The grandmother of one of the teenagers killed in Delphi repeated the last words she heard as the sensational double murder trial got underway Friday.
‘Grandma I’ll be okay,’ Libby German’s grandmother, Becky Patty tearfully recalled during her testimony as the first witness in the highly anticipated trial of Richard Allen, the man accused of murdering the Delphi teens on February 13, 2017.
Emotional and at times barely audible, Patty recalled her granddaughter as a smart, sporty girl who was set to graduate from school a year early.
She told of the frantic search that followed when neither Libby nor her friend Abby Williams turned up at the allotted pick-up point after their walk on Delphi’s historic trail.
Heartbreakingly, she revealed that the hope that bloomed when she was told that the girls had been found the following day was only dashed when she saw the coroner’s van drive past towards the scene. Until then she had thought they were found alive.
Patty told Carroll County Circuit Court’s packed courtroom that, Libby, 14, loved police shows once telling her, ‘I’m going to help the police solve crimes’.
Earlier this morning, Allen entered the hushed courtroom. Dressed in a pink check button down and khaki slacks, thin and standing just 5ft 5in he presented a startlingly gaunt figure.
His hair was shorn to the scalp and his pale face bore the signs of a faint stubble. He waved slightly as his eyes found the seat where his wife Kathy was seated in the second row of the gallery, across the aisle from the family and friends of the girls.
Prosecutor Nick McLeland told the jury in his opening statement, ‘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 assert 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 the trial that day and numerous jail house confessions.
But when Allen’s attorney, Andrew Baldwin stood to address the jury he told them that they were about to watch the state’s case ‘fall apart in front of your eyes.’
He dismissed the prosecution’s timeline, insisting that Libby and Abby were not killed on the 13th but moved from the scene and returned and killed shortly before they were found the following day.
Baldwin told the court that they had ‘hard data’ in the form of cell phone pings that showed Libby’s phone – found beneath her body – pinged from a tower near the trail then went dark for almost 12 hours before pinging from that location once again.
The implication was clear – both Libby and the phone had been moved. He also stated that the jury would be presented with evidence that Libby’s phone had been ‘handled by human hands,’ after 4pm by which time, by the prosecution’s own timeline, Allen was nowhere near.
Baldwin dismissed the bullet evidence as trash science and pointed to a flubbed investigation full of lost evidence and missed opportunities including the testing of DNA found in Abby’s hand in the form of a strand of hair.
The day began with Judge Frances Gull reminding the media of the strict decorum she has put in place guiding their coverage.
Speaking in stern tones she revealed that officers of the court had confiscated five still cameras and one video camera from organizations including NBC and Associated Press when they were caught filming the arrival of the jurors at the court early this morning.
Before proceedings began, Judge Frances Gull picked the movies the jury 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,’ 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 Allen, 50, was charged with the double murder. 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.
The Allen County Special Judge spoke at a media briefing 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.’
Shw 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.
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 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.
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.
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, a married father-of-one, lived in Delphi, a town with just 3,000 residents, he worked as a pharmacy technician at the local CVS.
He 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,’
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.
Prosecutor 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.’
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.
Just this week Allen’s wife Kathy gave a lengthy statement to The Murder Sheet podcast through her attorney, Dave Cloutier.
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.’
Allen came close to losing his defense team when, following a leak of crime scene photographs in which their office was implicated, Judge Gull 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.