Attorneys for Richard Allen, the Indiana man accused of killing 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams on a hiking trail in February 2017, said on Tuesday that a hair found near the victims' bodies did not match Allen, according to local news.
Allen's attorney, Andrew Baldwin, made the revelation for the first time during "mini opening statements" ahead of jury selection in Carroll County, according to FOX 59 Indianapolis.
Potential jurors have been transported into Carroll County from neighboring Allen County after Allen's attorneys asked the case be moved out of fear that Carroll County residents may not be impartial due to the high-profile nature of the case in the area and around the country.
Fox News correspondent Alexis McAdams, who covered the case locally when it broke, said it feels like just yesterday that Liberty and Abigail were initially reported missing.
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"I think the sentiment overall, at first, from people in the community and journalists who were covering it, was that it was going to be a missing persons case that was going to be solved, like these little girls in this small town maybe slept over at a friend's house and didn't tell their grandparents or parents," McAdams recalled. "I don't think anybody thought that it was going to be this huge murder mystery case that took over like the whole state and the whole country."
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Liberty and Abigail vanished while walking along the Monon High Bridge Trail on Feb. 13, 2017. They were found dead the next morning. Allen, now 52, was questioned months after authorities recovered the girls' bodies, but he was not arrested at the time.
Allen was initially arrested in 2022, when he was working at a CVS store in Delphi, five years after the killings.
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McAdams said Delphi was the kind of close-knit community where residents didn't lock their doors at night before the murders happened.
"I don't think anyone I talked to, including police in the beginning, really thought it was somebody that was from that community," McAdams said. "So now, to find out that the main suspect is this Richard Allen, who was living in the town the entire time, I think blew everybody's mind."
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Police recovered Libby's cellphone under her body on Feb. 14, 2017. The phone had a 43-second video that shows Abigail walking on the Monon High Bridge in Delphi toward Libby while a man in a dark jacket and jeans walks behind her. The man can be heard ordering the girls "down the hill," according to an affidavit.
Libby captured the video at 2:13 p.m., less than 25 minutes after she and Abigail's family members dropped them off at the trail.
More than five years after their deaths, investigators executed a search warrant at Allen's home in Delphi on Oct. 13, 2022, and they recovered a blue Carhartt jacket, a SIG Sauer P226 .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun and a .40-caliber S&W cartridge in a "wooden keepsake box" from a dresser between two closets in Allen's bedroom, according to authorities.
The handgun recovered at Allen's home was consistent with a .40-caliber unspent bullet police located at the site of the murders in 2017, police said.
"[T]he most damning evidence that the state police had was the bullet left at the scene that fell out of his weapon that he still had at his house, and it had the same markings on it," McAdams said.
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She added her belief that the victims' families "just want this to be over": "If his attorneys do bring all these different things forward… I think [the victims' families] are just going to just be more upset."
The high-profile, small-town murder case has been wrought with legal back-and-forth, clerical errors and misinformation spread through social media in the years leading up to Allen's trial.
Journalist Áine Cain and Indiana-based attorney Kevin Greenlee, who co-host "The Murder Sheet" podcast, were the first to report that Allen's delayed arrest was likely the result of a clerical error or misfiling of a tip that was not properly processed in 2017.
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Prosecutors have alleged in previous court filings that Allen "admitted that he committed the offenses that he is charged with no less than five times while talking to his wife and his mother on the public jail phones available at the Indiana Department of Corrections" in a June 2023 filing.
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Allen's attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, alleged in a 136-page memorandum released in September 2023 that there is "overwhelming evidence" to support the narrative that "[m]embers of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists, ritualistically sacrificed Abigail Williams and Liberty German."
The defense said the evidence backing the details in their memo "was found scattered over no less than 10 hard drives and several flash drives provided by the prosecution, meaning that the Defense is not making wild accusations, but rather primarily relaying facts and information that is backed up by the prosecutor’s own discovery, even discovery that the prosecution just provided to the Defense as late as September 8, 2023."
While prosecutors have dismissed the claims as outlandish, Allen's attorneys may get to argue their Odinism theory in court during their client's trial.
McAdams believes the trial may reopen wounds for people in the Delphi community who have been trying for nearly eight years to heal after the horrific murders.
