Richard Allen reached out to authorities five years before he was arrested and charged with killing two middle school students near an Indiana trail. He had informed an investigator that he had been in the area the day the girls were killed. This information was inadvertently marked clear and wasn’t discovered until 2022 when a volunteer clerk organizing tips found it. The case involves the 2017 killings of Liberty German and Abigail Williams, aged 14 and 13 respectively.
Allen’s legal team claims he is innocent and suggested the killings may have been part of a ritual sacrifice. They challenged the prosecution’s timeline and witness accounts that placed a man near where the girls’ bodies were found. Investigator Dan Dulin spoke with Allen in 2017, who mentioned being in the area where the girls were killed.
The investigation was reinvigorated when volunteer Kathy Shank discovered a tip involving Allen, wrongly marked as cleared. Investigators were looking for a suspect, known as the “bridge guy,” seen in a Snapchat video on one of the victim’s phones. Witnesses reported seeing Allen in the area on the day of the killings.
After a search of Allen’s home yielded a .40 caliber handgun, which matched a bullet found near the girls’ bodies, he was arrested. Ballistics experts testified about the matching bullet. Allen’s statement, physical presence near the trail, and the matching bullet led to his arrest, despite his claims of innocence and challenges to witness credibility and evidence.
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