How the murder of two teenage girls was left unsolved for five years... until a volunteer office worker stumbled across evidence that led police to married father-of-one
By Tom Leonard
Daily Mail
Sep 20, 2025
Libby German (left) and Abby Williams (right) set off on a walk along the Monon High Bridge trail in Delphi, Indiana, on February 13, 2017 and never returned
The footage is shaky and erratic, the terrified teenager capturing it on her camera phone doesn't want to look too obvious.
There are shots of the gravel path ahead of her – and then the field of view tilts upwards to reveal her friend, Abigail, who's walking a little way behind her on the old railway bridge, stepping carefully but as swiftly as she can over the wooden sleepers.
The reason that Libby German started filming suddenly appears in shot: the man who is following behind Abigail.
He is muffled up heavily against the chill of the misty, grey February day. He too is trying to look nonchalant, head down and hands in pockets, but it is clear the girls are his focus - and he's gaining ground on them.
Libby, 14, and Abigail Williams, 13, can be heard exchanging nervous whispers on the video.
'Is he right there?' asks Abigail, clearly too scared to look behind her.
Libby steps off the rail tracks as the bridge ends and the camera – once more pointing downwards - catches a glimpse of steeply sloping woodland.
'See, this is the path that we're on,' begins Libby. Heartbreakingly, you sense she's trying to sound calm, normal even. Abby suddenly rushes past her.
'Um, there's no path going there so we have to go down here.'
One of them is breathing hard, the other sniffling as their footsteps are heard on the gravel.
Then comes a man's voice. 'Guys,' he says. 'Down the hill.'
That is when the chilling tape ends – 43 seconds after Libby began her desperate filming.
The two best friends, who had set out for a walk on well-known trails in the woods outside the small Midwestern town of Delphi, Indiana in February 2017, never returned home.
Police believe the girls' killer forced them down the slope at gunpoint. Their bodies were found in woodland half a mile from the trail the next day. Their throats had been cut. There was no sign of sexual interference, but Libby was naked while Abby had been dressed in Libby's clothes.
A few thin branches had been strategically placed over their bodies lying close to each other under the trees.
The double child murder horrified America as did what followed – a litany of investigative blunders, despite the vital clue the girls had left.
The best friends managed to capture their killer in a video on Libby's cellphone moments before they were killed
Richard Allen, 52, leaves the Carroll County Courthouse after being sentenced to 130 years in prison for the murders
Libby had captured that haunting phone video – now a YouTube sensation - of the man following them over the derelict Monon High Bridge and recorded those four muffled words of his voice.
And then Abby had somehow managed to conceal the phone under her body even as she lay dying.
Within two days, investigators were circulating a grainy photograph taken from the video of a heavyset white male, wearing a bluecoat, walking quickly after the girls over the bridge. He was soon declared to be the prime suspect.
There had been few hikers on the trail that day but several of them had seen a man. In July 2017, police released a composite sketch of a middle-aged, bearded individual wearing a cap. Police said that, as he appeared to be familiar with the local trails, he was likely to have been a local.
Yet for the families of Libby and Abigail, over five agonising years, the hunt for 'Bridge Guy', as he became known, proved fruitless. Delphi – population 3,000 - was left living in fear as shocking rumours claiming that the two girls were 'ritualistically sacrificed' by pagan worshippers of the Norse god Odin dominated headlines for a time.
Now, a new book, Shadow of The Bridge: The Delphi Murders And The Dark Side Of The American Heartland, by Aine Cain and Kevin Greenlee, and - separately - an ABC News documentary series, have provided a 'definitive' account of the brutal murders and how a chance discovery by a volunteer clerk finally led to justice being done.
The Delphi Murders were a classic case of a small and inexperienced police force being overwhelmed by the demands – and national scrutiny - of a huge murder investigation.
Firstly, the authorities managed to lose 70 days' worth of recorded interviews with local people, some of which would have proved crucial.
Then, two years after releasing a sketch of the suspected killer, they released a new one which was wildly inaccurate.
Far worse, the police had also missed an opportunity to find the killer in the first few days of the investigation. Under pressure from his wife, a local shop worker called Richard Allen had told police that he had been in the area at the time the girls were killed. But the 'tip sheet' that could have led investigators straight to him was misfiled.
Investigators were struggling to deal with thousands of tips as an atmosphere of mutual suspicion enveloped the town.
An early suspect was Ron Logan, on whose land the girls' bodies were found. On the night of their murder, CCTV footage captured him dumping large bags of rubbish at a local tip.
He told police that he'd gone out with his cousin to a tropical fish shop, but - under questioning - the cousin admitted it was a lie.
Logan not only had a history of drink-driving and violence against women but also a huge collection of knives and guns. However, it transpired Logan had been lying to police not to cover up a double murder but to conceal that he'd been driving while banned.
Another man who featured prominently in the investigation was an obese sexual predator called Kegan Kline. While hiding behind an online persona of a Justin Bieber-lookalike calling himself Anthony Shots - Kline spent his time 'catfishing' or tricking underage girls into sending him revealing pictures of themselves. He had chatted to Libby German online the night before the murders and he didn't live far away.
When police raided Kline's house, they discovered more than 100 phone videos of naked underaged girls. In 2020 he was convicted and jailed for 40 years on charges of child exploitation and child pornography but, due to a lack of any supporting evidence relating to the murder case, police ruled him out as a suspect.
The book 'Shadow of the bridge: The Delphi murders and the dark side of the American heartland' reveals new details about the haunting case
And then there were Brad Holder and Patrick Westfall, two former soldiers who'd served together in Afghanistan. They were members of the Delphi branch of a bizarre white supremacist pagan cult called the Odinists, who worshipped Odin and other ancient Norse gods.
Might they, or other Odinists, have been responsible? Investigators had been struck by the 'oddness' of the branches positioned over the girls' bodies and how Libby's right arm was outstretched to touch a large tree on which it appeared that a symbol had been drawn in the victim's blood. Social media posts about their ceremonies showed the local Odinists taking offerings to a tree, which was sacred to them.
Brad Holder was of particular interest to investigators as he had posted online memes referring to 'friends helping friends move bodies' along with runic symbols drawn from the ancient Norse alphabet made of branches.
And Abby Williams had been friends with Holder's son. Even more intriguing, it was discovered in a social media post that Holder had the same runic marking on his hand that appeared to be recreated by the branches over Abby's body.
When Holder turned out to have a solid alibi for the time of the murders, attention was concentrated on his partner in Odin worship - Patrick Westfall. But police said they couldn't find evidence that either man was in Delphi at the time of the killings, let alone was involved.
Westfall dismisses the speculation about them in the ABC documentary and says their practices, although strongly tied to nature, have nothing to do with human sacrifices or killing.
Months turned into years as police ran out of suspects and the murder investigation petered out. Then in September 2022, a volunteer police clerk named Kathy Shank, a sharp-eyed retiree who'd offered to help on the investigation, was going through the case files and noticed there was one name that had slipped through the cracks.
This had happened because he was listed as 'Richard Allen Whiteman' and, as no such person existed, his 2017 conversation with an officer about being on the trails the day the girls died had fallen out of the system.
Shank realised that 'Whiteman' referred to the road where he lived – it was not part of his name. She also deduced from the details he'd provided about the other people he'd met on his two-hour hike, that he had to be 'Bridge Guy'.
Finally, last November, husband and father Richard Allen - a chubby-faced, 5ft 5in tall man with large, pale eyes - was convicted of the killings.
He worked as a manager at the Delphi branch of pharmacy chain CVS, and the town had to contend with the unsettling knowledge that the killer had been hiding among them for years.
After searching Allen's home and finding a large collection of knives and a handgun, forensics experts were able to match the gun with an unspent bullet that had been found lying in between the girls' bodies.
Investigators believe that the bullet had been accidentally expelled from the gun when the killer cocked it, perhaps to intimidate his victims. Although the round was never fired, it still left faint markings that allowed experts to match it with the gun in which it was loaded.
While Allen had spent the five years since the murders living quietly in Delphi, police were quick to uncover a sinister side to the personality of the quiet, unassuming shop worker.
Online, he would search for morbid, disturbing films and he had a taste for especially perverse pornography. He was weak and needy, repeatedly failing to earn a permanent promotion at work because he couldn't cope with stress. He was also prone to sudden explosions of anger and violence.
His wife, Kathy, said he suffered from depression which had got worse in the past seven or so years. She had once had to call police after he jammed a gun barrel in his mouth and threatened to kill himself.
It also emerged that Allen had discouraged Kathy, and their adult daughter, Brittany, from getting involved in the hunt for the girls in the hours after they disappeared. And he'd only agreed to tell the police he'd been in the area at Kathy's urging.
He insisted to investigators that he'd never encountered the girls but refused to take a polygraph test and, in October 2022, was charged with both murders, pleading not guilty.
As Allen, now 50, languished in jail for over a year while awaiting trial, his behaviour became deranged (he took to smearing himself with his own faeces) but his guards believed he was faking it.
Police tape blocks off the trails and creek around the Monon High Bridge in Delphi back on February 16, 2017
He also started confessing to anyone who'd listen - including his mother, his devoted wife Kathy and prison officials - that he'd killed the girls.
However, Kathy, his high school sweetheart who worked as a receptionist at a vet's surgery, couldn't accept that the man she'd married was a child-killer, assuring him that the authorities 'are screwing with you' and that she didn't believe he had done it.
Meanwhile, Allen's lawyers - desperate to produce an alternative suspect to their client - leapt again at the possibility of the Odinists even though police had ruled them out.
They recruited Dawn Perlmutter, an expert on ritualistic crime who has helped federal agencies, including the FBI, to re-examine photos of the dead girls.
However, the connection, while colourful, had never been convincing and the judge handling Allen's case refused to allow the defence to put the local Odinists up as the possible murderers.
At his trial, which opened last October amid intense public and media interest, the credibility of his jail confessions - along with the bullet analysis and the exact timing of when Allen was on the walking trails - were the three main areas of contention.
As an alleged child killer, Allen had been placed in solitary confinement for months for his own protection and the defence produced psychiatrists who argued that the intense mental pressure this put on him could easily have affected his judgment.
Unfortunately for the defence, prosecutors had obtained a very detailed confession that Allen had given to a prison psychologist, Dr Monica Wala. It included details that only the killer would have known.
He'd described to her how, on the day of the murders, after visiting his mother and sister in a nearby town, he bought a six-pack of beer, drank three of them at home, and then headed for the trails. He planned to lie in wait for a woman he could stalk and then rape.
Instead, he saw Abby and Libby and, convinced they were older than they looked, followed them on to the bridge where he caught up with them and, at gunpoint, took them down the hill to a creek.
He told Dr Wala he'd intended only to rape them but then saw a van passing by on a nearby access road which spooked him into murdering them with a box cutter he'd taken from work. He threw some sticks over the bodies to obscure them from view and made his escape.
Prosecutors told the jury that the 'Bridge Guy' seen hazily in the girls' phone video was Allen, while a police officer who'd listened to 700 of Allen's prison phone calls testified that the voice that ordered them 'down the hill' was Allen's.
Jurors spent 19 hours deliberating before finding him guilty on all counts last November. Allen was sentenced to the maximum 130 years in prison.
Blindly loyal, his wife continues to insist he's innocent. She tells the new ABC News documentary series - now streaming on Hulu - that Allen is 'a wonderful, caring, compassionate father' and 'non-judgmental, very giving, he has good morals… he's not the monster that people think he is.'
There are few in Delphi who would agree.
1 comment:
How the hell do you "lose" dozens and dozens of recorded witness statements?
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