INDIANAPOLIS — The fate of an Indiana man accused of murder in 2017 murder of two young girls The man who disappeared during an afternoon walk near their small hometown was handed over to a jury Thursday.

Richard Allen, 52, faces two counts of murder and two additional murder charges in the commission of kidnapping or attempted kidnapping in the killings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German. He was found guilty of all charges.

Seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weeks-long murder trial. Negotiations ended approximately two hours later and will continue Friday morning.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland told jurors that Allen was the man seen in grainy cellphone video recorded by one of the girls, known as Abby and Libby, crossing an abandoned railroad bridge just before she disappeared on Feb. 13, 2017.

“Richard Allen is the Bridge Guy,” McLeland told jurors. “He kidnapped them and then killed them.”

He stated that Allen repeatedly confessed to the murders in person, over the phone and in writing. In one of the recordings he played back for the jury, Allen can be heard telling his wife, “I did it. I killed Abby and Libby.

Allen’s defense cast doubt on the confessions and presented witnesses, including a psychiatrist who testified that Allen was delirious and psychotic after months in solitary confinement.

Attorney Bradley Rozzi closed by saying Allen was innocent.

He noted that no witnesses identified Allen as the man seen on the walkway or bridge the afternoon the girls disappeared. No fingerprints, DNA or forensic evidence has been linked to Allen’s murder scene, Rozzi said.

For more than five years after the teens were killed, Allen continued to live in Delphi while working at a local pharmacy.

“He had every chance to escape, but he couldn’t because he didn’t,” he told jurors.

The case attracted a lot of attention from true crime enthusiasts; repeated delays, some related to the leak of evidence. Allen’s public defenders withdraw and their Reinstatement by Indiana Supreme Court. At the same time subject of speech ban.

12 jurors and their alternates were detained The trial started on October 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwestern Indiana city where Allen also lives and works as a pharmacy technician. A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull traveled with the jurors from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County.

In his closing statement, McLeland outlined evidence that an unspent bullet was found among the teenagers’ bodies. “transformed” Allen’s .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistol. A firearms expert called by the defense questioned the state police’s analysis, and Rozzi dismissed it as a “magic bullet,” saying investigators made an “apples to oranges” comparison between the unspent bullet and the bullet fired from Allen’s gun.

The prosecutor also said a state trooper who listened to more than 700 phone calls made by Allen found German’s cellphone video showing Allen’s voice telling the teens: ” down hill After passing an abandoned railroad pier called the Monon High Bridge. McLeland showed jurors a digitally enhanced version of the cellphone video and said the man recorded walking behind Williams was Allen.

McLeland said Allen, armed with a gun, forced the teenagers off the road and planned to rape them before a passing van changed his plans. Gruesome crime scene photos showed the girls were found the next day with their throats slit a quarter mile (less than half a kilometer) from the bridge.

The defense challenged the state’s timeline with witnesses, including a digital forensics expert, who said he and a digital forensics expert had headphones or an auxiliary cable plugged into Libby’s cell phone for about five hours after Abby’s disappearance, leading investigators to believe the girls were killed and left there. raised doubts about his faith. We were in the forest around 14:32 that day.

Attorney Andrew Baldwin argued during the hearing that one or more people may have kidnapped the teens and taken them back to where they were found early the next day.

Prosecutors once again referred jurors to Allen’s own words in confessions he made to his mother and wife, as well as to a prison psychologist, corrections officers and the former warden of the Westville Correctional Institution. box cutter which he later discarded.

Prosecutors said Allen’s incriminating statements contained information only the killer could have known.

Defense attorneys argued that Allen’s confessions were unreliable because he was facing a serious mental health crisis while under the pressure and stress of being held in solitary confinement, monitored 24 hours a day, and mocked by people incarcerated with him. A psychiatrist supported this claim, stating that being in solitary confinement for months could cause a person to become delusional and psychotic.

Before the trial began, Allen’s lawyers had tried to argue that the girls were murdered. in a sacrifice It was made by members of a white nationalist group known as Odinists who follow the pagan Norse religion, but the judge ruled against it, saying the defense “failed to produce admissible evidence” of such a connection.