An Indiana man convicted of murdering two teen girls while on a hike in 2017 will serve the rest of his life in prison.
Richard Allen, 52, was sentenced Friday to 130 years in prison for the murders of Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14.
Family members criticized the defendant during his sentencing.
“This man has made my family’s life a living hell,” Liberty’s cousin Josh Lank told WXIN, a local Fox affiliate. “Now it’s time for your life to be a living hell.”
Meanwhile, the defendant maintained his innocence, and his attorneys stated that they would file an appeal.
In November, a jury found Allen guilty of two counts of murder and two additional counts of felony murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping in the girls’ deaths.
The guilty verdict followed 17 days of testimony in one of the most high-profile — and contentious — murder trials in the state’s history.
Williams and German went missing while walking the Moon High Bridge Trail near Delphi, Indiana, on February 13, 2017. The next day, their bodies were discovered in a wooded area near the Delphi Historic Trails system, with their throats slashed.
Prosecutors entered the case with no direct physical evidence implicating Allen — no DNA, fingerprints, or other forensic evidence linking Allen to the murders.
Furthermore, since his initial arrest, the case has been fraught with errors and animosity from all sides.
For example, prosecutors accidentally deleted 70 days’ worth of police interviews. The state provided Allen’s attorneys with a previously unseen report outlining “how all videos between April 28, 2017 and June 30, 2017” were lost.
Those lost tapes were in addition to two recorded interviews from February 2017 with men who the defense claimed were “key suspects” in the girls’ murders. Prosecutors claimed the tapes were accidentally erased.
Allen’s attorneys were chastised for accidentally leaking sealed evidence and were even removed from the case by the presiding judge before being reinstated.
During the trial, prosecutors claimed that Allen confessed to the murders several times and is the “Bridge Guy” seen on cellphone video walking behind the two victims shortly before their deaths.
Jurors also heard a recorded phone conversation between Allen and his wife in which he stated, “I did it. “I killed Abby and Libby,” according to the Associated Press.
“The State has shown that Richard Allen is Bridge Guy,” Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors in his closing argument, according to the Indianapolis Star.
“He has lived in the city for five years. He has been living among us for five years.
Defense attorneys Brad Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin claimed that prosecutors tried to retrofit evidence to make Allen appear guilty because authorities were under extreme pressure to solve the horrific case.
They also called in expert witnesses to testify that Allen’s confessions were false and the result of months of solitary confinement, during which he was constantly harassed.
Allen’s defense attorneys previously proposed the theory that the victims were killed in a ritualistic sacrifice by members of a white nationalist “Odinism” cult.
However, Judge Francis C. Gull ruled that the defense could not present that theory at trial due to a lack of admissible evidence.
