The man prosecuting Richard Allen, who is accused of killing two Delphi, Indiana, teenagers back in 2017, has said that the deleted interviews of two men after the killings are not “useful evidence” to the defense.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland on Thursday responded to defense accusations that Delphi police “recorded over” interviews with key witnesses that could have helped Allen’s case, Fox 59 reported. McLeland said 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 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German were found, had been recorded over, but “were not destroyed by the state purposefully or in bad faith.”
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 last week.
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.
The prosecutor added that the recorded interviews were just a way for the defense to further their “wild theory of this case that has no evidentiary support whatsoever.”
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.
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.”
In one example provided by the defense attorneys, one of the men interviewed in 2017 said he had “never met” Abby Williams, but six years later, he told investigators that he “barely even knew” her and had “met her once.”
“It is therefore plausible that many more contradictions would be available to the defense but for the State’s intentional or negligent failure to preserve all of the evidence,” the defense attorneys wrote. “Such negligent and intentional conduct on the part of the police has also resulted in the absence of material evidence which could be exculpatory in nature.”
Last month, Allen was hit with additional charges of murder and kidnapping.