Delphi trial: Jurors reviewed murder evidence, missteps during 2nd week in court

DELPHI, Ind. — It has taken more than seven years for prosecutors to bring evidence regarding the murders of Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, before a jury.

For eight days, seven women and five men have sat in the jury box of a Carroll County courtroom and listened to the accounts of family members, witnesses, experts and police officers in the State’s pursuit of Richard Allen, 52.

They’ve been told that for five-and-a-half years, after a burst of tips and slight initial progress, the investigation into the murders went cold, save for video captured on Libby’s cell phone of Bridge Guy, the suspected killer, stalking the girls on the Monon High Bridge and then ordering them, “Guys…down the hill,” toward the south bank of Deer Creek followed the next day, February 14, 2017, with the discovery of the bodies and a single unfired bullet buried nose first into the ground at the crime scene, at least twenty yards up the opposite creek bank on private property.

Dr. Roland Kohr, the pathologist who conducted the autopsies, said both girls died of deep lacerations to their necks, but there were no signs of sexual assault injury.

Though a pair of sketches were generated as the result of witness descriptions of men — one middle aged, the other significantly younger — who were spotted on the nature trail leading up to the bridge that day, investigators remain stymied in their search for the alleged killer.

The sketches were ruled out of the trial by Special Judge Fran Gull, who agreed with Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland that, since the renditions did not resemble Allen, inclusion in the evidence could only serve to confuse jurors, which is the point of the defense team’s attempt to introduce them as evidence. A reference to the sketches by a woman on the witness stand last week, however, may open the door to reconsider the judge’s ruling.

After years of a seemingly cold investigation, despite Indiana State Police assurances the case was still active, on September 21, 2022, Kathy Shank, a volunteer who was tasked with scanning bankers boxes full of files in a central investigative data base, pulled open the drawer of a desk in a soon-to-be abandoned office and discovered a file that contained an initial tip sheet from February of 2017, just a couple days after the murders, in which a man listed as Rick Allen Whiteman called in to self-report that he was on the bridge that day if his name should come up or if investigators wanted to ask him questions.

On the tip sheet, someone had written the word, “Cleared.”

Shank testified that she read the report and immediately identified a clerical error that misinterpreted Allen’s home address of Whiteman Drive as his last name.

The retired government employee took the file to Chief Deputy Tony Liggett of the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department, who was running for sheriff in the upcoming election less than two months away, and he immediately began an investigation into Allen, first confirming that he drove a black 2016 Ford Focus.

A security camera captured the image of a car resembling Allen’s vehicle parked at a business along County Road 300 North which runs along the border of the private property where the bodies were found.

Sarah Carbaugh told jurors she saw Bridge Guy walking along that road covered with mud as if he had fallen in the creek or down the hill approximately 90 minutes after investigators say the girls were killed.

Carbaugh did not say Allen resembled Bridge Guy, and even though the defendant is 5-foot-4 and approximately 145 pounds, neither the prosecution nor the defense asked the witness to describe the size of the man she saw.

Indiana Department of Natural Resources Officer Dan Dulin received the original Rick Allen Whiteman tip to follow up on on February 16, 2017, two days after the bodies were discovered and more than five years before the misfiled original report would be discovered.

Dulin testified that he interviewed Allen in the parking lot of a grocery store after unsuccessful attempts to meet him at his home or Delphi Police headquarters.

The conservation officer said Allen told him he was on the bridge trail between 1 and 3 p.m. on Feb. 13 but later revised that timeline to 1:30 to 3:30 p.m.

Dulin said he did not find any reason to not believe Allen’s story that he had parked his car near County Road 300 North, that he spotted three young women walking on the trail, that he was focused on his cellphone and reading a stock ticker during his walk to the bridge and, upon his arrival, watched fish in the water sixty feet below.

Allen showed Dulin the phone he was carrying, and the officer wrote down its model and other identifying information.

Dulin told jurors he wrote up his report and submitted it to Unified Command which included the Delphi Police, the Carroll County Sheriff, Indiana State Police and the FBI as well as law enforcement officers from around the state.

His report remained unexamined in the file for more than five years.

Upon a call from investigators in the fall of 2022, Dulin said he plugged Allen’s name into the DNR database and discovered that, upon renewal of his fishing license six weeks after the killings, Allen changed the height on his permit from 5-foot-4 to 5-foot-6, which the officer told jurors he found “odd.”

On October 13, 2022, Ligget and former Delphi Police Chief Steve Mullin, who had retired to become Chief Investigator for the Carroll County Prosecutor, called Allen in to DPD headquarters for an interview, advised him of his Miranda Rights to remain silent and have an attorney present during questioning, showed him the photograph of Bridge Guy and told Allen he was a suspect in the girls’ murders.

Allen reportedly changed the timeline of his walk along the High Bridge Trail that day to noon to 1:30 p.m. and left the interview after denying he was the killer.

Hours later, Indiana state troopers conducted a search warrant on Allen’s Whiteman Drive home, discovering several large knives, more than two dozen cellphones and pagers, a .40 caliber Sig Sauer semi-automatic handgun and an unspent bullet.

Missing during the search was the cellphone Allen showed DNR Officer Dulin during his initial interview in 2017.

As Allen sat in a detective’s car in the driveway during the search, ISP Sergeant Jerry Holeman, since promoted to lieutenant, told Allen that, if investigators damaged his home during the search, there would be forms available to seek State compensation.

Holeman told jurors that Allen said “it doesn’t matter” in response to his statement. Holeman also claimed Allen told him “it’s over” twice.

Holeman testified he didn’t know what Allen’s comment meant until he conducted a further interview two weeks later.

A former Indiana State Police forensics firearm examiner, Melissa Oberg, told jurors that she identified three distinct scratches on the base of the .40 caliber Winchester Smith & Wesson unfired bullet that was found at the crime scene, and after six unsuccessful attempts to replicate those scratches on test bullets dry cycled through Allen’s gun at the crime lab, she resorted to firing four bullets from the gun into a tank of water, and two of those rounds, though potentially altered by the heat and pressure of the firing process, did display ejection marks similar to the unfired cartridge discovered near the bodies.

Police theorize that Allen, as Bridge Guy, may have cycled one round into the chamber of his handgun when first encountering Libby and Abby at the south end of the Monon High Bridge, as recorded on Libby’s cellphone video, and later ejected that bullet at the crime scene, perhaps to scare his victims.

Based on the bullet evidence and witness accounts, investigators called Allen in for one last interview at state police’s Lafayette post on Oct. 26, 2022, as Holeman told jurors it was standard procedure to lie to a suspect during interrogation, even though he told Allen, “That’s not ethical.”

Holeman said Allen denied more than 20 times that he had killed Abby and Libby, even after the detective admitted he told Allen, falsely, that witnesses had identified him on the bridge and that experts had determined his voice matched that of Bridge Guy on Libby’s phone.

Experts have told FOX59 and CBS4 that analysts need to examine approximately 20 words in order to make such a comparison.

Bridge Guy is heard saying, “Guys … down the hill,” as Libby responds, “There’s no path here,” or “See, the trail ends here,” or “We got to go down here.”

The audio, played twice for jurors, is open to interpretation, as is Sheriff Liggett’s claim, which was disregarded by the judge, that Bridge Guy is heard saying, “This be a gun.”

The detective said that, while he reminded Allen at the start of the Oct. 26, 2022, interview about his Miranda Rights given two weeks before, that admonition was not captured on video because “we had a lot of technical difficulties” throughout the investigation.

Holeman also admitted to jurors that he had misrepresented Oberg’s firearms match findings to other investigators, he did not record Allen’s conversations in his car the day of the search warrant, even though he had received interrogation and body language training in interviewing subjects, “I’m not expert at it,” did not view crucial security video of the black car near the murder scene, didn’t know the names of specific witnesses and believed at one time that more than one suspect was involved in the slayings.

Under cross examination, Holeman also said that investigators failed to submit the Bridge Guy video to experts to determine, based on other visible evidence, the height of the suspect due to cost and time in developing the case but also due to the potential error rate of two inches in their anticipated findings.

Holeman admitted that blood-stained sticks that covered the girls’ bodies were left behind by the original crime scene investigators. They were retrieved two days later after the owner of the property, Ron Logan, had escorted TV news crews down to view the site

Holeman also confirmed state police didn’t attempt to positively identify a strand of hair, likely from the German family, found in Abby’s hand until earlier this month.

The investigator agreed with Defense Attorney Andrew Baldwin that mistakes have been made during the investigation.

Holeman also revealed, for the first time, that investigators believe Allen, “may have heard somebody” who interrupted his attack on the girls.

Investigators contend Allen displayed knowledge of specific facts that only the killer would know.

Holeman also told the court he told Allen “you realize the death penalty is on the table” during an interview. Holeman said Allen told him, “I don’t care. Kill me. I want to die anyway.”

It was only then that Holeman said he decided to arrest Allen.

In the coming week, jurors will likely hear details about Allen’s two-year-long, pre-trial incarceration in solitary confinement in a pair of Indiana maximum security prisons, more than 60 alleged confessions and his deteriorating mental condition.

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