Officers escort Richard Allen out of the Carroll County Courthouse following a hearing Nov. 22, 2022, in Delphi, Ind.

Darron Cummings/AP

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Darron Cummings/AP

DELPHI, Ind. — A former pharmacy worker in the small community of Delphi, Indiana, was found guilty of murder Monday in the slayings of two teenage girls who disappeared 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 a kidnapping in the 2017 slayings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and Liberty German, aged 14 years.

Allen was not arrested for another five years, while the case attracted immense attention from true crime enthusiasts. His trial followed repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court.

Courtroom reporters said Allen, 52, showed no reaction when the verdict was handed down, but looked back at his family at one point.Allen is scheduled to be sentenced on Dec. 20. He could face up to 130 years in prison.

Outside the courthouse, people on the sidewalk began to cheer as news of the verdict spread.

Indiana State Police spokesman Capt. Ron Galaviz told The Associated Press that the judge’s order remains in place and he believes it will remain in place until Allen is sentenced. Allen’s attorneys left court Monday without making statements.

A special judge oversaw the case – Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, who, along with the jurors, came from Allen County in northeastern Indiana. The seven women and five men were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the Carroll County seat of Delphi, the girls’ hometown of about 3,000 in northwest Indiana, where Allen also lived and worked .

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland noted in his closing argument that Allen 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.”

McLeland also said Allen is the man seen stalking the teenagers in a grainy cell phone video recorded by one of the girls as they crossed an abandoned railroad bridge called the Monon Bridge.

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

McLeland said it was Allen’s voice heard in the video telling the teenagers, “The Hill” after they crossed the bridge on February 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, with their throats slit, in an area wooded area nearby. area.

An investigator testified that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teenagers disappeared, he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — similar clothing to what the man recorded on the bridge was wearing.

McLeland said an unexpended bullet found between the teenagers’ bodies “was cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury that her analysis linked the cartridge to Allen’s gun.

But a firearms expert called by the defense questioned the analysis, and defense attorney Bradley 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.

Allen was arrested in October 2022. He had become a suspect after a retired state government worker who volunteered to help police in the case found documents in September 2022 showing Allen contacted authorities two days after the girls’ bodies were found were found. Those documents indicated Allen told an officer he was on the hiking trail the afternoon the girls disappeared, according to testimony.

Allen’s defense argued that his confessions were unreliable because he was experiencing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being locked in solitary confinement, watched 24 hours a day and taunted by his fellow inmates with him. A psychiatrist called for the defense testified that months of solitary confinement could make a person delusional and psychotic.

But Dr. Monica Wala, Allen’s psychologist at the Westville Correctional Center, said Allen shared details about the murder in some of the confessions, including telling her he cut the girls’ throats and put tree branches over their heads. their bodies. She wrote in a report that Allen told her he abandoned his plans to rape the teenagers when a van drove by. A man whose driveway passes under the Monon High Bridge testified that he was driving his van home from work at the time.

That van, McLeland told jurors in his closing, was a detail “only the killer would know.”

During cross-examination, Wala admitted that she had followed Allen’s case with interest in her personal time, even though she was 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 witnesses explicitly identified Allen as the man seen on the hiking trail or on the bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared. And he said no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the crime scene.

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

Allen’s lawyers tried to argue before the trial that the girls were killed 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 that, saying the defense ” failed to produce admissible evidence” of such a connection.