Defense attorneys for the man accused of killing two Delphi, Indiana, teens in 2017 don’t want the suspect’s jailhouse confessions to be heard at trial.
Richard Allen, 50, has been charged with kidnapping and killing 13-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, asked Special Judge Fran Gull on Thursday to suppress statements Allen made in prison allegedly confessing to the crimes, WTHR reported.
The attorneys alleged that Allen did not make the comments voluntarily and was mentally ill at the time. Rozzi said in a motion to suppress statements filed Thursday that prison officials put inmates at Allen’s cell door and had them keep logs of everything Allen said and did. Rozzi said that some of those inmates actively questioned Allen, which Rozzi said amounts to a “sustained form of interrogation; one that lasted more than five months before he was finally broken.”
Rozzi argued in another filing that allowing those statements to be used in Allen’s trial would violate his constitutional rights, since he didn’t have an attorney present when he made the comments.
Further, Rozzi said Allen “slipped into a state of psychosis plagued with grossly disorganized, delusional, paranoid and highly dysfunctional behavior,” while he was in prison. This behavior included “periods of not sleeping for days, paranoia, stripping off his clothes, drinking toilet water, covering himself with and eating his own feces, and many other socially unacceptable behaviors.”
The defense attorneys also argued that Allen’s alleged confessions don’t even align with the evidence from the crime scene, meaning they can’t be accurate.
The prosecution in the case first mentioned the alleged confessions in June 2023, saying that Allen “confessed five or six times” while in prison.
Prosecutor Nick McLeland stated in court at the time that Allen “made multiple confessions to multiple people,” Fox 59 reported.
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Rozzi acknowledged that Allen had made “incriminating statements,” but said those statements couldn’t be trusted due to his client’s deteriorating mental health.
Allen’s trial is set to begin on May 13, following Judge Gull’s refusal to dismiss the charges based on allegations from the defense team that police recorded over interviews with key witnesses.
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.