Richard Allen is on trial for the shocking murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German. The case has taken so many strange turns that it's hard to see how the prosecution could make it stick. According to them, while Allen was in prison, he confessed to the crime—repeatedly and in a way that no sane person could understand committing after having said he was innocent at first. They also say that the evidence against him is so overwhelming that it could only make sense if he committed the crime. But the defense team will have something to say about all that.
Jurors heard testimony that an unspent bullet was found at the crime scene which a firearms examiner testified was Allen’s. She said she test-fired the same type of bullet with Allen’s gun and results showed the bullet found at the scene came from Allen’s gun. Defense attorneys questioned the science of trying to match an unfired round with one that was fired.
Prison psychologist, Monica Wala who treated Allen at Westville Correctional Facility, testified for the prosecution that he confessed to the crimes many times, and on one occasion going into fine details.
On February 13, 2017, during a hike in Delphi, Indiana, two young teenagers, Abigail and Liberty, disappeared. Their violent deaths have made the community of Delphi question the very safety of the environment and have led many to believe that justice might not be served. With the girls' bodies discovered the day after their disappearance and showing signs of having been through a struggle, the investigation itself took on an air of urgency that often accompanies homicide cases.
The Delphi murders are still unsolved five years later. Allen's arrest in October 2022 stemmed from a tip that had been overlooked before, suggesting he had been at the crime scene. This and his alleged confessions over the phone from prison make up most of the prosecution's evidence against him. The recordings in which he supposedly admits to the crimes are, of course, quite damning. In one, he is heard saying, "Honey, I did it. I killed Abby and Libby," which is something even the most damaged defendant would hesitate to say on a recording. Prosecutors are banking on this as their big piece of evidence, with the hope that the jury will find it just too much of a stretch to not take as a direct acknowledgment of guilt.
The defense will argue that the confessions result from a troubled mental state rather than a clear admission of guilt. Allen's statement, "I think I've lost my mind," certainly raises questions about his psychological condition. Was he in a sound state of mind when making these confessions? And what about the DNA? Or the lack thereof? In the absence of any linking evidence, the prosecution must rely on the idea that the confessions were not only valid but also not given under coercion. And yet, the jury might very well see these as special circumstances—"sounds like the poor guy was just saying anything he thought would get him out of a jam"—if the prosecution can't make a stronger case than it has thus far.
The jury has a difficult job as the trial moves forward. It is trying to make sense of a lot of different kinds of testimony—some quite emotional—that either favors or discredits the prosecution's case. A case that seems, at times, to hinge on the kind of story one might tell when one's conscience is clear or vice versa.
The story that Allen supposedly told in order to get off a mountain might play a large part in the kind of verdict the jury ultimately reaches and the way in which they interpret not only Allen's mind but also the minds of those around him.
The case against Richard Allen sums up the complex criminal justice dynamics that whirl around confessions, mental illness, and forensic evidence. It yokes together so many humanities that paths through the case could lead in any number of directions, given the right or wrong kind of evidence. The trial serves as a stark reminder of the penetrating impact that violent crime can have on a community and the unsettlingly simple narrative of law enforcement solving the case to restore some amount of order. Yet, so many questions knit together. Is Allen guilty? If so, how? If not, why do so many prosecutors seem so bent on crossing a bridge from the past to today?
This brings up the issue of his mental health when he was confessing. On several occasions, Allen has made statements that are clearly contradictory to each other. These statements have been interpreted by some as being the product of a seriously impaired mind—one that's not capable of either telling the truth or understanding what kind of consequences are going to follow from it. For the defense, Allen's history of mental illness and these strange statements are strong indicators that he's not really guilty of the murders.
The prosecution insists that Allen's confessions were clear and consistent, made without coercion, and supported by incriminating evidence at the scene of the crime. They argue that the confessions show an awareness and intent that runs counter to the defense's claim that Allen is mentally impaired and therefore not capable of committing the crime.
This clash between the prosecution and defense underscores a vital concern in the legal system: the intersection of mental health and criminal responsibility. The defense's focus on Allen's poor mental health pushes the conversation toward the fundamental issue of the reliability of his confessions. If a person is mentally ill, can they be said to be mad enough to commit a crime but also sane enough to confess to it? The prosecution's insistence that these confessions were key pieces of evidence pushes the conversation back toward a discussion of the culprits' characters and why some people with poor mental health are treated like dangerous criminals rather than people in need of help.
As the trial moves forward, the jury will be tasked with measuring the evidence put forth by each side, and they'll need to look closely at not just the "what" of the confessions Allen gave but also the "why" and the "when." Allen's mental health—a significant factor in this case—will be an even greater issue for the jury to wrestle with. On a level just slightly below the case's major theme (which is the jury's perception of Allen's confessed guilt), this case is making yet another statement about the profoundly tangled relationship between mental health and criminal justice.
Significant advances have been made in the past couple of decades in our efforts to understand the nature and the neurobiological basis of borderline personality disorder. This is a very serious illness that afflicts a substantial number of patients—up to 2 percent in the general population, and a much higher number if one looks within psychiatric settings. To have BPD is to have an impaired sense of self, one that is more variable and less coherent than in normal human experience. This impaired sense of self leads to volatile emotions, a tendency to see the world in black-and-white terms, and to having very intense but extremely unstable relationships.
Sterrett's testimony about the missing clothes and about the very, very early part of the investigation raises some questions about, um, the kind of investigation that was being conducted, from the very beginning and, the kind of evidence that was being collected and—most importantly, the timeline of it, because if you're not finding these essential pieces of evidence and you're making these preliminary conclusions and you're not finding the essential pieces of evidence, that's problematic. And it calls into question the thoroughness of the investigation and the, the timeline of it.
On Friday, the defense called a clinical psychologist, expert witness, Deanna Dwenger, who worked for the Indiana Department of Corrections Behavioral Health. She testified that he was diagnosed with a serious mental illness in April 2023 and that a team of mental health professionals concluded he had a “grave disability.”
The defense may gain a leg up from the absence of direct biological evidence. It is not the DNA linking Allen to the crime scene that the prosecution points to as damning evidence against Allen. It is what they assert makes the absence of DNA all the more suspicious. In fact, the prosecution holds, it makes Allen's contained circumstantial evidence seem all the more packed with force. It is a complex landscape that the defense is working in. They are also working in real time, as the plot thickens. Stay tuned.
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