Delphi murder suspect Richard Allen was convicted in 2017 of killing two Indiana teenagers

A jury has found Richard Allen guilty of his role in the brutal murders of Indiana teenagers Abigail Williams and Liberty German, who disappeared while hiking in Delphi in 2017.

The 12-member jury found Allen, 52, guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of murder during the commission of a kidnapping after deliberating for about 19 hours. If convicted, he could face up to 130 years in prison.

Prosecutors have alleged during the nearly four-week trial that Allen cut the throats of Williams, 13, and German, 14, on Feb. 13 while hiking on the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, north of Indianapolis. 2017.

Allen’s defense attorneys argued that he was innocent and that there was too much reasonable doubt for a jury to convict him.

The jury – made up of seven women and five men – began deliberating Thursday after Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland said they should believe Allen’s own words as he repeatedly spoke in calls to his wife, in person and in writing confessed to having committed the heinous crime.

“I did it. ‘I killed Abby and Libby,'” Allen was heard saying in a recording played for the jury.

But Allen’s lawyers called witnesses, including a psychologist, who suggested he may have lost his mind in prison when he made the confessions because he was locked up in solitary confinement for so long.

Attorney Bradley Rozzi said in his own closing remarks that his client was innocent and that there was a lack of evidence directly linking Allen to the crime, as there were no fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence linking him to the murders. Rozzi also noted that no witness identified him as the man seen on the trail the day the girls disappeared.

Jurors were shown a rough cellphone video taken by one of the girls that showed a man telling them, “Down the hill,” after they walked over the abandoned railway bridge before they went missing.

Prosecutors say an armed Allen ran the two teens off the trail and that he was going to rape them until a van drove by, prompting him to change his plans.

Jurors were shown grisly crime scene photos of the girls’ bodies with their throats slit about a quarter-mile from the Monon High Bridge, where they were found the next day.

Jurors and their alternates have been sequestered in the small northwest Indiana town of Delphi since the trial began Oct. 18. The panelists and the special judge, Supreme Court Justice Fran Gull, all came from a county on the other side of the state.

With post wires