Delphi Murders Crime Scene: Evidence, Blood Patterns, and Trial

The Delphi murders crime scene sat on private property on the north side of Deer Creek, roughly half a mile from where Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, had been dropped off near the Monon High Bridge on February 13, 2017. When searchers found the girls the next morning, both had deep lacerations to the throat, sticks and branches had been placed over their bodies, and hidden beneath Abby lay Libby’s cellphone — which held a 43-second video of the man police would spend more than five years trying to identify. An unspent .40-caliber cartridge partially buried near the bodies eventually tied the scene to Richard Allen, who was convicted of both murders in November 2024.

Where the Bodies Were Found

Carroll County Sheriff’s Deputy Darron Giancola was working the search on the morning of February 14, 2017, when a search party reported spotting something by the creek. He noticed a multicolored shirt in the water and a shoe caught in tree roots before locating the two bodies on the north bank, on the back end of property owned by Ron Logan.¹ Logan described the terrain as so steep that “you couldn’t carry them in a million years or drag them,” meaning the victims had walked to the location.

Indiana State Police crime scene investigator Sgt. Jason Page arrived at about 1:30 p.m. He taped off a perimeter he compared to the size of a football field, then designated the area within roughly 30 to 40 feet of the bodies as “ground zero.”² The core scene was at least twenty yards up the bank from the creek, on the opposite side of the water from the bridge.³

Condition of the Bodies

Libby was found nude, with significant blood on her face, hands, right calf, and the heel of her right foot. Abby was clothed, but wearing Libby’s clothing: a black hooded sweatshirt, a grey sports bra, a pink T-shirt, and Converse shoes. Her jeans were unfastened and appeared too large. Her body lay with the right leg bent beneath the left, arms folded at the elbows, hands raised near her face with the sleeves covering them.² Both bodies were cold and rigor mortis had set in. Deputy Giancola testified that no lifesaving measures were attempted because “it was apparent they were deceased.”⁴

Forensic pathologist Dr. Roland Kohr testified that Abby suffered a fatal two-inch laceration to the jugular. Libby had at least four overlapping cuts to the neck, two of them fatal.⁵ Kohr estimated both victims likely survived four to ten minutes after the injuries were inflicted, though they probably lost consciousness before death. There were no signs of sexual assault injury.³

Sticks, twigs, and larger limbs had been placed over both bodies. Investigators initially left them in place, judging them to have no evidentiary value because of their rough, crumbly condition. Weeks later, on March 3, 2017, the sticks were retrieved after being matched back to crime scene photographs.² Those sticks later became central to a defense theory that the killings were ritualistic.

Physical Evidence Recovered

The most consequential item at the scene was a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson cartridge — an unspent round, not a fired casing — found partially buried nose-first beneath leaves, less than two feet from one of the victims. Investigators located it using an Alternative Light Source.² Years later, it would be matched to a Sig Sauer P226 pistol seized from Richard Allen’s home.⁶

Beneath Abby’s body and clothing, investigators recovered a black Nike tennis shoe and Libby’s cellphone in a purple Gryffindor case. Several items of the girls’ clothing were pulled from the creek itself: a pair of size 26 jeans, a black athletic shoe, a bandana-type fabric, socks, a black spaghetti-strap shirt, a tie-dye T-shirt, and a grey zip-up sweatshirt. The clothing was wet and covered in mud silt consistent with the creek bed.²

A single strand of hair was found in Abby’s hand but was not analyzed until October 2024. Forensic scientist Stacy Bozinovski testified at trial that the hair was matched to Kelsi German, Libby’s older sister, who had dropped the girls off at the trailhead.⁷ No DNA at the scene was tied to Richard Allen or anyone else.⁸

The Video on Libby’s Phone

Hidden beneath Abby’s body, Libby’s cellphone held a 43-second video that captured a man on the Monon High Bridge approaching the girls from behind. The clip shows Abby walking along the bridge with the man visible in the distance. One girl, believed to be Libby, is heard saying, “There’s no path down here. We’ve got to go down here.” Thirty-eight seconds in, a male voice commands, “Guys, down the hill.”⁹

Indiana State Police digital forensic expert Brian Bunner extracted the video from Libby’s phone four times between 2017 and 2019, and the device was also sent to the Department of Homeland Security. Former ISP system administrator Jeremey Chapman enhanced the images, adjusting brightness and applying filters to sharpen the figure of “Bridge Guy.” The defense challenged those enhancements as altered from the original and noted Chapman had no specialized linguistics training for the audio.¹⁰ Police released a still image and the audio clip early in the case, asking the public for help identifying the man. The footage became the signature piece of evidence.

What Blood Patterns Showed About the Attack

Major Pat Cicero of the LaPorte County Sheriff’s Department, a crime scene reconstructionist and blood spatter expert, reviewed photographs, autopsy records, and lab reports beginning in February 2024. He was not at the original scene, but his trial testimony gave the most detailed reconstruction of the attack.¹¹

Cicero testified that the attack on Libby began at a tree about 20 feet from where her body was ultimately found. Blood stains and spatter on the bark showed swipes from a weapon or a bloody hand, a “transfer stain.” Blood flow patterns on her torso suggested she had been upright at one point; flow on her thighs indicated she had been seated at another. Blood on her hands pointed to her trying to stop her own bleeding. Cicero concluded she was “likely mortally injured” while leaning against the tree, died there “in a large pool of blood,” and was then dragged to her final position.⁸ He also identified moisture on her body consistent with tears mixed into the blood.

Abby’s body told a different story. The complete absence of blood on her hands and sweatshirt sleeves was, in Cicero’s words, “very unusual,” something he said he had “never seen” across hundreds of scenes where there was no physical sign of restraint. He concluded Abby was likely restrained or unconscious when her throat was cut. Her raised hands, held in what he called a vertical “boxing” position, suggested she did not die right away, and “this would have taken some time.”¹¹ Cicero testified Libby’s killing was “bloodier” than Abby’s and said one person could have committed the crimes, though he did not rule out multiple perpetrators.¹²

How the Scene Evidence Led to Richard Allen

Allen had reported himself to police three days after the killings. On February 18, 2017, then-Lieutenant Dan Dulin of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources met him in a Save A Lot parking lot for a roughly ten-minute conversation. Allen said he had been on the trails between 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. on the day of the killings. Dulin typed his notes into a Word document and entered them into the system, but under the name “Richard Allen Whiteman,” a clerical error incorporating Allen’s street name, Whiteman Drive. The tip was marked “cleared.”¹³

On September 21, 2022, volunteer file clerk Kathy Shank, a retired Department of Child Services worker helping organize roughly 14,000 tips, found a folder that had been separated from the others. She recognized the name discrepancy, opened a new lead sheet under “Richard Allen,” and notified Sheriff Tony Liggett.¹⁴ Liggett later described the early investigation as “somewhat disorganized” and said Allen had been “hiding in plain sight.”

An October 13, 2022 search of Allen’s home turned up several firearms, including a Sig Sauer P226 .40-caliber pistol. Indiana State Police forensic firearms examiner Melissa Oberg determined that the unspent round from the scene bore ejector and extractor marks matching Allen’s gun. Eight firearms were tested over the years; Allen’s was the only match.¹⁵ Allen confirmed he owned the pistol, said he had never lent it out, and could not explain how a round cycled through it ended up at the murder scene.⁶ He was arrested on October 28, 2022.

The Scene Evidence at Trial

Allen was charged with two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder. He pleaded not guilty. Trial began October 18, 2024, before Special Judge Fran Gull, with a jury drawn from Allen County. Prosecutors built their case on the cellphone video, the ballistic match to the unspent cartridge, and more than 60 alleged confessions Allen made while incarcerated, including jail phone recordings in which he told his wife, “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.”¹⁶ He also reportedly told a warden he had used a box cutter and disposed of it in a CVS dumpster.¹⁷

The defense argued the investigation was “botched” and pointed to the absence of DNA or fingerprint evidence at the scene. Attorney Brad Rozzi characterized the confessions as involuntary, the product of a mental health crisis after 13 months in solitary confinement at Westville Correctional Facility, where witnesses said Allen ate paper, smeared feces on himself, and hit his head against the wall.¹⁸ Judge Gull barred the defense from arguing that the girls had been killed in a ritualistic sacrifice by white nationalists practicing Odinism, a theory that relied in part on the sticks arranged on the bodies as “rune” symbols. She ruled the theory lacked sufficient connection to the crime.¹⁹

The jury found Allen guilty on all four counts on November 11, 2024. On December 20, 2024, Judge Gull imposed 130 years — two consecutive 65-year terms — after vacating two counts on double jeopardy grounds.²⁰

The Leaked Photos

The scene evidence itself became a scandal before trial. In October 2023, Mitchell Westerman of Westfield, Indiana, a former coworker and friend of defense attorney Andrew Baldwin, visited Baldwin’s law office, found graphic crime scene photos on a conference table, and photographed them with his phone without permission. Westerman shared the images with an acquaintance, who forwarded them to a Texas contact, who distributed them to YouTube and podcast creators.21 The man who initially received the photos from Westerman died by suicide after police questioned him.²² Westerman was charged with conversion, a misdemeanor, completed a pretrial diversion program, and had the charge dismissed in October 2024. In February 2025, the Carroll County prosecutor separately released three photos of Libby German’s cellphone as it appeared at the scene, as part of a legal filing.²³

Appeal Status

Allen’s attorneys filed a notice of appeal in March 2025 and a 113-page appellate brief in December 2025. The appeal argues that the search of Allen’s home was unconstitutional because the warrant affidavit contained false information about witness descriptions, that his confessions were involuntary products of prolonged solitary confinement, and that Judge Gull’s exclusion of the Odinism theory denied Allen a complete defense.²⁴ The Indiana Attorney General’s Office filed a brief in March 2026 urging the court to uphold the conviction.²⁵ The Indiana Court of Appeals has scheduled oral arguments for September 21, 2026, in the Supreme Court Courtroom at the Indiana Statehouse, with a three-judge panel hearing 30 minutes from each side.²⁶ Allen is serving his sentence at the Lexington Assessment and Reception Center, a maximum-security prison in Lexington, Oklahoma, where he was transferred in July 2025 under an interstate compact agreement.²⁷