Recently released videos from 2022 show Richard Allen, the Indiana man convicted of killing two girls on a hiking trail in Delphi in 2017, denying he had any role in the crime when questioned by Indiana officials and his wife.
An Indiana judge in December 2024 sentenced Allen to a maximum of 130 years behind bars for the murders of 13-year-old Abigail „Abby“ Williams and 14-year-old Liberty „Libby“ German, also known as the Delphi murders.
A jury found Allen guilty of killing the two girls, who disappeared during their walk along the High Monon Trail Feb. 13, 2017. Investigators found them both brutally murdered the next day with their throats cut several times and sticks covering their bodies in a wooded area near the trail.
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„It’s sounding more like you’re … I’m not going to be somebody’s fall guy,“ Allen told investigators in an Oct. 13, 2022, interview video obtained by YouTuber Tom Webster and shared with Fox News Digital.
„I mean, it’s been so long, and I haven’t thought about this much, and it’s just, like, I don’t want to be someone’s fall guy. And we’re going to try to make pieces of a puzzle fit somewhere they don’t fit so we can close this thing … and please don’t think I’m questioning you’re integrity.“
Supt. Doug Carter of the Indiana State Police, right, speaks during a news conference with an update on the Delphi murders investigation April 22, 2019, at the Canal Center in Delphi. (© Nikos Frazier/Journal & Courier/USA Today Network)
The interview started out jovially when Allen entered the interrogation room with investigators and laughed along with them.
Allen was initially questioned in 2017 after the murders because he was on the High Monon Trail the day the girls went missing, but his name was scrubbed from the case due to a clerical error, journalist Áine Cain and Indiana-based attorney Kevin Greenlee, who co-host „The Murder Sheet“ podcast, first reported.
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Richard Allen was arrested in October 2022 for the 2017 murders of 14-year-old Liberty German and 13-year-old Abigail Williams. (Indiana State Police)
Allen was arrested in 2022 after evidence led police to his home, where they found a gun matching an unspent bullet located at the crime scene and a blue jacket similar to the one a man was wearing in a video Libby took on the trail just before her disappearance. Allen’s arrest took the Delphi community by surprise at the time because he was a longtime employee at a local CVS.
„I guess I’m starting to feel more like I’m your main lead here, and I’m not gonna do that,“ Allen told officials in the interview.
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On Feb. 14, 2017, Libby German, 14, and Abby Williams, 13, were killed while biking on trails near Delphi, about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis. (Indiana State Police)
He also took issue with police asking for permission to search his phones and other personal belongings.
Allen later says he and his wife watch „TV shows and stuff,“ and he doesn’t „want to be associated with this thing more than anybody else does.“
„Am I an angel of a person? No.“
„Am I an angel of a person? No,“ Allen said. „I mean, I’m like anybody else. … Maybe I don’t want you looking at every website I visited.“
Throughout the interview, Allen can be seen playing with a water bottle, which he finishes about 40 to 50 minutes into the questioning.
Snow covers the water of Deer Creek as the Monon High Bridge towers above Feb. 9, 2022, in Delphi. (Nikos Frazier/Journal & Courier/USA Today Network)
He said he understood that police want „closure“ for the families of the victims.
„We’re here because we haven’t found the guy that did this, and I’m not going to turn into that guy. … Like I said, we watch ‘Dateline’ every week. We watch everything, and … I mean, there’s nothing that’s going to tie me to it. I’m not worried about that, but to have people come and start searching my house and stuff. … I mean, my wife doesn’t even know I’m talking to people,“ Allen said. „I don’t want anyone to know I talked to you guys.“
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Grainy cell phone video footage and a sketch of a prime suspect in the murder of local Delphi girls Abigail Williams and Liberty German on the office wall of Tobe Leazenby, sheriff of Carroll County. (Robert Scheer/IndyStar/USA Today Network)
In a separate video obtained by Tom Webster and shared with Fox News Digital from Oct. 26, 2022, Allen denies the crime to his wife.
„They’re trying to tell me you actually believe I did it, and I just can’t believe that,“ Allen told his wife in the video. His wife responded that he was trying to figure out how his gun was linked to a bullet at the crime scene.
„I know you know I didn’t do this,“ Allen said. „And I don’t know what they’re trying to do this, but I’m not going to say something that’s not true, and I don’t know how to explain something I don’t understand. … There’s no way a bullet from my gun ended up at a murder scene. I didn’t murder anybody. I didn’t help somebody murder anybody.“
Allen added that he did not see Abby and Libby on the High Monon Trail Feb. 13, 2017, and he did not have his gun with him on the trail that day.
„They’re not gonna get away with this,“ Allen says.
„They want you to think I done it.“
He repeatedly told his wife she knows him, and he knows her, and he does not understand how investigators found a bullet from his gun at the crime scene.
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Allen then goes back-and-forth with an officer who tells Allen police have evidence showing the bullet found at the scene came from his gun.
One key piece of evidence presented during Allen’s trial last year was a video Libby recorded on her phone at some point before she and Abby were killed.
Officers transport murder suspect Richard Allen during a hearing about sealed documents Nov. 22, 2022, at Carroll County Courthouse in Delphi, Ind. (Alex Martin/Journal and Courier/USA Today Network)
Jurors watched 43 seconds of the video, which showed Libby and Abby walking with an unknown man wearing a hat and blue utility jacket in court Oct. 22. The man in the video became known over the last five years as „Bridge Guy.“ Libby captured the video at 2:13 p.m., less than 25 minutes after she and Abigail’s family members dropped them off at the trail.
„Guys, down the hill,“ the man told the girls in the video.
Prosecutors argued that Allen is „Bridge Guy“ after witnesses who testified against Allen said they saw him on the trail around the same time the girls disappeared, and authorities recovered a similar blue utility jacket from Allen’s home in 2022.
DELPHI MURDERS SUSPECT CONFESSED TO KILLING 2 GIRLS ON HIKING TRAIL IN SMALL TOWN, PRISON DOC SAYS
Delphi murder suspect Richard Allen, who has a hearing in June, is living in a 6-foot by 10-foot cell „no larger than that of a dog kennel“ and is sleeping on a pad on a concrete floor. (FOX 59 Indianapolis )
Allen also admitted in one of dozens of jailhouse confessions that he did order the girls „down the hill.“ He repeatedly confessed to killing the girls, apparently saying he wanted to rape the girls but was spooked by a van nearby, at which point he decided to kill them.
His attorneys said his declining mental stability led him to make false statements behind bars.
More than five years after their deaths, investigators executed a search warrant at Allen’s home in Delphi Oct. 13, 2022, and they recovered a blue Carhartt jacket, a SIG Sauer P226 .40-caliber semiautomatic handgun and a .40-caliber S&W cartridge in a „wooden keepsake box“ from a dresser between two closets in Allen’s bedroom, according to authorities.
The handgun recovered at Allen’s home was consistent with a .40-caliber unspent bullet police found at the site of the murders in 2017, police said.
Fox News‘ Patrick McGovern contributed to this report.
