An Indiana courtroom on Friday will host a sentencing hearing for Richard Allen, who was recently convicted for the February 2017 killings of two teen girls who had been walking on a hiking trail in Delphi, known as the Delphi murders.
A Carroll County jury in November found Allen guilty of murdering Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14, who disappeared during their walk along the High Monon Trail on Feb. 13, 2017. Investigators found them both brutally murdered the next day with sticks covering their bodies in a wooded area near the trail.
Allen was convicted on two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder and faces up to 130 years in prison.
Allen has maintained his innocence. His lawyers filed a motion this week indicating they would not present evidence at the sentencing and would focus on an appeal going forward, FOX 59 Indianapolis reported.
His attorneys said his declining mental stability led him to make false statements behind bars.
Grainy cellphone video footage and a sketch of a prime suspect in the murder of Delphi girls Abigail Williams and Liberty German, on the office wall of Tobe Leazenby, Sheriff of Carroll County. (Robert Scheer/IndyStar / USA TODAY NETWORK)
More than five years after their deaths, investigators executed a search warrant of 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.Â
The handgun recovered at Allen’s home was consistent with a .40-caliber unspent bullet police found at the site of the murders in 2017, police said.
