Five men and seven women deliberated for a few hours on Saturday in the case of an Indiana man accused of killing two teenagers out on a hike in February 2017.
But they ended the session shortly before 3 p.m. and won’t be back in the jury room until Monday morning.
The jury heard closing arguments on Thursday in the case against Richard Allen for the murders of Libby German and Abby Williams. They deliberated for about two hours on Thursday, then returned Friday morning at 9 a.m.
They concluded at 4 p.m. Friday and began again at 9 Saturday morning to continue their work, the Lafayette Journal & Courier reported.
Not including time for lunch, the jurors have mulled the case for a little more than 14 hours, court officials told the newspaper.
Best friends Abby, 13, and Libby, 14, headed out to the Monon High Bridge, an abandoned railroad bridge over Deer Creek in Delphi, on February 13, 2017, as CrimeOnline reported. They did not return, and their bodies were found alongside the creek the next day.
Five years later, investigators arrested the 52-year-old Allen, a Delphi pharmacy employee, for the murders.
Seventeen days of testimony ended on Wednesday, and attorneys made their final arguments the next day. Prosecutors focused on a video Libby captured on her cell phone of “Bridge Guy” — a man prosecutors say is Allen, although they were unable to enhance the video enough to make an identification.
Some witnesses, who saw a man they thought might be Bridge Guy that day, described him as young and fit, not like the middle-aged and portly reality of Allen in 2017.
Prosecutors also say a bullet found with the bodies matches a gun Allen owned at the time. They also pointed to 61 confessions he made in the course of his incarceration, but defense attorneys countered that he was psychotic when he made those confessions and they weren’t reliable.
State attorneys also noted that in one of his confessions, he said he had intended to rape the girls but changed his mind when a van passed by on the nearby road. That van was driven by land owner Brad Weber as he was on his way home from work. While a prosecution state police witness said only the killer could have known about the van, the jury will have to decide about Allen’s state of mind at the time — did he make up the van, did he really see or, or did he hear about internet speculations about the van?
The same state police witness, Master Trooper Brian Harshman, testified that after listening to all of Allen’s hundreds of prison phone calls, he is confident that it is Allen’s voice heard on Libby’s video telling the girls to “go down the hill.”
Meanwhile, protesters for and against Allen were lined up outside the courthouse on Friday and will likely return with the jury Saturday morning.
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[Featured image: Abby Williams and Libby German/Handout]
