only in September or October 2022 — five-and-a-half years after the killings and long past the time when there appeared to be no public progress in the search for Abby and Libby’s murderer — that Kathy Shank, a retired government employee in Carroll County who volunteered to help run the investigative office early on, was reviewing Dulin’s file. McLeland told jurors that she came up with Allen’s original interview, which she brought to the attention of detectives.

Within weeks, investigators said they linked Allen’s .40 handgun to an unfired bullet found at the crime scene, and he was charged with the murders.

Almost immediately, Allen was incarcerated at Westville Correctional Facility, Indiana’s maximum security prison, in solitary confinement in an internal cellhouse containing the most dangerous offenders in the department of correction.

Authorities said Allen was locked away pre-trial, despite never being convicted, “for his own safety.” Then-Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby admitted he could not keep the defendant safe in his small county jail where relatives of the murdered girls might also be housed.

Six months later, according to his attorneys, Allen exhibited signs of mental stress, washing his face with toilet water, eating feces and confessing more than sixty times to his wife and mother as well as other inmates and DOC guards and the Westville warden that he had killed Libby and Abby.

McLeland told jurors that Allen knew details of the crime that only the killer knew.

Baldwin said Allen confessed to details that weren’t true.

Those confessions subsided when Allen, under the recommendation of a contract prison psychologist, was injected with Haldol, an anti-psychotic medication.

During jury selection, some potential jurors expressed empathy with a person under stress who might make a false confession.

Allen’s attorneys told the Court that their client was badgered into making false claims by other inmates and terrorized by the presence of DOC guards who wore Odinism patches on their uniforms.

Westville Warden John Galipeau, who has since been reassigned, directed the guards to remove the patches from their uniforms in September 2023, though IDOC has refused FOX59 and CBS4’s requests for information on the department’s uniform policy or the decision to force the removal of the Odinism adornments.

During jury selection, McLeland asked jurors what their reaction would be to a prosecution that included no DNA or murder weapon evidence.

Baldwin told jurors the State has no DNA or eyewitness who can positively identify Allen as the killer.

During an unexpected twist during jury selection, Baldwin revealed for the first time that a strand of hair was found in Abby’s hand at the scene of the murder and that a DNA test concluded it didn’t come from Allen.

In his opening statement, Baldwin told jurors that was an example of the disarray of the State’s investigation. He added that no DNA tests were conducted on that strand, which he said likely came back to a female in the German family, until he raised the issue in court earlier this week.

Judge Gull dealt the defense a setback Friday when she ruled that a pair of ISP sketches of potential suspects or persons of interest derived from the descriptions of witnesses two years apart could not be shown to the jury.

The defense contends those sketches don’t resemble their client.

Prosecutor McLeland agreed, arguing that the sketches were never intended to portray the killer and were only an “investigative tool,” and their inclusion as the evidence would confuse the jury.

Upon the release of a sketch of a man with dark hair in his early 20s in April 2019, ISP Superintendent Doug Carter said “the result of the new information and intelligence over time leads us to believe the sketch is the person responsible for the murders of these two little girls.”

Judge Gull agreed and ruled the sketches out.

ISP Lt. Jerry Holeman, the lead investigator, during a pre-trial hearing this summer testified that he believed the sketches — one portraying an older man in his 40s, the second a man a generation younger — were both of the same person years apart.

“The state police were major movers in this this investigation,” said Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings, who is not connected to the trial. “I’ve done a number of cases with the Indiana State Police, and the resources they have, they have top notch investigators. They have resources no local community can put together, you have no idea how sophisticated some of their techniques are.

“They are outstanding, and they will have had everything that’s available in terms of evidence that’s available they’ve been gathering, the Indiana State Police investigative unit will have gotten it. They’re outstanding and second to none.”

Indianapolis Defense Attorney John Tompkins, who is likewise not affiliated with the case, told FOX59 and CBS4 that, in the coming week, the strength or the weakness of the State’s case will start to become evident.

“I think we’ll probably start getting into the real meat and potatoes of the State’s case,” he said. “They are going to start bringing in the people to set up the actual timeline of the day. To show how they can prove where the girls were and when they were there. They’ll start getting in the evidence of phones. They’ll start getting in the evidence of the forensics and the analysis of the recovered rounds.”

Tompkins said the defense doesn’t need to score a unanimous Not Guilty verdict to claim a partial victory.

“They are clearly not trying to disprove the State’s case. They will probably be in a position at the end to say ‘Yes, somebody did exactly what the State said, but we’ve shown you it wasn’t Mr. Allen, because based on the times that he was in certain places and the times he was gone from the area of the bridge, he could not have been the person who did it.’”

The trial is expected to last until mid-November. FOX59 and CBS4 will have crews in Delphi on Monday morning when the trial resumes.

For the latest news, weather, sports, and streaming video, head to Eyewitness News (WEHT/WTVW).