A trove of approximately 100 documents in the Delphi murders case were unsealed for the first time last week thanks to two Indiana-based podcasters covering the story.
Journalist Áine Cain and attorney Kevin Greenlee, who co-host "The Murder Sheet" podcast, have been closely covering the case of Richard Allen, who is accused of killing Liberty "Libby" German, 14, and Abigail Williams, 13, on Feb. 14, 2017 while the two teen girls were walking on a popular hiking trail in Delphi, Indiana.
"Any time anything was filed in the case, whether it was routine or not, it was always sealed. It was always kept from the public," Greenlee told Fox News Digital. "And we'd always get these emails from people saying, ‘Why is this?’ And other reporters would tell us, ‘This is so strange. This has not happened in any other case. Why isn’t someone doing something about this?'"
So, he and Cain decided to "do something about it" and worked with an attorney to file a motion to unseal the documents in Carroll County. On Wednesday, Judge Frances Gull decided to release dozens of other files that had been mistakenly sealed — possibly due to a misunderstanding of what a gag order entails — as a result of the Greenlee and Cain's motion.
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The unsealed documents revealed two key details that were previously unknown to the public: First, investigators "believe a knife was used in the murder of Abigail Williams and Liberty German," who had wounds caused by "sharp object."
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Authorities found multiple knives and gun paraphernalia in Allen's home while executing a search warrant in October 2022. He was arrested later that month.
Prior to his arrest, Allen worked at a CVS in Delphi — the only pharmacy in town — so the accusations against him came as a shock to the community, Cain said.
"He was married for a long time. We've talked to colleagues at CVS who worked with him. Nobody had any strong complaints. I mean … the typical work stuff, maybe you don't get along, but it was not in a concerning way," she explained. "And then other people really liked him. They thought he was a nice guy. They thought he was funny. This was throwing Delphi for a loop."
Second, prosecutors said in a recent filing that Allen confessed to killing the girls in recorded jailhouse phone calls to his mother and wife "no less than five times." His defense team is arguing Allen's mental health has declined significantly while in jail, which is why he made the confessions.
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The recently unsealed filings reveal that Allen destroyed a tablet he was using to communicate with people outside prison, he stopped eating and sleeping, and even tried to eat legal paperwork.
"It's very dramatic and frankly upsetting," Cain told Fox News Digital.
Cain added that she and Greenlee are "incredibly gratified" that Judge Gull, whom she said "has a reputation of being a very meticulous and thoughtful judge," was able to see things from their perspective and wanted proceedings to continue properly.
"I think you're seeing the parties in the case agree that transparency should be the order of the day," she said. ". . . And of course, the defense and the prosecution will still have the ability to seal documents going forward if there's a reason to. This does not take away their ability to do that. It just means that nothing will be sort of randomly sealed for no reason going forward, hopefully."
The mistakenly sealed documents were not the first time a clerical error affected reporting on the murder case, which has garnered attention from across the country.
"It's a small area. Maybe the court doesn't deal with a case like this every day. So it's easy for mistakes to be made," Cain said.
Cain and Greenlee believe a clerical error may be the reason Allen's arrest came five years after police initially questioned him in 2017.
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During that interview, Allen said he had been on the same hiking trail as German and Williams on the day they went missing. He also said he was wearing a blue or black jacket, blue jeans and a head covering that day, which matched the description of a man seen walking toward the victims in a video taken on German's phone the day the girls went missing.
When authorities found the girls' bodies the next day, on Feb. 14, 2017, they recovered German's phone from beneath her.
Investigators did not arrest Allen until approximately five years later. Prosecutors said they linked Allen to the crime after investigators found an unspent bullet at the scene that "had been cycled through" a pistol he owned.
"We reported that there was some sort of clerical error or misfiling of a tip and that it was not properly processed," Cain explained. And we're standing by that reporting for now. It's possible we'll learn more information or there could be alternative explanations out there."
In another instance of a clerical error, Greenlee downloaded a nearly 200-page transcript of an interrogation involving a Kagen Kline, a person of interest tied to the Delphi murders through a social media account, before officials realized they had not intended to make the document public and totally removed it from the Indiana courts website.
Cain and Greenlee have taken it upon themselves to publish, redact or not release certain information based on advice from their contacts in the case.
"We really think long and hard about anything before we put it out there, and we try to understand that the investigators in this are very diligent and really want justice," Cain said. "So, we see it from their perspective, as well as the journalistic perspective of: let's get information out there to the public. Because I feel like there has been very little information given so far up until [June 28]."
