The special judge overseeing the case against Richard Allen won’t dismiss the charges despite police recording over interviews defense attorneys said were with “key suspects,” FOX 59 reported.
Allen has been charged with kidnapping and killing 3-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German, whose bodies were found off a hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana, back in 2017. His attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, argued that the charges should be dismissed because police recorded over interviews with two men the attorneys described as “key suspects.”
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland pushed back against the defense’s claims, arguing that the interviews were “not evidence at all related to this case.”
He acknowledged that the interviews, which were conducted just days after the bodies of Williams and German were found, had been inadvertently recorded over, but “were not destroyed by the state purposefully or in bad faith.” Prosecutors said the interviews had been “recorded over” because of “a DVR program error.”
Judge Fran Gull agreed with McLeland that charges against Allen shouldn’t be dismissed based on the missing interviews, saying Baldwin and Rozzi didn’t prove that the recordings were destroyed “negligently, intentionally, or in bad faith,” according to Fox 59.
“The recordings of interviews between February 14 -17, 2017, were lost due to human error or were spontaneously lost due to equipment resetting,” Gull wrote in her ruling, according to the outlet.
Even though the recordings don’t exist, there are memorialized summaries of the interviews, but defense attorneys Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi wanted the recordings so they could “listen to the exact spoken words” of the two men who were interviewed, “particularly the statements that the author of the document admits were not memorialized in the document,” the attorneys wrote in a filing in late February.
McLeland, in his response, argued that the interviews “are not evidence related to this case.”
“The evidence in question is not exculpatory evidence nor is it potentially useful evidence,” McLeland wrote, according to Fox 59.
Baldwin and Rozzi have claimed in a past filing that the teenage girls were killed by “[m]embers of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists.”
The attorneys said in the filing that two groups of Odinists, one from Delphi and the other from Rushville, Indiana, were investigated for their possible involvement in the murders. As evidence the girls were murdered as part of a ritual sacrifice, the attorneys point to ritualistic symbols allegedly found at the crime scene, which include the strange way young Libby’s body was positioned.
A March 2017 search warrant request from the FBI noted that the girls’ bodies looked as though they had been “moved and staged.”
The filing also notes that investigators didn’t further investigate the alleged ritualistic symbols left at the crime scene, which included sticks and tree branches placed on the girls’ bodies that mimicked certain Norse runes. At least one branch appeared to have been cut with an electronic device, suggesting premeditation, the defense argues. Libby’s blood was also used to paint a rune on a tree that was identified as a calling card of the pagan religious cult, they added.
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Without the recordings, it may be more difficult for Allen’s attorneys to point out “inconsistencies or raise questions about other witnesses or other information relevant to an unbiased investigation.”
The defense attorneys have argued that the two men interviewed by police in the days after the girls’ bodies were found are tied to their theory about a ritualistic killing.
Allen’s trial is set to begin on May 13.