The judge overseeing the Delphi double murder case has picked the movies they will be able to watch during the five-week trial.
And she made it clear they will only be able to view light fare to take their minds off the grisly details of the case.
‘They won’t be watching any murder mysteries,’ Judge Frances Gull made clear.
The jury trial began Friday in Delphi, Indiana, the town where Libby German and Abby Williams were found dead seven years ago.
Their bodies were found near the abandoned Monon High Bridge along Delphi’s Historic Trail.
Judicial proceedings got underway Friday, a year after Richard Allen, 50, was charged with the double murder. As of now, he has pleaded not guilty.
Jury selection took just two days with 12 jurors and 4 alternates seated by the end of Tuesday.
Jurors were chosen from a pool drawn from Allen County, 100 miles away, in a bid to ensure a fair trial for a case that has generated intense emotion and thrust the small town of Delphi into the spotlight.
The chosen 16 will be sequestered for the duration of the trial which is expected to last five weeks.
During that time, they will not have access to electronics such as phones or laptops which will be securely stored. Any calls to family will be made in the presence of a bailiff and family time at weekends will be similarly monitored.
Any television viewing will be done under the watchful eye of a court official, and the court has bought in a host of DVDs for their entertainment.
The Allen County Special Judge was speaking at a media briefing held Thursday afternoon. Judge Gull has denied a press request to allow video cameras or photographers in her court and has allotted just 12 of her courtroom’s 72 seats to journalists.
She warned all present to abide by her court decorum order, saying, ‘I run a tight ship. I don’t suffer any fools.’
Just this week Andrew Baldwin, an attorney for Allen, told potential jurors that cops had ignored a hair found in Abby’s hand. While the lawyer did not say who the hair belonged to, he said that DNA evidence showed it did not belong to his client.
Meanwhile, Judge Gull has yet to rule on a motion filed by the prosecution who want to exclude suspect sketches drawn up in the early days of the investigation.
They have argued that the sketches did not contribute to identifying Allen and would only muddle and mislead the jurors if shown to them.
Concerns that an appeal recently filed by Allen might derail the start of the trial were quashed when Gull denied it earlier this month.
It was the second blow for the defense in as many months.
Last month the judge ruled that the jury could not hear the defense’s theory, set forth across hundreds of pages of legal filings, that the girls were the victims not of Allen but of an Odinist cult’s ritual killing.
Judge Gull decided to exclude the theory which was aired in an earlier court hearing on the grounds that there was no evidence to support it, and it would simply confuse the jury.
The judge has since decided to allow the defense to make another bid to have some of this theory heard in court as well as their assertion that there were other suspects whom police ignored.
The search for the girls began after they failed to show up to meet family on the afternoon of February 13, 2017.
Earlier that day Libby had taken what would turn out to be the last picture of Abby. She posted the image of her friend standing on the Monon High Bridge to Snapchat.
The girls’ bodies were found in woodland the following day. Investigators have said little about the circumstances beyond intimating that there was ‘a lot of blood.’ But it has since emerged that the girls were both killed with a knife or box-cutter, undressed and their bodies ‘staged’ and covered with branches in a fashion that gave birth to the cult theory.
On February 15, 2017, two days after the murders, police released what was to become the most defining and chilling image of the case.
The grainy screen shot taken from video retrieved from Libby’s cellphone showed a man who would become known simply as ‘Bridge Guy,’ filmed by the teenager in the final moments of her life.
Dressed in jeans, a blue jacket and a cap, he was seen walking on the bridge on which, moments earlier, Abby had posed for her picture. He walked with his head down and instructed the girls, ‘Guys down the hill.’ One of the teens could be heard saying ‘gun’ as he approached.
Among the evidence leveled against Allen is that a bullet found near the girls’ bodies had been ‘cycled through’ a gun that he owned.
But despite cops receiving thousands of tips and true crime fanatics pouring over the short clip and analyzing the audio in a bid to identify ‘Bridge Guy,’ the case stalled.
The girls’ families, particularly Libby’s grandparents Becky and Mike Patty, pushed to keep the case in the public eye, regularly speaking at press conference and even attending the yearly true crime convention CrimeCon.
In the intervening years seemingly, significant developments led nowhere.
Pedophile Kegan Kline, 28, of Peru, Indiana admitted to police that he had solicited hundreds of nude pictures from teens by catfishing them, posing as teenage girl ‘Emily Anne’ or hunky actor model, ‘Anthony Shots.’
It emerged that Kline, who has since been sentenced to 43 years in prison for a slew of child pornography charges, had communicated with Libby under the assumed identity of Shots. He was one of the last people to message the girls before they took their final hike.
But though police interviewed him they told Kline they did not believe he had committed the murders, merely that he was protecting whoever did. Intriguingly the defense plan to call Kline as a witness.
Early on police had pegged Ron Logan on whose property the girls’ bodies were found as a possible suspect.
An FBI search warrant was served on Logan’s home and property March 17, 2017, and revealed that, on February 14, the day after the killings and before the bodies were found, Logan asked a relative to provide him with a false alibi.
He told a cousin to say that a friend had picked him up and taken him to a fish store between 2.00pm and 2.30pm and that he didn’t return home until 5.30pm.
The last time the girls were known to be alive was at 2.13pm when Libby made her brief cell phone recording of Bridge Guy approaching them.
Logan’s alibi was shown to be a lie, and text messages retrieved from his phone showed that he was out of his house and ‘in the vicinity of the murders’ on the evening of February 13.
The FBI document also noted that Logan, who had a history of violence against women, asked his relative to lie for him the following morning, before the crimes were even discovered.
Yet despite this and despite a former girlfriend and Logan’s own brother both stating their belief that he was involved Logan was never officially named as a suspect and died at the age of 84 on January 24, 2022.
Ten months later, when police announced that they had arrested a local man and charged him with the murders on October 31, 2022, the news seemed to come out of nowhere. Allen, an unassuming married father-of-one, not only lived in Delphi, a town with just 3,000 residents, he worked as a pharmacy technician at the local CVS store.
In fact, it emerged, Allen had been interviewed by cops immediately after the killings back in 2017. Somehow the interview had been overlooked and only came to light when a new investigator cast his eyes over the files.
In the interview Allen admitted to the officer who met with him that he had been on the trail that day, during the period the girls disappeared and wearing clothing consistent with that worn by ‘Bridge Guy,’
According to an arrest warrant unsealed by a judge in December 2022 several other witnesses told officers they had seen a man in similar clothing and one woman told them she saw a, ‘muddy and bloody man,’ at 4.00pm walking away from the area where the girls’ bodies were later found and towards the area where Allen had allegedly parked his car.
In the months since, prosecutors have shared few details of the crime. The girls’ autopsy reports have been withheld. It is not known if they were sexually assaulted, if the crime was opportunistic or planned or if the girls were specifically targeted.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland argued for multiple court documents to remain sealed back in 2022 on the grounds that there is ‘good reason to believe Allen is not the only one involved.’
Yet despite issuing that statement two years ago there have been no further arrests in connection with the crime and, in March 2023, Allen is said to have confessed to prison psychologist Dr Monica Walla.
Shortly after his arrest Allen was transferred from Carroll County jail to Westville Correctional Facility, 76 miles away where he was held in an isolated cell for his own safety. It was here that, Dr Walla told the court at a hearing during which the defense attempted to have the testimony excluded, he had a ‘come to God’ moment and confessed.
Allen, who his attorneys argue has been showing signs of ‘grave mental illness,’ also confessed more than 60 times during recorded telephone calls to his wife and mother.
According to Indiana State Police Detective Brian Harshman, Allen gave specific details about the crimes and what he claimed was his motive.
Just this week Allen’s wife Kathy gave a lengthy statement to The Murder Sheet podcast through her attorney, Dave Cloutier, in which she addressed her husband’s confessions and rumors that have suggested she no longer believed in her husband’s innocence.
She admitted that their marriage had been ‘profoundly affected,’ by Allen’s incarceration and said that both are, ‘suffering immense distress.’
But she insisted that she loves her husband, ‘believes in the sanctity of marriage vows, and believes that the same presumption of innocence our legal system gives to Rick should be given in equal measure to the husband she loves.’
Cloutier stated, ‘As to her husband’s alleged confessions, it is not true that Kathy now believes them.’
He added, ‘With malice toward no one, Kathy prays for justice and for healing for all innocent people affected by the murders of Libby and Abby. She’s also extremely grateful to Rick’s defense team of lawyers, their staff and investigators.’
Allen came close to losing his defense team when, following a leak of crime scene photographs in which their office was implicated, Judge Cull told them to withdraw, or she would strike them from the case.
That withdrawal was reversed by Indiana’s Supreme Court after Allen expressed a desire to maintain his original legal counsel.