The trial is slated to begin Monday for a central Indiana man accused in the mysterious killings of two teenage girls whose bodies were found along a wooded trail more than seven years ago.
Jury selection is scheduled to get underway in the trial of Richard Allen, who is charged in the 2017 deaths of Abigail Williams and Liberty German in Delphi, Indiana.
The special judge in the case in mid-September denied a defense request to have the Indiana Court of Appeals reconsider two of her orders before the trial. The judge had ruled the jury could hear 61 alleged confessions Allen made while being held in prison. She also blocked the defense from presenting their ritual sacrifice theory to the jury.
Less than two weeks later, WTHR, the NBC affiliate in Indianapolis, reported on Sept. 23, Allen's defense team requested the jury to be taken to where the bodies of Abigail and Liberty were found.
Allen's public defenders claim police arrested the wrong man. They say multiple people with ties to a Nordic pagan religion known as Odinism were responsible for the murders, and they had planned to tell a jury about those alternate suspects at trial.
Prosecutors previously said Allen confessed to the killings of Williams and German to multiple people, including his family members, prison guards, other inmates, a prison warden and a prison psychologist. His lawyers have argued that Allen did not make the confessions voluntarily and that he was coerced by guards and was suffering from mental illness at the time of the confessions.
Abigail, 13, and Liberty, 14, were killed while going for a walk in February 2017 near the Monon High Bridge in Delphi, Indiana.
Allen, who has pleaded not guilty, has remained incarcerated since his arrest in October 2022.
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