Delphi murders: Man charged with killing 2 girls is 'his own worst enemy,' expert says
Richard Allen, the suspect in the 2017 murders of two girls in Delphi, Indiana, "has been his own worst enemy," according to a journalist who has been covering the case for years.
Allen, who is charged in the murders of 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams on a hiking trail in February 2017, is set to face trial this month.
"Richard Allen has been his own worst enemy throughout this process. We've learned through multiple filings that he's made incriminating or damaging statements to what sounds like around 30 people – inmates, prison guards, police officers, family members – about this [crime], and I think that is going to severely tamper him at trial," journalist Áine Cain, who co-hosts "The Murder Sheet" podcast with Indiana-based attorney Kevin Greenlee, told Fox News Digital.
Cain said the alleged incriminating statements came either from an innocent man who is mentally unsound, which his defense team would have to prove, or they came from a guilty man who is trying to get something off his chest.
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Prosecutors have alleged in previous court filings that Allen "admitted that he committed the offenses that he is charged with no less than five times while talking to his wife and his mother on the public jail phones available at the Indiana Department of Corrections" in a June 2023 filing.
Cain said her sources have told her that Allen has made incriminating statements to some 30 people during his time in jail.
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The high-profile small-town murder case has been wrought with legal back-and-forth, clerical errors and misinformation spread through social media in the years leading up to Allen's trial.
"I believe the Delphi murders case represents a new kind of true-crime case where the role of internet culture becomes increasingly emphasized, and the legal system is not necessarily equipped or prepared to handle that," Cain said. "This case has garnered very strong interest from outside Indiana – from outside the United States – and people [are] very [passionate] about it."
Cain, who has been closely covering the murder case for the past several years, said the overwhelming attention on the small-town murder has led to good and bad behavior; the bad includes leaks of graphic crime-scene photos and the proliferation of misinformation on social media.
"I think this is going to be par for the course for true-crime cases [that] become a certain level of notorious where people are just going to want to be involved, and I think that the legal system, law enforcement, defense attorneys, judges, prosecutors need to be aware of this and need to ensure they are taking steps to safeguard what they're doing," Cain said.
Most recently, in a motion filed Monday, Carroll County prosecutor Nick McLeland asked the court to bar the defense's theory that the murders were a ritualistic sacrifice performed by members of a pagan cult rather than an alleged crime of opportunity by Allen, a middle-aged CVS employee-turned-suspected killer.
McLeland wrote that the defense "must show some connection between the 3rd party and the crime" in order to present their cult theory in court, FOX 59 Indianapolis first reported.
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Allen's attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, alleged in a 136-page memorandum released in September 2023 that there is "overwhelming evidence" to support the narrative that "[m]embers of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists, ritualistically sacrificed Abigail Williams and Liberty German."
The defense said the evidence backing the details in their memo "was found scattered over no less than 10 hard drives and several flash drives provided by the prosecution, meaning that the Defense is not making wild accusations, but rather primarily relaying facts and information that is backed up by the prosecutor’s own discovery, even discovery that the prosecution just provided to the Defense as late as September 8, 2023."
Following the memo's release last year, graphic photos of the crime scene were leaked and ended up on various social media platforms, including YouTube.
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Baldwin's former co-worker, Mitchell Westerman, 41, of Westfield, was charged with one count of conversion in connection with the leak, FOX 59 reported. Baldwin and Rozzi were removed from Allen's case in October 2023 but reinstated several months later.
Allen's trial is set to begin this month after years of delays. In another motion filed this week, the defense alleges the state has tried to hide evidence linking the murders to other suspects besides Allen, according to FOX 59.
Allen was initially arrested in 2022, five years after the girls disappeared along the Monon High Bridge Trail on Feb. 13, 2017. They were found dead the next morning. Allen was questioned months later but not arrested.
Prosecutors said they linked Allen to the crime after investigators found an unspent bullet at the scene that "had been cycled through" a pistol he owned.
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Cain and Greenlee were the first to report that Allen's delayed arrest was likely the result of a clerical error or misfiling of a tip that was not properly processed in 2017.
In another instance of a clerical error, Greenlee downloaded a nearly 200-page transcript of an interrogation involving Kagen Kline, a person of interest tied to the Delphi murders, through a social media account before officials realized they had not intended to make the document public and removed it from the Indiana courts website.
Cain and Greenlee have taken it upon themselves to publish, redact or not release certain information based on advice from their contacts in the case.
"I think it eventually should be looked at as a case study about what went right, what went wrong, but a lot of that will be outcome-based [depending on] what happens at trial," Cain said.