Jurors in Delphi, Indiana, have heard key testimony about when and where Liberty German and Abigail Williams’s bodies were found by the man who discovered them.
Local man, Patrick ‘Pat’ Brown found the girls’ bodies around noon on Tuesday February 14, 2017, having joined community search efforts earlier that day.
Taking the stand on Saturday morning, he struggled to maintain his composure as he told the court: ‘I looked and at first, I thought they were mannequins. Then I said, “We’ve found them. Please call the police.”’
The details of the timing and location of Brown’s grim discovery are pivotal to both side’s case and Richard Allen’s innocence or guilt could turn on which version jurors believe.
Allen has been accused of murdering Libby and Abby, whose bodies were found near the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi.
Libby, 14, and Abby, 13, went missing on the afternoon of Monday February 13, 2017, but their bodies were not found until the following day.
In his opening statement for the defense, Allen’s lead attorney Andrew Baldwin, insisted that this is because the girls were not killed immediately on site but were abducted and held elsewhere then returned to the woodland area the following day, when they were brutally murdered.
It’s a timeline that, if believed, would blow the prosecution out of the water as it spans a period during which Allen’s movements are accounted for.
Today, prosecutor Nick McLeland set out to close the door on Baldwin’s claims and pushed back at the defense suggestion that the area where the girls were found had already been thoroughly searched the previous day.
In fact, the jury heard, initial search efforts were focused on an area downstream from Monon High Bridge on which Libby and Abby were walking.
Carroll County Investigator Steve Mullin, who was chief of police in Delphi at the time of the murders, explained that law enforcement was working on the assumption that the teens had met with an accident and perhaps fallen from the bridge in which case they would have been washed downstream.
He said: ‘At that point, I still believed they would return home. I just couldn’t imagine that anyone had done any harm to them.’
In fact, the court was told, it was the discovery of items of Libby’s clothing, caught on roots in Deer Creek upstream from the bridge on Tuesday morning, that led to a closer search of the thickly wooded area in which they were found and which, the prosecution stated, had neither been searched on foot nor in daylight on Monday.
McLeland told the jury in his opening statement earlier this week: ‘The last face the girls saw before their throats were slit was Richard Allen’s.’
His words came as a chilling conclusion to his brief opening remarks about a case which he summed up as being ‘about Bridge Guy, a bullet and the brutal murder of two young girls.’
While the jury listened intently, he painted the scene of a bucolic, innocent day being enjoyed by two girls who were more sisters than friends.
It was, he said, unseasonably warm, ‘a nice summer day in the middle of winter,’ when they decided to walk a path they had walked many times before, along abandoned railway lines, towards Delphi’s High Monon Bridge.
‘It’s scary and flat-out dangerous,’ McLeland said of the bridge, and once it has been crossed there is, he noted, ‘no escape.’
It was while they were crossing that bridge that Libby looked back on her friend Abby, 13, and saw they were being followed. She pulled out her phone and took the now infamous video of ‘Bridge Guy,’ before the two were threatened with a gun and ordered ‘down the hill.’
With the cell phone footage capturing ‘Bridge Guy’ the man whom the prosecution asserts is Allen, filmed in the final moments of Libby’s life, she may yet fulfill that ambition.
McLeland described the horror of the scene that met searches who discovered the girls the next day. Both had their throats slit multiple times, Libby was naked and covered in blood. Abby was partially clothed in both her own and her friend’s clothes while the rest of the girls’ clothing was found in the creek.
Convincing the jury that Allen is guilty of the crimes and that he alone knows what happened in the hours between the girls’ disappearance and this awful reality will be the work of the next five weeks for the state.
The prosecution will depend on the presence of a bullet at the scene and allegedly ‘cycled through’ Allen’s gun as well as his own statements of having been on trial that day and numerous jailhouse confessions.