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In the Delphi murders, Richard Allen and the defense team make their case

Online Niel November 8, 2024

DELPHI, Ind. ― At 9:07 a.m. Wednesday, just after jurors in Richard Allen’s double-murder trial filed into a downtown Delphi courtroom to begin the day’s proceedings, Special Judge Frances Gull asked the defense to call their next witness.

Instead, Bradley Rozzi uttered three words that caught prosecutors off guard: “The defense is resting.”

Allen’s defense attorneys rested their case after less than a week of testimony, a sign that the long-awaited trial may have a resolution sooner than expected. Closing arguments will begin on Thursday.

Legal experts who have followed the case say Allen’s lawyers were hurt by Gull’s decision to bar them from presenting a key part of their defense – that the real killers are a group of Odinists who killed. Abigail “Abby” Williams and Liberty “Libby” German during a bloody ritual in the forest. But, experts say, the defense team also managed to significantly challenge some of the prosecution’s strongest evidence against Allen, calling experts with the credentials to rebut critical testimony from state witnesses.

“I think they did an excellent job of showing two main points of their defense,” said John Tompkins, an Indianapolis defense attorney who prosecuted the case. “One of them was that Mr. Allen’s state of mind when these purported confessions and pleas … are proven unreliable.”

The other, Tompkins said, is a forensic analysis of Libby’s phone data, which revealed new information about what may have happened to the girls in the hours after they disappeared from the Monon High Bridge trail on the 13 February 2017.

These testimonies it happened on tuesday. Insulation expert Stuart Grassian, he told the jurors that Allen’s bizarre behavior and mental state while at Westville Correctional Center were “perfectly consistent” with the effects of prolonged confinement. The Massachusetts psychiatrist’s testimony was intended to discredit dozens of confessions Allen did so at Westville, where he was held in solitary confinement for a little more than a year, and to support the defense’s argument that a serious mental health crisis caused him to falsely testify.

Later that day, Stacy Eldridge, a digital forensics expert employed by the defense, he told the jurors that a headphone jack was plugged into Libby’s phone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared. The only explanation he could think of, Eldridge testified, was that someone was with the girls from 5:45 p.m. until about 10:30 p.m., when prosecutors said their bodies had already been lying near Deer Creek for hours. Until then, defense attorney Andrew Baldwin he said in his opening remarksAllen had long since left the trail and was already home.

“I think they did everything they could. The experts they brought in were very credible experts,” Indiana University professor Jody Madeira said, referring to Eric Warren, a forensics consultant from Tennessee who raised questions about a Indiana State Police Examiner’s Findings which linked Allen’s gun to an unexpended round found between the girls’ bodies.

Madeira also said Grassian proved to be a “sophisticated” expert whose testimony went a long way toward convincing jurors that Allen’s confessions were unreliable.

“I think it largely depends on which experts the jurors find most credible,” Madeira said. “They have what the prosecution says and they have an alternative.”

Allen is on trial for two counts of murder and two counts of murder while abducting the girls. Prosecutors alleged he followed Abby and Libby onto the Monon High Bridge, threatened them with a gun and forced them into the woods, where he killed them by slitting their throats.

Defense attorneys countered that Allen is an innocent man who was caught up in a botched investigation and whose already fragile mental health escalated to psychosis after months of solitary confinement. They presented an alternative theory which The Odinistsmembers of a Nordic pagan religion hijacked by white nationalists, killed the teenagers during a sacrificial ritual.

But Gull has repeatedly ruled that lawyers have failed to present admissible evidence related to Odinism. That has hampered the defense, Madeira said, because even though they can point to alleged serious mistakes and misconduct during the investigation and provide jurors with alternative expert testimony, they can’t give them a full picture of what they believe happened.

“In other words,” Madeira said, “I can answer the what, but not the how.”

Absent the ability to present most of their case, the lawyers focused on their position that Allen was suffering from an actual mental health crisis when he confessed to the murders.

They also called a neuropsychologist who testified that Allen, contrary to the testimony of his Westville therapist, was not engaging in psychotic behavior. They he showed the jurors hours of silent footage of Allen’s life in prison. And they called Allen’s half-sister and daughter who testified he never molested any of them—testimony intended to prove that Allen’s psychosis caused him to confess to things he never did, such as molesting family members.

Tompkins, the Indianapolis defense attorney, said hearing from Allen’s family members, albeit briefly, allowed jurors to “relate to the person sitting at the defense table.”

“It’s the people who know him best,” Tompkins said. Having family members testify was “a very effective way to … show that the reality of people who know him is supported by the science of people who have studied the conditions he was in.”

After the defense rested Wednesday morning, prosecutors call witnesses to undermine the terrible conditions of incarceration that Allen’s lawyers presented to jurors and to establish that Allen’s psychosis was not consistent.

Brian Harshmanthe Indiana State Police commander who listened to hundreds of Allen’s calls from prison, testified that Allen had been in solitary confinement for much of the past two years since his arrest. The implication of Harshman’s testimony was that Allen, except for three months in 2023, was largely stable.

At Westville, he was allowed to have fun and had the ability to communicate with his cell neighbors, Harshman said. Conditions of incarceration were similar to Wabash Valley Correctional Centerwhere he was transferred after about a year to Westville. At the Cass County Jail, where he is being held pending his trial, he has a small room and a table.

The day’s more critical testimony came from Dr. John Martin, a Westville psychiatrist who saw Allen several times between April 2023 and June 2023. Martin said he saw signs of psychosis on April 13, 2023, when Allen was found lying empty in his cell with feces smeared on his body. But Allen gradually improved after being injected with antipsychotic drugs.

Martin’s testimony focused on one key date: June 20, 2023.

That day, he told jurors, he saw no evidence of psychosis from Allen and decided to stop the medication. And during a meeting with Allen – in a moment of apparent sanity – he, again, admitted responsibility for killing the girls.

“That day, he told me,” Martin testified, “‘I’d like to apologize to the families of Abby and Libby.’

But during cross-examination, Rozzi played a video of Allen that was shot that same day.

Allen sat motionless while strapped into a wheelchair during a medical exam. Dressed in a white T-shirt and bright orange pants, a frail-looking Allen stares ahead and barely moves as doctors take his blood pressure and scan him with a stethoscope. As the video played, Allen put his hands over his eyes and craned his head to look at his wife, sister and mother, all of whom held their heads down as they wept quietly in the courtroom.

“Does that video make you question your diagnosis that Mr. Allen was no longer in a psychotic state on June 20, 2023?” Rozzi asked Martin, who hadn’t seen the video before.

“Yes,” said Martin.

Answering questions from jurors, Martin said it was possible to be in and out of psychosis on the same day. Jurors also asked Martin if, after watching the video, he believed Allen was faking his condition, as Dr. Monica Wala, Allen’s therapist at Westville, testified.

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at [email protected].