Hidden True Crime - DELPHI MURDERS: Prosecutor Nick McLeland Interview

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

On this episode, Dr. John and Lauren sit down with the prosecutor of the Delphi Murders case to talk about the case. About Hidden True Crime: What started as a simple conversation at their dinner table became a captivating podcast. Join the dynamic duo of Dr. John Matthias, a criminal psychologist, and Lauren Matthias, an investigative journalist, as they delve into the psychological facets of unthinkable crimes every week. Their unique perspectives and in-depth analysis offer a fresh take on true crime storytelling. Thank you for your support through sponsorships, subscribing, listening, and becoming a Patreon member at Patreon.com/HiddenTrueCrime Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello, Hidden Jems. We are here with a very important guest. If you recognize him, you know who this is. If you don't recognize him, it's because, well, the trial wasn't televised. But here he is now. This is prosecutor Nick McLeeland of the Delphi Indiana trial, the Richard Allen trial. Richard Allen was convicted of killing two best friends in 2017, Libby German and Abigail Williams on February 13, 2000. And the jury convicted Richard Allen. They believe he is bridge guy. They said he is bridge guy. We can now call Richard Allen, bridge guy, the man on the bridge, telling the two little girls to go down the hill. We are so honored, actually, that you would be with us today, prosecutor McLeeland. Thank you for accepting this interview with us. And full disclosure, I just want to share that we actually will probably

be going live later today with some new exhibits that are coming down. By the time we released this interview with you, we might have already gone live with them. So I want everyone to keep that in mind that there might be some new exhibits from the trial that have come out that we might have shared before this interview comes out, but we haven't seen those here yet while we interview you, prosecutor. While you understand that the public deserves to see these, what were you saying, actually before we. It's just kind of, it's a mixed emotion when those kind of things came out. I know that the video from Liberty German cell phone was leaked, I suppose, because it wasn't given

through formal channels. So I'm going to say leaked probably two weeks ago or so. And it's just, it's a mixed bag of emotions, I guess, when those kind of things come out. And mainly because of the family, it affects them. They have to relive it. It's somewhat for me and my team, because we've got to relive it. as well. And so I completely understand that the public's right to know those things and those things are public documents. And I understand they're going to come out. It's just always when they do is just

a little bit of emotion behind it because you realize the family sees those and may not, they may not even intend to see them. They may click on something and then it pops up or somebody may send them something. And so it's just a mixed emotions, I guess is the best adjective I could use for that. And so I understand and I appreciate you give me the heads up so I can let the family know. But when the cell phone video came out, nobody really knew it got sent to all of us. And while it was played in court, while the family seen it, to see that again, the last moments of their, man, it still gets to be choked up. The last moments of their loved ones, it's just hard for them. Yeah. Thank you for reminding us of that.

And thank you for being there for the families too. I know we interviewed Becky Patty and she brought you up a lot. Nick, Nick, Nick, Nick said this. And I know that you have been very close to the families of the victims for many years now. Yeah, we don't have a victim advocate representative in our office. A lot of prosecutors offices do. But with us being such a small county, it's my chief deputy and myself. And then I have a staff of two people and an investigator.

And that's really all we have for our office. And so we, meaning the chief deputy and myself, we are the victim advocates on top of the prosecutor. And so we have to meet with the victims. We're the ones that keep them updated. We're the ones that answered all their questions about the proceedings because a lot of this stuff is legal proceedings that the lay person just is not familiar with

because they're been through it. And so you build that bond with the victims, even if it's unintentional, you just do because you're hearing stories about the worst moment in their life oftentimes. And so like I told you, I have a trial next week that's a rape and then one after that's a murder. And with the rape victim, you know, I've met with there several times just like we did Becky Patty and the family.

And you get to know them. You get to know their family, their kids, their grandkids, you know, what they're doing, what their hobbies are. And you just build a connection with them. And so, yeah,

it does get emotional. and yes, did stay in very close touch with the Paddies and Ann Williams, you know, to the point where we're texting each other about, hey, this is going on, this is going to come out,

just because that's the nature of our job in a small office like this. Well, I'm grateful then that I brought this up, and I'm grateful that you will be able to share then with the families before this comes out and I'll make sure that they know too. Appreciate that.

Thank you. Yeah, absolutely. And for those that are new to our church, channel. I'm Lauren Matthias, a former broadcast journalist and my husband over here who is allowing me to talk more today because I attended the trial every day is Dr. John Matthias. He is a clinical and forensic psychologist, criminal psychologist. And I know that prosecutor, you had a few questions for him too. And so he is here to help you with your questions that you have later. Yeah. And, you know, I attended trial every day. I saw you. I will admit, I did share during the trial that both the prosecutors and the defense were excellent. Attorneys. You were all, you all worked very, very hard. Again, I was there every day except I think minus one or two days when I had to go home for Halloween. But it was intense. It was overwhelming. And I just want to also.

commend you and all the attorneys there. You guys did an excellent job. Appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, it was very much a team effort. I know I was kind of the front man, I guess if you will, but I couldn't have done it without Stacey Deaneer and Jim Lettrell. I mean, they were so integral and just preparing. And even during the trial, I mean,

they both had very difficult witnesses that they had to take on and very difficult topics that they had to learn, you know, teach themselves about and learn, We're not experts in the field of psychology or firearm forensics. And so, you know, very, very, very tough topics that they took. And I'm just grateful that they both came on and assisted me in it. And again, I just couldn't have done it without them. Will you, you know, you have a background in the military.

I want to share. And then got into law school. And you were a defense attorney before you were your prosecutor. Correct. So you've been on both sides of the aisle. Can you take us back to 2017 or wherever you feel that we should start when it comes to your involvement in this horrendous murder that completely rocked the town of Delphi, Indiana? Yeah, I mean, I guess 2017 when it happened, I'm a lifelong member of this community. I was born and raised here.

Of course, went away to school. I did travel a little bit after undergrad and then got into law school and was away during law school. immediately the plan was always to come back here and hang my own shingle and start my own firm here. And so I did that. And so I was gone for a few years between 1998 and 2009 is when I came back, went to undergrad, took a couple of years off, then went to law school, came back and hung my shingle. I got involved in the military after I came back. And so I was a defense attorney here locally, as a public defender and private practice, also did some divorce, some real estate stuff, wills and trust, those kind of things.

I was also a defense attorney in the military with the child defense service. They called it. And then so it really started in 2017, just as a member of the community hearing about these two little girls going missing. I knew the German family. I've known them my whole life. A lot of their family members went to school with a lot of my family members, a generation ahead of me. And so just knew them, knew the community.

knew them in the community. And so when they went missing, it kind of just shook everybody in the community. And then the next day when they were found, it even rocked us more because I've said this a lot of times, and I think it even came out in trial. When they first went missing, no one believed anything nefarious had happened.

We all thought, oh, they went to a friend's house and fell asleep or their phone died. Again, this was 2017. We didn't have the technology then that we do now. now, people have to understand that we've taken leaps and bounds between then and now. And so we, everyone in the community just thought, oh, they'll turn up. This happens. They're at a boyfriend's house.

Whatever the case may be, nothing's bad has happened. As the hours tick by, your mind starts to, okay, they haven't been found, what's going on. And then in the next morning, they still aren't found. And then you really start to wonder, okay, something bad has happened. It's okay to be two, three, four hours late, but now this is overnight. And it's February. The day in February was warm, but at night it got very chilly and very cold, very damp, just a typical night in February.

And then when they're found, just I guess the shockwave that went through the community, that how could this happen here? It is not a lie or it is not being facetious to say. that we didn't lock our doors here, that we kept the keys to our vehicles in those vehicles. That was not an uncommon thing in this community. And to think, how could this happen? We're a place that we think is safe, our safe place. And so I think that's when my first involvement, you know, became or came to light because

just as a member of the community, I was a defense attorney at the time. And so I wasn't in the prosecutor's office. I didn't become the prosecutor until January 1st of 2018. The former prosecutor, Robert Ives, he retired. There was an opportunity for me. I had always wanted to in my career kind of progress up the line to be a defense attorney. And then at some point, if the opportunity came available to be prosecutor or judge, that is what I wanted to do.

The ultimate goal now is to become judge to kind of move up. through the ranks. And so the opportunity came available. I took the opportunity and then I first became aware, not of all the evidence, but of a brief overview of the evidence in January of 2018. I sat down with investigators, Jerry Holman at the time, Sheriff Toblesenby, the detective, Tony Liggett. We all, Steve Mullen was involved. We all sat down and we did a PowerPoint briefing of, okay, here's the broad strokes of what we have. And that's when I first saw the cell phone video, saw the crime scene photos and everything we had,

and then just tried to hit the ground running that became one of my goals with the floor of fire to solve the floor of fire and to solve an arrest and convict somebody for this crime as well. It just became kind of a bucket list item for me when I was here in this office. And so that's kind of how the progression, started. I didn't know much about the facts or details from February 2017 until January of 2018. January of 2018 is where I kind of dove in and got all the evidence, not all the evidence, started to get all the evidence. And then from then on, I would get weekly, if not daily updates on,

okay, we have this, we're doing this. We're investigating this person. We're talking to this person. And it became to a point where we just had a weekly Friday meeting where we would just brief each other on, okay, this is what we have. And so you were a major part of this investigation since 2018 then, in other words. And that's when you saw those crime scene photos. Can I ask you, you know, I saw them too in trial. Sure. What your first thoughts were when seeing the evidence, seeing this gruesome discovery,

seeing what happened to these two little girls, as you pointed out, you guys just thought that they had gone to a friend's house, you know. What were your first thoughts when investigating? Where were you looking? Where were you guys or were the leads going? You know, in the beginning, I guess you got a couple of questions in there. The first question about the crime scene photos, it's hard. It's hard to see crime scene photos regardless of who it is.

When it's two children, it's just worse. I can't really explain it, but it just is. And we're taught as attorneys to kind of separate our emotions. from the case and it's easier in some cases than in others in this case i knew liberty german i mean i didn't know her on a first name basis but i knew her her mom and dad were i knew who she was and so it's just hard what was hardest for me and what still gets me choked up is the video because because that really it's a live action video and you can hear the emotion it really brings to life the situation and so the video was really the hard

thing for me to see. The crime scene photos are definitely difficult. So it was tough. At the time, I didn't have kids. When I finally did have kids, it became even more tough to look at those things because I put my kids in those situations. And I, you know, I think how horrible this must be to Becky and the German and Patty family and Anna. And so it definitely got tougher for me over time just because I had kids of my own. And so. So it was difficult. Then the next part of your question, I think I've forgotten it already. What was the second part?

Where did the leads take you originally? Originally, we just, in 2018, there were still thousands and thousands of tips coming in over the tip line through the phone and through email. And so the tips, we would just let them take us where they took us. Somebody would call in, we'd go interview that person. if that led us to another person, we would just do normal investigative things where you would just go down the line. Now, there weren't very many tips that we didn't investigate. There were a few tips that, you know, a family of Sasquatch has abducted the girls in the bridge. I mean, those things you can discount immediately. But other than that, we didn't discount anything because

we didn't know where, which tip was going to lead us to which person. And so I can't specifically remember where we were looking at in 2018 when I came in, I just know that through those years that I was working on it, there were several different people we interviewed, several different leads we investigated. So yeah, that's kind of the answer. I have to jump in quickly on the Sasquatch reference. I presume that you're making that up,

but did you receive it? You're not making that up. You got a tip that they were abducted by, I'd like to hear more about that. Well, that's, I really don't know. That's about it because we didn't. Oh, okay. We didn't go into it any further. Yeah, yeah.

That was the one lead that you're like, no. Well, there was a lead to, we, you know. I'd have showed up in the Franks memo if you'd invest in. Yeah, exactly. We also had a lead at one point, and I'm probably going to get this wrong, but I believe we had a lead at one point that had been abducted. by aliens. And so we thought, okay, illegal aliens. Okay, so we need to look into who's in the county here illegally at the time. So we called the gal back and no, it was aliens. And so that's kind of

another lead that we said, okay, we're not going to spend a lot of resources on this. We called her back. We've got it. We documented it. We filed it and kind of moved on. So we had some of those leads like that that were just so far out there that we didn't put a lot of effort into. But other than that, I mean, you guys know the early leads that we looked into. Ron Logan. I mean, we looked into him. We looked into Bradford. We looked into all these people.

And again, we just didn't take any lead for granted, with the exception of some of them that were just so far out in left field that didn't warrant any other man hours. Today we're learning about the tips, please don't follow. Yeah. Right. But Ron Logan, right. That was, it was his property.

he had a violent past. You guys searched his home. Sure. He was a suspect. You know, and I, and I was following from my home every time there was a suspect. I thought it was Ron Logan at first. And when you guys went in a different direction and Keegan Clank came out, I thought, oh, this is the guy. This is the guy.

And then he wasn't arrested either, you know, just. And that's a roller coaster we went through. You know, you get a tip and you think, okay, this is it. I always use the analogy. I have done it in several interviews. I grew up in the 80s and early 90s, so Price is right, was big. And you know, you have the Yodeler where he's going up and you fall off the cliff.

That is the experience we had. Every time we thought you'd get a solid lead, you'd kind of ride this, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. And then you just fall off the cliff because, okay, he's not in Delphi at the time or he's got an alibi or whatever the case may be. And so it was just, it's an emotional journey. each time. Yeah.

But what about so, you know, the public we knew about we knew about Ron, we knew about Kegan. We did not know about the aliens until now. But we didn't really know about

Odinism until the Franks memo came out. This was clearly a lead in the beginning. Can you help us understand where odinism came in the investigation? I don't know how it originally was brought to light. I just know that we investigated it. We obviously, we did everything we could to track it down. We didn't take it for granted.

We have specific investigators investigating those leads. We interviewed someone who had knowledge about Odinism from Purdue, the professor. You know, we didn't just take it for granted, even though I remember when it first came out, I thought this is, this is too crazy, not here in Carroll County, that this is, but okay, let's see, maybe it's not odinism, but maybe these people are involved. Maybe odinism has nothing to do with it, but maybe the people are involved. And so we have to look at those things. The people that were accused, you know, they had some criminal history. And so they had the connections to each other.

And so it's just something when you're doing an investigation like this, it's something you don't want to just cast to the side, you've got to look into it. And even though the Odinism aspect to me was far-fetched, the people still could be involved in some other way. And so we looked at it. Again, I can't remember exactly how it came up. But at the end of the day, it was just another lead where you can't, you can't prove. We couldn't have charged any of those people for this killing because you can't, you can't

prove the elements of the crime with them. And so we just, we moved on. And when you say the elements of the crime, Are we talking alibi? What are elements of the crime that you could not prove when it comes to odinism? Well, and so each crime has certain elements. The defendant knowingly intentionally murdered the victim. Those are the basic elements of murder.

And you have to be able to prove those things. And so with the people that were involved, I guess the people that were tipped in that had connections to odinism, we could never prove those elements. You can never place them in Delphi at the time of the crime. All of them had alibis from where they were at the time of the crime. The defense projected this well, even though this person has an alibi, maybe it was a situation where he's directing other people to do it. Just none of that matched up.

We couldn't tie them to the crime scene. Couldn't tie them to Delphi at the time of the crime. Couldn't they add alibis. I'm trying to think what else. There's just nothing. We could not have charged. them. You could not have gotten probable cause that they were even on the trails that day or in the county of Carroll that day. Okay. Fair enough. And so when people say, did you investigate,

did you investigate odinism? All of these people. Thousands of man hours and law enforcement hours to investigate it because that was the right thing to do. Okay. What about there's a, there's a moment in an interview, and I'm not just a, sure if law enforcement did the interview where there's there's where the, where he says something to the effect of, well, what if some of my spit shows up on one of the victims, right? People use that as strong evidence that somehow that means that this person would have been at the crime scene because they presumed or they made the assumption that their saliva would be on one of the victims. Could you maybe explain how and why?

Or could you maybe explain that to the viewers a little bit about? Was this tip investigated? It was. Elvis Fields was the one that said that. And he said it to ISP Trooper Murphy as Murphy is dropping him off at his house. And we investigated it. We interviewed Elvis several times. He was interviewed, I think three or four times.

And one of those interviews was about four hours long. We talked to Trooper Murphy. Obviously, I had several conversations with Trooper Murphy about it. And I don't want to put words in Trooper Murphy's mouth. And I don't want to say something he doesn't mean. So, I mean, he'd be the best source. But my recollection is he thought Elvis was just messing with him. And he didn't believe what Elvis said.

And Elvis was. I guess born and raised or hometown Rushville guy, didn't have a lot of life experience. And so, you know, I don't think Murphy, Trooper Murphy put a lot of weight into it. But we did investigate. We interviewed Elvis several times. Everything in the Franks memo is an investigation that we did.

The defense didn't go out and connect their own investigation. So they have 136 pages of investigation that we did. And at the end of the day, none of those people were the people. They just weren't. I don't know how much clear to say it. If there were other people involved, the only person that knows that at this point is Richard Allen.

And when we refer to the Franks memo, for those listening that might not understand, the Franks memo is what came out before the trial showing the defense's defense, the defense of Richard Allen. And as you point out, what they did is they took past investigations of the prosecution of law enforcement to say, hey, there are these other ideas. And you're right.

They didn't go out and do their own investigation. They took your investigation and said, maybe possibly odinism, Elvis Fields, all these different things, assertive. I'm going to say it. And now you confuse the public. Bring out some things about the investigation that we did not know. But as you pointed out, even though we didn't know about it, doesn't mean that you weren't doing the investigation and dotting your eyes,

crossing your T's and moving on. Is that what you're saying? Yeah. And, you know, they even had an opportunity at a hearing, a three-day hearing before the trial to present their best case about why Odenism should be allowed to be brought up in the trial. And they did not meet their burden.

And so you can't even meet the burden there. The burden for a conviction is higher than that. And so we investigated it. It's just not it. It's just not it. Well, so that did upset a lot of people when Judge Gull said, yeah, no, you didn't meet your burden of proof. The nexus, you know, which as people pointed out, I'm not in law, so help me out here. The nexus isn't as extreme as probable cause necessarily, but it's a nexus.

It's a connection. Can you help explain why this third. party didn't meet a nexus, the judge goal would have said, yeah, no, we can't bring this up. Because this has upset people, you know, that it could. And look, I've already talked about on our channel. I don't see a nexus either. But, but I mean, again, I'm not, I'm not the prosecutor here. I'm not a lawyer. Anything you can. suggest or offer to help us understand the judge's decision there a little bit more? A lot of these things are based in common sense. You didn't see a nexus, right? When you observe the,

when you observe the evidence, we as lawyers as the prosecutorial team didn't see a nexus. You couldn't tie anybody involved with odinism to the scene of the crime. You couldn't tie them to Delphi at the time of the crime. You couldn't tie them to the girls in any way. There was nothing. And I'm not saying you have to have those things, but you have to have. have something, something. And so they didn't have it. And so it's common sense. If you can't make that connection to the crime or to the murder, then that evidence doesn't come in. And I guess to me, it's as clear as that. And the nexus is not as strong. Oh, go ahead, John. Yeah, no, I just want to point out too. I want to get back to, I hear about Elvis Fields all the time as how strong evidence,

you know, that was when he talked to to you guys. And I want to reiterate what you said earlier, Nick, in terms of I think sometimes people don't understand that during interviews, suspects that may not have the

best history with law enforcement tend to be a little rebellious. They're going to say provocative things, right? When somebody makes a comment about spitting on a victim, you have to look at context and you have to look at their motivation right and so I think like many times people lose the context and they take a statement like that quite literally when in fact as you point out you know the the trooper said that he was messing with them right and and that's important to know that not

everything someone says is literally true or accurate it depends on the context and the interview and the goals and motivations of the interviewee, right? And I think sometimes people get confused by that. And they'll latch on to a comment or an observation that supports their argument, but it's taken out of context. Yeah, I mean, that's human nature a lot of times. We pick out the things that support our stance on an issue. And we'll latch on to those and we'll focus on those.

And those become the foundation of our argument. And we'll engross ourselves in that because it supports our argument. And a lot of people get tunnel vision in that respect and say, well, this is the key, you know, this is a smoking gun. This is the key piece of evidence. Well, you've got to look at everything. And you can't view things in a vacuum. And so it's not uncommon for, let's just be honest, pro defense people are going to latch on to that.

Pro Richard Allen people are going to latch on to that because that's something that they, that's a piece of evidence they can latch on to. They're going to ignore the confessions. They're going to ignore the fact that he's on the trail that day. They're going to ignore the bullets tied. They're going to ignore all those things and just latch on to this when there's no other evidence to back up that statement besides that statement. There's no evidence to place Elvis Fields here at the time.

There's no evidence to place him in Carroll County at the time. There's no DNA evidence at the scene to placing there. There's no connection or tied to the scene to placing there. But of course they're going to latch on to that because, because that's good for their cause. And so I've heard the same thing that you have. I don't understand it. I think you're correct.

You have to take things in the context. You've got to look at the interview that he did before that. You got to look at the conversation he had with the trooper before that. You have to take everything together and you can't just single out one little thing. Now, the defense did that a lot and a lot of their motions. They would take a statement or a deposition and pull out one line of that deposition because it supported their cause. And I'm not saying that's wrong,

but when you look at things in the totality, you can see that their statement really doesn't support what they're saying. Yeah. Thank you for clarifying that. Yeah, psychologists call that confirmation bias, by the way, that taking evidence and supports your view, you know, looking for things to confirm, confirm your perspective and not to deny it or not to challenge it.

And confirmation bias is often thought of as sort of the Mount Everest of conspiracy theories or, you know, what it's, it's a bias that often supports conspiracy theories because it will support whatever the theory is. But I will say this too, if we're talking confirmation bias, odinism was investigated by law enforcement, and it was a part of the Franks memo, and it did deserve our attention. I think when I read the Franks memo, I was very interested. And so I also think it's fair that, you know, look, there was a gag order. There was a hidden probable cause.

I know you got a lot of flack for that. I'm going to ask you about that after the arrest. You know, you chose to keep that probable cause sealed. So I do have empathy for all of us that read the Franks memo. and try to understand and make sense of what was going on because it gave us information we didn't have before. So I want to say I understand why it got so much attention. I do want to be honest, that was the point of it, right?

That was the point of it from the defensive standpoint to be a, I guess, a way for them to tell the public their theory to get around the gag or, to be kind of a public announcement, here's our theory and here's all the details of the crime, to push a narrative out to the public when we couldn't. And so, I mean, let's be honest, that's what it was for. Yeah, and we're jumping ahead. You did accuse the defense of breaking the gag order. You mean when we had the contempt hearing?

Yeah. That was because of the crime scene photos. We'll get to that. That's a, or we can talk about that. I think that they use the Franks memo to get around the gag order. I think that was the point of it to get a portion of the public on their side, if you will, or be kind of a PR release for them. People may not agree with me.

The defense will not agree with me. That's just my opinion for what it's worth. The contempt was more because the crime was not more. It was because the crime scene photos were released. And we, the state thought it was intentional by the defense. So when you say that, Nick, that sort of implies that maybe they weren't plain fair. Do you, do you, how would you see that?

Do you think they were, do you think it was a fair playing field? Do you think that that was a fair motion? I mean, I agree with Lauren that at some point, I think the Odinus theory probably needed to be investigated or made public at some point. I think it was a fair motion. I guess the context of the motion or what is offensive. I don't know that you need for a Franks motion and memo. I'm not sure that you need to put all that.

Well, I don't think you need to put all that stuff in there to release to the public. I was pretty strong about, and again, I'll be honest. You're right. I did catch a lot of flag. I was pretty strong in my belief that everything in this case should be kept quiet until the trial. I was really concerned about the opportunity to get a fair jury and not taint the jury pool. This is a statewide, nationwide, worldwide case, and I was really concerned that we were going to have difficulty getting a jury. And I really didn't think it was appropriate to put evidence out

into the public until after the trial. I just had really, really strong convictions about that. And so the fact that a lot of the evidence, specific details about the crime scene, all those things came out, that was offensive. I don't think a Frank's motion is inappropriate. I think you have to, as a defense attorney, have to do everything you can do to defend your client. The contents of it, to me, is what was offensive. Fair enough. Going back to, oh, go ahead, John. And trying, as you point out, trying to get around the gag order and to some degree sway public opinion in advance of the trial? That was, that's my opinion. that's what I thought a lot of that was for

again, that's just my opinion. It's my opinion too. I'll throw my opinion out. Nobody's going to agree with me. The defense is probably going to not agree. Yeah, I think it's the defense's opinion. I think the defense would agree with us that that was what they were trying to do.

I don't think they'll say that publicly fled to truth. Yeah. Yeah. Don't wait for that. Yeah. But I think, you know, in terms of the frank, motion to suppress. I think those are all valid things they should have done. I think those are good defense tactics. I think it's, you know, when you've got bad evidence against your client, the thing to do is

to try to get that evidence out, get it out of the, you know, get it out of the trial. And to try to suppress the confessions, the search of the house where we find the gun, those are all good defense strategies. Those are things I would have done. I just would have drafted the motions differently. That goes back to, but I want to put a pin in John's comment. Well, no, let's just. So did they play fair? Did the defense play fair? Let's ask it now.

I think that depends who you ask. And I think that my comments about what they've put in there kind of tell you where I'm at. I'll leave it at that. Okay. And I still want to get into Richard Allen's arrest. So we've jumped way ahead. We're not going in order anymore. But I can't leave this content here.

alone and what you just said that you absolutely believe that the defense released crime scene photos of little girls at their murder scene on purpose. I mean, if it wasn't on purpose, it was definitely negligent to leave those things out and to allow somebody that you think is a, at first as a trusted confidant, and then, you know, they snookered you, is the word that they used. I don't, what I can say is I don't know that we. have the full truth of what happened. Again, people will disagree with me. That's my opinion. Well, the victim's family, you know, Becky Patty agrees with you and that matters.

Yeah. And their heart broke over it. I mean, it's offensive. You know, they, they got those sent to them like I did and said, hey, do you know these are out there? There's no warning. There's no, hey, this is going to be tough to see. Hey, this is your loved one, daughter, granddaughter, and her most vulnerable moment that you could ever imagine. And there's just, there's no preparation for that. And once it gets on the internet, you can scrub as much as you want. It's not, it's going to be out there. It's just going to be. And I think Becky Patty said it best when she said it's multi-generational.

You never know which member of which family is going to click on. something 10 years down the road and that image is going to pop up. And so that goes back to the bittersweetness of things getting released because I think in a fashion, at least for me, it causes me to relive the investigation, the trial. And I can't imagine what it does for the families. Yeah. And I want to say the response to the defense because of negligence, because of let's say it was negligence, best case scenario, right, leaving crimes and photos out on their desk of little girls, you know, that were murdered. So, so let's give it best case scenario and say it was negligence. They were very indifferent in discussing this and not apologizing at the hearing. I want to

point out. And the victim's families made it very clear in their victim impact statements, how upsetting this was. So whatever you believe, Nick, or whatever we believe, I think what matters most is how the victim's families believe and the response that the defense has given. Of course, they seemed a lot more apologetic on national television, but not in the hearing. Sure. I'll just say. Yeah. John, do you have any more questions or can we jump back to Richard Allen?

In terms of the leaked crime scene photos, I think it's an interesting question. to ask, is there a purpose, right? Is the defense, does the defense gain something by doing that? Right? And to me, that's a critical question. Yeah, I mean, that's a question. I think you're right. I think you hit the nail on the head.

That's a critical question. If it was on purpose, why do they do it? And I don't have an answer to that question. And that's why I can't, you know, I can't tell you it was on purpose. At a very minimum, I think, was negligence. But, you know, what is the, I think the defense has retorted a lot.

Like, you know, what is our point in doing that? Why would we do that? And I don't know. I don't know. I have a motive. I have a motive that makes a lot of sense to me. It goes with what they wrote about Odinism in the Franks memo. I find it ironic that and that the very photos that were released are the photos that

the photos they describe in the Franks memo. You may be right. You'd have to ask them and hope that they gave you a candid answer. Yeah. I don't know what my husband thinks of that, but co-hosts, excuse me, whatever you are, the psychologist on the other side. Since I don't want to get in trouble here, I'll accept your answer. I liked your answer.

But yeah, I mean, it's interesting that the photos that, that were leaked seemed to fit precisely their theory of the crime. So that's, was that just an accident? According to them, they were betrayed by a friend. And that's the explanation. And so. Right, right. And look, that just makes me angry too that they'd be victims.

According to me, they betrayed the victim's families because they left them out on the desk for their friend to betray them. So don't pass the buck on that one. Sorry. I just, it makes me very angry. Well, I'd ask you to think about this question. Had I done that, had the state of Indiana did that, what would have been the fallout? Well, I would be very angry at you right now, too. You know, so, yeah, I want you to know that.

Yeah, exactly. The fallout would be immense. It would be immense with possible, I would assume with possible legal implications, right? Yeah. I think John's right. I mean. Legal. Yeah.

I think if that, and I'm not sure how much of this you should air, but I think if the foot, if the shoe were on the other foot, I think that the repercussions would be, would be vast, and I think it would be quick. And I think it would include me off the case, possible, you know, lossage of license. I think it would be, I think it would be different is all I'm, and I've asked you to consider that and think about that, but I think John and I think John's right. Yeah. And that, yeah.

And fairly, too. I do. It is. Those type of things should be protected. Absolutely. At all cost. They should never, ever be leaked. Yeah, even if it was negligence. So back to the arrest of Richard Allen. All of these investigations. And I do want to say you did investigate a lot of leads. You were sort of known for that, like, that I've heard, like just you said to investigate every year. That was sort of your theory, minus the aliens. Yeah, my thing I would commonly say is if it has legs run with it. And that was just kind of a saying that became, you know, synonymous with me in meetings. And, you know, I would say, you know, go, go talk to the person. What's it going to take an hour, two hours?

It's not worth not doing. Let's go do it. Sue, where does Richard Allen come in? Then it's 2002. This, you know, not 2000. I'm sorry, 2022. That's what I meant to say. 2022.

And today's Friday, right? And we're in March? Yes, ma'am. Okay. I wish we could go back to 2002 because I'd like to redo a few things. But I wish we had a time machine. So, you know, it sounds good. But, yeah, 2000 is what we did.

It was 2002 and there was a time machine and we can go there. So, 2022, Richard Allen, how does this suspect? come and where do you find out about him and where do we go from there? I'm sure you've heard the story. It's been told several times. Kathy Shank. She's really kind of an unsung hero here. People forget she was doing this all voluntarily. We weren't paying here. We weren't, you know, giving her benefits, nothing. She was just doing it voluntarily. And a lot of times she would bring with her food and snacks and everything for all of us during the meeting. She was the, you know, quintessential grandmother of the group. I mean,

she would just take care of us. And she found. the tip. She was going through a box and refiling and just organizing things that she commonly did. And she came across something that she hadn't seen before. And she came across a suspect that was on the trail that day. And she hadn't known about this guy. And so she took it to Tony Liggett. Tony Liggett called Steve Mullen and I. I mean, it was pretty quick and said, hey, we got this. You know, holy cow, this may be the missing piece. And we just ran with it. You know, went and talked to him immediately, made sure the information on the tip was still current and accurate, then got a search warrant for his house, sent the stuff off to the lab. The gun came back,

and then we went from there. So it's not really a secret. Everybody knows the story how it happened. So, you know, God bless her and thank God for her because we may not be here today, but for her. It wasn't. Go ahead. No, go ahead. It wasn't. There's this common theme out there that it's because it was misfiled under Richard Allen Whiteman. That's not the case. Somebody wrote, cleared on the tip. We don't know who. It was on the bottom of the tip sheet. And I think that's why, I mean, I don't know, because I don't know when it got misfiled or how it got misfiled. I wasn't there. But that's why we believe that it got filed in the cleared section, because somebody had written that on there. So nobody did any further investigation on it until she came across it in 2022 and said,

look, nobody, I don't know the further investigation on this guy. I don't recognize the name. We need to look into this. Okay. When did you realize this really is the guy, though? I mean, where do you start hearing about him? And when did you think this really is rich guy? Well, you got to realize by 2022, I'd been in this since January of 18.

And by 2022, I was probably the devil's advocate of the group and very skeptical and saying, okay, I wasn't going to ride that roller coaster again. Prove it to me. Prove it to me. Prove it to me. And so I probably, it probably hit home for me. Well, I know it hit home for me when we've got the lab results back for the firearm. Because I'll never forget where I was at that day.

What I was doing, it's you have those moments in your life. My grandpa still talks about he knows where he was at and what he was doing the day. JFK was assassinated. You just have those big moments in your life. life where you're never going to get, you know, when your first child's born, all those kind of things. And I'll just never forget where I was at or what I was doing when I got the phone call. So that for me was when it really hit. And for me, it was like, okay, this is the guy.

Well, Nick, you can't throw that out there without telling us the full story. So where were you and what were you doing? Well, I was with my girls. It was fall break. of 2022 is in October of 2022 and that's when they have fall break for the school my girls are young at the time you're going to throw them into the bus here at the time i think they're four and five or five and six they're only about 13 they're only 13 months apart and we're on fall break and we're in tennessee at a water park um and it's big indoor water park um and they have

an indoor kind of theme park it's this big resort that we went down there pigeon forge and i remember we were in the water park. It was in the middle of the day. We were in the water park. And the phone was ringing and it was ringing and ringing and ring. And of course, I'm playing with them in the wave pool and the water. And I was checking my phone every hour, hour and a half because I knew that we had gathered stuff from the house. And I knew the investigation was ongoing and called Jerry Holman back. And he told me, I said, you're never going to believe this. And he told me. And I said, oh my gosh. I remember there was talks that went to fly down and get me. I said, no. So we end up coming back a day early. I think I got the call on a Thursday. We're supposed to come back that Sunday.

We ended up coming back Saturday, actually leaving early Saturday morning like four in the morning to drive back so I could get back so we could get together probable cause and get things together for the arrest. We didn't have plans of arresting, but we wanted to interview them again after that to confirm, okay, had anybody else had your gun, had anybody else had your bullets, had you been out there. We wanted to make sure, but, and so when we interviewed him the second time, we weren't even sure we were going to arrest him, but we wanted to have everything in order in case we did. And so I know I came back a day early to be able to get a briefing on that, to start to write together some kind of PC.

Again, we didn't know we were going to arrest him. If you just said, oh, I'd lend my gun to my brother Joe. okay, let's go interview Joe, you know, but we wanted to be ready so that once we arrested him, we had, you don't want to wait to draft these documents until afterwards. And so we wanted to put together everything we had. So we put together the PC from the search warrant. We added this piece into it. And then we were going to continue to add to it if we needed to.

But we weren't sure until we talked to him, right? We had to kind of check those boxes. had anybody else had your gun? Did you purchase it new or did you purchase it off somebody else? Had anybody else had your ammo? Did you buy it off somebody else or did you purchase it new? Is there any reason you would have been out in that area? Mushroom hunting, fishing, hiking, you know, we had to make sure, is there another explanation? Because we weren't going to jump, you don't jump to a conclusion in something this serious. You've got to make sure that we have everything.

And so we weren't sure we were going to arrest him until after that second interview. It was in the moment. Jerry Holman came back and said, okay, what do we do? And I said, we've got enough now. And the enough meaning alibi. What did you have enough? What was enough? Enough probable cause you arresting.

So you check. Go ahead. Go ahead, John. Oh, you check the boxes on the gun. And yeah, go ahead, Lauren. What were the what was the problem? cause. So we tied him. He was on the trails that day. The witnesses we had didn't see anybody else on the trail that day. The witnesses we had gave a description that matched what he was wearing that

day, that he confirmed what he was wearing that day. He was on the trails during the time the girls were abducted and murdered. We had a bullet tied to his gun that I believe came from his gun. People will argue the science, but I believe in the science. There was no other explanation how that bullet had gotten there. And so those were kind of the main, main things we had at the time of the arrest. We tied him to the scene. He was in Delphi at the time. He was on the trails at the time.

He matched a description of bridge guy and then tying that bullet to the scene that ties him directly to the crime. And so those are the key pillars that we had at the time. And at this moment, did you know that the three girls also sort of identified him to, You had all these witnesses with different descriptions of bridge guy. Fair enough. Nobody knew that they were going to be having to, you know, share exactly what he looked like the following day after they saw him on the trail. But you have these varying descriptions of bridge guy.

And I think for me, the most compelling were the three girls walking because they were able to share each this experience together. And their descriptions were both a little bit different, but they both saw the same guy. right and he admitted to seeing them like was that kind of a moment too because for me it meant a lot to me it did and this is a better question for john i guess that i'll kind of ask you at the end here but i think the different descriptions are important there were really four girls but one of the girls was so young we did an interviewer and so it gets narrowed down to three but there were actually four girls there we just interviewed three of them because the other one was so young we just didn't think it was going to be worth the interview.

But all three of those girls see the same person at the same exact time. And they all three give a little bit different description of what that person's wearing. However, their description of his demeanor is all the same. And I think it's a better question. We as attorneys say, you know, witness statements sometimes are not the best evidence. Because you can have three people see something. in the exact same moment and describe it in three different ways. And it goes back to, you know, I have taken a couple of classes.

It goes back on to how they were raised, what their beliefs are, what they find important. And John, you can talk on this more than I can because you're the expert. But why do people give different descriptions of the exact same event? I think you gave a good analysis. So, yeah, I mean, it's memory. It's the nature of memory and its context and its expectations. it's all the things you said, Nick. It's that our experiences are going to shape our memory and how we perceive things.

And that's going to be different for everyone. And so you're right. That's why eyewitness accounts are never perfect. Yeah. You know, they don't have to be perfect. I mean, they were close, right? But you point out something interesting, which is something I noticed right away in the probable cause statement myself. And that was the demeanor was the same.

that they all like so you might have differences in terms of eyewitness accounts of what they're seeing and perceiving visually but emotionally they're all experienced the same thing which this guy was on a mission he right he was focused he was not he was not really noticing them he was he seemed to be a little bit aggressive right like that was all consistent and that's what stuck out to me. You know, they, the other thing is when you show a picture of bridge guy, they say, yes, that's the guy I saw. They were all very confident about that, very clear, that's the guy I saw, along with Betsy Blair and Sarah Carball. And so, you know, they all were very adamant. That's the person I saw. And so they all described them a little bit different.

But I'm with John on, that's what stuck out to me, the demeanor of what the three girls kind of realized, okay, this guy, you know, he wasn't friendly. He was on a mission. He was focused. All these kind of things that stuck out to them. That's what kind of stuck out to me. And those things would be consistent with someone who's on that bridge for a purpose, right? That kind of knows where he's going and what he wants to do. Not somebody who's looking at fish. Right. But go back to your statement, Lauren, too. I think it's important that he says, yes, I see them. That confirms he's the guy they saw. So it's just a matter of peace. I think that's what matters. He saw them, which means it corroborates that they

saw a bridge guy. They said, as they looked at Bridge Guy's picture, that's who he saw, even though they all described him differently. It was all the same experience because they were there together. Right. And then he states he saw them. Right. So if you take one little piece of this, it doesn't make sense. If you take the whole picture together, all the witness statements, his statements, to me, it just confirms that it's bridge guy. And I think that's what people miss.

When you first read the probable cause, it's not as clear as it probably should be because it's hard to put those things in writing, all those things together. But I think if you sat, and maybe there's a question for you, when you sat through the trial, the timeline and all those pieces,

did they come together for you? Yes, yes. I had to go home and do some calculating. I'll be honest. I was taking notes rapidly. And I had to go through it again. Yes, it did on multiple days. Like, it just kept coming.

It just kept coming. And yes. And it clearly did for the jury. And I want to point that out. Like you had to have each separate witness come in. And each description was a little bit different. But they all gave this timeline that added up, including when Libby and Abby are dropped off. And, and I.

I went and walked the trail too because that that helped me. There are two separate entrances. And so I took where Abby and Libby was dropped off. And I took where Richard Allen parked and where he walked and the time that they would have met. And then where the girls were taking the photo, right? They took this photo on a bridge. So I want to say, yes, after sitting in trial and hearing this very detailed timeline from each witness and then going to the trail myself and taking each. different walk. Yes. Richard Allen was bridge guy. Yeah. It made a lot of sense to us,

meaning myself, my team, the investigators, because we're familiar with the area. And so that adds a lot to it. Once you, I don't know if this happened to you, but I've talked to other people. And once you go out there and physically walk there and see, okay, this is what they're talking about. it really kind of makes things start to click. And that's really hard to do in a jury room. We tried to use the drone footage and we did the best we could, but it's very difficult to do that until you go out there and kind of put boots on the ground and walk that path.

It just makes it a lot easier because a lot of us are visual people. And it just makes it easier to do that. And so I'm glad to hear that when you walked out there, it made even more sense to you. Yeah, it did. It did make even more sense to me. And you're right. And there are a lot of people like, well, where would they have gone here or there or wherever?

I'm like, this, if I'm a very visual person and going there and I went there multiple times. And like I said, took the multiple different routes and the multiple different drives. It makes sense when you're out there. And it also makes sense. People will ask, why didn't you take the jury out there? I mean, the bridge is really different now. You know, you can't just, you can't go. take a jury onto that very scary bridge.

So that's complicated. But think about the logistics of trying to do that, especially with the publicity that this case has, and especially with the lack of boundaries that some podcasters and YouTubers have. There is no sense of, hey, this is a criminal proceeding. This is a professional setting. There's no sense of decorum.

There's just- Everybody stay off this public trail for the next three. Three hours, yeah. No drones. I mean, I just don't see how you could do that in a way where you don't run the risk of taining the jury or having someone trying to film the jury and put, I mean, we had people trying to film their license plates and follow the jury buses. And do you think for a second, they're not going to hesitate to go out on the trail and hide in the woods and wait just so they can get that next, you know, that extra click on their website or, I mean, this case had so much sensationalism. crazy. Yeah, and we do. We need to protect a jury at all cost because as these trials, criminal trials, start to be played out, you know, in public opinion, you know, on YouTube and the rhetoric gets so strong and so frightening that we, there is a chilling effect. I talk about this with jurors, potential jurors, where they're going to be afraid to share what they really

think if they realize that someone's going to find out who they are or their identity is going to come out. And so it is so important to protect juries and jurors as more and more criminal trials are being played out on YouTube and public opinion is becoming so strong. But yeah, I get it. I hear you. So Richard Allen is arrested. The day he was arrested, I want to say, I was on News Nation on Banfield, just as shocked as Ashley Banfield was. We both jumped on there and talked about how we didn't know much. We didn't know much because the probable cause to arrest this man that none of us had even heard of was sealed.

And that was your decision, right? To seal that probable cause. So to talk to me about that because, yeah, I, I've revisited that News Nation clip with Ashley Banfield where we both say, why is it sealed? They're not telling us anything. We don't know who this guy is. He's not Keegan Klein. He's not Ron Logan.

And we can't even learn why in the world this man was arrested. What were you thinking? What were you thinking? I've got a lot of flack for this. And I can do nothing but stand behind my decision because I do believe it was the right decision. And I understand that, you know, something in a case that's big when someone gets arrested, everybody wants to know everything right away.

I get that. That's human nature. I probably have that human nature on certain things. And so I'm not faulting anyone for that. But at the end of the day, I've got to protect the intent. integrity of the case and I've got to protect. I have a duty to make sure that Richard Allen is a fair trial and that also the state of Indiana has a fair trial.

And so when we first released or first arrested him and filed the probable cause, it was sealed. There were witnesses names in there. At the time they were witnesses, they were juveniles. Some of them weren't at this point because they had turned 18. I was concerned about that. I was concerned about Richard Allen's safety. If this had gotten out because he was housed in the Carol

County Jail and the White County Jail and didn't really know how that was going to affect things. I thought it was important to keep this information from the public until I could have a judge order redacted version. And so those are the main reasons why I thought it was important to keep it out of the public. Now, there are people that disagree with me. Public has the right to know no matter what, no matter what. To me, the integrity of the case trumps that. And I think the FOIA laws and the ARPA laws take that in consideration and why there are exceptions in that and why I was able to file it sealed. And so I don't disagree the public has a right to know. I disagree that the public has the right to know right now when they want to know. I think that they have a right to know

once the integrity of the case is protected. And it's an unpopular opinion. I get it. I've gotten flack. I'll continue to get flack for it. But that's just my opinion. Fair enough. Fair enough. Thank you for sharing. I was really hoping, Nick, that you were going to say you sealed it because you didn't want the world to finally understand that Sasquatches are real. No, that's not the reason. You can believe whatever you want. I'm not going to fault you for it. If you think you're real, more power to you.

A psychologist who believes in Sasquatch. That's, yeah, our next YouTube channel. I knew I couldn't prove it in court, so that's why we didn't go with. Yeah. So, all right, I have so many questions here. I've been taking notes. That's where I'm turning. Everyone, just to people know, I turn and I'm taking notes here, trying to decide where I want to go next. And I think, well, let's just jump into the gag order then. Stealing the probable cause was one thing. And tell us your thought process on when you decided to put a gag order in place and family honored it. it, you know? Again, I thought it was all, I mean, this is not a flashy answer. I mean, I just wanted to protect the integrity of the case. I wanted to make sure that we had a fair trial. I didn't want the family. I didn't want the defense attorneys. I didn't want anybody out there saying, you know, putting all this stuff out on YouTube and Reddit and all this stuff to try to sway the public

one way or the other before we had the trial. I was really, I can't express this enough. I was really that we weren't going to get a good jury, not a good jury, a jury who was fair and impartial. I was really concerned that there was going to be so much out there in the public that it was just going to taint any jury pool that we had. And, you know, I don't want to do this trial more than once. Nobody would want to want to want to pick a jury more than once. I don't want to pick a jury, you know, I don't want to call 600 jurors in and go through all six of them just to find out, okay, none of them are fair and impartial. They all have heard about this case. they've all formed an opinion.

And so for me, it was just all about that. And that's not only for me, that's for Richard Allen too. We didn't want a jury that was tainted, you know, towards the state to say, oh, we believe he's guilty without hearing any evidence. We want it to be fair because everybody wants to do the trial one time. And we want it to be fair for everybody. So the point in the gag order, the point in the protective order for discovery was that part of the reason for the discovery protective order is also protect the family. I did not want crime scene photos. I didn't want the stuff released out there to re-victimize the family.

And re-victimizes my word. People won't agree with that. I get it. But that is my word. That is the word I use because I know these families. I talk to these families. And it is re-victimization. It just is.

And so that was the reason for the gag order just to protect. I didn't want this case tried on the courthouse square. I wanted it tried in a courtroom. where it's fair, we all have the same rules. And that was the only point of it. So that's why I did both the gag order and a protective order for the discovery. Okay. Richard Allen's arrested.

He hasn't confessed. In fact, I've seen his interviews, his interrogation, whatever it is, you know, with law enforcement. And he doesn't confess. He claims he didn't do it. He wasn't there. he didn't murder Abby and Libby. But, you know, you guys arrest him and he starts singing. Is that what we call it?

He starts confessing. I don't know what you call. Confessing is what I call it. But yeah, he starts to talk on the phone to his family, mainly his mom and his wife. Are you listening to all of these? Are you listening to all of these confessions while they're happening? Well, not while they're happening. we get it after it's recorded and then sent to us.

So it's not in real time, but it's same day, same night. It's very quickly after those things happen. Yes. Okay. And at this point, he has a defense, right?

He quickly has a defense. He's confessing. What are you thinking when you're hearing these confessions? For me, personally, I was just thinking, okay, it confirms,

it just reconfirms, everything that we have anyways. It confirms all the evidence that we have. And so it just, it just starts to make our case more solid, I guess, if that's, that's not really proper English. But again, for me, it was just confirmation of everything that we already knew. So what was difference between his confessions and say Elvis Field saying he spit on the victims? Like, what's the difference between the confessions here that you were hearing? Well, they matched the evidence that we had. where Elvis Fields confession did not.

Those confessions that from Richard Allen, they match what we had. And so I think that's the main difference for me. And, you know, and maybe I'm going to turn to John here, you know, because I actually wrote that down when we brought up at the Lus Fields. And, you know, we talked about how context matters and how, well, John, you brought that up. Context matters. So, I mean, I mean, and I wrote down, false confessions versus. is real confessions because I knew that we were about to jump into the fact that

Richard Allen confessed and his confessions are real versus I guess I get maybe it's a question for John what's the difference John well most most false confessions at least after someone's arrested are coerced there's some element of coercion and you know as far as I can tell there's no coercion at all with Richard Allen he's In fact, it's the opposite of coercion because he's talking to family members. Right? And he's talking to family members.

If there is coercion, it's his family members telling him, don't say this. Right. It's not law enforcement being overly harsh or cruel with him trying to get him to confess. It's clear that he's volunteering this information to his family. They're not coercing them. In fact, it's the opposite. So to me, these confessions, I mean, And what I tell Lauren all the time is you only need one true confession to know that someone's

guilty. I mean, whether you can prove that in a clear of law is a different issue. But like, if somebody tells you they committed a crime and they provide some details and they even talk about their motive, which came out later from the testimony of Dr. Walla, you know, my thing is believe them. unless you have a reason not to believe them, they're telling you what they're confessing what they did. You know, I used the example of Chris Watts.

He confessed one time, and his father was in the room, and his father said, that's really bad. He said, son, that's really horrible what you did. You need to take responsibility for that. You need to go and take a deal, right? And I feel like maybe if, Richard Allen's mother or wife had said something similar, you never would have gone to trial.

But they didn't. They said, oh, don't say that. That's horrible. Yeah, you may have killed them, but you may have murdered them, but we're not going to talk about that. Let's pretend that you didn't. John, let me ask you, the timing of the confessions has always been important to me. And so you have an individual who's taken to prison, and he's in confinement by, He's got this dependency on his wife specifically, I believe.

And now he's separated from her. He's in a situation that he's not familiar with, that he's lost. And he's also lost his, I'll say lifeline, I guess, for lack of better words. He also in the process tells his family that he finds Jesus. So he finds something to lean on, something to rely on. And he starts to read the Bible. And he, in my opinion, he realizes that part of giving yourself to Jesus is repenting your sins or at least admitting your sins. Tell me about what your thoughts are about the timing of the confessions, that the confessions happen after those things.

Yeah, I think that's really important. I think it actually adds validity to the confessions in the sense that he wants to get it off his chest. Right. He wants, he tells us in the confessions. He wants to be in the afterlife with his family. And the only way he can do that is to confess and tell the truth. He wants to be forgiven. And so I agree with you, Nick.

Like, to me, that just adds more, you know, it adds more validity to these confessions in terms of, you know, the argument against that, I guess, is that he was tortured and psychotic. And therefore, he couldn't make, right, he couldn't because he couldn't discern reality that he couldn't provide a, a true confession. I mean, that's, that's the argument. Although, as I point out all the time, if you look at the window of his so-called psychosis, which in and of itself is questionable, as you know, there are questions about whether he was faking it or malingering, which everyone in the all the guards, right, even his therapist felt like he was probably malingering to some degree. So let's put that aside, though. That's the other argument. It's important for people to know that his psychosis was occurred during a very limited window.

You only need one confession. Let's just, let's grant, let's grant the defense the fact that he's totally psychotic. He's divorced from reality. So let's take away a two-week window when he's psychotic. The question is, are there confessions outside of that window of time where he's not psychotic? And the psychiatrist and his therapist are documenting he's not psychotic.

right? The answer is yes. He's confessing over a period of well over a year, right? He's confessing outside of that psychotic window. That's the thing I don't understand. Like people keep saying, well, he was psychotic. Well, no, he wasn't. Not for, even if I grant you that he was psychotic during that window of time, you're still going to have to explain to me when he's not psychotic

and he's not in that window, why is he confessing? why is he confessing and why aren't those valid right so the question i get a lot too and i i have a take on it but i'd like to hear your take is also you know why was he confessing you know he's confessing to his mom is confessing to his wife but he's also confessing to guards and then um suicide companions why would he confess to those guards and suicide companions he's not dependent on those he doesn't have an attachment to them what are your thoughts on that because he's he's as as was pointing it out by intestinoated by Dr. Walla.

He's somebody who he's got some obsessive qualities and he ruminates a lot. He's as you've said when he finds Jesus and he wants to get this off his chest and he wants to you know

find some measure of forgiveness. I think at that point he just he wants to tell everyone. He can't stop thinking about it. He's he's whatever he needs to get that catharsis. in that release, he's going to do that.

And if that means talking to guards, talking to family, I think he's someone who, because of these obsessive qualities, once he latches onto something, he's going to, you're going to see that behavior displayed quite frequently. So I think that's why he keeps doing it. I think he feels like,

and also he's not getting the validation he wants from his family. Again, if his wife or his mother said, I acknowledge what you just said. You know, like Chris Watts, I acknowledge what you said, let's go to, let's go talk to Nick and see if we can do a plea deal

because you should take responsibility for this, right? If he had done that, he probably wouldn't have confessed to everyone else around him, right? Because he's not, he's not unburnt. hurting in himself because his family won't hear him. Sure. Sure. I agree with you. I think the other part that went into my mind is he's taking advantage of what he's got in his environment. Those

people are there and they're human face-to-face contact. And so it adds, it satisfies his need for attention, I guess, if you will. Yeah. You're seeing those people face-to-face instead of on the phone and just hearing a voice. And so I think it just goes back to kind of what you said. but that's what stuck out to me as well. Yeah, that's a good point. That's a really good point. Yeah, I think that combination of elements is probably the reason why he's confessing so many times. He's obsessed.

He's got these obsessive qualities. You're right, that there's something about human contact that's comforting that makes him feel safe. And he's not getting the validation he needs from his family. Yeah, that's huge. The non-validation from his mom and his wife, I think that really, I think that affected him. Yeah, so that's a really important piece of this puzzle, I think. Yeah, I'll never even forget him saying, like, will you still love me if I did this?

And his mother's answer was like, sure, I'll always love you, but you didn't do this. It's just like such a disregard. And John, you know, better. I mean, I think that's a common human trait. We want people, even in our bad things, we want people still to like us. I think most of people in society, we want people to like us. And even when we do something bad, you're growing up as a kid, you're telling your mom, you're crying. Part of that crying reaction is you have to tell her something bad.

But really, to me, that crying reaction is you're afraid she's going to react in a way that she doesn't love you anymore. She doesn't like, I mean, to me, that's so that, you know, that's ingrained in essence. So, you know, I understand that. Yeah. And it's especially true for someone who's diagnosed with dependent personality disorder, which he was by multiple psychologist that took the stand. For someone with that diagnosis, one of the worst fears they have is rejection, especially rejection by people who love them.

Sure. And I want to say that it was, yeah, it was both the defenses psychologist as well as Dr. Wall and his own, everyone agreed with the dependent personality disorder. That was one thing that seemed to be something everybody agreed on that assesses. him. So day 13 in trial, I do have a question in cell videos. So sell videos of Richard Allen were played. There was no audio. Well, I have multiple questions about the in-sell video because we weren't able to see it. The jury could only see it. So first off, I want to know what it was. And then secondly, I want to know why there was no audio. Like, was he confessing in the audio or why was no audio allowed? with the videos too. So two questions.

Yeah, let me answer the second question first. It's a little easy. I just don't think there's audio. It's just a camera. It doesn't record audio. So there wasn't any reason why it wasn't on there. There is no audio.

It's a camera in the middle of the cell. It's behind a glass for protection so people can't, whatever. And so there's just no audio. So that's the easy, easy part. The other part, kind of already answered,

it's just a picture of him in his cell. The camera's in the corner of the cell. and it views him in the cell. Okay. What was the jury seeing on those days where the in-cell video was being shown? Like, was it, I mean, I've heard a few things, something about maybe a spit mask over him. Well, those were the other, there are two videos. There's in-cell videos, and then they also videoed him when he was transported from the cell to doctor's appointments,

psychology appointment, whatever it was. So there are two separate videos. So the in-cell video, they were just seeing him in the cell, and they were seeing all those actions that the defense brought up that they thought led, they thought was evidence of him being psychotic. So the feces incidents, I can't remember all the incidents right now, but they were the videos the defense believed gave weight to their stance that he was psychotic when he gave these confessions.

And so there were videos, there were snippets of instances they had picked out. I mean, obviously, he's been recorded 24 hours a day. You know, he was in jail for two years. Can't play all of it. They would pick out snippets that they thought were important. Just like I picked out phone calls, I thought were important. We couldn't play you all the phone calls. There were hours and hours and hours, you know, 700 phone calls.

And most of them are 20 to 25 minutes long. Can't play all those. And so the defense picked out the videos they thought were important to support their stance in the case. And so that's what they play. Okay. There were some things that you wanted to show that Judge Gold said, no, you can't do that, ruled against you. One of them was of interest to me was something that happened with Richard Allen and Cass County. So after he had been moved to a different facility, because there was a lot of controversy over.

the other facility. What was it you wanted to show in trial that you got? It was nixed. You couldn't show it. That's a good word. I can't comment on it since it wasn't allowed in evidence. I really can't comment on it. It was obvious,

I mean, you know it was video of him in Cass County. And we thought that it was something that would benefit the jury to shows the meter. I'll leave it at that. Okay. I respect you can't say. I'll share what I've heard it is. I haven't seen it, but I have heard it is.

Well, and you argued, you know, some things in court that I also heard, but that it was of him threatening the guards, of him being violent and threatening violence and even threatening with possibly the use of a knife or a sharp weapon. That's what I heard. No comment. Okay. I'll give you the very low answer that I, uh, I appreciate your opinion, and that may be what it is, but I can't comment on it right now. Fair enough. There were, on that issue, by the way, there were certain law enforcement officers that took the stand who talked about it.

They didn't, there was no video supporting it, but they mentioned, it seemed like, I don't know if you can answer this, Nick, but it seemed like based upon some of the testimony, even at sentencing, that there were comments about this pattern of, of aggression in jail that Richard Allen had over a period of time. Is that, would that be an accurate? Oh gosh, I just shouldn't comment on it since it wasn't admitted in evidence. You know, after the appeal comes back, the door opens up a little bit to be able to comment on some of the things that didn't come into evidence.

But at this point, I just, I don't want to get myself in hot water and so shouldn't make any comments about it. It was not allowed in evidence. I don't remember specifically, what the witnesses said or what I even argued at this point. So whatever they said is out in public, you can obviously say whatever one about it, but I just probably shouldn't comment on it. Fair enough. Thanks for letting us try to push you, but yeah, we don't want to, we don't want to have any problem for you. Why do you think Libby took that video? Because you commented on the video a lot

actually during trial. And we started out with this video here in this interview. You actually got emotional right away. Why do you think Libby German took that video that we've now all seen? We've seen the whole thing now only recently. It does make me emotional. I don't know why it still does to this day, but it just does. I think because when I view that video, I know those are not the very last moments of their life, but very near the last moments of their life. And it really it makes it the video makes it real for me the photos i can kind of separate myself and i know this is weird but i just kind of can there's still images and i can kind of just separate my emotions but when i see that video and see you know the two girls there and uh i think it's affected me more now

since i've had kids i don't think i know it has and you know i can see my two girls out there just enjoying the day and and so it does the video really, I mean, trying not to get emotional now. It's just, it really does mess with my emotions. And I don't really know how else to say it. I can't crawl in Liberty's head and tell you why she took the video. The only thing I can comment about is common sense is that she thought something wasn't right. Why would anybody in that moment pull out their phone and try to film this guy? She sensed something wasn't right. We all have that innate ability in our bodies to say, okay, this makes me uncomfortable. This something, something is afoot. Something is not right. And so I don't really know

why she did. I mean, thank God she did. I, I, who I am in court is pretty much who I am in real life. And so when I say stuff, like when I say in closing that her and Abby are the heroes in this situation to help solve their own crime, I believe that. I just truly and firmly believe that. And so I don't know why she did. I'm glad she did. The only comment I could make. is that she thought something wasn't right. She knew or felt something bad was about to happen. Yeah, I agree. I agree.

And I do agree that they are the heroes in this. They did solve their own murder. It really did. And they kept the phone safe. And I don't know how they did it. Honestly, I don't know how they kept that phone safe either. That blows my mind, too. Taking the video and then making sure that video was safe.

the entire time are two separate heroic feats in my opinion i agree um so i have so many questions here i'm looking and going like where do i go next are you good john john i'll just interrupt me if you have anything right john or do you do you have something you want to say right now i just want to jump in with um just talking about how personal that has been for you nick and how you talked earlier at the beginning about how you negotiate all these different roles like like victim advocate and you know you were you're not just a prosecutor you're everything um you know i guess my question is and this has been a hard trial i mean i think you know you you must have been the target of a lot of animosity sure from a lot of places right like i guess the one question i'm

interested in is how has this affected you personally what what's the what's the personal impact been and how have you negotiated that uh you know it's not even easy. I mean, you know this. It's not easy. You have to try to, I guess, you know, separate yourself from it a little bit. It's, you know, in the moment, I'm very focused in the moment and I'm focused on the conviction. So, you know, during the investigation, I'm focused on, okay, let's solve it. Let's find out who did this. Once the arrest is made, I'm focused on the conviction. Really during that time, what affects me mostly is time away from my family. time away from my girls, you know, spending nights here instead of at home. That's where it really starts to affect me. But the gravity of the case, I'm just so focused on what I have to do to get to the end. Now, afterwards, it is tremendously affected. Afterwards, you allow those emotions to kind of flood in.

And I think that's why I get so choked up now and I didn't during the trial. Although, you'll see, you don't, Lauren didn't know me, but I had to stop at one point during to closing because I was getting choked up. Yeah. I remember that moment. And so it's in the trial. I'm able to separate my feelings enough and just be able to get the job done afterwards is where it's really, really.

So after the conviction, during the sentencing, when I'm kind of, I allow myself to kind of let those emotions go. And so I don't know. It's affected me. I'm more emotional. There's no doubt now. There was one hard part. during the trial where we showed the crime scene photos to the family the day before we were going

to present in court. And that was, to see their reactions really, really, really affected me. It really hit home. And I'm glad Jim Lettrell did that part because I don't know if I could have done it. It just really hit home to see people that I knew and that I had grown attached to affected in that way. It gets to me now. Sorry. So I don't know. You've got to take time and, sorry, cuts this part out. But yeah,

it's made me super emotional since the conviction and since the sentencing and you allow yourself to kind of feel those things. But during the time, I was just able to separate myself. So I don't know if that really answered you a question, but I guess those are my comments. Yeah, no, thank you. I think you're, no, you're fine.

You're good. Thanks for. Yeah. Thanks for being so open about it. I think you're showing us right now how hard it's been and how personal it's been. And I appreciate your openness. I spend a tremendous amount of my life working on this case. You know, and so it is it becomes, you become emotionally attached to it.

And so, yeah, and I guess the comments I made before when I see the video kind of takes me back and it makes me emotional about it. And I wouldn't go as far as it's PTSD. or anything like that because I think that people that have PTSD mainly are armed forces, girls and guys. I mean, those, that's PTSD. The things that they go through and the things that they see in real life, that's PTSD. And so, you know, I wouldn't equate what I have to what they have any day of the week. But, you know, there is, it does give you flashbacks to, you know, what the family went through, what they're feeling. And now that it's over, I'm letting myself get a little more emotional about those things, which is not common for me. So I think this case has made me

definitely more emotional in that sense. And I think having kids is really what kind of made me more emotional. I think men in general have trouble showing their emotions, and I'm probably not, you know, separate from that. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and it's just how you're raised. And so I know this is a lot of rambling, but just to tell you that it's kind of opened me up a little bit. It is emotional for me to talk about now. I mean, a lot of this case played out in public opinion. I mean, you know that. That's the reason, again, you sealed the probable cause

and you were trying to make sure you had a fair jury. But, you know, I'm a reporter. I'm a former Bradcaster, now YouTuber and podcaster. I've covered other murder trials. I've thought this case was actually quite unique, this trial. much it played out in public opinion with release some extreme sides and vitriol and even people in trial in the trial in court every day sort of taking different sides. And I mean, I don't know if you kept yourself separated from this or how you were able to deal this of

people were slipping you clips of things. But did this affect you how much this trial played out in the public with some conspiracy theories with different, you know, people picking sides, picking teams, things like that. It was definitely unique. I'd never dealt, you know, none of the trials we haven't here in Carroll County in other cases get publicity like that. Certainly, I'd never dealt with any kind of case that had so much internet publicity just with YouTube and Reddit and podcasters.

So that was all very foreign to me. The fact that so many people wanted to know what was going on was just really foreign to me because we don't have that. I mean, I have a rape case Monday in a murder trial. Nobody's called me about that. Nobody's asked me, you know, so it's just very foreign to me. I was surprised how passionate people were on one side of the other about things. I am surprised about the amount of threats that I got. I was surprised about the amount of.

negative negativity I got from people. I tried to stay away from it. The biggest hurdle I had was keeping my family away from it. It really, they kind of got sucked in a few times and they were really offended, you know, and just my moms especially. I mean, imagine how a mother is when somebody's talking bad about their child. And so, you know, she really got affected by it. I didn't, I would have, we'd have several people that would send us clips of stuff.

And I would watch them on occasion when I had time, but I tried not to base what I did on public opinion. I tried to base it on what I thought was right for the case. But we did have people sending us clips about things. The one thing I did enjoy is I felt like at the beginning of this that everybody thought I was inept to try this case and that I was the underdog. And I'm okay with being that way. I like being that way, frankly. I like people to underestimate me.

I like the people think that, you know, I don't know what I'm doing. I think that lets them let their guard down a little bit and maybe not prepare as much. And so I kind of like that. But I really, I did, after the fact I've went back and listened things, I've really kind of enjoyed how I was kind of, I was the bad guy off the bat with all the public anyways because I sealed the PC. So it kind of just snowballed from there to me not being able to try this case

because I only tried one murder beforehand. You know, just all these negative things. And then as it goes on, you can see that people kind of, some of the podcasters and some of the YouTubers, they kind of switched and said, okay, he knows what he's doing, you know, whatever. So I didn't get sucked into it too much. We did watch, I did watch some clips that people would send me of your show of the murder sheet of Bob Mata, you know, all those kind of people. They would send me that stuff. And I'd watch clips. but I tried not to let it sway my opinion,

but it definitely was something foreign to me for sure because no other case I'd ever had had this kind of publicity. So someone did send you on a clip. Which one? Oh, go ahead, John. I was just going to, I just want to jump in and say, for all the doubters and the haters, you proved them wrong, and you did an exceptional job. So I just want to acknowledge that.

So I think you were amazing. And thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you. So, Lord, I don't remember which clip. I just remember when I saw you at the trial and the press conference, I recognized you because somebody had sent me a clip. I can't remember exactly what it was about. It was probably about the Franks memo or the odinism if I was a guessing

because we got a ton of stuff in about that when that came out. Okay. Okay. Yeah, and I want to reiterate what John said there. I said this at the beginning of this interview, and I'll say it again, every attorney in there, I was so impressed with. And I was so impressed with you. And I was relaying that to John.

I mean, these, you guys were everyone. I appreciate it. And it was a fair trial. And the jury heard it all. And they deliberated for days. Yep. And they came to their decision. A great jury.

I mean, I've never had such inquisitive questions from a jury like we did with this jury. And they were detailed questions. questions and they were educated questions. And they, you could tell they were really paying attention to what each side was doing and each side was presenting. And so, you know, really thanks to the jury for hanging in there through, you know, what, three weeks of trial. And then not going right back and making a hasty decision, actually go through the evidence and make a decision and give it the time that it deserved. Yeah. Look, this is, this is something I want to ask. Forgive me for asking this question and actually you're probably going to laugh me like this is it this is what

you're going to ask okay but how tall was bridge guy because this will not end and and and Ron Logan is over six feet right I've been to the bridge I even had a model who was about five nine walk the bridge Did you guys do measurements? Because that didn't come in in trial either, like any, you know, calculations. I mean, we tried. We even talked to experts. And the answer we always got was, you know, we can't give you an accurate height. It's going to be off two to four inches one way or the other.

And so at the end of the day, we couldn't give a reliable answer. Okay. The FBI put on their original, their original five, what was it, five? eight to five, five, seven, five, ten, five, I think. But they took that off later. But, um. See, that was before. I think that was before I was a prosecutor.

I think. I mean, I don't remember that. Yeah. I can't tell you why they did that. I don't even remember seeing that on the sign. That very, very well might be, but I just don't remember that. I always had a question about, like, facial, recognition programs or voice recognition programs.

Is that something you guys tried to use? Was the quality of the video not sufficient to use it? Tell us a little bit about that. I know that we tried to clean up the image as best we could. We sent it to several different agencies to say, okay, give us the crispest picture that you can. In terms of face recognition, I can't tell you one way or the other,

if anybody ever tried that. If they did, they never brought to me and say, hey, we put it in face recognition. We couldn't do it. They may have done it and not been able to do it, just not told me. I don't remember. With the voice recognition,

I just remember briefly one conversation to say, look, there's not enough there for somebody to put this through voice recognition. We, so, you know, we all listen to the video hundreds and thousands of times with headphones on without headphones, on speakers. I mean, anything you'd imagine. And we all thought the voice was Richard Allen, especially after listening to all his phone calls.

But I don't know if they ever did put it through voice recognition. I just remember a conversation at one point saying, well, either not long enough or probably not long enough, and so we didn't do it. Right. You could do it, but it wouldn't be conclusive. I can't really exactly remember the exact conversation, but you may be right.

Yeah. I thought it sounded like him for what it's worth. Yeah. I thought it looked like him too. So we all we all did too. And who else would it have been but him? Right. Yeah.

I mean, at the end of the day, that's the question. We can argue about whether it sounded like him, whether it looked like him, at the end of the day, answering him that question. Who else could it have been? Exactly. Exactly. You know, so sitting in the gallery, every day in trial, I couldn't always see Richard Allen because he sat straight ahead.

So I could see him when he turned his head, right? I could see certain things, but I couldn't always see him. And there were a lot of discussions after about how he would roll his eyes or some of his reactions during trial. but I was not able to see all of those, neither was the public. Can you share a little bit about what you noticed Richard Allen was doing? Would we in the gallery, couldn't see? You know, unfortunately, I don't have a whole lot for you. As you remember, that gallery or the well, we call it, above the bar, it was very packed.

We were crunched in there. And I had Jerry Holman right beside me, who was a big man. And so he blocked a lot of my view of Richard Allen. Now, I would be able to see Richard. We kind of played musical chairs in a sense that I thought it was important for whoever was doing the questioning would sit in that first chair. So they had a better view of the witness, the TV. And so between Jim Lutrell, Stacey Deere and I, we kind of switched chairs. And there'd be at times I'd be at the end of the table.

And the only thing I noticed is I think what everybody else noticed is that he would have a tendency to look at you and not. to hate to use the word stare, but stare at you an uncomfortably long time and not really divert his gaze at all. And it was kind of something he did with a lot of people. I don't know why. Maybe better question for John, but I got in the habit of just doing it right back to him until he would, you know, kind of not look at me anymore because he would do that. And I saw him doing it to a bunch of people. Again, I don't know why he would do it, but that is kind of the behavior I saw. The rest of time when I was in that first chair, I can't even seem. I got Jerry Holman sitting right behind beside me. There's two officers behind Richard Allen. I just, and again, I'm pretty laser

focused on watching the jury and watching my witness. I will look at the judge because I want to see her reaction, but my big thing in a trial is you've got to read the room. That is huge to me. And so I spend the majority of my time trying to watch the 12 to 16 people in the box, also watch the judge and see her reactions and then pay attention to the witness too because I think it's important to make eye contact with the witness to make them feel as comfortable as possible. So that's a long answer to say I didn't see much. Yeah, yeah. Fair enough. Any thoughts, John? Or, you know, I mean, without being there, it would be difficult to assess. But, you know, the staring could be some type of attempt to intimidate or it could be some type of power play. I don't

know. It's hard to know for sure. I mean, that was my thought and that's why I just, I wasn't going to let him intimidate me. And so I just stayed right back at him to try to, I guess, deflect his intimidation or maybe intimidate him a little bit. I don't know. But my thought was it's a way of trying to, you know, intimidate me. Because I did have reports that he said a lot of stuff, but he didn't like me and those kind of things. And so Well, he shouldn't like you. I don't just agree. It was a strange who did like you. I don't think you guys,

you guys weren't meant to be besties. That's right. You know, since trial, you know, the defense has released some things, including someone named Ricky Davis, an inmate who has claimed Ron Logan confessed to him before Ron Logan's death. Ron Logan is dead, so he can't say,

oh, yeah, I confess to Ricky Davis. but Ricky Davis is saying this happened. And since that time, Ricky Davis is also saying that Ron and Kagan were involved together. Any thoughts on this? The defense had every opportunity to call whoever they wanted to at trial. They had every opportunity to call whoever they wanted at the three-day hearing to promote their third-party motive.

They have to play by the rules of evidence just like I do. And so they're bound by those. And so they had an opportunity at least to call Ricky Davis. at the three-day hearing to see if the third-party motive could come in. It did not come in about Ron Logan or Kagan Klein or the Odenism. And so now to throw that in after the fact, I'm not sure what the strategy is there. I'm not sure I agree with it, but it is something they filed. State does not give any weight to what Ricky Davis says.

If you do, then Ron Logan, Kagan Klein, and Richard Allen committed the murders. And that's what he says. And so you can't pick and choose. I believe what he says here, but not here. You can't, you can't do that. And just to remind everybody, if the defense is now going with the theory that, you know, Ron Logan, Kagan Klein, and Richard Allen did it, or Richard Allen somehow didn't do it, then what happened to the Odinism, you know, was worth a 136 page memorandum. What happened to that? Thank you. That was exactly, yeah, that's exactly what I thought when I got that. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, I was like, wait,

they've been screaming from the rooftops that it was odinous. But now it's on Logan? Couldn't those three have been odinists? I know Richard Allen wasn't connected to odinism, but it, you know, their argument could be that they were all others.

Absolutely could be. But I go back to the Sasquot, the Sasquatch and the alien. Well, I go back to, you can't put Ricky Davis on as a reliable witness who has implicated your client. that seems counterintuitive to your end goal. Right. For everyone to know, he has also said Richard Allen was a part of this. Right.

Right. Which, by the way, of those three, one's deceased and the other two is, is King Klein still in prison? Yes. Yeah. So two of them are already incarcerated. So in a peculiar sense, that would mean that justice has already been served. Right. Yeah.

And I don't disagree with that analysis. Yes. So I don't know. I don't know why the defense did that. Don't give any weight to what Ricky Davis said. Those letters that he sent came in during the trial. So if I'm honest, I didn't look at the letters to after the trial. You know, the first letter comes in October 4th. I'm prepping for jury selection for the biggest trial of my life. You know, and so I don't even see those things until after. And then the other two come in during the trial. I don't have time to look at that stuff. And, you know, I'm focused on the task at hand. And so that's the other realities. I didn't look at him until after church till he brought it up. And I said, okay, where are they at? Let's look at him. Well, what do you mean? They're implicating Richard Allen too.

I don't understand how this is important. So. Yeah. Or how it exonerates their client. Right. Anything else, John, that you want to ask? No, I think we've covered a lot. I don't want to keep Nick too long here.

You guys are fine so far. just is there let me ask you nick is there something else that you want to talk about i mean the gag order affected you too your gag order it was your your fault but it had to have been hard you kept it you kept it and here's your chance yeah i yeah no there's not really anything i want to say i kind of just let my actions speak for themselves and i think our our performance at the trial performance is probably not the right word but are the way we presented this case, I think that speaks for itself. And so I agree the gag order affected me. And there were times that, you know, I wanted to yell from the mountaintops,

you got it wrong or, you know, wait to you hear this side of the story. But I was just so adamant about not doing that because I wanted to present everything in a trial, in a courtroom. I was just really adamant about that. I think this case opened itself up to attain a jury in so many ways because it was so publicized across the state of Indiana, across the U.S., across the world. I mean, and so I was really adamant about trying to make sure that everybody had a fair trial. It's really, really important to me. I do this job because I believe in the system, our judicial system. If you don't believe in it, you shouldn't be in this job.

And so I hold that sacred. I hold my actions in professional sacred. And so it was just really important to me to make sure that everybody had, a fair footing in the trial. We're obviously bound by the rules of evidence and, you know, all those kind of rules that come into play, a procedure in the courtroom. And so it was difficult, but I don't, you know, I don't have really anything I want to say. I think what we presented at the trial was the truth. And I think that came out. And, you know, I'd just like to leave it at that, I guess. Yeah. Fair enough. You've been on both sides, defense and prosecution, which I've already

mentioned. You said you would have done things differently. I just have to ask, is it, is it common for, and maybe it is defense attorneys to sort of continue on sort of like playing out these different reasons from Ricky Davis to Ron Logan to others after a conviction? Is it? No, it's not, but this case isn't common either. And so you've had to kind of take that into context as well. And you know, I don't fault the attorneys for doing anything they did. I mean, you've got to represent your client zealously and, you know, we're all professionals. I don't agree with the way they did some of the things and some of the things they put in the motions, some of the personal attacks. I don't think those are appropriate in motions.

And, you know, I got sucked into that on some of my responses. I won't lie. It's hard not to. When somebody attacks you, you want to do this kind of tit for tat thing. And so I did get sucked into that a few times and you know I'm as a fault as much as they are but and so I don't really fault some of the motions they filed I think the motions they filed some of them are appropriate the contact the the content of those motions that's where kind of I think it went away from what we're used to as professionals as being a lawyer in terms of a motion usually a motion from a lawyer to the court is very sterile here's the legal facts here's why I want it kicked out here's my law case in my case law to support it

here's my summary. We don't get in those, and I felt like a lot of their emotions got into emotions and into personal attacks and into blaming people and accusing people of things. And so I didn't agree with that, but again, they had to do what they felt was best for their client, and that's what our system requires. And so I don't have to agree with it. I'm on the opposite side. We're opposition for a reason. And so all I can say is I just didn't agree with everything they put in their motions. I respect that. I respect that. I'm also not going to talk bad about, I mean, I respect the profession. They had to do what they think they had to do. And so it is what it is. It is what it is. Absolutely. What about your thoughts on it sometimes

feels like they're still trying the case in public post-conviction? I think that's, in my opinion, that's what's happening. They couldn't get past the third-party motive. And so in an effort to put this new theory out to the public, they put it in a motion to correct air. So I agree with you. I don't agree with that tactic. He's got an appellate attorney, two appellate attorneys now. Let the appeals process go through that process and let's get through that and see what the court of appeals says. You know, depending on how they rule, I hope that that settles a lot of things. And we can kind of move on to the next step. So I didn't agree with trying to promote this theory, you know, after the fact. You had an opportunity to call people. You had your

chance for whatever reason at the time. You didn't do that. And so, you know, he has appellate attorneys now. Let's let the appeal process work its way through the system. Well said. And we will. We'll let it work its way out. Thank you so much, prosecutor McLeeland. Thank you so much for being here with us. And until next time, we'll see you. Yeah. Thank you.