Indiana man is found guilty of murder in the 2017 killings of 2 teenage girls

By The Associated Press

DELPHI, Ind. (AP) — A jury in the small Indiana town of Delphi convicted a man of murder on Monday in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who vanished during an afternoon hike.

Deliberations stretched into a fourth day before jurors found Richard Allen guilty in the killings of 13-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Liberty German. The former drugstore worker was convicted of two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping. Allen, 52, could now face up to 130 years in prison.

The 12 jurors along with alternates were sequestered throughout the trial, which began Oct. 18 in the girls’ hometown of Delphi, a small northwest Indiana city where Allen also lived and worked as a pharmacy technician.

The seven women and five men began deliberations Thursday afternoon after hearing closing arguments in the weekslong murder trial.

A special judge oversaw the case. Superior Court Judge Fran Gull, along with the jurors, came from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County.