A motion filed by prosecutors in the Delphi, Indiana, murder case makes clear the prosecution is aware of a motion filed by the defense that is supposed to be private.
Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McLeland last week filed a motion that quoted directly from a motion attorneys for Richard Allen filed previously that should not have been seen by prosecutors, WTHR reported. It is unclear how the prosecution learned about the defense filing.
Allen is accused of killing two Delphi teenagers back in 2017.
His public defenders, Bradley Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin, are required to ask Special Judge Fran Gull to approve funding for expert consultations to help build Allen’s defense. These requests are only to be seen by the defense and the judge, yet somehow, the prosecution obtained at least one, even directly quoting in its own motion.
The state has since withdrawn its motion.
Baldwin and Rozzi maintain their client’s innocence and have claimed in a past filing that 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German 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.
The defense has also called out the police for deleting interviews with two witnesses who the attorneys say are key to the case. Even though the recordings don’t exist, there are memorialized summaries of the interviews, but Baldwin and 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.
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.”
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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.”
In January, Allen was hit with additional charges of murder and kidnapping.