The Delphi Murders: How Libby German's Own Phone Helped Convict Richard Allen

Richard Allen is the man convicted of murdering Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14, two best friends from Delphi, Indiana, who were killed on February 13, 2017. After more than five years of investigation, Allen — a local pharmacy technician who had lived quietly in the same small town the whole time — was arrested in October 2022. On November 11, 2024, a jury found him guilty on all four counts, and in December 2024 a judge sentenced him to 130 years in prison. Allen has appealed; his case is before the Court of Appeals of Indiana, with oral arguments scheduled for September 21, 2026. That is the legal shape of the story. But the heart of it belongs to two eighth-graders who deserve to be remembered as far more than how they died.

Who Abby and Libby Were

Abby Williams and Libby German were inseparable — the kind of friends whose families’ lives had grown braided together through years of sleepovers and shared rides. Abby loved to draw and paint; she was creative and a little shy until you got to know her, and then she was funny. Libby was the spark — outgoing, athletic, the one who documented everything because that’s what teenagers in 2017 did with the people they loved. On a mild February afternoon during a day off from school, a family member dropped the two girls off to walk the Monon High Bridge Trail, a stretch of old railroad track and woods that locals had hiked for generations. It was supposed to be an ordinary outing. When the girls didn’t show up at the agreed pickup spot that evening, their families raised the alarm. Searchers found their bodies the next day in the woods near the bridge.

The Recording That Refused to Let the Case Die

In a decision investigators and the girls’ family have called extraordinary, Libby used her cellphone to record the man who approached them on the trail. The footage captured a figure walking toward them on the bridge — the person the public came to know as “Bridge Guy” — and audio of a man’s voice saying the now-infamous words, “Down the hill.” Indiana State Police released portions of that video and audio in the months after the murders, asking anyone who recognized the figure or the voice to come forward. For years, that grainy clip and short snippet of sound were among the most-viewed pieces of evidence in any American criminal case. A frightened 14-year-old had the presence of mind to turn her camera on her own killer — and in doing so, she left behind the thread investigators would eventually pull. Libby German helped catch the man who took her life. That fact does not soften the loss, but it is a testament to who she was.

How the Case Was Built

For more than five years, the investigation seemed stalled. Tips poured in by the tens of thousands. The Bridge Guy clip was everywhere, yet no arrest came. According to reporting from the Associated Press, CBS News, NBC News, and the Indianapolis Star, the breakthrough came in 2022, when investigators revisited an old tip and a 2017 interview record involving a local man named Richard Allen — who had actually told police back in 2017 that he had been on the trail that day. That lead had slipped through the cracks years earlier. When investigators searched Allen’s home, they recovered firearms, including a .40-caliber handgun. At the murder scene, between the girls’ bodies, investigators had found an unspent .40-caliber round — a bullet cycled through a gun but never fired. State forensic analysis concluded the round had been cycled through Allen’s specific pistol, a tool-mark finding the prosecution treated as a linchpin. The state’s case also relied on witness accounts placing a man matching Allen’s description on the trail and statements Allen made in custody that prosecutors argued amounted to confessions. The defense disputed both the firearms analysis and the reliability of those statements, citing his declining mental health in pretrial confinement. The jury returned its verdict on November 11, 2024: guilty on all counts.

Where the Case Stands Now

More than seven and a half years passed between the murders and the conviction — years of birthdays, holidays, and graduations the families spent without answers. Richard Allen has appealed. In December 2025, his attorneys filed a brief with the Court of Appeals of Indiana arguing that evidence from the search of his home should have been suppressed, that his in-custody statements were unreliable, and that the trial court wrongly barred an alternative-suspect defense. In March 2026, the Indiana Attorney General’s office filed a response urging the court to uphold the conviction. Oral arguments are set for September 21, 2026. A scheduled hearing is not a reversal; as of this writing, the conviction stands.

It would be easy to let Richard Allen’s name dominate this story. But the reason anyone knows the name Delphi is two girls who went for a walk on a winter afternoon and never came home — and one of them, in the last minutes of her life, did something so steady and brave that it helped bring her killer to account. Abby Williams should be in her twenties now, maybe still drawing. Libby German should be too, probably still filming the people she loved. Remember them as kids, not as a case file.