(Reuters) – A jury found an Indiana man guilty of the murders of two teenage girls who disappeared during a hike outside their small hometown of Delphi in 2017, bringing a long-running unsolved case to an apparent conclusion, Court TV reported on Monday. . .

Richard Allen, 52, was charged with two counts of murder in the commission of kidnapping and two additional counts of murder in the deaths of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German.

The girls’ bodies were found Feb. 14, 2021, in a creek near Delphi, a town of about 3,000 people about 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis.

Their throats were slit, and an unspent bullet was found among the bodies, which were found a short distance from the abandoned railway bridge where they had been left for the march.

Prosecutors said the bullet came from a gun belonging to Allen and that he was the man seen on the bridge by witnesses and in the video German recorded on his cellphone the day the girls disappeared.

Allen, who works as a pharmacist at Delphi, was on leave that afternoon and was interviewed by investigators as a possible witness at the time.

The case went cold. Allen wasn’t arrested until 2022. Allen repeatedly admitted to killing the girls when he was in prison, prosecutors said, after jurors played recordings of him telling his wife in phone calls that he did it.

Allen’s defense attorneys told jurors that Allen was in great mental anguish when he went to prison and that the apparent confessions were lies. They noted that he had been held in solitary confinement for long periods of time; This situation left him in a situation where he could not clearly distinguish between reality and fantasy.

They said the prosecution’s evidence did not prove that the unspent bullet found at the scene came from Allen’s gun.

(Reporting by Jonathan Allen in New York; Additional reporting by Brad Brooks in Colorado; Editing by Bill Berkrot)