The 51-year-old man accused of killing two Delphi, Indiana, teenagers in 2017 has had new charges filed against him.
Richard Allen was charged in October 2022 with two counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit the kidnapping of 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German on a hiking trail in 2017. On Thursday, Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland filed a request to amend the charges to include two additional counts of murder and two counts of kidnapping, WTHR reported.
McLeland said in his filing that the inclusion “more accurately aligns the charging information with the cause’s discovery and probable cause affidavit,” according to documents reviewed by WTHR.
Allen’s trial is scheduled to begin in October, and McLeland said his defense attorneys should have “adequate time to prepare to defend the amended charges.”
McLeland filed the new charges on Thursday, the same day the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that Allen’s original defense attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, should be reinstated, CBS News reported. At the same time, the state Supreme Court denied Allen’s request to remove Special Judge Fran Gull from the case and for the trial to take place within 70 days of its ruling.
Allen, a CVS worker and father, is accused of forcing Abby and Libby off of a trail they were hiking and into a wooded area, where he allegedly killed them both. With Baldwin and Rozzi reinstated, he will likely defend himself by claiming the girls were killed by “[m]embers of a pagan Norse religion, called Odinism, hijacked by white nationalists.”
“Richard Allen has zero connections to any pagan cult or pagan cultists, and furthermore no forensic evidence (such as DNA) or electronic evidence links Richard Allen to the girls or to the crime scene – i.e., he is a completely innocent man,” his attorneys wrote in a filing last September.
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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.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland dismissed the theory as a “fanciful defense for social media to devour.”