Images of the gruesome wounds sustained by Liberty German and Abigail Williams were displayed in court during the Delphi murder trial Wednesday.
As Richard Allen’s high-profile trial for the teenage friends’ murders entered its fifth day jurors were visibly stricken as forensic pathologist Dr Roland Kohr gave evidence regarding the autopsies he had conducted on both girls and testified that both had bled to death.
It is the first time any details of the girls’ injuries and cause of death have been made public.
Pictures of both girls’ gaping neck wounds were displayed on a large screen placed directly in front of the jurors. One man put his head in his hands, breathed deeply and reddened. Behind him a woman put her hand over her mouth.
Libby, 14, and Abby, 13, were killed outside their home town of Delphi, Indiana, in February 2017
The abandoned Monon High Bridge outside Delphi, Indiana, where Abby and Libby were murdered
In pictures both girls were seen lying on the mortuary table on their backs, their neck wounds gaping wide. Both were 5ft 4, Abby weighed 95lbs and Libby 200lbs
James Luttrull Jr told the court that there would not be any images from the internal examination of the girls and a female voice could be heard uttering ‘Oh thank God,’ from where Allen’s wife, Kathy, sat with supporters.
Abby sustained just one cut, between 5 and 6 cm in length and less than an inch deep. It ran right to left and was deep enough to partially cut her jugular vein meaning her death would not have been quick. The doctor estimated it would have taken the 13-year-old five to ten minutes to bleed out.
He told the court she would have ‘felt pain,’ before going into ‘fight or flight mode’ and panic setting in.
He said, ‘Her heart rate and her blood pressure would rise, and her breathing become more rapid.’
The bleeding would, he said, be ‘passive’ as no arteries were injured. He said, ‘It’s going to take some time before you lose enough blood…[for] the onset of shock.’ From there, he told the hushed courtroom, organs would start to fail, and consciousness be lost. ‘She was not dead immediately,’ he said.
Libby’s wounds were more severe and also made for distressing viewing. On first glance it appeared that the 14-year-old had three deep slashes to her throat to the left, the center and the right.
In fact, Kohr testified, she had sustained four or five deep cuts as at least one of the wounds showed evidence of overlapping cutting.
The slashes partially severed Libby’s left carotid artery and fully severed both her right carotid artery and her jugular vein. She would have bled more quickly than her friend, but her death was not instantaneous either as, the pathologist testified, swelling in her brain was evidence of a more protracted death.
In pictures both girls were seen lying on the mortuary table on their backs, their neck wounds gaping wide. Both were 5ft 4, Abby weighed 95lbs and Libby 200lbs.
Neither, the court heard, showed any physical signs of sexual trauma – though it was pointed out this did not mean no sexual activity occurred – nor did they display any defensive wounds. But Libby’s hands were covered in blood suggesting, the doctor said, she may have desperately tried to stem the bleeding at her neck.
Eyewitness Sarah Carbaugh told the court she had seen a ‘bloody and muddy’ man fitting Bridge Guy’s description walking away from Monon High Bridge trail around 4pm the day the girls’ went missing
The trail in Delphi, Indiana, where Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, were killed
A faint red line across Abby’s chin and under her mouth suggested, he said, that either duct tape or some sort of material restraint had been placed over that portion of her face at the time of her death.
Asked if the girls’ state of livor mortis – the skin discoloration that occurs when blood settles postmortem – was consistent with them having died 40 to 41 hours prior to autopsy Kohr answered ‘Yes.’ But under cross examination he admitted that establishing time of death was challenging and speculative at best.
Earlier, jurors had heard from a final eyewitness, Sarah Carbaugh, who told the court she had seen a ‘bloody and muddy’ man fitting Bridge Guy’s description walking away from Monon High Bridge trail around 4pm the day the girls’ went missing.
She said that she looked at him as she drove by in the opposite direction, but he did not make eye contact with her.
When challenged over the consistency of her recollection – transcripts of her three interviews with law enforcement show she did not mention ‘blood’ until a 2019 interview – Carbaugh insisted that she had always mentioned both mud and blood.
She argued that she may have mumbled during her first interview and pointed to the fact that more than an hour of video of her second interview has been lost.
In an increasingly ill-tempered exchange with Andrew Baldwin, Carbaugh snapped, ‘I saw Bridge Man walking along the road. He was covered in mud and blood and that’s that.’
Jurors were given their first glimpse of ‘Bridge Guy’ as prosecutors played the haunting video recorded on Libby German’s cell phone, capturing the last documented moments of her and best friend Abigail Williams’s lives on Tuesday.
In the footage – 41 seconds long – Libby, 14, who reached the end of the Monon High Bridge ahead of her friend, turns to film Abby, 13, as she picks her way carefully over the structure’s rotten timbers and gaps.
Richard Allen denies murdering Liberty and Abby who were killed while hiking in their hometown of Delphi, Indiana
Prosecutors struggled to have the witnesses positively identify that Allen was the suspicious man on the trail
Caught in the frame, several feet behind the teen, is a man, dressed in blue jacket, jeans and a hat. His hands are in his pockets, his chin tucked down so that his face isn’t visible beneath his hat. He is little more than a sinister blur as he moves with purpose behind her.
As Abby reaches the end Libby’s cell phone lens drops to focus on the gravel at the girls’ feet. She appears to cast about, taking in the steep slope to their left and the track which simply disappears before them.
One of the girls can be heard saying, ‘Um there’s no path so we have to go down here. See the trail ends here.’
As prosecutor Nick McLeland pointed out in his opening statement, once the girls were across the bridge there was ‘no escape.’
Moments later a male voice can be heard uttering the now infamous words, ‘Guys down the hill,’ and one of the girls lets out a yelp as if startled.
But if the state hoped to definitively identify Allen as ‘Bridge Guy’ by following the footage with a series of eyewitnesses their efforts fell flat.
Three separate eyewitnesses confidently stated that they saw ‘Bridge Guy’ and identified him from a screen shot of the video. But the descriptions each gave of the man that they saw was not only wildly different from the video image it was wildly different from the defendant.
Railly Voorhies, who was 16 at the time, described seeing a man dressed in black boots, black shirt, black jeans, black jacket with a black hoody pulled up under his hat and a black mask pulled up over his mouth and nose.
She described him as ‘unfriendly’ and said he made her feel ‘unsettled,’ as their paths crossed on the afternoon of February 13, 2017, when she, her sisters and a friend took a trip out to the Monon High Bridge trail to take pictures.
She remembered the man as ‘muscular’ about 5ft 10 and in his 20s or 30s and conceded that her memory may have been altered by seeing the subsequent picture of ‘Bridge Guy.’
Richard Allen is slight, gaunt, with closely cropped hair and barely five-feet, yet witness Breann Wilber described Bridge Guy as tall and muscular
Breann Wilber was next. She was with Voorhies that day. She too described seeing a youthful, muscular, tall man dressed in black, before saying the moment she saw the picture of Bridge Guy she knew that was who she had seen.
Betsy Blair gave a haunting description of seeing a man standing out on Monon High Bridge. She was out for her regular fitness walk along the trails when she saw him and said he appeared to be waiting or looking for someone. She said, ‘I just felt like he wasn’t looking for me.’
Yet the man Blair described was also ‘youthful’ with ‘fluffy brown hair and in his 20s or 30s.
Slight, gaunt, with closely cropped hair and barely five-feet, 52-year-old Allen sat flanked in court by his attorneys.
Earlier in the day they grilled CSI officer Ryan Olehy who took the stand to complete testimony he began on Monday.
Under aggressive cross examination by Bradley Rozzi Olehy was forced to concede that despite taking numerous swabs and samples from the crime scene and each victim they found no DNA evidence to link Allen with either.