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Delphi murderer Richard Allen is appealing his 130-year sentence for killing two Indiana middle school girls — blaming psychosis from solitary confinement for his repeated confessions to his wife.
Allen, 54, was found guilty in 2024 of murdering eighth graders Abigail Williams and Liberty German — who were just 13 and 14 when their bodies were found in 2017 with their throats slit near a hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana.
Allen repeatedly confessed to prison guards and psychologists, as well as several times to his wife, Kathy, in person, phone calls and letters.
“I did it. I killed Abby and Libby,” Allen stated frankly in one of many phone conversations with his wife played for the jury during his four-week trial.
“Yes, I did,” he assured her when she tried to challenge his confession.
Allen’s attorneys are now seeking to overturn his conviction, arguing that he only confessed because he became severely mentally ill while locked in solitary confinement — where he smashed his head against cell walls, bathed in his toilet, ate paper, and covered his face and cell walls in feces, Fox 59 reported.
His appellate attorney, Mark Leeman, argued in court Monday that the judge should never have allowed the confessions to be admitted as evidence.
“We want to make sure we got it right,” he told the court.
“We do not have a reliable verdict,” he said, adding that he didn’t believe Allen, who had no criminal history, could have committed such a horrific crime.
Prosecutor Ellen Meilaender with the Indiana Attorney General’s Office stressed that Allen’s confessions were voluntary and not forced, and not part of his interrogations.
Meilaender also stressed that Allen was only in solitary confinement for his own safety.
There, Allen also had a tablet — which was replaced when he broke it — and met with a chaplain and mental health professionals.
The conviction also did not solely rest on his confessions, with Allen having admitted in 2017 — years before his arrest and confinement — that he was on the trail at the same time the girls are believed to have been killed, Meilaender said.
When investigators followed up years later, Allen changed his timeline.
The former drugstore clerk encountered the girls, who were close friends, on the Monon High Bridge Trail just outside of Delphi, about 78 miles north of Indianapolis, in February 2017, prosecutors said.
Allen forced the pair at gunpoint off the trail and threatened to rape them — but changed his plans when a van passed by, prosecutors said.
He then forced them down the bottom of a hill and cut open their necks about a quarter mile from the trail, where they were found the following day.
He was found guilty in November 2024 and sentenced the following month to 130 years behind bars, the maximum sentence.
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