(Delphi, Indiana) — A man serving 130 years in prison for killing two teen girls in Indiana is asking an appeals court to overturn his convictions, saying that he confessed while he was having a psychological crisis and was unfairly barred from arguing at trial that the girls were killed by unknown participants in a pagan ritual.
Jurors convicted Richard Allen of murder in 2024 in the deaths of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, known as Abby and Libby. The case in the tiny town of Delphi went unsolved for more than five years before Allen was arrested.
Allen’s case goes before the Indiana Court of Appeals for an hour of arguments today. Prosecutors said some of Allen’s incriminating statements came before he showed signs of mental illness and continued after he improved. Even without his confessions, they said jurors had enough evidence to find Allen guilty. They said Allen admitted to being on the trail near where the girls were killed at the time one of them took a brief video of a suspicious man nearby saying, “Down the hill.”
Prosecutors said that if the judge had allowed a defense expert to testify about a possible pagan ritual it would have turned the trial into a sideshow. Prosecutors said Allen was armed with a gun and forced the girls off the hiking trail. They said he confessed to planning to rape them before a passing van made him change his mind and he killed them. An expert testified an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s handgun.
Defense lawyers at his trial said no witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen near the trail the afternoon the girls went missing. They also said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the murder scene. Allen was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. He denied killing the girls for months, but his attorneys said mental stress from isolation led to a steep psychological decline. Eventually, his mental state became so bad he convinced himself he killed the girls and confessed several times.
