DELPHI — A former drugstore worker in the small Indiana town of Delphi was found guilty of murder on Monday in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who vanished during an afternoon hike.
Jurors convicted Richard Allen of of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the killings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German.
Reporters inside the courtroom said Allen, 52, showed no reaction as the verdict was delivered, 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.
The 12 jurors along with alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwest Indiana city where Allen also lived and worked.
The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weekslong murder trial.
A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, along with the jurors, came from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County.
Reports that the jury had reached a verdict began to spread and drew a crowd outside the courthouse. Minutes later, a handful of people spilled outside and people on the sidewalk began to cheer.
The case has drawn outsized attention from true-crime enthusiasts, with repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of Allen’s public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court. It has also been the subject of a gag order.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors in his closing arguments that Allen is the man seen following the teens in a grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, as they crossed an abandoned railroad trestle called the Monon High Bridge.
“Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and later murdered them.”
McLeland also said it was Allen’s voice that was captured on German’s cellphone video telling the teens, “ Down the hill ″ after they had crossed the bridge just before vanishing on Feb. 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day, their throats cut, in a wooded area about a quarter-mile (less than half a kilometer) from that bridge.
An investigator testified during trial that Allen told him and another officer that on the day the teens vanished he was wearing a blue or black Carhartt jacket, jeans and a beanie — clothing that’s similar to the person seen in German’s cellphone video.
McLeland recapped evidence in his closing that an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer handgun. An Indiana State Police firearms expert told the jury her analysis tied the round to Allen’s handgun.
