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13th Juror Podcast
The Defense of Richard Allen
00:53:47
Was Richard Allen really the man on the bridge, or did investigators lock onto a suspect while overlooking evidence that pointed elsewhere? In this episode, the defense exposes investigative failures, conflicting eyewitness accounts, and digital evidence that suggests someone else may have been handling Libby’s phone long after the murders.
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The 2017 murders of 13 year old Abby Williams and 14 year old Libby German shattered the small town of Delphi, Indiana. And from the beginning, one thing haunted those who followed the case. The video. A few seconds of shaky footage captured by Libby herself in an attempt to give the world clues about the man who was approaching. The last terrifying moments of their lives may have been preserved on a phone, but for years there were no answers. Then, five years and eight months later, police announced an arrest. Richard Allen, a name no one had ever heard in a tip, rumor or piece of online speculation. In the last episode, we walked through the prosecution's case to the state that there was only one possible conclusion. That Richard Allen was bridge guy and that he alone was responsible for the deaths of Abby and Libby. They called witnesses who said they saw the man from the video on the trails that day, questioned investigators who claimed a bullet found near the girls matched Allen's gun and played recordings of Allen telling his wife from jail that he was guilty and he was sorry. According to the state, the story was simple. One man, one crime, one conclusion. But the defense said nothing about this case was simple and had a story of their own. One where critical witnesses were ignored, early interviews were lost and investigative mistakes piled up. A story of a man held in solitary confinement for months who spiraled into psychosis. And one where the single most important piece of evidence in this case, Libby German's phone, contained data that made the state's timeline impossible. And the truth, they said, would leave the jury staring at a very real possibility that the man sitting at the defense table was not the man on that bridge. The prosecution said says it's justice served. The defense says it's at the expense of an innocent man. But it's the jurors who have the final say. This is the 13th juror podcast where we break down real court cases and put you in the juror's seat. Two sides, the same evidence. You decide what to believe. I'm your host, Brandi Churchwell. Today's episode is Indiana versus Richard Allen, Part two. The defense. Richard Allen is truly innocent. Truly innocent. Those were the first words out of defense attorney Andrew Baldwin's mouth as he stood in front of the jury. He told jurors that when a person is truly innocent, the evidence and lack of evidence will reveal it. He warned them that so some of what they were about to hear might seem hard to believe at first, but asked that they wait to make up their minds and listen. Because the full story, he said, would show that Richard Allen did not Kill Abby and Libby. From the very beginning, Baldwin said, this investigation was completely flawed. Not just early on in 2017, when the case first broke, but all the way through to just days before the trial began. Evidence was lost, interviews disappeared, and entire pieces of the investigation seemed to have vanished. Baldwin told jurors that evidence is gone forever, and the defense will never get to see it. And neither would they. He said he'd show how key witnesses were never contacted, how tips that contradicted the state's theory weren't followed, and how entire lines of inquiry simply stopped. But despite these gaps, mistakes, and missing evidence, the defense promised to piece together a story of what really happened. And just like he began, Baldwin ended his opening statement with the same passionate declaration. Richard Allen is innocent. He's really innocent. Through the testimony and evidence they presented, this is the defense's version of events. The state's case rested on a single pillar that Richard Allen was the man on the bridge. And if Richard Allen wasn't that man, nothing else in their case mattered. Not the bullet, jail calls or timeline. So the defense took jurors back to February 13, 2017, and recounted the day through the eyes of the people who were actually out on the trails. And interestingly, none of these witnesses described a man who looked anything like Richard Allen. State witnesses Rayleigh Voorhees and Brianne Wilbur told the jury they were leaving the trails early that afternoon when a man walked toward them on the path. Raeley remembered him clearly, but her description of him didn't resemble Richard Allen. She saw a man dressed head to toe in black, and more importantly, a person much taller than Richard Allen. Brianne said he was tall and muscular, and both girls estimated he was around 510 or 5 11. Richard Allen, however, is only 5 foot 4. Betsy Blair, one of the state's star witnesses, had been out on the trails that day, walking toward the Monon High Bridge. She paused at the end of the trail and noticed a man standing on the bridge alone. Minutes later, two girls, who she would later learn were Abby and Libby, walked past her as she was leaving, heading directly toward that same bridge. The prosecution insisted this man was Richard Allen, but they didn't tell the whole story. Betsy said the man she saw looked young, boyish, not middle aged. She estimated he was in his 20s or early 30s, with what she called poofy hair, the opposite of Richard Allen's closely cropped military style haircut. To the defense, Betsy Blair didn't place Richard Allen on the bridge. She eliminated him from it. And then the defense turned to the last bridge guy sighting the state relied on a woman named Sarah Carball, who saw a man walking along County Road 300 north around 4pm the state told jurors this was Richard Allen Fleet fleeing the murder scene. But the defense reminded the jury that Sarah's original description to police was very different from her testimony at trial. In her first statement, Sarah said she saw a man in a tan jacket, not a blue one, and that it looked like he had mud on him, not blood. But after national coverage, rumors, speculation and online theories, Sarah's story grew more dramatic. Suddenly, the mud became blood. So much blood. She said he looked like he had slaughtered a pig. A detail she didn't report immediately. The defense asked the jury a simple question. If you saw a man covered in blood walking close to an area where two girls vanished, would you wait weeks to report it? They argued Sarah didn't see Richard Allen and weren't convinced she even saw anything at all. The point was simple. If the prosecution was right and Richard Allen was the man on the bridge, then the descriptions from witnesses on the trails should match him. But the descriptions from the parade of witnesses the prosecution brought in didn't point toward Richard Allen. They pointed away from him. If jurors wanted to understand what really happened that day, they needed to hear about all of the movement on the trails, all the people on it, and all the details the state left out. So the defense began filling in the gaps, first by bringing in people the prosecution hadn't called. One of those people was David McCain, a project manager for developing the trail system. That afternoon, he grabbed his camera and headed out to document the February scenery, something he'd done dozens of times over the years. He parked at the entrance locals referred to as the Mears lot shortly after 2pm at that time, the lot was empty. No Blackford Focus or suspicious man, just David, his camera and a quiet trail. A short time later, 23 year old Shelby Hicks pulled into the same lot. She and her boyfriend decided to take advantage of the warm weather, first following the trail toward the Freedom Bridge, then looping back toward the Monon High Bridge. Minutes later, Cheyenne Mill arrived with her friend Shelby Duncan. They also parked at the Mir's entrance and began walking the path toward the bridge. What happened next was a sequence of events the defense argued mattered deeply. McCain with his camera, slowly wandered on the trail, taking pictures along County Road 300 north, then heading toward the bridge. He didn't notice anything strange like shouting, commotion or signs of fear. Just a quiet afternoon. Shelby and her boyfriend reached the first platform of the Monon High bridge and sat down, legs dangling over the edge, talking, relaxing, enjoying the unusually warm day. Eventually, they noticed an older man with a camera, almost certainly McCain, moving along the trail. Then Cheyenne and her friend appeared. They recognized Shelby from school, exchanged a quick hello, and continued across the bridge. Cheyenne testified that as they crossed the planks, she saw no one else. When they reached the far end, they needed to use the bathroom. So they looked around carefully, checking the tree line, bridge deck, and behind them. The coast was clear. No one was there. They finished their business and crossed the bridge to make their way back, taking pictures on their way. Meanwhile, McCain took his time heading back toward the lot. He estimated he'd been out there for more than an hour. When he returned to his car around 4pm the area was suddenly busier, cars in the lot and a man asking if he'd seen two girls. That was the moment he realized something was wrong. Every one of these witnesses came forward to authorities and gave their timelines, backed by calls, photos or routine habits. Together, their testimonies painted a picture the prosecution didn't Multiple people at different points on the trail between 2 and 4pm and not one of them saw Richard Allen or anyone who matched the man in the video to the defense. Investigators didn't miss these pieces of the story. They ignored them. When Cheyenne Mill first called police to tell them what she'd seen on February 13, she said they were dismissive, even rude. She tried to explain that she'd been on the bridge between 2:50 and 4pm and who she saw, and that she'd crossed the exact spot where the girls recorded their video. But the person on the tip line brushed her off. Weeks later, when police finally did call her in, she said they jumbled the names of the people she mentioned, mixed up her details, and didn't seem to care about clarifying any of it. Eventually, after Allen's arrest, as the case exploded online, strangers began attacking her, claiming she had identified Richard Allen, a claim she never made. Cheyenne even wrote a letter to the state prosecutor to correct the record, but never heard back. Shelby Hicks had a similar experience. She met with police twice, once the day following the girl's disappearance and again weeks later. She tried to give them the timeline she and her boyfriend had put together, told them about the people they saw and the older gentleman with the camera. But investigators never asked to see her phone, pull her location data, or extract her photos or timestamps. After that interview, Shelby never heard from them again. And then There was David McCain, who told police he had been there at the time the girls went missing. He talked to authorities that night and later when he talked to the FBI, he turned over his SIM card with the pictures he had taken. His photos included a shot of the road near the mirrors entrance with a car passing in the background. Investigators came back later to ask about that car, but McCain told them he had no idea whose it was and that was the end of it. Authorities never returned his SIM card or had him testify, and the prosecution never mentioned him. The defense said these weren't isolated mistakes. They were clues and sightings that should have mattered, but didn't. Just like Teresa Liebert, she lived just half a mile from the bridge near near the property of Brad Weber, the man who drove the white van prosecutors say caused Allen to panic and kill the girls. At about 8:30am on the morning Abby and Libby disappeared, she and her husband were returning home when they noticed a man standing at the neighborhood mailboxes, which all stood together at the end of the long private drive. The man was a stranger. No one she or her husband had ever seen before. He was just standing there alone. Teresa explained that the mailboxes were so far away from the houses that people usually drove to pick up their mail or stopped on the way as they were coming or going. To see someone. Standing there sans car was odd to Teresa, so much so that she said something to her husband about it. When they passed by him, he seemed uncomfortable, like. Like he didn't want to be seen. By the time she reached her driveway and turned around to look, the man was gone. She reported the incident, but nothing came of it. Then there was Brad Heath, a pest control technician who had serviced a building near the bridge every week for 40 years. That morning around 8:45, he saw a car parked on the side of the road, a boxy, older blue sedan. When he came back that afternoon around 2pm the same car was still there. He reported it, but nothing came of that either. Even one of the state's own witnesses, Betsy Blair, unknowingly introduced a problem. In order for the prosecution's story to work, they needed Richard Allen's black Ford Focus to be parked in the parking lot of an abandoned CPS building nearby from 1:30pm to until 4pm Betsy Blair testified that she did see a car in that parking lot at 2:15 when she was driving by the problem. The car she saw wasn't black, she said. It was older, boxier. Not a hatchback, not a Ford Focus. In fact, she said it closely resembled a 1965 Ford Comet that her father used to own. She even drew it carefully, sketching its squared off, angular silhouette. When the defense put that drawing beside the vehicles described by the other witnesses, it didn't resemble Allen's car at all. It looked far more like the older, boxy blue car that pest control worker Brad Heath had reported seeing earlier that same day, parked along the road for hours in almost the exact same stretch of roadway. When confronted on the stand about this critical information, investigator Mullen downplayed its importance. Even though the state had used Betsy Blair as a key timeline anchor. Mullen said Blair may have been wrong or confused about the vehicle she saw, but somehow positive about everything else. This would become a pattern with the state's witnesses. Investigators would say they were confused or mistaken on the things that worked against their theory, but certain on the things that worked with it. And according to the defense, this was the beginning of a pattern that didn't stop in those early, chaotic hours. These issues stretched into days, months, and then years. At this point, the defense told the jury, their story took a darker turn because it wasn't just about witnesses who weren't called or tips that weren't followed. It was about evidence that disappeared, interviews that went missing, and decisions that, according to the defense, broke the foundation of the case before it even began. One of the first major revelations of the issues in this investigation came from the man who ultimately took it over, Detective Steve Mullen. Under oath, Mullen admitted something few jurors ever expect to hear in a double murder trial. Dozens of early interviews from February and March of 2017 were lost, gone, overwritten by the police department's recording system. These weren't small, insignificant leads. They were the earliest witnesses, people with the freshest memories. Many of them were the last people to see Abby and Libby alive. The jury learned that no backups or transcripts of these interviews were ever made, and no additional interviews were scheduled to recoup what was lost. There was no record of who those people were or what they said. Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin hammered on that point. A second wave of interviews was also compromised. This time, the audio portion was destroyed by a DVR malfunction. And again, no re interviews or a second attempt to rebuild what was lost. Whole pieces of the case, voices, statements, details simply vanished from the record. What came next sent a ripple through the courtroom. During a pretrial hearing, Detective Mullen testified under oath that there had been no log documenting these missing interviews, nothing that even showed who had been spoken to in those early days. But in court, sitting in front of the Jury Mullin said there was a log, one he had recently found tucked away in a filing cabinet. From early in the investigation, the sudden appearance of a document he previously testified did not exist caused defense attorney Andrew Baldwin to snap. His voice rose, frustration boiling over as he pressed Mullen about the contradiction. The courtroom grew tense, and after Baldwin took a moment to regroup, he apologized to the court, then returned to questioning even more focused. In cases like this, when a local investigation is struggling, the most responsible move is to bring in more help. Resources and expertise. And help was available. The FBI wasn't just willing to assist. They had already been deeply involved. Contributing agents, analysts, behavioral experts, and forensic support. Which is why what happened next stunned the courtroom. Because instead of strengthening the investigation, Indiana State Police Superintendent Doug Carter was pulled the FBI off the case. Under oath, Carter confirmed that in August20, 21 years into the investigation, and long before Richard Allen was ever identified, he made the decision to release the FBI from Delphi entirely. Not only that, he asked them to return every piece of evidence and every investigative document they had gathered. Who tells the FBI to walk away from the most high profile child murder case in the state? The defense used this moment to drive home a point they'd been building for days. How can you trust the outcome of an investigation when the agencies most competent to handle it were pushed away? That decision to remove the FBI dropped the responsibility for one of the most complex homicide investigations in any Indiana history, right back into the laps of the very investigators who had already lost interviews, misplaced evidence, and built timelines that didn't align with their own witnesses. Which raises an important question. What else was overlooked? The defense pointed to entire investigative avenues that were never pursued. And these weren't limited to people seen on the trails or roads that day. They also included unidentified individuals captured on a trail camera in the woods on the very day of the murders near where the girls were found. In the early days of the investigation, a nearby property owner handed over trail cam footage to police. Not only did footage exist from the day the girls vanished, but according to Detective Mullen himself, there was footage showing a person near the area of the crime scene. In his deposition, he estimated the figure was within 100 to 200 yards of where the girls were later found. In court, he even agreed there might have been more footage the following day. And yet the jury learned that no one was ever identified. From that footage. There was no attempt to reconcile who this person was, why they were there, or how they fit into the larger picture. There's also Brad Weber, According to The defense Weber was one of the most consequential oversights by investigators. And they had a list of reasons why. Weber wasn't just some random name that surfaced years after the murders. In fact, he lived right across the road from where Abby and Livy were found. The private drive to reach his property goes directly under the Monon High Bridge, close enough that, in theory, two girls could be forced into a car and taken away, with witnesses in the area never hearing a thing. Brad Weber was never charged with anything in connection to this crime. But the defense says the lack of investigation into him as a suspect leaves plenty of unanswered questions. On February 13, 2017, the day the girls were killed, Weber says he drove right through that area. Around the same time prosecutors believed the murders were happening. But what he told police and what prosecutors told the jury didn't exactly line up. Prosecutors told the jury that Brad Weber's white van was the key independent detail that proved Richard Allen's confession was real. When Allen, deteriorating in solitary confinement at Westfield Correctional Facility, said in a confession that he saw a van and panicked, investigators seized on it immediately. Why? Because up until that moment, every confession Allen made was vague, non specific and riddled with errors. He said he shot the girls, but there were no gunshot wounds. He said he stabbed them multiple times. But the pathologist testified they each had one fatal wound, but a van, that was something investigators thought they could work with. The officer monitoring Allen's jail calls testified that he had never heard mention of a van before. He said he went digging and found a name that had been in the case files since the beginning. Brad Weber, the man who lived directly across the site from where Abby and Libby were found. Weber owned a white van, and according to the state, he drove right, right past the crime scene at the exact time Allen claimed he was murdering the girls. The defense, however, said this wasn't independent information at all. They reminded the jury that Allen's prison psychologist, Dr. Walla, admitted she was a True Crime follower and that she discussed things she saw online with Allen. Could this have included rumors circulating on social media about a suspension suspicious white van offering candy to children in a nearby town? The defense believed so and argued that the one independent detail prosecutors relied on may not have been independent at all. When Weber himself took the stand, the problems only grew. He told the jury he owned two vehicles in 2017, a Subaru and a white van, but only used the van when hauling a trailer. He said he left work at the subaru plant around 2pm went straight home, took a nap and didn't wake up until someone knocked on his door at 5pm but his earlier statements, they didn't match. In one interview, Weber wasn't sure which vehicle he drove that day. In another, he said he might have serviced ATMs after work. Police also documented that he told investigators he did drive past the murder site around 2:30pm in his van. When defense attorney Andrew Baldwin confronted him with all of these contradictions, Weber grew visibly upset. Baldwin asked why? And Weber responded, because you were trying to tell me what I did. Then came something even stranger. The day before Weber's official interview, Detective Mullen called him on an unrecorded line. He admitted on the stand he had the ability to record it, but didn't. He even admitted he should have. And Weber testified that before speaking with police, he reviewed his text messages despite supposedly not knowing what investigators wanted to talk to him about. Mullins said that was interesting to the defense. This wasn't a coincidence. It was contamination. A witness unsure of his own timeline, a detective who didn't record a critical call, and a theory that seemed to shift depending on what prosecutors needed it to be. And then came the final blow. Mullen wasn't even sure the lab actually excluded Weber's gun. The gun he owned, a standard.40 caliber, was the same caliber as the cartridge found at the scene. So prosecutors needed Weber's claims about his van to be real. They they needed it to be there to explain why Richard Allen supposedly panicked and murdered the two girls quickly. But the man behind the wheel didn't seem sure what he was driving that day. Investigators didn't seem sure of what he said, and the detective in charge didn't seem sure of what was true and what wasn't. To the defense, this was a symbol of the entire case. And they hammered the point home. If investigators couldn't keep track of evidence, how could they possibly claim beyond a reasonable doubt that Richard Allen was the killer? For the prosecution, one piece of evidence was supposed to tie everything together. One detail that, if true, would erase doubt, confidence, coincidence, and the possibility that anyone but Richard Allen stood on that bridge. That unspent.40 caliber cartridge found near the girl's bodies from day one. Prosecutors said that cartridge had a distinct extractor mark, and that mark matched Richard Allen's Sig Sauer. It became the backbone of their entire theory. Richard Allen chambered around at the scene. There was no. No other logical explanation. But the defense had been waiting for this moment. They brought in Dr. Eric Warren, an expert in tool mark identification, a former state special Agent in firearms and someone who had spent years studying how these marks are created, preserved, and misinterpreted. And his testimony reframed the entire story the state told Warren walked the jury through something the prosecution never explained. You can't compare an unfired cartridge from a crime scene to a fired test cartridge and treat it like it's a match. It's not apples to apples. It's apples to oranges. A fired cartridge experiences massive pressure, force and heat. An unfired one does not. Warren explained that to make a reliable identification, examiners must compare like to like. And in this case, the state's firearms examiner, Melissa Oberg, had done the opposite. She compared the unfired scene cartridge to a fired test cartridge from Allen's gun. Far worse, Warren said, Oberg failed to document whether she had checked for subclass characteristics, which are manufacturing marks that can appear on entire batches of guns. Class characteristics are broad, like a car's make and model. Subclass characteristics are mid level. Individual characteristics are unique fingerprint marks. Without documenting subclass characteristics, Oberg's conclusion couldn't be verified, repeated or trusted. In fact, the triangular ejector marks on the cartridge found at the scene were the hallmark shape of subclass characteristics, meaning the very thing the state called a unique match might have been produced by hundreds of Sig Sauer slides made in the same manufacturing period. Warren said the proper conclusion was not a match. Not even inconclusive, but an insufficient agreement, A scientific way of saying you cannot confidently attribute this cartridge to this gun. For the defense, this was huge. The state's strongest piece of physical evidence. The evidence they used to justify a search warrant. The evidence they used to justify an arrest was scientifically unreliable. So what does that leave according to the defense? Doubt. The defense also challenged the state's claim that one man, Richard Allen, at just 5 foot 4 in, medium build, could have committed this crime alone in the narrow window of time prosecutors described. And they reminded the jury that for years, investigators didn't believe that either. In the early days of the investigation, long before Allen's name ever surfaced, police openly discussed the likelihood of multiple attackers. And it wasn't just a rumor floating around the station. It was documented, repeated and acknowledged by investigators themselves. One of those investigators was Detective Steve Mullen. On the stand, Mullen admitted that for years, based on the complexity of the scene, he believed more than one person had to be involved. Two girls moved across uneven terrain. Bodies staged, clothing changed, branches arranged. No defensive wounds. To him, it never looked like the work of one man. But that belief, held for years, changed the moment Richard Allen was arrested. The state's theory shifted with it. Suddenly, what once required multiple attackers was now being explained as the work of one man acting alone. That was the problem. The evidence didn't change, only the conclusion. And when you pair that with the timeline the state insisted was airtight, especially the phone data that showed Libby's phone stopped moving at 2:32pm the window for a lone killer grew impossibly small. But the defense wasn't finished. If there was one moment where the courtroom froze, where jurors leaned forward, stunned, it was during the testimony of digital forensics expert Stacey Eldredge. Eldridge, a former FBI examiner, spent weeks digging through the raw files and metadata from Libby's phone. Her job wasn't to advocate for one side or the other. Her job was to tell the jury what the phone itself was showing. And what she found unraveled the state's timeline. Eldridge testified that Libby's phone stopped connecting to cell Towers at 5.45pm on February 13. It remained offline, although not powered down all night. Then, out of nowhere, it reconnected at 4:33am on February 14th. That alone was. Was strange. But what she said next was even more bizarre. Between 5:45pm and 10:32pm, long after prosecutors said the killer had fled, long after Richard Allen was home, Libby's phone registered something that should have been impossible. Wired headphones were physically plugged into the phone. Eldridge told the jury there was no. No explanation for that reading other than human activity. Wind couldn't do it. Animals couldn't do it. Software errors couldn't do it. Someone touched that phone and interacted with it at a time Richard Allen was already home. She testified that during those same hours, the phone was not connecting to towers, not receiving messages, not. Not acting like a phone sitting under a body in the woods. Then, at 4:33am Dozens of withheld texts and voicemails downloaded all at once, consistent with the device coming back into service after being shielded or moved. Eldredge told jurors she could only reach one conclusion. Something external blocked the phone, like a building structure or car. And then someone plugged something into it. Jurors exchanged glances. Pins froze. One juror leaned back, staring at Eldridge in disbelief. Because if the phone was handled long after the killer supposedly fled, if the phone was moved and then plugged into a device, the prosecution's timeline collapsed. And the question the defense needs needed jurors to grapple with rose to the surface. If someone Was handling Libby's phone long after Richard Allen left. Who was it? That question is one that haunted deli for nearly six years and is one that still haunts the defense team today. 14,000 tips came in when police released the information about the video and the man on the bridge. The video and audio were nationally broadcast and widely shared on social media platforms worldwide. Thousands of tips, and not one of them mentioned Richard Allen. So the final question the defense needed to answer. Why did Richard Allen confess? Confessions are one of the most powerful pieces of evidence a jury can hear. Jurors are taught that people don't confess to crimes they didn't commit, Especially not brutal, senseless murders of two children like this. So when a defendant says, I did it, many jurors stop listening to anything else. And the defense knew that. But the defense attorneys also know something most people don't. False confessions are far more common than we'd like to believe. They happen under pressure, under exhaustion, under fear, under manipulation, and most persuasively, under the kind of psychological breakdowns that leave a person untethered from reality. I've covered this in past episodes, like my episode on the Winston Salem 5. There are three main categories of false. Voluntary, coerced, compliant and coerced. Internalized and coerced. Internalized. The type where mental deterioration causes a person to actually believe the story being suggested to them is the rarest, but also the most dangerous, because the person confessing isn't lying. They're delusional. And in Richard Allen's case, the defense told the jury that's what happened. They didn't deny he said disturbing, incriminating things. They didn't deny he told his wife he was guilty. They didn't deny that he told jail staff that he killed the girls. What they argued relentlessly was why he said it. Because every single one of those statements came after Richard Allen was removed from the Carroll county jail and placed into solitary confinement at Westfield Correctional. After he spent week after week in a concrete box alone, deprived of sunlight, human contact, and stimulation. After guards testified that he stopped eating, sleeping, and bathing and began smearing feces, drinking toilet water and rocking, trembling or babbling incoherently in his cell. Statements made after psychologists documented a dramatic, measurable collapse in his mental functioning. And after his own treating doctor said his brain had effectively broken. Not once did Richard Allen ever confess before he was placed into solitary confinement. And according to the defense, that mattered more than anything the jury had heard so far. Through hours of recorded videos, they showed the jurors what Solitary confinement really looked like the concrete box without windows, a clock, and no human contact except for brief, controlled interactions with guards or a psychologist checking to make sure he was still alive. Defense attorneys told the jury this is where Richard Allen lived every day for months. Then they began calling the experts. Dr. Deanna Dwenger, a clinical psychologist with the Indiana Department of Corrections, told the jury that long term solitary confinement is toxic for the human brain. Not metaphorically, literally. She testified that isolation destroys a person's sense of reality, triggers hallucinations, worsens depression, and can push a vulnerable mind into psychosis. She said that by the time she saw Richard Allen, he was already deteriorating. He had become paranoid, confused, frightened, and met criteria for serious mental illness. Eventually, he even met the criteria for being gravely disabled, a clinical term meaning a person can no longer manage basic tasks like eating, bathing, or caring for themselves without help. Then came Dr. Polly Westcott, a forensic neuropsychologist hired by the defense. She'd reviewed hours of footage, jail logs, medical notes, and interviewed Allen herself. She told jurors that the difference between Richard Allen in 2022, right after his arrest was and Richard Allen months later at Westfield Correctional was staggering. She compared his mind to a fun house. Distorted, disjointed, fragmented. She said his brain chemistry had been altered by sensory deprivation and that he had slipped into psychosis. His thinking during those periods was not grounded in reality. Then she told the jury something else. Psychotic people can say things that sound like confessions. Some of it may be rooted in truth, some of it may be rooted in delusion. And often the speaker can't tell the difference. And finally, the defense brought in one of the country's leading experts on solitary confinement, Dr. Stuart Grassian, a Harvard trained psychiatrist who has evaluated hundreds of inmates exposed to extreme isolation. Grassian didn't mince words. He said that prolonged solitary confinement can break a person. It can produce hallucinations, delusions, false memories, and uncontrollable terror. In fact, according to the Department of Corrections, it's part of their policy to not hold a person with serious mental illness in solitary for more than 30 days. Richard Allen was confined for 13 months, and Grazian told the jury that what he saw in Richard Allen's phone calls, his rambling, fragmented thoughts, shifting stories and references to Satan being involved was classic delirium, the kind caused not by guilt, but by isolation. Then the defense did something few jurors ever see. They showed hours of surveillance footage from inside Richard Allen's cell, footage recorded before many of his most disturbing statements. Jurors watched as Alan paced endlessly in circles. They saw him stop eating, stare into space for long stretches of time, smear feces. They watched as he cried, shook and deteriorated. Some jurors took notes. Some looked away. Some appeared shocked. One alternate juror stared with raised eyebrows, her face tight with discomfort. Another, with a background in psychology, watched intently. And through it all, Richard Allen sat at the defense table, head down, hands shaking, as the worst moments of his own mental unraveling played out on a screen for strangers to watch. The defense's message was unmistakable. This was the man who said he killed Abby and Libby. Not the man who walked into the trails that day. Not the man who gave a calm, coherent interview in 2022. But a broken, isolated, decompensating man lost in a world where reality and delusion blurred together. And if his mind could not be trusted, how could his words? The defense didn't pretend to have every answer or claim to know exactly what happened in the woods on February 13, 2017. But they did argue that the state's version of events simply couldn't be true. Witness after witness had described Bridge Guy, and not a single one matched Richard Allen's appearance. They spoke about a man who looked younger, someone in his 20s or 30s, a man who was taller, with longer strides, a leaner build and even poofy hair. Not one of those fit. The five foot four, stocky middle aged man sitting at the defense table in the car prosecutors claimed Allen parked at the CPS lot didn't match either. Witnesses like Betsy Blair described a boxy older four door sedan, not a black Ford Focus hatchback. Even her sketch looked nothing like Allen's car. The car investigators believed was a Ford Focus caught on the Hoosier Harvest store camera didn't help the state's case much either. The defense noted it was driving the opposite direction from where Allen told police he would have come from. An answer he gave before he knew any surveillance footage existed. He even told investigators he wasn't sure which vehicle he drove that day. And then there were the people who were actually out there, walking the same bridge and trails during the exact window. Prosecutors say the murders occurred. People in multiple locations along the trail between 2 and 4pm but not one heard screaming or a struggle. Several people even testified that sound carries across that area. But on the one day screams should have echoed nothing. Not one piece of digital evidence tied Allen to the girls. Not one piece of DNA connected him to the crime scene. But DNA was found unknown male DNA that didn't match Allen. The only physical Evidence the state relied on was a single unspent.40 caliber cartridge. Their case hinged on the idea that this round had once been chambered in Allen's gun. But the defense's firearms expert dismantled that claim, showing that Sig Sauer's own manufacturing process can produce similar marks across many firearms, including Brad Webber's gun, which was never formally excluded. And then there was the scene itself, staged and complex. Abby dressed in Libby's clothes. Libby stripped of hers. Sticks and debris placed deliberately over their bodies. Two victims moved and positioned across uneven terrain. The forensic pathologist testified that Libby's injuries would have caused massive blood loss. Yet none of Allen's clothing showed even a microscopic trace of blood. Meanwhile, a witness saw a man around 4pm covered in mud or possibly blood, wearing a tan jacket and walking toward a vehicle that also did not not match Allen's. And don't forget that the phone showed human interaction long after Allen was already home. Investigators themselves had once believed this crime involved multiple offenders. And the pathologist said he thought the injuries on each girl suggested potentially different weapons, one serrated, one not. But the investigators beliefs vanished only after Allen was arrested. The defense told jurors the evidence didn't change, just the theory. Out of more than 14,000 tips that poured in after national media coverage, not a single person mentioned Richard Allen. The only time his name ever surfaced was when he called police himself in 2017 to voluntarily report he'd been on the trail and wanted to help the investigation. He gave his name, number and timeline and was cleared the very day he met with a DNR officer. It wasn't until five and a half years later that Allen's name was reintroduced when police suddenly built an entire case from an old tip sheet, trying to force pieces of evidence to fit. Allen forcefully denied any involvement until he was cut off from family, deprived of stimulation, threatened by other inmates, and deteriorated psychologically. The defense insisted these weren't real confessions. They were the words of a man whose mind had come apart in the exact way experts warned it would. In the end, the defense said, not only was there reasonable doubt, there was nothing but doubt. The state hadn't built a case, they built a story. One in which their own evidence contradicted the narrative at every turn. In closing arguments, Allen's defense made a final plea to the jury. Two little girls need justice, but convicting an innocent man isn't the way to give them that. After nearly a month of testimony, evidence, and two starkly different versions of the same events, it was time for 12 strangers to determine the ending to this story. After roughly 19 hours of deliberations, word came that a decision had been reached. Richard Allen was found guilty on all counts. In the courtroom, Allen sat expressionless as the words were read aloud. Libby's grandmother broke into tears, embracing her family. Outside, part of the crowd erupted into cheers, while just feet away, others holding signs in support of Allen stood in disbelief, shaken by a verdict they believed was deeply unjust. As Allen was shackled and led away, his attorneys placed reassuring hands on his shoulders. And as his wife, Kathy left the courthouse, she told reporters only one this isn't over. Little did the public know at the time just how right Kathy would be. At Allen's sentencing, the judge described the crime as exactly what it was. Heinous, cold, and beyond comprehension. She called Abby and Libby innocent children who suffered unimaginable terror. Family members of the girls gave victim impact statements expressing their grief and anger and their belief that Richard Allen is the person responsible. And then the judge delivered the sentence. 130 years in prison, 65 for each girl served consecutively. Before we close this part of the story, I want to step back from the legal fight and remember what this case has always been about. Abby Williams and Libby German. Two girls who should still be here. Two families who deserved answers. They lost their lives in a way no family should ever have to endure. Their names deserve to be spoken with reverence, their memories honored and their families supported as they continue to navigate a grief that doesn't end with a verdict. Libby once told her grandmother that she loved true crime when they were watching her favorite crime show together one day, she even told her, I'm going to do that one day. Help the police solve crime. Crimes. When investigators found the video on Libby's phone, it was as if she had tried to do exactly that. Her intuition told her something wasn't right on that bridge, and she documented it the best she could. Justice for Abby and Libby matters, but so do the constitutional rights of the person accused. Our justice system only works when both are protected. The prosecution has a duty to protect. Build a case anchored in facts. The defense has a duty to test every weakness in those facts. And the jurors have the solemn responsibility of deciding whether the evidence truly adds up. But what about the evidence that is withheld from jurors? Is it possible to be a finder of fact when you aren't given all of the facts? In the next episode, we step outside the jury, the jury box and take a look at the evidence. The jurors were never allowed to hear a social media profile that was one of the last people to communicate with Abby and Libby traced back to a known child predator. And details about the suspicious neighbor, Brad Weber, that the jury never got to hear. And then the most explosive allegation of all, information that had once been dismissed as too far fetched to believe was found to be backed by an FBI investigation. Men the defense had long pointed to tied to a violent paganist group were revealed to have not only confessed to family members, but also to have a direct personal connection to one of the girls. One of them even asked an investigator, quote, if my spit is found on one of the girls, but I can explain it, will I still be in trouble? What once appeared to be nothing more than bizarre conspiracy theories pulled from message boards would make its way to court documents, depositions and statements. And once you hear this side of the story, you may never look at this case the same way again. Thirteenth Juror is an audio Chuck production hosted by Brandi Churchwell. Ashley Flowers is executive producer. You can follow 13th Juror on Instagram. 13th year podcast. I think Chuck would approve.