Prison psychologist fired for leaking private information to true crime channels covering Delphi murders said Richard Allen confessed to her multiple times
Richard Allen gave a detailed confession to a prison psychologist telling her he wanted to ‘provide a narrative of what took place’ the day Liberty German and Abigail Williams were murdered.
Richard Allen gave a detailed confession to a prison psychologist telling her he wanted to ‘provide a narrative of what took place’ the day Liberty German and Abigail Williams were murdered.
Jurors in Carroll County Circuit Courthouse sat rapt as Dr. Monica Wala took the stand at the start of the eleventh day of the high-profile trial and spoke of her daily sessions with Allen – who was on suicide watch at Westville Correctional Facility at the time.
According to Wala, on May 3, 2023, seven months after Allen had arrived at the facility, he told her he would like to confess to his crimes.
Speaking softly and rapidly, Wala delivered what may prove to be the prosecution’s most compelling testimony.
She said that Allen told her he avoided seeing his parents for lunch on February 13, 2017, – he had been visiting his mother that morning – and instead bought a six pack of beer and drank three, saving the rest for later.
Richard Allen snorted and shook his head as jurors in Delphi were told that he confessed to having killed both Liberty German and Abigail Williams with a stolen box-cutter
Libby, 14, and Abby, 13, were killed outside their home town of Delphi, Indiana, in February 2017 while hiking on the Monon High Bridge trail
Reading from clinical notes she said, ‘He said, “I bundled up, I went to the trail, and I lay in wait. He remembered seeing the girls and following them [then] doing something with his gun. He stated I think that’s where the bullet fell out.
‘He ordered them down the hill. He wanted to rape them and thought they were older than their biological age. He saw a van and got scared. He cut their necks and wanted to make sure they were dead.
‘He covered their bodies with tree branches and exited avoiding the trail so not to be seen.’
Wala claimed Allen told her he returned to his car which was parked by the old CPS building – the location investigators believe a witness spotted it.
According to Wala, Allen told her that, ‘He managed to continue living his life after time had gone on and he hadn’t been caught.’
It was not the only time, Wala told the court, that Allen confessed to her. On another occasion the previous month he told her he was an alcoholic and sex addict who had both been molested as a child and molested his brother and sister. He also said he experimented sexually with children of both sexes from the age of 11.
On another he asked her to listen into a phone call in which he confessed to his wife Kathy, Wala said.
‘He asked whether his wife and family loved him and said he may have to spend the rest of his life in prison…he mentioned the electric chair and told her he killed Abby and Libby.’
Kathy told her husband to ‘stop saying that’ and abruptly ended the call. Afterwards Allen looked at Wala and told her, ‘She doesn’t believe me. I didn’t do everything that I said I did but I did kill Abby and Libby.’
But defense attorney Bradley Rozzi was quick to dismiss these confessions as the tainted product of a true crime superfan whose interest in the Delphi case was not only a professional breach but bordered on obsession.
Under cross examination he elicited from Wala admissions that she had followed multiple podcasts, YouTube channels, Facebook and social media accounts discussing the Delphi murders and to which she had contributed until her identity as a Westville psychologist became known among other users at which point she shut her own accounts down.
She also admitted to looking up Allen on the Indiana Department of Corrections database meaning she had access to information not made public – a violation that cost her her job.
Allen faces four counts in connection with Abby and Libbys deaths, two of murder and two of felony murder. he as denied them all.
He faces a maximum penalty of 130 years in jail.
On Tuesday Allen snorted and shook his head as jurors in Delphi were today told that he confessed to having killed both Liberty German and Abigail Williams with a stolen box-cutter then threw it in the trash at the CVS where he worked
It was just one of numerous jail house confessions read out in court that day.
On another occasion, Carroll County Circuit Court heard that he confessed he had intended to rape the girls but ‘panicked and killed them instead.’
Allens jail house murder confessions were read in court, while both the prosecution and defense argued about its validity
The prosecution believes Allens deteriorating mental state in prison was a ploy while his defense argued that it was because of his extensive time in solitary confinement
Earlier on Tuesday, his wife Kathy wept as she watched video of two increasingly intense interrogations of her husband, the second of which ended with his arrest on October 26, 2022. She watched his repeated denials then saw what would have been their last embrace before he was taken into custody played out on the screen before her.
Allen stands charged on four counts in relation to the murders of the girls. Two counts of murder and two counts of felony murder, which is murder committed in the act of another crime – in this instance kidnapping.
He faces a maximum of 130 years in prison if convicted for killing the girls who disappeared after they went for a hike on Monon High Bridge trail on February 13, 2017.
Seven current and former corrections officers, as well as one warden, stepped up to testify Tuesday afternoon and told the court that Allen had repeatedly confessed his guilt. The lengthy testimony stretched through the afternoon and into the evening.
All the guards had been designated Allen’s ‘suicide companions’, meaning they kept a constant watch over the 52 year old, who was on suicide watch for most of the 13 months he was held at Indiana’s Westville Correctional Facility – some 76 miles outside Delphi, pending his trial.
But while prosecutor Nick McLeland sought to present the confessions as the products of Allen’s tormented conscience, his defense reframed the context of his behavior that, they stated, was nothing short of a mental breakdown exacerbated by being held in solitary for months - despite not having been found guilty of any crime.
Bradley Rozzi repeatedly pointed up the absence of any detail, in what he described as ‘just generic confessions.’
During his cross examination, officer after officer admitted that Allen’s words came amidst erratic behavior that included banging his head repeatedly on his cell wall, drinking toilet water, spreading feces on his body and cell - on one occasion eating it - mumbling, crying, sleeping excessively, speaking gibberish and eating a bible.
Sheriff Tony Liggett (left) and former Delphi police chief Steve Mullin interviewed Allen who said that he had gone for a walk on the trail on the day of the murder, after visiting his mother
On April 9, 2023, the Suicide Companion Watch Report written by Officer John Miller noted that at 6.58am Allen announced, ’I killed Abby and Libby,’ then started flushing paper down the toilet.
At 7.04am Allen said, ‘The funniest joke is how I killed them.’ Then, the officer noted, ‘He started to shout foul words at his shadow.’
At 7.24am Allen said, ‘I got what I deserved for what I did, and I hope I burn in hell for what I did.’ Then at 7.55am he added, ‘I’m sorry for what I did, for killing them but I don’t care I killed them.’ Three minutes later, he apologized for killing ‘those kids.’
Five days earlier, former Westville Warden, John Galipeau, testified Allen had written an interview request addressed to him which read: ‘I am ready to officially confess for killing Abby and Libby. I hope I get the opportunity to tell the families sorry.’
But while they conceded on cross examination that being held in the conditions in which Allen was living could be detrimental to an offender’s mental health, each witness was insistent that they believed Allen’s behavior to be an ‘orchestrated’ sham and that he was simply ‘acting up,’ for attention.
Certainly, the behavior they describe was in marked contrast to the calm, confident man who voluntarily sat down with law enforcement across two interviews on October 13, 2022 and October 26, 2023.
During the morning the jury heard for the first time, in his own voice, Allen’s account of his actions on February 13, 2017 and how he watched as things ‘took a turn’ - leading Allen to realize he was a suspect.
In video played in court, Allen presented a far more robust figure than the one who sat in the dock. Dressed in a black top and pants, with his hair longer and a full beard, Allen told now-Sheriff Tony Liggett and former Chief of Police Steve Mullin that he had gone for a walk on the trail after visiting his mother that morning.
He said, ‘I went home, and it was a warm day, but I put a jacket on and went to the trail. I walk down to the High Bridge. I remember walking out on to the bridge.’
Allen told investigators, ‘I went home, and it was a warm day, but I put a jacket on and went to the trail. I walk down to the High Bridge. I remember walking out on to the bridge’
Allen told law enforcement back in 2017, when he self-reported his presence on the trail, that he was there during the same time as the girls - he would later change this time frame
Allen told the officers he saw three girls leaving the trail as he arrived but otherwise encountered nobody. He claimed to be monitoring stocks on his cell phone with an app, a hobby of his he said, before returning home.
But when Allen arrived to self-report his presence on the trail back in 2017, he told law enforcement that he was there between 1.30pm and 3.30pm - which placed him there at the same time as the girls.
When he was interviewed five years later, he changed the time to between noon and 1.30pm. The girls were last seen alive in video filmed by Libby at 2.13pm.
Speaking in a deep, confident voice, often rapidly and gesticulating enthusiastically, the Allen on the screen was the picture of cooperation until the officers asked to examine his phone and pressed more insistently on his description of what he was wearing that day, which seemed, they insist, to tally with Bridge Guy.
As the first interview continued an increasingly agitated Allen told them, ‘Its been so long, and I don’t want to be somebody’s fall guy and we’re going to try and make pieces of the puzzle fit somewhere they don’t fit so we can close this thing.
‘It doesn’t sound like a conversation. It sounds more like you think I did this thing.’
Ultimately Allen refused to let the officers search his phone or home without a warrant saying, ‘How are they going to help you? There’s nothing that’s going to link me to it. I’m not worried about that. I have nothing to do with it. It’s a horrible thing.
I don’t want to be any more involved than I have to be. If I thought, I had anything in my home that would be useful to you I’d give you everything I have. I just don’t know what I have.’
Two weeks later, after officers had obtained a warrant and searched his property, Allen returned to be interviewed once more, this time by lead investigator Jerry Holeman.
In the antagonistic interview with Holeman, Allen - who not once asked for an attorney - repeatedly denied any involvement in the crime.
Allen took the stand on morning of the trial to discuss an antagonistic interview that took place when he realized he was a suspect with lead investigator Jerry Holeman
Allen denied any involvement in the murders saying ‘this is ridiculous when Holeman said a bullet from his gun matched one found at the crime scene
The investigator told Allen that they had definitive proof that a bullet from Allen’s gun - by then retrieved from his home - had been found at the crime scene. But Allen rejected this as impossible and refused to try to explain something, he insisted, could not be.
At one point he rocked back in his seat and smiled in apparent disbelief muttering, ‘This is ridiculous.’
When Holeman stated he was trying to help Allen get his narrative out there rather than be simply branded a monster, Allen responded, ‘It’s over. You’ve already started something there’s no backing out of. The damage is done…. Do you realize what you’ve done to me? You’ve talked to people I work with, my neighbors. I’ve got anxiety, I’ve got depression… people already know you think I did something.
‘I don’t know how to explain to you,’ he doubled down. ‘I had no involvement.’
When he was falsely told the death penalty was on the table, Allen said, ‘Kill me. My wife will get rich.’
Allen’s wife Kathy was being questioned in another room. Deep into the interview, Holeman offered Allen a break to see her. Their interaction was recorded as the tape continued running after the officer left the room.
Kathy and Allen embraced, and he immediately told her, ‘It’s going to be alright. They’re trying to tell me you actually believe that I did it. I can’t believe that.
You know me, you know this isn’t something I could do. You don’t have to tell me that. I know. I’m not going to say something I didn’t do.’
Visibly upset and crying, Kathy asked her husband, ‘How did the bullet from your gun get there?
During Allens interrogation with Holeman, his wife Kathy was being interviewed in another room. Their reunion was tearful and Kathy asked her husband how the bullet from his gun was at the crime scene
Investigators asked to see Allens phone and pressed him to give a description of what he was wearing that day, which they insisted looked like the Bridge Guy
Allen responded, ‘I don’t know how to explain something that isn’t possible.’
Not once in their interaction did a distraught Kathy assert that she believed her husband’s innocence, instead she questioned him about the bullet and the eyewitnesses that she had been falsely told had positively identified him.
As Kathy left, Holeman urged Allen to ‘do the right thing.’ His voice rising to a shout he yelled, ‘Now you’re going to drag your wife and daughter into this because you’re too f***ing bullheaded to get in front of this thing and say, “I made a mistake.”’
Clearly furious for the first time Allen yelled back, ‘You’re going to pay for what you’re doing to my wife. F*** with me but leave her out of this. Did you see what you did to my wife?’
Holeman rounded, ‘Did you see what you f***ing did to those girls? You dragged them down the f***ing hill.’
With that Allen told Holeman, ‘Arrest me, I’m done talking.’ The officer responded, ‘With pleasure…you’re guilty and I’m going to prove it.’
Whether he has succeeded in that aim remains to be seen.
