Original subtitles

The date has now been set for the murder trial

of Richard Allen, the man accused of killing

two Delphi teens back in 2017.

50-year-old Allen, a married father, charged last October.

He has pleaded not guilty.

It's now been nearly seven years

since Abby Williams and Libby German were killed.

It's been an emotional roller coaster.

Not having details, I feel like my mind kind of filled in.

I just felt like everything went really fast

and really slow all at the same time.

All these years of building up

and waiting and anticipation.

You just don't even know what to do.

Days ran into each other.

I struggled really badly

with my mental health.

You're nobody in prison.

It was horrible.

We were helpless.

There was nothing we could do

other than take his phone calls.

My belief is Richard Allen is innocent.

What happened to Richard Allen

should make every single person uneasy and angry.

Half the town does want it to be over.

The other half, we don't feel that

they've done right by Richard Allen.

My name is Nicholas McLeland.

I'm the Carroll County prosecutor.

This investigation is still very ongoing.

We are not going to talk about the evidence

that we have in this case.

I would be lying if I didn't admit

we were a little bit concerned,

because the prosecutor, Nick, is young.

I told Nick, I said,

"You screw up, I will call you out."

We will have our opportunity and day in court when

we can present the evidence that we have against him.

But until that day, he is presumed innocent.

I think Delphi has changed from this crime.

The evil has not been expunged from Delphi yet.

We're not even close.

This case received so much worldwide attention.

This is a case of a lifetime.

But I don't say that with glee.

It's a fact.

People are interested in justice for those girls.

There's a lot of pressure.

The stakes were so high.

A man's life is on the line here.

It's difficult to prepare

for a trial of this magnitude.

It's like running a marathon.

Every mile hurts.

The last few miles hurt worse than the first.

Brad and I were going through

the mounds and mounds of evidence

to show that Richard Allen is innocent.

All right.

It was a Saturday morning, and my mind exploded.

It's 10:00 in the morning.

I've been up a while.

Had a breakthrough late last night.

I stumbled upon a 12-page report.

There's evidence here that this highly unusual

Norse pagan religion might be connected to the crime scene.

I'm reading one thing, and I'm like, holy crap.

And then the second one, I'm like, oh, my God.

Law enforcement saw that there were hallmarks

at the crime scene that suggested ritualistic activity.

It made you think that a person, or persons,

did place things on the girls for a particular reason.

My name is Dawn Perlmutter,

and I'm a ritualistic crime expert.

I've worked on hundreds of cases of ritualistic crimes

with the FBI, the DEA, Homeland Security.

I get called in when there's very unusual types of evidence.

The defense wanted my opinion on whether

this crime scene was ritualistic

and what I thought was going on.

When I first looked at the crime scene photos,

what stood out to me were the body positionings,

the arrangement of the branches on their bodies,

and what appears to have been a symbol on the tree

was done in the victim's blood.

I can tell you from experience

that these are common indicators

of ritualistic crime.

Once you determine that it may be a ritualistic crime scene,

then the next step is determining which group

it may be affiliated with.

Early on in the case, law enforcement started

looking at a group of people in the Delphi area

called Odinists.

Odinism is a contemporary religion

that takes its inspiration in the pre-Christian religions

of Northern Europe, so Germanic and Norse religions.

These are people who had worshipped

the gods Odin and Thor.

I think the branches that were covering the bodies

were placed in a very specific way,

and in my opinion,

they look like runic symbols.

Runes are the ancient alphabet of Norse people,

and they are very much incorporated

into contemporary heathenry.

I've had several cases with runes

in ritualistic crime scenes.

They're usually intentional marks

that indicate that, in the offender's mind,

he is doing something that has meaning.

Law enforcement investigated the possibility

that Odinists were involved.

I learned that there are people from our area

that are involved in this Norse pagan Odinist religion

that I never knew about.

This Odinist movement in the United States

is often made up of young white men

from working class backgrounds.

These groups began to proliferate

in a sort of industrial decline of the Midwest.

Odin is the god of fury and ecstasy and power,

but they are refiguring the figure of Odin

as representing this sort of

class disappointment and class rage.

There were several people living in the area

that were allegedly practicing Odinism.

In fact, one of them was already

on law enforcement's radar...

a local man named Brad Holder.

Abby was friends with his son.

Brad Holder was posting things on his social media

that caused some concern.

Soon after the murders, Brad Holder posted

something where it said something along the lines of,

"Friends help friends move bodies."

Also, Holder's Facebook page showed runes.

He posted these images of Odinist rituals,

Odinist altars.

He would make runic symbols out of branches.

And these sticks that were on Abby

looked like a marking on a social media post

where he had the marking on his hand.

Brad Holder had also posted a picture

of two girls that were very similar in nature

to the way we found Abby and Libby.

And he would sometimes

do rituals with another local, Patrick Westfall.

My name is Patrick Westfall.

Brad Holder was in the group that I was in

out of Afghanistan.

We got to know each other quite well

over, you know, our time in the combat zone.

Patrick Westfall became a person of interest because of

his relationship with Brad Holder.

Part of what I reviewed was a video of a pagan group

doing a ritual in the woods.

Brad Holder is on camera

showing that he's the one videotaping.

That was just a standard ensemble

where people come together.

You have your meat or different other things

that you can have as an offering.

'Cause we're nature based... we love nature.

Trees, you know, have special meaning to us.

If you remember, Libby is located

and moved next to this big tree.

And I found it interesting that they were all bringing

their different offerings to the tree.

There's nothing that's part of it that has

anything to do with violence

and human sacrifices and killing.

And, you know, there's no initiation ritual

where you have to go out and stomp somebody out

to be a practitioner.

Law enforcement spent

dozens of hours investigating these people,

maybe hundreds of hours.

But then there was kind of a division

between the members that were investigating this,

whether this was a satanic type killing

or if it was just a murder that looked that way.

Brad Holder had a really good alibi.

Police had time cards and also people placing him

at work at the time of the murders.

I think it's a misconception

that we did not thoroughly investigate

the Odinism connection.

We did. We just were never able

to establish any probable cause.

No one could ever prove Brad Holder

and Patrick Westfall were involved.

We couldn't even put them in Delphi.

I think many in the investigation

believed that this kind of stuff

only happens in the movies.

I can tell you from other cases I've worked on,

officers aren't trained in ritualistic crimes.

There is absolutely nothing in their training

that prepares them for this type of crime scene.

It was really hard for me to understand

why they gave up on this angle so quickly.

It appears to me that there was more evidence

on third party suspects than on Richard Allen.

Here we go.

After that, I was all about doing nothing but

looking for Odinism and that angle.

From a professional standpoint,

we were preparing to go to battle.

We realized that none of this information

regarding the Odinists from the police investigation

was offered up to the court.

And so we started creating a memo

to get the judge to see that Odinists may have been

involved in this crime and to allow us

to present that idea to a jury.

So we did a ton of our own investigative work.

For starters, you better go to the scene of the crime.

We've now, using the GPS, gotten to this.

She would have been here then.

Libby was placed right here

with her arm up against the trunk

and her head turned to the left

and her feet coming out this direction.

And Abby would have been right here

at about a 30-degree angle to what Libby was.

I spent 12-, 15-, 18-hour days,

seven days a week working on the case.

I was sleeping on my couch.

And there were... you know, my clo...

if you, like, looked at this office,

it was a complete wreck most of the time.

I hope my wife remembers me.

I've gained a little weight.

We mined all this information regarding the Odinists

from the police investigation,

some of it from our own follow-up investigation,

to prove to the court

that law enforcement misled the judge.

So it's almost like saying,

"Judge, here's the rest of the story.

Here's what they didn't tell you."

Finally, we finished getting

that 136-page memo together.

Sierra and Sarah have been

unbelievably working on this thing.

September 18, 2023.

Now's the time to hit the Send button.

I'm just checking one last thing.

OK, Andy.

What time is it?

It's 2:06.

Here. Hit the button.

You do it.

All right, well, this is for Richard Allen.

All right.

Hope that gets him out.

This morning, a new twist

in the Delphi double murders.

Allen's attorneys filing a 136-page motion on Monday,

where they claim the girls were ritualistically

sacrificed by members of a pagan Norse religion

called Odinism.

It read like a gripping novel

of this Odinism conspiracy

that sacrificed these two young girls.

It set the whole state ablaze with people talking.

It was quite a shock

that somebody would make that allegation.

The media, the YouTubers, social media,

podcasts, they grabbed hold of this idea and they ran with it.

Today, McLeland calling the entire memo

"colorful, dramatic, and highly unprofessional."

So everybody online was like,

were these girls murdered as a sacrifice?

And it was just, like, rampant speculation.

Is there some coverup going on here or something happening?

If true, the information in these documents

point the finger in

a completely different direction.

But I think they're actually on to something here.

Once that memorandum came out,

and I had people calling me left and right asking

why I'm all over YouTube channels.

Patrick Westfall.

-Patrick Westfall. -Patrick Westfall.

It absolutely crushed me.

That's not small change stuff.

This is a double homicide.

It's worldwide watched, followed event,

and my name is slapped all over this memorandum.

Brad Holder was posting on Facebook

saying people are accusing him of being Bridge Guy.

He posted a video on TikTok saying

that he's not Bridge Guy.

You don't like my hat?

You... you think I'm the murderer 'cause...

because I'm wearing his hat, right?

It seemed like he was sick of these online accusations.

No matter how big of a dickhead I am,

I didn't kill those girls.

I'm tired of hearing Odinism.

I never have had anything to do with it.

I get that that's an attorney's job

is to create reasonable doubt.

But man, they really ruined a lot of things for me

by doing it that way.

The memo was well within the boundaries of what

a competent lawyer would do to defend their client,

but the reactions were pretty overwhelming.

You have to go where the investigation leads you.

You have to do your job.

And then just deal with the consequences

of whatever comes from that.

As the trial in this case got closer,

we were awaiting the judge's pre-trial rulings

on our request to introduce third party culpability.

Until that happens, we just have to keep

working on the case night and day and morning

and noon and night.

Law enforcement, they have an infinite amount

of resources to investigate these crimes

and to prop them up in a courtroom.

The government has a huge advantage in that regard.

We knew that prosecutor

was working as hard as us.

There definitely are days

that you get overwhelmed and think,

I have so much to do.

I don't know how I'm going to do all this.

Obviously, a lot of sleepless nights,

a lot of time away from family and friends

to put the work in that's necessary for the case.

It took a toll on Nick.

We watched him.

He gave up a lot for this case.

Judge Gull ruled that the defense would not be

allowed to raise the issue of third party suspects,

basically hampering the defense's allegations

of Odinism and human sacrifice.

It was a one-, maybe a two-page order saying that

we could not present any of that evidence at trial.

She just flat out denied it,

essentially saying to Rick Allen that,

you know, if you think you're going to get away with

pointing fingers at these other people, you know,

you got another thing coming.

The bottom line is there was no connection,

no direct criminal nexus in that group of people

that, in my opinion,

the defense came out and falsely accused.

The judge's ruling was

a devastating blow to the defense.

My professional opinion is

that to make this information public,

it was displeasing to the court.

And in hindsight, you know, it probably wasn't

the best way to garner judicial support.

Whether or not the Odinists are responsible

for the death of these girls,

I don't really have a personal opinion about that.

But what I do know for certain is,

this ruling stripped Rick Allen of the ability

to defend himself.

Did it change our strategy?

I mean, the strategy went from third party suspect

to just plain old reasonable doubt.

There's reasonable doubt here.

We really believed that we were going to win.

We were going to be able to get Richard out of this

in spite of that ruling.

Well before the trial, people took sides.

There were people who were pro Richard Allen

or against Richard Allen.

Right here, a protest is gearing up.

"We love you, Rick Allen."

We are pro prosecution here.

There's no evidence connecting

Richard to the crime.

I cannot declare

that Richard Allen is totally innocent.

I really had a fear that we're not going to be able

to get a jury pool that hasn't formed an opinion

so that we could have a fair trial,

not only for the state, but for Richard Allen.

The trial for the man accused of killing

Abby Williams and Libby German begins tomorrow.

There was an influx of media here in Delphi.

A lot of people certainly got tired

of microphones in the face.

The judge said she's not televising the trial.

So people showed up hoping to hear

the evidence against Richard Allen.

I'm from Atlanta, Georgia.

I was really concerned about the process

and whether or not a fair trial was going to happen.

I have spent every day for almost four years

thinking about this case.

I need to know the evidence for myself.

It was almost like a spectacle.

A woman was saying she flew in from Seattle

and brought her kids with her

because they wanted to walk the trail

and... like it was a tourist attraction.

So the branch went from here to here.

It was this end where they were abducted.

Only 24 people from the public

were allowed in each day, so people started lining up

the night before, hoping to be one of the first

24 people to get in.

People were paying people to sit in line for them.

At what point does people's interest in justice

become just a bloodlust for the gruesome details?

It's free entertainment to them.

People tend to forget that the subjects of the story

are real people.

It's been eight years of building up

and waiting and anticipation.

I told Libby I would be there for every second.

I was there for the entire trial, every day.

I did that for her.

It was the least I could do.

So as a memorial to Libby, I decided to do this tattoo.

These coordinates here are where she is buried.

I've got a music note here.

She was a painter.

Got more music.

This here was for Mother's Day of 2016.

Libby gave me a pendant that said Mom.

I put all four of my girls' birthstones,

and it says Libby instead of Mom.

It's taken 7 1/2 years

to get to the official day of trial.

People I spoke to say they just want this to be over

so the entire community can heal.

It was definitely somber and kind of weird

that finally the time had arrived for the trial.

Abby and Libby's families, they say they won't rest

until there's a conviction.

We sat through court every day.

We owed that to Abby and Libby.

We owed it to the prosecution team.

You know, we were there to support them.

The strongest arguments

that were presented at trial by the prosecution

I think you can break into a few groups.

The timeline... it was Richard Allen

on the trail that day at the time of the murders.

The bullet... could they link the bullet

they had discovered at the crime scene

to Richard Allen?

And then the confessions where he says that

he did it... can you believe them?

When Richard Allen first spoke to the police

back in 2017, he puts himself squarely

in the middle of the crime scene

at the time the crime was being committed,

which investigators narrowed down

to roughly a 2-hour window between 2:13 and 4:00 PM.

Richard Allen says he was there

1:30 to 3:30.

Five years later,

on October 13, 2022,

when he's being interrogated by

Carroll County Chief Investigator Steve Mullen,

Richard Allen gives a different timeline.

At 2:13 when

the famous video is taken,

Richard wasn't there.

He left the trails about 1:30.

And that's, you know...

that's what his...

what he told police.

The defense argued that

this report was unreliable

because the officer didn't record the interview.

He did not have it recorded.

We didn't see his notes.

The prosecution argues

the 1:30 to 3:30 timeline

is correct because police say

they see his car at 1:27.

The Carroll County prosecutor placing a car

that he says matches Richard Allen's

near the Monon High Bridge

between the time frame of 1:30 and 3:30,

which is what he originally said in his police interviews.

I've looked at those videos.

The distance from the camera to the road,

the fact that it's moving,

it's super hard to identify a make or a model.

I just don't think that you can honestly say that

that is Richard Allen's car.

Today, the focus is on an unspent bullet.

The only piece of physical evidence

the state had was this unspent cartridge or bullet.

There was no other forensic evidence

tying him to this crime.

So the jurors were extremely attentive.

They were tuned in.

They were paying attention.

They were, you know, nodding.

The police and prosecutor are saying that

Richard Allen had his gun out, and he pulls it back

as, like, an intimidation method.

So when you do that, sometimes an unspent round will pop out.

She testified for hours

as to how she came to that conclusion.

She said it primarily came from markings left behind

that are unique to Allen's gun.

Whether you want to believe the bullet was

a direct match or a direct tie,

that was heavily debated in court.

But there was forensic evidence

that proved that it did come from his gun.

That discipline is far from an exact science,

and really relying on that uncycled round

to convict this guy would have been reckless.

If that's the best they have to do, they're in trouble.

This magic bullet to me was shaky ground.

It is day 11

of the Delphi double murder trial.

And today, the jury heard from the former lead psychologist

at Westville Correctional Facility.

Dr. Monica Wala testified to hearing

a number of alleged verbal confessions

from Allen, including where he confessed

to killing Abby and Libby,

adding he was sorry for what he did.

Allen shared a timeline with Dr. Wala

of what happened on February 13th of 2017,

the day the girls were last seen alive.

The state heavily relied on this confession at trial.

This is a very convincing confession

because of the detail.

This confession had details that allegedly

only the killer would know.

Richard Allen allegedly said that

he left his mother's house, and on the way home,

he stopped to get a six-pack of beer,

drank three at home,

and then headed out to the trails and bundled up.

While he was on the trail, he saw Abby and Libby

and eventually followed them onto the bridge,

where he encountered them

and then took them down the hill.

And he said in his confession to her,

his intention was sexual in nature

and wanted to rape them.

And he saw a van arriving at the end of this very long

private driveway, which caused him to cross over

to the north side of the creek,

where eventually the girls' bodies were found.

Wala's testimony was questioned

by defense attorney Brad Rozzi.

Dr. Wala reported that Rick said many things to her

that were incriminating.

You know, and I'm not doing the math technically,

but I would say 98% of those things

were generic confessions and at a time

when even she acknowledged that

he was suffering from a state of psychosis.

She admitted on the stand

to using a work computer to search for information

on people involved in the case,

information that the public would not know.

It was revealed that she was interested

in the Delphi case even before

Richard Allen was arrested.

She joined Facebook groups in 2021.

And also, she stopped by the trail

before Rick was arrested to get more intelligence

about where this all happened.

This person had no business,

no business being in Rick Allen's world at all.

The idea that a van was involved

had probably been shared on social media dozens of times

throughout the five-year investigation.

It was not information that was really new.

The state says that Dr. Wala

accurately reported what Mr. Allen said.

The defense says Dr. Wala's reports were tainted

by her outside knowledge of the case,

and also pointed out that about the time

Richard Allen started confessing,

he was losing touch with reality.

We were hoping to get the jury's mind

to at least consider that it's possible

that a man who "confessed" is actually innocent.

The jury is going to have to weigh the confessions

that Richard Allen made while behind bars,

but the defense says those confessions are false.

Right now, closing arguments are underway

in the Delphi double murder trial.

The prosecutor, Nick McLeland,

in his closing argument, made a very important point.

Libby wanted to work in law enforcement.

She wanted to solve crimes.

In a very real way, she did solve this crime.

Because she took that video,

she captured the image of her own murderer.

Had it not been for that, had it not been for the voice,

Richard Allen might never have been caught.

During the prosecution's

closing arguments, they said Bridge Guy

was Richard Allen and walked through

a number of reasons why they believed that.

The state is officially done with their closing arguments.

Next will be the defense.

In this day and age, it's really hard for me

to accept the fact that there is not really

one iota of forensic evidence

that connects Richard Allen to this crime scene

or to the death of these two girls

and how there couldn't be some forensic DNA evidence

associated with Richard Allen,

except for the fact that

Richard Allen didn't commit this crime.

The fate of the man accused of killing

Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German in 2017

is now in the hands of the jury.

I felt pretty positive that

they're going to make the right decision,

because reasonable doubt was written all over the place.

I said, you know what?

We can't do anything.

Turn it over to God.

You're at the mercy of 12 people that I don't know,

and they're making the decision on

not only Richard Allen's fate, but ours as well.

Those four days that we were waiting,

the jury was deliberating, were excruciating.

Eight years that I've lost

just waiting for something, anything.

I'll not get that time back.

It still feels much like it did

the first day the girls were gone.

Doing this park in honor of the girls

ensures that they'll never be forgotten.

Libby's cousins and our kids, our family,

the little ones that Abby never got to meet,

they all get to play here.

It doesn't make it hurt any less,

but it sure does feel good to come out here and see it,

and to be here and to give people a place to go.

Just run around and be kids.

Do what the girls did.

Healing?

Not... not yet.

That's... that's a work in progress.

Jurors preparing for their fourth day of deliberations

after working through part of the weekend.

This was the first time in two years

that we all actually had some hope.

On my phone conversations with Ricky,

I heard some joy in his voice.

And I had some, too.

Waiting for the verdict is a lot of anxiety.

You're waiting and you're waiting.

It's always hard waiting for the jury

to come back because you're just wondering,

what are they doing?

What are they thinking?

Nobody made a sound when that jury came in.

We didn't know which way it was going to go.

As the jurors walked out, I looked at their faces.

I didn't see any of the jurors

making eye contact with Richard Allen.

And I remember when the verdict was announced,

somebody off to my left gasped.

Guilty on all counts.

More than 7 1/2 years after the murders

of Delphi teens Abby Williams and Libby German,

a jury today said

Richard Allen is guilty of the crimes.

Guilty!

Yeah, yeah!

Guilty. Guilty!

To hear the guilty verdict was kind of a relief.

-Yes! -Guilty!

I'm grateful that we got justice when we did.

Richard Allen's wife, Kathy, could not even stand

after the verdict was read,

and she actually had to be assisted to her feet.

When I heard those words, guilty, it was shock.

Ricky looked confused.

And I wanted to stand there and scream for him.

The prosecution said,

we know this Bridge Guy took the girls.

And they proved Richard Allen was Bridge Guy.

The people that matter were those 12 jurors.

And we have a system of justice that allows them to decide

the fate of a human being.

Do you feel Richard Allen had a fair trial?

Yes.

Richard Allen sentenced to

the maximum 130 years in prison.

I'd be remiss if I didn't thank

Abby and Libby themselves.

Without the efforts from those two little girls,

we wouldn't be here today.

So, Abby and Libby, thank you.

At this point, we don't believe

any other actors are involved.

If evidence comes out in the future to support that,

we'll obviously investigate that.

There are two sides to this case...

the people who think he was justly convicted

and people who think he was wrongly convicted.

I do believe that he is guilty of this crime.

I think that Carroll County seems very divided

in terms of whether they believe

Richard Allen is guilty or not.

I believe that

Richard Allen is an innocent man.

I have no idea who did this, and I think that person is

still here, is still out here.

Richard Allen is guilty and always will be.

I think most people are

somewhat satisfied that justice has been served.

I think there's a lot of people out there

that will go to their grave trying to help Richard Allen.

And it's not just about Richard Allen.

If they can do it to one man, they can do it to any of us.

Lawyers are superstitious in nature.

So to state that we have a strong appeal

makes me nervous.

But we have a strong appeal.

I know there's appeals that are coming,

but the process worked.

I'm very hopeful for an appeal.

His clothes are still ready.

They're not going anywhere.

I've got everything ready for him to come home,

all of his favorite books.

It was definitely our dream to grow old together,

and it still is.

I'm looking forward to that.

I'm not giving up.

How about we start to heal now?

How about we hit that reset button

and understand that justice in this country was served?

And if you don't like justice in this country,

go to another one.

Let's heal.

You think hearing guilty is going to be enough,

and you think the sentencing is going to be enough,

and it's just not true.

It's just not that way.

This doesn't bring her back.

The girls are still gone.

I think the conviction was, in a sense,

a scab over the wound,

but the scar is always going to be there.

Delphi is a small town.

They were shaken.

People didn't lock their doors, lock up their cars.

And everybody does now.

There is still some wariness that did not exist,

I would say, before that time.

I miss what it was before.

Yeah, definitely.

Just the safe, small town feeling that it had.

Yeah.

When it wasn't the Delphi murders,

when it was just Delphi, Indiana.

Yeah, definitely.

The girls are gone,

but they didn't take away

everything beautiful here in Delphi.

We're going to make the best of what we have

with the time that we have.

We want to make up to the kids and the grandkids

and go on

and live life like it used to be.

My name is Hayden.

I'm 16.

We lost somebody who would have changed the world.

I try to be passionate about everything

that I do, too, because that's the way she was.

And it's all I can do is do what she couldn't.

Libby could have done so many things.

She had so many plans.

We lost a lot of sunshine without her.

It's definitely hard not having Libby here

for milestones in my life.

But it hurts even more not being there for hers

and knowing that I'll never get to go to her wedding

or I'll never get to meet her children.

They would both, I think,

be on a very successful, happy path right now.

I feel like both of them

would be making differences in the world

in their own little perky ways.

We're like Gina and Pam.

Always.

-I'm her bestie, I am. -She is.

-We gonna pose for this cam. -Cheese.

We don't want your man.