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, becoming a magnet for true-crime enthusiasts.
Allen’s case goes before the Indiana Court of Appeals for an hour of arguments on Monday.
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.
Unusual evidence found along with bodies of the teens
The girls’ bodies were found down a steep hill from an abandoned railroad trestle on a hiking trail just outside of Delphi on Feb. 13, 2017. The eighth graders were dropped off and never made it to their pickup point.
The teens’ throats were cut, and a few branches were scattered over their bodies. One was found nude while the other was wearing the first victim’s clothes. There was no evidence they had been sexually assaulted.
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’s lawyers say isolation led to mental breakdown and false confessions
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, his lawyers said.
“Allen lost forty pounds, was unable to care for himself, was tased, his face was black and blue and at times bleeding, and he was poisoned by fecal matter and toilet water,” attorneys Stacy Uliana and Mark Leeman wrote in their brief.
Prosecutors said the statements coincided with Allen seeing evidence in the case including the conditions of the teens’ bodies.
“The discovery materials forced Allen to face the horrifying evidence of what he did ... images and events he had been able to ignore and repress over the five years in which his guilt had gone undiscovered,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita wrote in his office’s brief.
Expert on pagan killings not allowed to testify
Allen’s trial attorneys wanted to put an expert witness on the stand to testify the killings appeared to be a ritual sacrifice by people who worshipped Odin, the king of the gods in Norse mythology.
The expert was expected to say the positioning of the bodies, the branches on the remains, the outdoor location of the crime and knife wounds to the victims all were indications of pagan rituals.
Prosecutors said the expert had limited examples and that defense lawyers shouldn’t be able to present just any theory without evidence to back it up.
Other issues Allen’s attorneys are expected to argue before the appeals court are inconsistencies in how witnesses described the suspicious man near the trail, pointing to a sketch of a potential suspect that didn’t look like Allen. They also question why an expert for Allen’s defense wasn’t allowed to question whether marks on an unfired bullet can be traced to a specific gun.
