Murder suspect Richard Allen admitted 5 times to killing teen girls in recorded jail calls with wife, mom: docs
The Indiana man behind bars for allegedly killing two teenage girls on a hiking trail in 2017 admitted to the gruesome murders multiple times in prison phone calls to his wife and mother, documents released Wednesday reveal.
Richard Allen allegedly told his wife, Kathy Allen, and his mother “no less than 5 times” that he was responsible for killing 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German after he found them hiking alone just outside their hometown of Delphi more than six years ago.
In one April phone call, Kathy — who told reporters last week that her allegedly murderous husband was her “person” — abruptly hung up the phone after her husband confessed.
Carroll County prosecutor Nicholas McLeland wrote in a June 13 filing that Allen made the admissions on public jail phones that were available to the Indiana Department of Corrections.
“Investigators had the phone call transcribed and the transcription confirms that Richard Allen admits that he committed the murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German,” McLeland said.
“He admits several times within the phone call that he committed the offenses as charged.”
The revelation was revealed Wednesday after Allen County Judge Fran Gull, who was assigned to the case after the original judge recused himself, unsealed the motion describing the confessions alongside nearly 120 filings in the case.
Attorneys for Allen — who was arrested in October 2022 on two counts of murder — admitted last week that the alleged murderer “made incriminating statements implicating himself in the crime,” but argued that the confessions were a result of his declining mental state and from the abuse he was subjected to inside the correctional facility.
The unsealed documents include testimony from other inmates claiming both prisoners and guards constantly threaten to kill Allen as well as suggest Allen kills himself. Additionally, an inmate alleges the guards call Allen a “kid killer” and taunt him by telling him he has family visits when no one is there.
The documents also reveal for the first time that investigators believe a knife was used to kill German and Williams, whose bodies were discovered in a rugged, heavily wooded area near the trail where they had disappeared the day before.
“Autopsies of the girls ruled their deaths as homicides and their wounds were caused by sharp object,” the filings state.
Though authorities never confirmed how the German and Williams were killed, a probable cause affidavit that was unsealed after Allen’s arrest stated that police found an unspent round near their bodies that was later matched to one of Allen’s guns.
Additionally, investigators discovered that “articles of clothing from the girls were missing from the scene, including a pair of underwear and a sock.”
Allen, who pleaded not guilty to the murders, first talked to investigators in 2017 after he admitted he had been on the trail the same day German and Williams went missing.
Though he wasn’t looked into seriously until 2022, community members said Allen and Kathy would regularly talk about the teen’s murders and how it was such a “tragedy.”
He had no criminal record at the time of his arrest, though he was involved in a “domestic incident” in 2015.
