INDIANAPOLIS — The fate of an Indiana man charged with murder in 2017 the murder of two teenage girls who disappeared during an afternoon hike near their small hometown was 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 a kidnapping in the slayings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14. He could face up to 130 years in prison if convicted of all charges.

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

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

“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and later killed them.”

He noted that Allen has repeatedly confessed to the crimes — in person, on the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he played for the jury, Allen could be heard telling his wife: “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.”

Allen’s defense questioned the confessions, bringing witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that Allen was delusional and psychotic after months of 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 noted. No fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the crime scene, Rozzi said.

And for more than five years after the teenagers were killed, Allen was still living in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

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

The case has attracted immense attention from true crime buffs, with repeated delays, some surrounding a leak of evidence, withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and theirs reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. was also subject of a gag order.

The 12 jurors along with the alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began on October 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small town in northwestern Indiana, 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 recapped the evidence that an unexpended bullet was found among the teenagers’ bodies. “it was cycled” Allen’s Sig Sauer .40 caliber pistol. A firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police’s analysis, and Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators made an “apples-to-oranges” comparison of unspent rounds with one fired. with Allen’s gun.

The prosecutor also said that a state trooper who listened to more than 700 phone calls made by Allen identified Allen’s voice on German’s cell phone video, telling the teenagers, ” On the hill ″ after they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge called the Monon High Bridge. McLeland showed jurors 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 trail and had planned to rape them before a passing van made him change his plans. Gruesome photos from the crime scene showed how the girls were found with their throats slit the next day, about a quarter of a mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.

The defense challenged the state’s timeline with witnesses, including a digital forensics expert, who said headphones or an auxiliary cable were connected to Libby’s cellphone for nearly five hours after she and Abby disappeared, raising doubts regarding investigators’ belief that the girls were killed and left in it. forest around 2:32 p.m. that day.

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

Prosecutors again directed jurors to Allen’s own words, in confessions he made to his mother and wife, as well as to a prison psychologist, corrections officers and the former director of the Westville Correctional Facility , who said Allen wrote to her claiming he killed the girls with a box cutter that he later threw away.

Prosecutors said Allen’s incriminating statements contained information only the killer could have known.

Defense lawyers argued that Allen’s confessions were unreliable because he was experiencing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked up in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by fellow inmates 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 tried to argue that the girls were murdered in a ritual sacrifice by members of a white nationalist group known as Odinists who follow a Norse pagan religion, but the judge ruled against this, saying the defense had “provided no admissible evidence” of such a connection.