Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Delphi Murders Defense Drops Bombshell On Eve of Trial

Starting point is 00:00:00 Wondery Plus subscribers can binge all episodes of this Law and Crimes series ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. The jury is seated in Richard Allen's double murder trial as his lawyer drops a bombshell about evidence found in one of the victim's hands. I have those details and what you need to know as this trial begins. Welcome to Crime Fix. I'm Anjanette Levy. It took just two days to seat a jury of 16 people from another county in Richard Allen's double murder trial. Twelve of those people will decide whether there's enough evidence to convict Richard

Starting point is 00:00:36 Allen of the murders of Abby Williams and her best friend Libby German. Allen's lawyers dropped a bombshell during jury selection about evidence that could potentially raise reasonable doubt in this case. And I'm going to tell you about that in a little bit. But first, I want to lay out some of the details about the case. For many years, Abby and Libby's families and the people in the small city of Delphi, Indiana, were left to wonder if a murderer was walking among them. Police would say later in October of 2022 that, yes, there was a murderer walking among them, and his name was Richard Allen, a man who worked at the local CVS. The case was absolutely terrifying. Two young girls,

Starting point is 00:01:16 Abby was 13 and Libby was 14, had gone to the Monon High Trail on the afternoon of February 13, 2017. Their bodies were found the next day on Valentine's Day. Some of their clothes were found in a creek near the trail. After their bodies were found, there were few clues, but there was one that police believed was significant. It was a piece of video found on one of the girls' cell phones. Take a look. Detectives would later say that Richard Allen was the man in that down the hill video. By his own admission, Allen was walking on the trail that February 13th, and he said he saw some young people, but not Abby and Libby. Other people on the bridge described seeing someone who matched Allen's description as well, wearing clothes that

Starting point is 00:02:10 were similar to the man in the down the hill video. One woman told police, quote, the male subject was wearing a blue colored jacket and blue jeans and was muddy and bloody. She further stated that it appeared he had gotten into a fight. Police would say they found an unspent bullet between Abby and Libby's bodies and that that unspent bullet had been cycled through a Sig Sauer firearm owned by Richard Allen. Richard Allen, according to police, denied being in the area where that round was found, and he said he had never loaned that firearm to anyone. It had always been in his possession. Now to that bombshell, the possible bombshell dropped by Richard Allen's lawyers.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Andrew Baldwin said during a mini opening statement during jury selection that hair found in victim Abby Williams's hand at the crime scene did not belong to Richard Allen. So if the hair didn't belong to Allen, whose hair was it? Here's Defense Diaries host Bob Motta with how that moment unfolded in court. It's either going to be massive or it's going to be a non-starter if it turns out. I mean, we know it's not Richard Allen's, you know, and there was a lot of questions kind of floating out on socials about whether or not it was human. I have to assume by way of them stating that it wasn't Richard Allen's DNA, that he was excluded, that it's clearly human hair. Like, because there was some talk about it being animal hair.

Starting point is 00:03:33 I feel very confident that it's human hair because they obviously sent it to the lab to test it. But if it turns out to be, say, somebody like Libby's hair, you know, I mean, like in terms of like there could have been a situation where, you know, like they were together and she just got hurt. It's not as earth like earth shattering as if it's someone random, say, a male contributor that becomes a real issue for the state. If it's a male contributor and it's just somebody who's not in the database and they're going to try to do like you would have thought they would have done IGG at this point in order to try to find out if it is a male contributor. So we just don't know much about it. You know, but what we do know is that it hasn't been contributed to anybody yet. And we're at trial.

Starting point is 00:04:29 So how much weight it's going to end up having, I don't know. Police have said that Richard Allen has confessed to the murders many, many times and recorded phone calls from jail. But his lawyers have argued that those statements are not reliable. Richard Allen faces two murder charges in the deaths of Abby Williams and Libby German. I wondered what I might find. If I looked up Richard Allen on Truthfinder.com. It's one of the world's largest public record search services. Truthfinder is absolutely great because it will show you someone's current and past addresses, social media accounts, relatives and criminal and traffic records. I put in Richard Allen's name and found that he had a concealed weapons permit

Starting point is 00:05:05 out of Indiana. Not a huge surprise because we know in this case that he owned a handgun. Truthfinder also showed Allen's old addresses. You know what I also love about Truthfinder? It will show you the sex offenders who live in your neighborhood, which is great for me because I have a son. So right now I have a great deal for you. You can get 50% off of confidential background reports. Just log on to truthfinder.com slash LC crime fix and start accessing information about almost anyone. I want to bring in Andrea Burkhardt. She is an attorney from Washington state, but she's actually traveled to Indiana for Richard Allen's trial. So Andrea, thanks so much for coming on. I want you to take me inside that courtroom.

Starting point is 00:05:45 How did jury selection get done so very quickly? Well, a couple of things that really stood out to me about the jury selection process, I think helped it move along. So first off, to my surprise, quite a few of the prospective jurors did not have extensive media exposure to the case. My understanding is this is one of the prospective jurors did not have extensive media exposure to the case. My understanding is this is one of the reasons for choosing Allen County as the veneer from which to pull a jury in the first place, because in the state of Indiana it had relatively low coverage of these particular crimes, and so a higher chance of being able to identify prospective jurors who hadn't already learned about details of the case and formed an opinion on it. The jury selection process itself also did seem to move

Starting point is 00:06:33 the process along a little bit more quickly. Often in high profile cases like this or cases with a lot of media exposure, it's quite common to have a lot of individual voir dire, where jurors are taken aside and questioned individually about things like details of the case that they've learned and sources of information, the effect that it's had on their thought process in order to vet their qualifications as jurors. In this case, they did not do that. They did apparently use an extensive jury questionnaire and spoke with the jurors generally in open court about their exposure to the media. And so I think that generally saved them a lot of time rather than going through and addressing those details on a person-by-person basis that can be very time-consuming. So the jury was selected in two days very quickly.

Starting point is 00:07:27 We're looking forward to opening statements later this week. The attorneys, though, dropped a little bit of a bombshell and they're pretty good at this. This defense team in particular dropped a little bit of a bombshell during their kind of mini opening statement to the jury in which they said that hair that was found in Abby's hand was not a match for Richard Allen. So tell me a little bit about how that unfolded. And I might be not using the words that might not be a direct quote, but tell me your reaction to that when that happened, because there's been so much talk about this case. There have been like these tribal camps with this case. There are so many people, you know, there are people who think that Richard Allen is certainly guilty. And then there are people who don't believe the evidence is there to convict him, who think he's they believe he's

Starting point is 00:08:13 innocent and he's a patsy. Yeah. And so this particular information, when this was revealed, it did cause quite a stir in the courtroom because this is new information that had not previously been out there in public. So it has the potential to be very significant in this case as the details about exactly what this evidence is, how it was discovered, the circumstances, any testing it was subjected to, and so forth, as those details emerge in the course of the trial. Because the circumstances are, they have the potential to tell a story about how this crime was committed, and potentially who was involved and how it unfolded. So as a piece of new information, it is quite significant and does, in my view, have the potential to really, really change people's thought processes about the strength

Starting point is 00:09:16 of the evidence in this case. And we'll obviously have to wait for more information about that. You know, the devil is really in the details, as they say. And, you know, it'll have to be it'll have to come out in court and there will be a cross examination on that and direct evidence about that piece of evidence in particular. You know, the state has said that the jury in this case is going to hear about confessions that Richard Allen made. Apparently, 50, 60 statements that he's made on the phone from jail. He was actually being held in prison in some type of solitary confinement situation for a while. This has been very controversial, but that he gave details about this crime that only the killer

Starting point is 00:09:58 would know. So there are confessions that are coming in in this case. So give me your thoughts about that as we move toward opening statements and how the defense might deal with that. Well, the defense actually spent a significant part of their their voir dire, their questioning of the jury panel addressing this very issue. The defense is clearly going to advance a theory that these are false confessions, that these are not true. They were the product of coercive circumstances, the environment that you were describing, and Mr. Allen's deteriorating mental health. So, for example, some of the things that Mr. Baldwin, Mr. Allen's attorney, brought out at one point in the jury selection process was, for example, that Mr. Allen confessed to murdering his entire family and his grandchildren.

Starting point is 00:10:54 The problem is Mr. Allen doesn't actually have any grandchildren. Mr. Allen allegedly confessed to shooting the girls in the back. The problem is that the girls were not shot at any point in time. And so various details of the case that were provided by Mr. Allen are not consistent with the details that have actually turned out to be the facts of the case. So I expect this to be a situation where the defense is going to very vigorously challenge the veracity of those statements by Mr. Allen. And they have previewed that they intend to present expert testimony about Mr. Allen's mental health and about the circumstances in which he was held, in which these statements were made. Mr. Baldwin described this as being a recipe for false confessions in the views of the defense experts.

Starting point is 00:11:50 So my expectation, given that line of questioning, is that the defense is going to very vigorously challenge the jury's ability to rely on the statements that Mr. Allen made. Cameras are not allowed in this trial, which I think is very unfortunate. I know you would probably be an advocate for cameras in this trial as well. You felt so passionately about this that you traveled all the way from Washington state to see this unfold for yourself. Why was this so important to you? This is a very important case that has obviously caught the attention of the entire nation. This is a terrible crime. These are particularly vulnerable victims. The justice system is something that belongs to all of us. It belongs to the people and it's done on our behalf. So it's of critical importance for this process to be transparent so that we can watch it

Starting point is 00:12:46 unfold and evaluate for ourselves. Is the process fair? Is the evidence sufficient? Is justice being achieved in this particular circumstance? And so without the ability to be able to watch that for ourselves from home, it's very difficult to get good high quality sources of information about what is going on in that courtroom. So I did consider it important because I have a legal background and just the education to kind of understand maybe on a little bit more of a nuanced level what is happening in the courtroom, why certain decisions are being made, the significance of certain decisions over the course of the trial. I thought it was very important for me to be in that courtroom so that I can provide that

Starting point is 00:13:36 information to the public as a whole. Well, Andrea, we hope to check in with you again. You're right. It's an important case for many reasons. And those poor little girls, it's just a really awful, awful case. And Richard Allen, of course, deserves a fair trial. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Thank you for having me. And that's it for this episode of Crime Fix.

Starting point is 00:13:58 I'm Anjanette Levy. Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Delphi Murders Defense Drops Bombshell On Eve of Trial

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.

Your Ad Here

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

Crime Fix with Angenette Levy - Delphi Murders Defense Drops Bombshell On Eve of Trial

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.