Every disappearance has a final moment of certainty, a last sighting, a last call, a last place someone was known to be. The last known tells real true crime cases using only the facts. If you follow true crime, or honestly, if you've just been on the internet at all in the last decade, there is an image that is probably burned into your brain. It's unforgettable. It's this grainy, really pixelated still frame of a man. He's walking across this old, rickety looking railroad bridge, high above a creek. He's wearing blue jeans, a blue jacket, maybe a hat. His head is down, yeah, and he looks like, well, it looks like anybody. And that was always the most terrifying part. Of it, that image, and of course the audio that went with it, just three words down the hill. It sparked one of the most intent i mean truly one of the most widespread manhunts in recent American history. We are, of course talking about the Delphi. Murders, right and today, February fifth, twenty twenty six, we are sitting here and we can finally look back at a case that you know, it began with those two young girls on that bridge back in twenty seventeen, and it ended finally with a one hundred and thirty year sentence that was just handed down. It's been such a long, long road and while a lot of people, maybe most people know the headline Richard Allen is guilty, the actual story of how we got to that point is it's incredibly complex. Oh, it's amazing, it is. It's full of these stunning bureaucratic failures, some really bizarre forensic details, and you know, at trial, two completely different realities were presented to. The jury exactly, and that is our mission for this deep dive. We aren't just here to recount the tragedy. We're going to unpack the investigation itself, the trial, how it. All unfolded, and we have a ton of material to work with. We do. We've got a massive stack of sources here. We're pulling from court transcripts, a lot of fantastic local reporting from the Curle County Comet, the detailed evidence lists that were released after the trial, and all the recent coverage of the sentencing. We're really going to try and figure out how a case that felt so cold for so long was in reality actually solved within days. And then lost for five years. Yeah, and that's really the core tension we need to explore, isn't it. On one side, you've got the States case they called it the Bridge Guys starter kit, they had the ballistics, they had. The confessions, seemingly straightforward case. But then on the other side you have the defenses narrative, which is it's just wild. You have charges of a ritual sacrifice this group called the Odonists, and a complete and total lack of any DNA evidence. Two stories that just cannot coexist, not at all. It is a lot to get through. So to you listening right now, buckle up. We're going to walk you through the lost tip that honestly should have ended this entire nightmare back in twenty seventeen. We'll also get into the digital footprint that pinpointed the exact moment of the. Crime, and some of the really disturbing details that finally, after years of secrecy, came out during the trial. So let's start at the very beginning. Let's go back to that day, the day that everything in that small town changed. February thirteen, twenty seventeen, Delphi, Indiana. It's an unusually warm day for February. You know, a bit of a false spring. And you had two best friends, Abigail Abby Williams, who was thirteen, and Liberty Libby German, who was fourteen. And they had the day off from school. It's a snow makeup day. They didn't have to go to. Right so, like any teenagers would, they just wanted to get outside hang out. They decided to go to the Moon and Highbridge Trails. It's this really scenic sort of historic area in Delphi. They get dropped off by a family member and they're just you know, hiking, taking pictures for social media, just being kids. And this is where we have to stop and talk about Libby German because her presence of mind in this moment, I mean, in the history of true crime, it's almost unprecedented. She is the entire reason this case was ever solved. Absolutely, she is a hero. There is no other word you can use for it. As things started to feel wrong, she took out her phone and she started recording. We've all seen the short, grainy clips that law enforcement released early on, but recently the Justice for Rick Allen website of all places, released the full unedited video and it is it's just heartbreaking to watch it is. You see Abby walking ahead on the bridge and behind her walking a little too closely, a little too purposefully. Is that man, the man in the blue jacket bridge guy. Yeah. Then you hear the audio. You hear him say pretty clearly, guys. And then one of the girls you can hear she sounds so timid, almost confused. She says hi, and. Then comes that chilling command we all know down the hill. It's in shivers down my spine every single time I hear that audio. Now. Prosecutors they argued during the trial that the girls also made a reference to a gun. They claim the man was carrying one and that's how he was able to control two teenage girls by himself. The audio is a little muffled there, it's debated, but the implication is crystal clear. He forced them off the main trail, down that steep wooded hill and across Deer Creek to a more secluded area, and. They were found the next day, on Valentine's Day, twenty seventeen. Yeah, by a search party. And I think we need to prepare you listening. The details of the crime scene were kept secret by law enforcement for years to protect the investigation. They were finally revealed a trial, and they are they're deeply disturbing. Yeah, this is the part where you realized the absolute brutality of what happened. The prosecutors revealed in court that both girls had their throats cut. He was a very violent, very chaotic, and horrific scene. Investigators were also baffled by the state of the bodies. Libby was found naked, but Abby was found wearing some of Libby's clothes. It was so strange, so confusing to them at the time. But in all of that horror, there was one piece of evidence that changed everything. Libby's phone. The phone. It was found under a shoe which was tucked under Abby's body. The prosecutor Nick McClelland he made a huge point of this during the trial. He called Abby a hero for it. The theory is that in her last moments, she made sure to hide that phone to preserve the evidence, to make sure their attacker couldn't find it and destroy it. It's just incredible bravery from both of them. That phone is essentially the black box of this entire case. Without it, we don't have the video, we don't have the audio of his voice. We don't have the timeline. We don't have anything. But here's the thing that is so maddening about this case. We had the video, we had his voice, we even had a police sketch. Yeah, and yet Richard Allen, the man who was eventually convicted, he was living in Delphi the whole time. He wasn't on the run. He worked at the local CBS pharmacy. He was right there, hiding in plain sight. And this brings us to what might be the single most frustrating part of the source material. We have to talk about tip number seventy. Four, oh Man tip hashtag seventy four. This is the clerical error that you hear about, and it's just it's infuriating, it really is. So let's unpack this for everyone. Richard Allen wasn't caught because of some high tech DNA dragnet or a you know, brilliant detective's deduction years down the line. No, he was caught because he basically turned himself in days after the murder. That's right. In twenty seventeen, just a couple of days after Abby and Libby were found, Richard Allen went to an Indiana conservation officer, a guy named Dan. Dillon, and what did he tell him? He told him straight up, I was on the bridge on February thirteenth, between one thirty and three thirty pm. He also said he saw three young girls on the trails. He placed himself at the scene during the murder window wearing clothes that matched the description of bridge guy. He literally put himself there. He told them he saw three girls, which was a detail that wasn't widely known yet. So, I mean, the obvious question is why wasn't he arrested in twenty seventeen. Because of a red pen? A pen Someone and we still don't know who did it, took a red pen and on the sheet for his tip they wrote the word. Cleared, cleared as in nothing to see here. Exactly, and that tip sheet was filed away. The prosecutor mentioned that it wasn't even misfiled under the wrong name or something, though his name was entered weirdly as Ridgard Allen Whiteman. But the point is it was specifically marked as cleared by an unknown person. And it just sat there. It sat in a box for five years. It's unbelievable. So what happened? How did it get found? It wasn't until twenty twenty two. There was a volunteer, a woman named Kathy Shank. She was a retired social worker who was helping the new sheriff for a few old files. Just going through boxes of old tips. Right, and Prosecutor mcclewalin, he does this great quote in an interview. He said, Kathy Shank deserves an s on her chest for Superman. I love that. So she's just digging through thousands of these old tips and she comes across this one. She finds this one. She sees the name Richard Allen, which you know she hadn't really seen on any of the main suspect lists that had been circulating. And she sees the timestamp one thirty to three thirty PM. And she puts it together. She puts it together. She realizes, wait a minute, this guy is admitting he was at the seat of the crime during the time of the crime, a tip that was supposedly cleared. It's a moment that just makes you want to scream. Mean. Think about it. If that tip hadn't been marked cleared, if someone had followed up on it properly in twenty seventeen, this case could have been solved in a week. Instead, that community, those families they lived in absolute fear and uncertainty for five more years. It's just a catastrophic failure. So Kathy Shank flags this tip to the new sheriff, Tony Leggett. They realized the mistake, and then suddenly, in October of twenty twenty two, law enforcement descends on Richard Allen's home. And this brings us right to part two of our deep dive. Yeah, the arrest and what the States so memorably called the Bridge Guy starter kit. I remember when that phrase first came out in the court document's starter kit. It's so dark, but it's also incredibly descriptive, isn't it It is. So they execute the search warrant on his home in Delphi, a place he'd been living the whole time, and what do they find. They found exactly what you would expect the Bridge Guy to have. Exactly. They found a bunch of knives, box cutters. I have to remember the victim's cause of death was sharp force trauma. Their throats were cut. But the most important thing found was the gun. The gun, specifically a sig sour P two twenty six handgun, a forty caliber pistol. And this is where we get into the ballistics evidence. Now, usually when we talk about ballistics in a true crime deep dive, we're talking about matching a bullet that was pulled from a victim to a specific gun. But that's not what happened. Here, No, not at all. There were no gunshot wounds on the girls. But during the initial processing of the crime scene back in twenty seventeen, investigators found something very small and very significant lying on the ground between the girl's bodies. An unspent point four euro caliber round. An unspent round, and for anyone listening, that means a live bullet, a full cartridge that was never fired. So it wasn't a shellcasing from a fired shot, It was a whole. Bullet, correct. And the prosecution's theory on this, and this was a pivotal part of their case, was that Richard Allen racked the slide of his gun, probably to intimidate the girls, to show them he was armed. And when you rack the slot on a semi automatic pistol like that sigsur, if there's already a round in the chamber, it ejects it. It pops it right out the side, and the theory is that in the chaos of that moment, he didn't notice it or didn't bother to pick it up. Okay, so the science here is the big question. How can you match a bullet that hasn't been fired. There's no firing pin. Mark, right. That was the entire debate. The state's forensic experts. They came in and they claimed that the mechanism of the gun itself, specifically the extractor claw that pulls the round out and the ejector that kicks it away, leaves microscopic tool marks on the soft brass casing of the bullet, So. Even just cycling it through the gun leaves a unique fingerprint, so to speak. That was their argument. They compared the tiny scratches and marks on the bullet found at the crime scene to test rounds that they cycled through Allen's gun, and they told a Jerry it was a match. But the defense they were not having any. Of that, not at all. They latched onto this. They derisively called it the magic bullet. Right. They're basically saying, come on. Their experts argue that the science of matching cycling marks is nowhere near as reliable or as accepted as matching firing pin marks or barrel striations on a fired bullet. They also just emphasized the fact that, Okay, even if it was his bullet, Alan couldn't explain how it got there. But it doesn't prove he was the one who was there with the gun. It's a plausible argument, but for the jury, it was a tangible physical link, a piece of his property from his gun found between the bodies of the victims. It's a powerful image. And there was another piece of physical evidence, or maybe I should say a lack of evidence, that the prosecutor found to be extremely suspicious. Yes, the missing cell phone. This is a detail that really stuck with prosecutor McClellan. You can tell from the transcripts. When they searched Alan's house, they found he was sort of a bit of a hoarder when it came to electronics. He kept everything. He had a whole drawer full of old cell phones with chargers dating all the way back to nineteen ninety eight, kept all of them. He kept everything except for one the phone that he was using in February of twenty seventeen. That is, that's highly suspicious. Isn't it. I mean, it's a massive red flag. He had the phone from the four twenty seventeen, he had the phones from after twenty seventeen, but the specific device that would have had his location data, his search history, his call logs from the day of the murders, it was gone. What was his explanation? Alan claimed his wife Kathy might have gotten rid of it and recycled it at a Walmart, Kiosk or something. But McClelland argued to the jury that this gap was intentional. He called it a black hole in his digital life that existed for this specific window when the murders happened. So you have the gun, you have the missing phone, and you have the starter kit of knives and blades found in his house. It's a lot of circumstantial evidence. But the state had something else, something they leaned on, very very heavily. The confessions. And we're not just talking about one or two slips of the time. No, we're talking about over sixty. Times sixty sixty confessions, more than sixty times. Richard Allen confessed to the murders while he was incarcerated at Westfield Correctional Facility awaiting trial. Who was he talking to? Who did he confess to? I mean pretty much everyone he came into contact with. He confessed on the phone to his wife Kathy, He confessed to his mother Yannis, He confessed to the warden of the prison, He confessed to prison employees, mental health staff, and even to other inmates. That seems, I mean, that's excessive. Usually when a suspect is arrested for a high profile murder, they clam up, they lawyer up, they say nothing. Why was he talking so much? And that became the absolute core of the defense's argument. They claimed Richard Allen was having a severe mental health crisis. He was being held in solitary confinement for his own safety. Right because it's such a notorious case. Exactly. The defense argued he was delirious, he was psychotic, and he was basically cracking under the intense pressure in isolation. They said, he was just confessing to anything and everything that he would have admitted to being the Zodiac killer if they'd asked him. But the state they had the tapes of the phone calls, and they played them for the jury. They did, and this was a very effective strategy. Prosecutor McClellan talked about this in his post trial interview with the Combat He said they played these phone calls where Alan would be having a totally normal, mundane conversation with his wife like what he'd be asking, how's the cat, how's the dog doing, how's dad's health. Just totally loocid, totally normal stuff, and then in the very same calm, flat voice, he would suddenly say something like Kathy, I just need you to know that I did this. That is chilling. That's not a raving madman. It suggests he was completely aware of what he was saying. He was compartmentalizing. That's what the prosecution argued. And there was one confession in particular that contained a detail that the state said only the killer would know. This is what's known as the van detail. Right. This came from his conversations with the prison psychologist, a doctor Monica Walla. Yes. In one of their sessions, Alan told doctor Walla that his original plan wasn't just to kill the girls. He told her he had planned to sexually assault them, but he claimed he got spooked because he saw a van either parked nearby or driving under the bridge. He said that interruption changed his plan, and that's when he decided to take them across the creek and kill them quickly instead. And why is the van specifically so. Important Because a witness, a local man named Brad Weber, testified at the trial, and he testified that he was in fact driving his white work van under the munn And High Bridge right around the time the murders were happening. So Allan, in what's supposed to be a delusion, mentions a van interrupting him, and a completely independent witness testifies, Yeah, I was there. I was in my van. That's very difficult to explain away as a coincidence or delusion. It's powerful corroboration. The state argued that this was a detail that was never at least to the public. It was something that only the killer would know. How could Richard Allen know about a white van under the bridge unless he was there. So if you remember of that jury, you're hearing a lot. He was there. He admitted it himself back in twenty seventeen. He has the gun that matches the unspent round found at the scene, and he confessed over sixty times, including with specific details that seemed to match witness testimony. It really does sound like an open and shutcase. It does, but it wasn't because the defense had a completely different story to tell. And this is where things get really strange. This is where we enter the world of Odinism. Yeah, it's a sharp turn, for sure. I remember seeing the headlines about this when the defense documents were first filed, and I just thought, what, what are they talking about? So the defense's entire strategy was to create reasonable doubt by pointing the finger somewhere else, entirely specifically at a group of men who they claimed were involved in a Norse pagan religion called Odinism, which as. A religion has unfortunately been co opted in some circles by white nationalist groups. Right, that's right, And that was part of the defense's narrative. They focused on the crime scene itself. They argued that the way the bodies were found, the staging, the sticks and branches that were placed on and around them, that it wasn't just a clumsy attempt at concealment. They said it was a ritual. They said it was a ritual sacrifice. They claimed the branches were arranged in specific ways to form pagan symbols, or runs. They argued it was the signature of this Odinist group. And they didn't just have a theory. They had specific names, didn't they. They did. They named four specific individuals who they claimed were connected to this group and had been investigated early in the case. The defense's core argument was that these men, not Richard Allen, were the ones who sacrificed Abby and Livvy on that day. But and this is a huge butt the judge fran Gall she prohibited them from fully presenting this theory to the church. She did, and this is going to be the central point of Allan's appeal. So why, I mean, in a murder trial, shouldn't the defense be allowed to present their alternative theory of the crime? Generally yes, but there's a legal standard called the nexus requirement. The judge ruled that the defense didn't have enough direct, concrete evidence linking these specific foremen to the crime scene on that day to justify bringing it up. So you can't just throw out a wild theory. You have to show some kind of connection. Exactly. You can't just confuse the jury by saying maybe these other guys did it without some evidence. And prosecutor McClelland he later said that they did investigate the Odinism angle thoroughly early on. They went down that rabbit hole, as he called it, but found zero evidence to support it. He called it a disproven dead end. Okay, so the jury didn't hear the full odinism story, but the defense still had a very very strong card left to play, maybe their strongest. The DNA or more accurately, the DNA void. This was their knockout punch argument. I mean, we're talking about a brutal close contact double murder, throats cut, moving bodies across a creek, changing a victim's clothes. It's a messy physical crime. Incredibly messy physical crime. And yet the Indiana State Police forensic expert, a woman named Stacy Bozanovski, got on the stand and testified under oath that there was zero DNA belonging to Richard Allen found. Anywhere, nothing on the girl's clothing. Not a single cell, nothing under their fingernails from them fighting back, and maybe most importantly, no DNA of his found on the unspent cartridge that they claimed came from his gun. That is just baffling. I mean, how do you pull all of that off without leaving a single microscopic trace of yourself behind. That is the exact question the defense posed to the jury. They argued it was physically impossible for one man to control, kidnap and butcher two girls in that manner without leaving a shred of himself behind. So they used this lack of DNA to bolster their idea that it had to be a group of people, or at the very least someone else entirely. Of course, but the prosecution had a counter. They argued that the absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. Right, Just because they didn't find his DNA doesn't prove his innocence. Maybe he wore gloves. Maybe the fact that they crossed a creek washed crucial evidence away. There are explanations, and. That's where the case stood. You had the confessions and the bullet on one side, and the complete lack of DNA on the other. It was a classic circumstantial case, which brings us back to the digital evidence, because while there was no biological DNA, there was what you might call a digital fingerprint. Let's talk about the Apple health data from Libby's phone. This is becoming so common in modern trials, isn't it our phones? They know more about what we do than we do. Sometimes they absolutely do. Libby's iPhone was tracking her movements, her steps, her elevation changes. The data showed that during the time of the attack, her phone recorded that she traveled the vertical equivalent of two flights of stairs. And why does that matter? Because the topography of that hill from the end of the Moon and Hyghbridge down to the banks of Deer Creek, the elevation change almost perfectly matches the height of two flights of stairs, so. It corroborates the down the hill command from the audio. It shows they actually went down a hill of that specific height. It does, and then, even more chillingly, the phone's internal accelerometer ceased all movement, all vibration, all steps at two point three two. Pm two thirty two pm, So that pinpoints the time of death. It pinpoints the time the attack concluded and the phone came to rest under Abbey's body. It tightens that window of opportunity. Remember, Allen admitted to being on the trails until three point three zero. The murder happened at two point three to two. He has no alibi for that specific crucial moment. But there was a really weird moment during the trial related to the phone, right the headphone jack mystery. Oh, this was a moment of pure unscripted courtroom chaos. The defense's digital forensics expert, Stacy Eldridge, she got on the stand and dropped an absolute bombshell. How did she find? She testified that the internal logs on Libby's phone showed that a set of headphones was plugged into the phone's jack at five four five pm that day. Wait, forty five pm. That's hours after the time of death. The girls were already deceased. Their bodies are out in the woods. Who in the world is plugging headphones into Libby's phone? That was the explosive implication. Someone else was there, Someone touched that phone hours after the murders and long after Richard Allen was gone. It completely blindsided the prosecution. You can read it in the transcripts. They did not see this coming. So what did they do? How do you counter something like that on the fly? They're expert an officer named is Sergeant Christopher Cecil. He literally had to get back on the stand and admit that during the court's lunch break, he did a Google search. He googled it. In the middle of a double murder trial. He googled it, and he found a tech support article from Apple that explained that moisture or dirt or damage to the headphone port can cause the phone to erroneously log a headphone insertion event. So it wasn't a person, It was just water or debris in the port making the phone think something was plugged in. Exactly. It was a plausible, common sense explanation versus a more conspiratorial one. And in the end, it seems the jury went with the common sense explanation trial by Google search. Wow. And there was plenty of other drama in that courtroom too. I read about the defense using a picture of a torture rack. Uh, laughing slightly. It is during their closing arguments, trying to illustrate how Allan's mind had broken in prison, the defense attorneys showed the jury a picture of a medieval torture. Rack, a literal historical corture rack, a literal rack, to make a point about his treatment and solitary confinement. Prosecutor McClelland later said he almost jumped up to object, but then he decided to just let them do it. He thought it was so over the top that it would actually hurt their credibility with the jury. Let them go too far. And the trial was long and at times very dry. The judge had to admonish people in the gallery for sleeping. Oh yeah, Judge Gull had to stop the proceedings and say, I do not conduct court in your bedrooms. Apparently the dry DNA testimony was a little too much for some of the observers. So after all of that, we get to November of twenty twenty four. The jury has heard everything they've heard about the starter kit, the magic bullet, the sixty confessions, they've heard about the odinism theory, and the complete lack of DNA, and they go back to deliberate. They deliberate for nineteen hours over the course of three days, a long time, a very long time, and then they come back with a verdict guilty on all counts, two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder. And the sentencing, which just came down recently, one hundred and thirty years in prison. That's right, sixty five years for Abby, sixty five years for Libby served consecutively is effectively a life sentence. Richard Allen will die in prison. And the judge merged the counts right to avoid a double jeopardy issue. Correct, you can't be sentenced for both murder and felony murder for the same death. So the felony murder accounts were merged into the murder counts for sentencing. But the results is the same, one hundred and thirty years. The reaction in the courtroom, from what I read, it was just relief. I read that prosecutor McClellan refused to even say Richard Allen's name at the press conference afterwards. He didn't he wanted to erase him from the narrative. He said the focus should only be on Abby and Libby and Mike Patty, Libby's grandfather, who has been this incredible stoic face for the families throughout this whole ordeal. He just expressed gratitude that justice was finally served. It must be an immense relief, but it's also you know, it's not closure. Is that you can never really get closure on something this horrific. No, but you can get accountability, you can get justice and for them. That was the goal. So let's talk a little about the legacy of this case because it really deeply changed that small community of Carroll County. It did. But you know, it's amazing to see how out of this absolute horror they built something truly beautiful, the Abbey and Libby Memorial Park. I've seen pictures that looks incredible. It's a huge complex. It has playgrounds, fitness parks, and amphitheater, walking trails. It's a place for life and for joy, built in honor of two girls. Who had their stolen and Prosecutor McClellan he made a really poignant comment about the ripple effect this crime had. He did he talked about how, on top of the murders themselves, the families had to face years of harassment from online conspiracy theorists, people attacking the very people who are grieving. It's just awful. And he ended his press conference with something that just I think hit a lot of people. He said, being a dad of girls makes you kind of a whimp. Never miss an opportunity to tell them I love you. That really hits home. It's powerful advice, it is. But we also have to look at the legacy of the investigation itself. We have to talk about the what ifs because they are massive. The biggest one, of course, being tip hashtag seventy four. If that tip hadn't been marked cleared, if one person had just followed up properly in twenty seventeen, Richard Allen could have and should have been arrested within a week of the murders. Think about that. Five years of fear in that community, five years of Internet sleuths falsely accusing innocent people, including family members, five years of pain for those families, all because of a clerical error with a red pen. And then you have to think about the lost phone. What was on Richard Allen's phone from twenty seventeen. Did it have pictures from the bridge? Did it have incriminating search histories? We will never ever know. That evidence is gone. Forever, and the defense they aren't giving up. They've already filed their notice of appeal and it's going to cite the judge's suppression of their owdinism evidence as a primary reason the trial was unfair. So while Allan is in prison, this legal battle might not be fully over. That's the reality of the American justice system. Appeals can drag on for years and years, But for now and for the foreseeable future, the verdict stands. You know, we've covered so much today, the bullet, the bridge, the confessions, the red ink. But I want to leave you, the listener, with one final thought. Tam all over, go ahead. We live in this age of massive digital surveillance. We have geofencing warrants, we have DNA databases like cotis, we have AI fac recognition. We have this assumption that if a terrible crime happens, technology will eventually solve it. But technology didn't really solve this one, did it Not? Really? Not At its core, this case wasn't cracked open by an algorithm or a satellite. It was solved by a volunteer, Kathy shank, a retired social worker who sat in a room patiently reading through old paper files, and she spotted what all the cops and all the computers had missed for five years. The human element, the human element. It just makes you wonder, doesn't it. How many other cleared tips are sitting in dusty boxes, in cold case files all across the country right now. How many other killers are hiding in plain sight, just waiting for a cappy shank to open the right file on the right day. That is a very haunting thought. It is thank you for joining us on this deep dive into the Delphi murders. It's a heavy one, but it's an important story of justice delayed but not denied. Stay curious and stay safe. We'll see you on the next deep dive. This was the last known The facts are limited. The record ends where the answers disappear. Until more is known, this case remains unresolved.