A Walk Through the Woods
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Tonight on Dateline. It took my breath away. Here is this young girl with her friend out on this bridge on a beautiful sunny day. They have no idea.

What's coming? Got a call and said that they had found the girls. What did they tell you? That they're gone. Their lives were stolen from them. Those girls mattered. Were they out there to meet someone? Somebody was in contact with Libby, a fake persona. People wondered if there was some sort of a catfishing element. There was a theory that the girls were killed in a pagan ritual in the woods.

We found Libby's phone. She secretly was able to videotape this person approaching them. You also hear him say something. Down the hill. The voice of the killer. The voice of the killer. They knew something was not right. They had to be scared out of their minds. We've got a picture. We've got his voice. Where is this guy? Two girls who had so much to offer. We weren't going to let up until we found this guy.

A grainy picture on a phone, a gravelly voice recorded in secret. Could these girls help solve their own mystery? I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline. Here's Andrea Canning with A Walk Through the Woods. Winter was masquerading as spring, teasing those tired of the cold to step outside.

Two girls set out for a walk through the woods. It's very peaceful here. It is. I could see why they would want to come here on a day off. We just saw the bald eagle. Yeah, it's a beautiful place. And then this is the trail. A trail that ends here at an old railroad bridge. This is kind of scary. Yes. There's rotted out ties. We're so high up. Yeah. Yep. Water underneath us for part of it.

I walked across that bridge and I swore I'd never do it again. You wouldn't catch me crossing that bridge for anything? I walked as far as I could that I was on my hands and knees. One of the girls took a photo of the other, inching her way across the bridge. A final moment of innocence. Because the real danger wasn't beneath them. It was behind. A silhouette taking shape, growing as it picked up speed on the bridge, coming toward them.

It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Absolutely. When you think about these two girls, they knew something wasn't right. Yep. And they were scared. All they had left in that moment, a cell phone, each other, and a split second to act. Delphi, Indiana, population 3,000, more or less. A rural community about an hour and a half's drive north of Indianapolis. Carroll County, Delphi, is a great place to raise your family together.

Tony Liggett is the sheriff. I grew up here, choose to be here, I want to be here myself. It's beautiful. People felt safe. Still do, he says, though maybe a little less since that Monday, February 13th, 2017. The morning had started off promising. Blue skies, warm weather. Better yet, classes were canceled to make up for an unused snow day.

What's the plan for the girls that day, with this day off? Well, there wasn't a plan. Becky Patty is talking about her granddaughter, 14-year-old Liberty German, and her best friend, 13-year-old Abigail Williams. Libby and Abby...

They'd had a sleepover at Becky's the night before. Libby came out and she was sitting on the floor in my office. Just then, Libby's older sister announced she'd be taking the car out. Kelsey popped her head in and said, "Hey, I'm going to go to my boyfriend's house." And Libby jumped right up and said, "Hey, can you take us to the trails?" The public trails on the outskirts of town.

Kelsey dropped them off just before 2. They planned to stay for an hour, then call for a ride home. The hour came and went. Becky called Libby. Was it ringing or was it going straight to voicemail? It would ring and then go to voicemail. You're not really thinking anything bad, you know? She alerted Abby's family that they couldn't find the girls. Then she reached out to her husband Mike, Libby's grandfather. And said, hey...

Libby went to the trails. It's been about an hour. She's not answering her phone. Of course, it's getting cold. It is February. It was warm out during the day. So we're all thinking, all right, eventually we're going to find him here, right? But daylight was waning. And it was going to start getting dark. Yeah, because it's February. And I said, we're going to have to call the police. And Libby's afraid of the dark. I think we initially got the call somewhere between 5 and 5.30.

Liggett was a detective back in 2017. He figured the teens would show up soon enough. Were we actively looking for them? Absolutely. But there was not a real sense of urgency. I'm sure, you know, no evil thoughts were entering your mind at that point. Correct. Though when he heard they'd been at the trail, he did wonder about the bridge. What we're standing on now is a bridge.

This wasn't the way it was back then. This was what it all looked like, these rotting railroad ties, no railings. The Monan High Bridge is a relic from a past century. Trains once used it to cross Deer Creek, more than 60 feet below. It's the thrill. What teenagers don't like thrill. Libby's cousin, Sadie Mowdy, says the abandoned bridge was where young daredevils chose to hang out. I wouldn't even go out to the first platform. Nope. But the kids do it. Yeah.

my best friend in high school got her senior pictures taken on that bridge. Did you know if they were planning to venture out onto the bridge? No, we didn't. At some point, Libby's sister checked social media. We saw a Snapchat photo of

Abby, that Libby had taken. So we knew that they had been on the bridge. Is that reinforcing the thought that maybe this is connected to the bridge? You know, that maybe something happened, they got hurt, or... Well, that's what was going through my mind was, okay, now either they fell off the bridge or they got down one of the ravines out there. Is panic setting in? I just knew that something wasn't right.

When the sun went down, Liggett started to worry. Soon, word was out and Delphi sprang into action. Its residents joined the search. Even though not a lot of time has passed, you have a lot of people looking for these two girls. Oh, absolutely. That's just the way things work around here, yeah. Neighbors and police armed with flashlights searched for hours in the dark, around trees and brush, along unsteady paths.

But yet no one saw anything around the bridge area. Correct. So they just vanished. Correct. Now that the sun is up, the search here has resumed outside Delphi and Carroll County. Liggett was at the station the next day when the call came in. It was a little past noon. It was the worst possible news. Got a call and said that they had found the girls' bodies.

Abby and Libby lay in a hidden depression of the forest floor, about a quarter mile beyond the bridge. It was clear the girls had been murdered. We are investigating this as a crime scene. A shaken town would want answers and an arrest. Neither would happen quickly. This was a long journey with a lot of suspects along the way. That's correct.

I think a lot of people looking at this case always wondered if there was some sort of a catfishing element, why did the girls go out there that day? She had to wherewithal to pull that phone out and take a video. This man has placed himself by the bridge at the time the girls were there. Absolutely.

A police report that talked about Odinism and all of a sudden a whole new world opened up about what might have happened. A twisted world. It's a very twisted world.

Sheriff Liggett, back at the station, could hardly believe what he was hearing. Two local girls found murdered near the Monan High Bridge in Delphi, Indiana. He raced to the area a short drive away. What information have you been given before you arrive at the scene about how these girls died? Nothing. No information. He was directed down a hill near the bridge and onto a patch of privately owned land. Where were they ultimately found? So...

Further around, you see how the creek bends upstream up that way. It was grim. Abby and Libby lay dead a few feet apart. Libby at the foot of a tree. Their throats had been cut. Abby was wearing clothes. Libby was not. Libby's wounds were just devastating. It was obvious that Libby had been moved a very, very short distance. Kind of appeared they were trying to

conceal her behind a tree. There was a large tree next to her, and they both had some sticks on top of them. I don't know how a human being can do what they did to anybody, let alone two little girls. Becky and Mike were searching in a different area when they heard the girls had been found. They raced back to the trail, assuming they were okay. Becky didn't realize her sister was one of the searchers who'd come upon the girls' bodies. She just kept saying, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry," and she was crying.

She just kept saying I couldn't go back to them. I said, well, tell me where they are so I can go. Even then, it didn't sink in. Until... And I'm waiting, and the coroner's van come driving by. That's when I realized this isn't good. From that point on, a lot of things are really glazed over or a daze. Because you're like, this isn't really happening, you know, type thing. But...

They'd made an announcement that they'd found two girls, but they couldn't confirm the identity. But you knew? Well, yeah. Small community. Two girls missing, two girls found. Investigators brought the families back to the station where they had set up a command center for the search. And I thought at that time that they were there to help us, that they were asking questions and I was answering and, you know, trying to...

Let's figure out what's going on. I didn't even realize until years later, oh my God, they were interrogating us.

It fell to Mike to formally identify both girls. He remembered how surreal it felt. Just hours earlier, his granddaughter and Abby had been brimming with life, giggling during their sleepover. They were upstairs watching movies. They were painting and silly little videos and stuff, just having a good time. It was a normal night. They were being kids, you know?

Now the Patties and Abby's family had been thrust into a new, terrible kind of normal. One in which their girls existed only in photos and memories. I mean, there's so many beautiful photos of Libby and Abby. Just two happy-go-lucky girls. Abby had been the only child of a single mom. Libby and her sister Kelsey came to live with their grandparents after their mother and father split up.

I want to say through a course of life events, right, it presented an opportunity. And we had spare bedrooms, and they came to us and gladly welcomed it and took it on, made the best of it. Was there any hesitation to take her into your home? That's a lot, right, to bring a child in. No, not at all. We did it again.

Both Abby and Libby were good students. Abby loved crafts and music. Libby, music and sports. It was softball, then volleyball, swimming, soccer. She had soccer in the fall. There was about three weeks out of the year she was not in a sport. So you must have been doing a lot of driving. Lots. Yeah.

Abby was the shyer of the two. She was quiet and reserved. I think her and Libby complimented each other because Libby was a little more loud and boisterous and she was quiet. In fact, Libby was an all-around jokester at home. When you decide to be fancy after shaving. Here she is giving a tutorial on shaving for the first time. It burns. It burns. It's red. It burns. It burns. It burns. It burns.

She loved challenging anyone, especially her uncle, into ridiculous stunts. We were gone, and she was daring him to jump and do a handstand on the handrail and end up in the pool. And you could hear her saying, you won't do it, you're scared. And he'd say, why are you pushing me? She said, because Grandma's going to be home, so you've got to do it. Did he do it? Yeah, he did do it. Was he okay? Yeah.

Two girls, funny and sweet. Their families and the community were in mourning and on edge. Then, just hours into the case, investigators caught a break. We found Libby's phone. I mean, this phone could be everything, depending on what you find on it. Correct. Ever feel like everything's getting more expensive? Groceries, rent, even breathing? Let's not forget car insurance. It just keeps creeping up.

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Upgrade your playbook and make the switch to NetSuite, the number one cloud ERP. Get the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning at netsuite.com slash podcast 25. netsuite.com slash podcast 25. Mike and Becky Patty knew nothing would ever be the same. Their granddaughter Libby and her friend Abby had been taken from them, and so violently. Their lives were stolen from them. I'm a mother of five girls. I have a...

14-year-old and one that's about to turn 13, exactly the ages of Libby and Abby. And it truly is a parent's worst nightmare.

The rest of the family gathered at the house to help any way they could. Some of us were standing around the kitchen island. Some of us were at the kitchen table. Sadie Mowdy remembers her Aunt Becky looking for Libby's older sister, Kelsey. And I remember her yelling up the stairs, Libby, Libby. But she meant to say Kelsey, but she was saying Libby.

And we all just kind of stood there with eyes wide open. Like, none of us said a word. At that point, police were still not releasing the girls' names. But everyone in Delphine knew. This is a small town, so a word travels fast. This is a community that is hurting. Reporter Emily Longnecker covered the story for NBC's Indianapolis affiliate, WTHR. You could see it on people's faces. Delphine, nothing happens here. It's like...

How could this be happening here? You didn't need positive identification from the police. You knew, and you knew it in your gut, and you saw it on the faces of everyone you encountered in that town. People expect things instantaneously, and I started to feel that.

The investigation team included Indiana State Police. Doug Carter was the agency's superintendent. He was already fielding questions from the public, like, is this the work of a drifter, a serial killer, or someone already known to police? And I started to think to myself, oh my gosh, we are never going to be able to meet the expectation that people have. And we weren't. Investigators were at that moment collecting evidence.

You found some clues at the crime scene. Correct. The unspent round from a gun. A crime scene investigator noticed a bullet peeking through leaves between the girls.

So very odd that, number one, it's unspent, hasn't been fired through a gun, and also that the girls were not shot. Correct. In my head at that point in time was that there may have been a gun used to control. How does a person control two girls? Well, you can do it with a gun. ♪

Liggett believed the killer racked his gun to scare the girls into submission, not realizing the evidence he was leaving. So when you rack a gun, it ejects the bullet out the side and lands on the ground. There was more. As crime scene investigators moved Abby's body, they discovered a shoe. And beneath that... We found Libby's phone. They immediately sent the phone to a forensics analyst for testing. Meanwhile, officers continued collecting evidence hoping for DNA.

searched for surveillance cameras on nearby businesses, and spoke to property owners. It's just so mind-boggling. I haven't really caught up. It hasn't caught up with me yet. Like Ron Logan. He spoke to WTHR shortly after the girls were discovered on his property. My son grew up here. He's been down here when he was 13 years old. Never in your wildest dreams do you think that he comes down here to play, he won't come back home. I mean, that's just something that doesn't hit your mind. Ever.

Investigators also talked to anyone who'd been in the area that day. Indiana State Police Lieutenant Jerry Holman. We were able to identify everybody, interview them. Three girls described a man on the trail around 1.30, about 20 minutes before Abby and Libby arrived. We knew they saw a white male.

But the descriptions were slightly different. Though they agreed, he was overdressed for the warm day and avoided eye contact. A woman walking close to the bridge thought she saw the same man. Looking like he was waiting for somebody. As she's walking back towards the trailhead where she parked, she sees two girls later identified as Abby and Libby walking towards the bridge. Others came forward but had nothing really to offer.

One woman saw the story on the news and urged her husband to report he'd been out there that day. Did he see anything unusual? No. He did not see anybody or notify us of anything unusual. So you had to work with what you had to work with. Yeah. But one woman did report something disturbing. She saw a man near the trails while she was driving. He was walking along the road covered in mud and blood.

Are you thinking, wow, she witnessed the killer? Right. I mean, who else would have blood and mud on them like that? Exactly. The girls' autopsies revealed they had been killed with a sharp object. There were no signs of sexual assault. Police kept those and many other details of the investigation from the public.

Then, a major announcement. Police had obtained a photo of a man on the bridge that day. We've been able to identify almost everybody else that's been on that trail, and this gentleman has not been identified, and we want to know what he saw, what he might have seen on the trail. The officer didn't say who took the photo. We were definitely able to tell a pretty good description of the person, white male, blue coat.

Sweatshirt, head covering, blue jeans. Police described him as a possible witness. Viewers responded, flooding the tip line. Several identified the same man, Ron Logan, that property owner. And some women had a lot to say about him. They had experiences where they woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing at the foot of their bed watching them sleep. Oh my gosh.

Well, we know the family really well. So it's been overwhelming, the whole thing. In the days after the murders, people in Delphi came out to support the families. They released lanterns in remembrance. They gathered for prayer vigils and hung ribbons with the girls' favorite colors. Libby's family says a CVS worker even made free copies of the girls' photos for their visitation.

The line for it stretched the length of the building. It was overwhelming how many people showed up to show their support. I'm sure, yeah. It was supposed to end, and there still wasn't an end to the line. And I remember somebody asking us, what do you want to do? And we said, these people came. We can't stop now. So we stood there long.

But the small Delphi community was changing. People were fearful. This town used to not lock their doors when they went to bed. It was like everyone was scared, like nobody went on the trails. There's a boogeyman out there. I mean, unknown. Could be one of your neighbors. Yeah. Didn't know if they were walking amongst us or not. The whole community was scared.

And what about that man in the photo? Investigators described him as a possible witness. Was he something more? Were you trying not to scare the killer, maybe try to draw him in? Yeah, a little bit of both. That's one of the strategies. You make them start thinking, oh my, are they closing in on me? When he doesn't come forward, he becomes your prime suspect that you have named Bridge Guy. Correct.

Bridge Guy. They now believed he had to be the killer. Officers and agents from almost every corner of law enforcement were scrambling to figure out who he was. A week after the murders, they had an important update about that photo. This young lady's a hero. There's no doubt. For the first time, they revealed where the image had come from. It wasn't taken by some random eyewitness or even a security camera.

Incredibly, Libby herself captured the killer on her phone. Libby recorded from just off the end of the bridge way down there. You believe then that based on the video that he followed them across these railroad ties? Yeah, that's what the video shows, that he was behind Abby in the video. So yeah, I believe he followed them across, yes.

Libby had the presence of mind to know something wasn't right about this person, and she secretly, I assume, was able to videotape this person approaching them. It makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. Absolutely. When you think about these two girls. The phone's data revealed Libby hit record at 2.13 p.m., roughly six minutes after she posted that photo of Abby to Snapchat. I hate to even ask this, but the final moments of the girls and the fear that...

they would have experienced at the hands of that person. They had to be scared out of their minds. Police did not release the video, only a snippet of sound from it. A man's garbled voice playing on a loop. Down the hill. Down the hill. Down the hill. The voice of the killer. Voice of the killer. Down the hill.

To investigators, it sounded as though the man was ordering the girls down the hill to their deaths. And they thought they heard something else in that video, though they didn't reveal it at the time. We believe that we hear a gun racking in that video, and that kind of made sense with the bullet being down between the two girls when we found it.

A young victim recording her killer was more than enough to turn a small town's grief into a national news story. Police in Indiana are pleading for help to solve a double murder mystery. Tips were pouring in, thousands to sort through. When Connie Dillman learned where the girls were found, she believed she knew the killer. I just told them that I felt that it was Ron Logan. They had done this because he's abusive.

Ron Logan was Connie's ex-boyfriend, the man who owned the property where the girls were found. And I said, oh my God, Ron Logan killed him. I really thought he killed him. He just finally killed somebody. Connie said Ron once barricaded her inside his house. Another time, she said, he attacked her in his yard. I was helping outside do some things and

He just hit me over the head with a crosshairs wrench. Then, when she saw the picture of Bridge Guy, she was even more convinced. Just the build, the stance, it looked like Ron. Ron dressed that way.

This is Ron Logan's house. This is a guy with a sketchy past and some big accusations from women against him. Absolutely, and a lot of reasons for police to look at him. Barbara McDonald covered the Delphi murders for Court TV. She spoke to some of those women. Two of the women that he had dated told me that after they had broken up,

They had experiences where they woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing at the foot of their bed watching them sleep. Oh my gosh. He had broken into their house? Had broken into their homes. They had no idea how he got in. That's terrifying. But Logan was never charged with any crimes related to the women's allegations. And, you know, we interviewed Ron. He would deny all that. He would deny any of that. Those accusations...

Logan was a 77-year-old retiree living alone at the time of the murders. He told police he wasn't home the afternoon the girls were killed. He was out with his cousin running an errand. So we followed up. He said he had the cousin drive him to the fish store, so we located the cousin. The cousin backed up Logan's alibi. But then, two days later, he changed his story. Initially, the cousin was covering for him, but then during a separate interview, he said no.

As in, he had not driven Logan to the store. Why would he lie about that? Because he... What lie? Yeah, exactly. That's what we thought. Not only that, the cousin said Logan asked him to lie before the girl's bodies had even been found.

It was time for investigators to take a closer look at Ron Logan. All that has kind of led us back to this location. Police were moving in. An arrest was imminent. A lot of people, when that happened, thought, okay, well, this is the beginning, right? You're thinking back to interviewing him and thinking, my God, did I interview the killer? The hunt for a killer was still on, but some in town thought they already knew who it was. Ron Logan...

His ex-girlfriend, Connie, wasn't the only person to report him. As many as 15 tips came in suggesting he was involved in the girls' murders. The investigation was nearly a month old when police arrested him. But not for the murders.

He's picked up on a probation violation. He's not supposed to be driving. He's not supposed to be driving. He's on a suspended license. And I think a lot of people, when that happened, thought, okay, well, this is the beginning, right? This is what they're getting him on now. And then there's going to be these other charges. Investigators pressed Logan about the murders to see if he'd confess, but he denied any involvement. They also searched his house. With the information we received, with the interviews that we've done,

Tips that have come in, all that has kind of led us back to this location. Everyone is descending on Ron Logan's house. You see them hauling away his truck. You see them carrying out stuff. They're there five and six hours. Then we don't hear anything. Emily Longnecker had talked to Logan right after the girls were found. You're thinking back to interviewing him and thinking, my God, did I interview the killer?

Logan pleaded guilty to an unrelated charge and violating his probation. He was sentenced to four years in prison. Police continued to investigate him. But Detective Holman had doubts Logan was involved in the murders. Did he look like Bridge Guy at all? His build, his age, his weight? No, not to my opinion. He's very tall, older than the photo.

They didn't find any direct evidence tying Logan to the case, and investigators eventually cleared him. But if not Logan, then who? What's going on? We've got a picture of the man. We've got his voice. Where is this guy? Residents worried he would strike again. This was potentially a ticking time bomb with this killer. Big time. Big time.

Five months after the murders, investigators released a sketch. It was based on information from that woman who'd reported seeing a muddy and bloody man. It's basically just a clear picture of his face compared to what you saw down below. If the photo of Bridge Guy had been fuzzy, the sketch of him was detailed. Today was the first day that I've really been excited through this whole process. It was the most optimistic we've been. We've, you know, we got a face to the person.

We're going to get him. Instead, it kicked up a hornet's nest. People were accusing each other on social media with little or no proof. And that was really the time that people were convinced it was their ex-husband. They were convinced it was their neighbor. They were convinced it was their son. Some people on social media actually thought you could be the killer? Oh, yeah.

More months ticked by.

Libby's grandparents and Abby's mother, Anna Williams, tried to keep the case in the public eye. I'm hoping that there's going to be people that haven't heard about the girls see this. We just ask that you do the right thing. Do the right thing for our girls and keep this from happening to the next family. Along the way, the two families supported one another. Both families were equally committed to doing whatever they could to catch this killer. We always had hope.

that we were going to get to the end of this. The first anniversary of the girls' murders came and went. As the second anniversary approached, the families were frustrated there was still no arrest. It is sad. Nobody even here thought that we would still be looking for somebody in two years in a town this size, but we are. We got a voice recording. We got a picture. Albeit as grainy, we got a sketch from eyewitnesses that saw the guy. How do we not have him in today's world?

Still, Libby's family remained hopeful. Through strength of the Lord, you know, prayer, and this faith that the good Lord's going to see this thing through. A few months after the second anniversary, Superintendent Carter held a press conference. His hope, smoke out the killer. Directly to the killer, who may be in this room. We believe you are hiding in plain sight. I was convinced that he was watching.

It's an unsettling feeling. It was. I've never experienced anything like that. It's like you're talking to a ghost out there. Yeah. Investigators believe their killer was someone living among them, someone from Delphi. My gut the entire time was, people don't know about these trails. People didn't know about High Bridge.

the random person from the next town over, you would find very few people that even there knew what it was. So I always kind of figured that it was someone here or from here that was familiar with the area. We are also releasing video recovered from Libby's phone. One more thing to come out of that press conference. For the first time, investigators showed a short clip of Bridge Guy played on a loop. Watch the person's mannerisms as they walk.

I can imagine someone studying that walk over and over and over again and saying, yeah, that looks like somebody I know. The video generated more tips. None panned out. Then suddenly, there was a new name in the news. State police are now looking for information about a social media profile with the name Anthony Schatz. Anthony Schatz?

This male model type with his shirt off and smiling and nice pecs and good abs. Who was this mystery man? And what did he have to do with the murders? You learned that Liberty had been in communication with shots. Yes. Yes.

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Find a shoe for every you at your DSW store or DSW.com. It was late, past midnight, when they broke into the farmhouse. Never in a million years would you think that you'd see your parents' house taped off by that yellow tape. Wrong. And they said, you're one dead of being killed. They left behind a wall of blood and the key to a secret. She looked at me and she said, I'm screwed. Murder in the Moonlight, a new podcast from Dateline.

To listen to the latest episodes each week completely free, you can find and follow Murder in the Moonlight on Pandora. In early 2020, Delphi investigators were trying to figure out if the murders of Abby and Libby were linked to other crimes in the area. They reached out to Libby's sister, Kelsey.

Kelsey gets called in by law enforcement and they give her a list of names and among those names is this Anthony Schatz. And she says, "Oh, that sounds familiar to me." Kelsey told police in the days before the murders Libby had been chatting with Schatz. Evidence would seem to be that she was saying, "Oh, I'm talking to this really cute guy." The profile showed a floppy-haired heartthrob with abs and tats who was rich and drove fancy sports cars.

Police learned after the girls went missing, Kelsey looked for clues in Libby's social media. Kelsey had the passwords and she was going through and looking to see if there were messages. And she saw this Anthony Schatz account. On Libby's? On Libby's social media. Wow. And that it had at least liked or commented on one of Libby's images.

Kelsey even asked Schatz for help. So she reaches out and says, my sister's missing. Do you know anything about this? And the response is, no. You know, I talked to her earlier. I'm sure she'll turn up. I'm sure it's fine. And then it didn't go anywhere. At the time, Kelsey didn't tell investigators about Schatz.

But three years later, they knew a lot about him, including a disturbing connection he had with Libby. He had asked for explicit photos. This Anthony Schatz was soliciting young girls for nude photos and videos. And some of the girls were friends of Liberty, and one was Liberty as well. Which is a very bad sign. It's bad, yep.

To investigators, Schatz checked a lot of boxes.

He was one of the last people to communicate with her before she died. People are starting to think, okay, he's communicating with Libby in the days before her death.

Could be something here. I was in shock, first off, that she was even doing that because I kept thinking she would never do that. So it was hard to accept that she had. Did you think this person might have had something to do with their deaths? You know, and you start to ride up that roller coaster because of the connections made, right? We talked to Libby the day of or day before. Hours before their deaths. Yes. And they were really investigating things.

Becky wondered if he was part of a pedophile operation. And there was something else alarming. Police discovered the guy Libby had been talking to didn't exist. It turned out Anthony Schatz was not Anthony Schatz.

Correct. Anthony Schatz was just a screen name? Yes. While investigating the murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German... More than a year later in 2021, investigators asked the public for help. Investigators would like any individual who communicated, met...

or attempted to meet the Anthony Schatz profile to contact law enforcement. I think a lot of people looking at this case always wondered if there was some sort of a catfishing element, why did the girls go out there that day? Were they out there to meet someone? And so I think that fit in with that theory of the case is that, oh, yes, they're catfished. That's how they got out there. As we're covering this, we're thinking, okay, maybe this is the guy.

An update now, that fake social media profile shared by detectives investigating the murder of two young girls in Delphi.

As journalists and true crime bloggers race to identify the person who created the fake profile, local NBC station WTHR tracked down the man in those photos. Well, now for the very first time, we're hearing from the man whose pictures were stolen and used by that Anthony Schatz profile. His real name is Vincent Kowalski. Once a model, he'd changed careers and joined law enforcement.

Arjeni Ranovich talked with the former model and now current police officer in Alaska, who frankly was pretty shocked to see his face connected to this investigation in Indiana. Kowalski had nothing to do with sordid images of young girls or the murders of Abby and Libby. Just seeing your face blasted all over the news was crazy.

Even though he looked casual interviewing as he worked out, this father of two girls was outraged when he learned someone had used his photos as bait. Soliciting videos from young girls, like that's disgusting and it makes me sick. But to know that two young girls possibly lost their life because of my picture is...

It's the worst of the worst. Police had a catfisher on their hands. But who was it? Are you thinking that this guy could be the killer, given the fact that he was talking to Libby over Snapchat not too long before the murders? Yeah, absolutely.

To uncover the truth, the investigation would go into dark places. He's definitely a bad person, was doing bad things. And there would be allegations of something even more sinister. I believe that would have been the first ritualistic killing of two young girls. It was a complete shocker and was absolutely not the direction I thought they were going to go.

When investigators went public with the Anthony Schatz profile, they actually knew much more about the person behind it than they were letting on. He's definitely a bad person, was doing bad things. So you just knew that he had been misrepresenting himself to young girls? Yes.

Turned out he'd been the target of an entirely different investigation two counties away from Delphi. Back in 2017, a few days after Abby and Libby were murdered, the man posing as Anthony Schatz got an underage girl to send him her address. A day later, she saw a figure in a ski mask peeping through her bedroom window and reported the scary encounter. Police investigated and traced the account to a 22-year-old man named Kagan Klein.

Who is Kagan Klein? Kagan Klein is the person that was using the Anthony Schatz profile to solicit girls to send him pornographic photos. And Kagan Klein was a big, overweight, not somebody that these girls would talk to kind of person, so he changed who he was. Not long after that Peeping Tom incident, law enforcement raided Klein's home.

They turned up more than 100 sexually explicit photos and videos of underage girls on his electronic devices. It took three years, but he was arrested on child pornography charges. And that's when Delphi investigators spoke with him. He's a bad guy. He's a pathological liar. He would tell us something we'd look into and it'd be a lie. He lied a lot.

Klein seemed to have a strong alibi that he was in Vegas at the time of the murders. But after a deep dive into the data on his phones, the Delphi investigators found out that wasn't true.

It's determined, though, that he was not in Las Vegas. He's in Peru, Indiana, which is not far from here. That is true. They checked it and they thought he was in Vegas, but we knew shortly after that he wasn't in Vegas. Are you thinking that this guy could be the killer, given the fact that he was talking to Libby over Snapchat?

Not too long before the murders? Yeah, absolutely. He was definitely someone who we believed could have been capable of doing that. Kagan Klein was on the radar of police early on, but he came back on the radar because someone looked at him again and said, wait a second, he was not in Las Vegas. He was in Peru, Indiana. Yeah, seems like a suspect. This seemed like it had the most potential possible.

So you're just waiting for that call? Maybe they'll arrest him, you know, for the murders? That's how we said we were going to operate, and we stuck to that. When Court TV's Barbara McDonald learned Klein was in jail on child pornography charges, she contacted him. What happened? He talked to me. He gave me an interview from jail. Hi, Keegan. How are you? Did Keegan have any history of violence that you could see? No.

No history of violence. He seemed to be the type of guy who sat behind a computer and did his crimes that way. So are you aware that there's a bunch of news stories out there linking you to the Delphi murders? Yeah, I saw that on the news. Okay. And you have admitted that you created this fake profile, Anthony Schatz. Is that correct?

He did admit, though, to being involved in child pornography? Absolutely. You were committing crimes against children. You were asking children to send you inappropriate images, correct? He said, yes, the things that I'm accused of so far, the charges I have, I did that.

But when it came to contact with Libby, Klein seemed evasive. So Anthony Schatz was communicating with Libby. Was that you? That's what they said. Was that you? That's what they said.

Are you aware whether you may have talked to Libby on the 13th? And do you have any recollection of that? He said he had no plans to meet Libby or Abby or anyone else that day. Where were you on February 13th, 2017? In Peru, Indiana?

He says he'd never been to Delphi except for a high school football game and that he didn't know about the bridge or where it was. But with Kagan, it was always really hard to determine what was true and what wasn't. Did you have anything to do with the murders of Abby or Libby? No.

done everything they wanted me to. Immediately I was like, well, give me a polygraph test, a DNA, whatever you want. I'll do anything. I'm innocent of this and I would love to find out who did it.

Klein's phone activity showed he was at his grandmother's house 40 minutes from Delphi. We could never put his phone or any technology of him being in Delphi. During the time of the murders, he was actually at his grandmother's house. And in the end, investigators couldn't prove he killed Abby and Libby. We conducted a thorough investigation and ruled him out. Another dead end. Another dead end.

Klein would eventually plead guilty to 25 charges, including child porn and child exploitation. He was sentenced to 40 years in prison.

Then, after years of dead ends, investigators would finally get a break. A conscientious volunteer happened to find a box and stumbled upon a new name on a tip sheet. I mean, could you believe it? A new name! This is potentially huge! And not just a new name, a name and a timeline in this tip that fits what we've been looking for for, at that time, five and a half years.

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Now they had the final answer. Or did they?

Nothing has more suspense than a Dateline mystery. And no one wants to wait to find out what happens next. That's why everyone needs Dateline Premium, where listening is always ad-free. You get the whole story and nothing but the story. Or do you? Yes, actually, you do. Subscribe now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or DatelinePremium.com.

The double murder case that law enforcement once thought would be solved quickly had haunted them for over five long years. I knew it wasn't from lack of effort. We had a great team. We were working extremely hard, you know, 10, 12, 15 hours a day, a lot of sleepless nights. We were really focused on finding the killer, and we weren't going to give up.

By then, they'd received tens of thousands of tips. Some from the earliest stages of the investigation hadn't been filed away properly. There was so much coming in that we couldn't handle it. We just couldn't handle it. We just couldn't. Over the years, a local volunteer named Kathy Shank dedicated countless hours organizing and digitizing those files.

I felt like that I need to be here and I need to help. Excuse me, that's what I do. She was a former investigator with Child Protective Services and had an eye for detail. When she would come across things throughout the years that she wasn't aware of, she would bring it to an investigator. And most of the time, that was me. In September 2022, as the team prepared to move to a new location,

Kathy was packing up files and stumbled on a box in the bottom of a drawer. Inside was a tip from early in the investigation before Kathy joined. It involved that man whose wife had seen the story on the news and urged him to report he'd been at the trail that day. And so now this is a new name. Correct, yeah. To Kathy Shank, this could be their man. This could be Bridge Guy.

This is potentially huge. A name and a timeline in this tip that fits what we've been looking for for, at that time, five and a half years. Back then, a conservation officer met and spoke to the man who explained he'd been out of the trails around 1:30 to 3:30. The officer's report somehow got overlooked. Until now.

So it was misfiled as cleared, so no one followed up on it. So something fell through the cracks where this tip did not... Whoever wrote cleared on it, everybody ignored it. This man has placed himself...

by the bridge at the time the girls were there. Absolutely. What did you think when you saw that? I thought that, you know, that's Bridge Guy. So I'm like, we need to talk to that guy. That's the guy that we were missing. Oh my gosh, are you just dying when you hear this? Like, is this what we've been waiting for? Yes. The man who'd come forward all those years ago was Richard Allen, a 50-year-old Delphi man who worked at the local CVS. He was married with a grown daughter.

So this is an average Joe, it seems like. That's what it appeared. Squeaky clean as far as law enforcement goes. Correct. Investigators went back over the evidence, including surveillance video from a business near the trail. In it was a black car. They couldn't confirm the license plate or who was driving, but they knew Allen owned something similar. Was his vehicle on that video? It was. It lined up with the time that Richard Allen said he was there. A few weeks later, they paid Allen a visit.

Went to his house and knocked on the door and asked him to come talk to us. He willingly went with you? He did, yep. Back to the investigation center, where Sheriff Liggett and another detective began their interview. Allen chose not to have an attorney present. In the beginning, his demeanor was fine. I believe he drank a lot of water, but in the beginning, he was fine. When detectives showed Allen the picture of Bridge Guy, he bristled.

He said it wasn't him, that he never saw Abby or Libby at the trail. And he changed his timeline. Now he said he was there earlier in the day. But what about that video of the black car? Did you confront him with that? Yes. He was abrasive about it and said, you don't know that that's my car and things like that. Did he look nervous? And he got to that point, yes. The interview ended. He was free to go.

But the investigation into Allen was just beginning. They got a search warrant and went back to his Delphi home. What do you find from the search warrants? He had a lot of knives, a lot of clothing that matched the description that matched... Bridge guy? Yes. And they found something else, a Sig Sauer pistol like this one. They sent the pistol to the crime lab, where a state firearms expert tested it using .40 caliber bullets.

She then compared markings on the bullets made by the gun with markings on the bullet found at the crime scene. Soon after, Sheriff Liggett got a call. Was it a match? It was a match. This news is everything. It's huge. Investigators thought they heard someone racking their gun on that video from Libby's phone. Now, with the bullet match, they were convinced it was Allen.

Once we got the result back that the round matched his gun, we decided to call him back in for another interview. Allen agreed to come in, again without an attorney. Lieutenant Holman did the interview this time and told Allen how the crime scene bullet matched to his gun. Why is your round from your gun at the crime scene? And he just denied it and could never give us an explanation.

The tone in the interrogation room quickly became heated, and the lieutenant says Allen eventually threatened him. He just made the comment that I was going to pay for this, and I told him, no, you're going to pay for this. The detective had heard enough, and soon after that interview, police arrested Richard Allen for the murders of Abby and Libby. After so many false leads, Libby's grandparents were cautious when they heard the news.

And we asked him, do you have enough evidence to convict? Are you sure? Are you positive? Are you, you know? They were sure. And on Halloween 2022, police unmasked the alleged killer. But the arrest of Richard M. Allen of Delphi on two counts of murder is sure a major step in leading to the conclusion of this long-term and complex investigation. You waited five days to announce the arrest? Yes.

The case had become an international story, even more so after a stunning allegation surfaced. Could others have been behind the murders?

These men who practice Odinism were perhaps performing some sort of a ritualistic sacrifice in the woods. What did you make of that Odinism theory? It needed to be investigated. For the people of Delphi, the news was still settling in that there'd been an arrest. We're going to keep pushing all the way. Libby's grandparents were, of course, relieved. And as for the identity of the suspect...

Do you know Richard Allen? No. If law enforcement is correct, the suspect has been hiding in plain sight this whole time, just like they thought. Mm-hmm. Many in Delphi did know Richard Allen, or at least had seen him working at that neighborhood CVS.

of disturbing detail is that this man is the man who prepared the photos for the girls' funerals. - Yes. - That was the first thing my daughter thought of when they showed his picture and said he worked at CVS. She said, "Oh, Mom, Mom, he's the one that developed those pictures."

For the victims' families, the arrest marked the first of many more startling revelations. The defense was about to drop an alternate theory of who did this and why, and it was a shocker. It was a complete shocker and was absolutely not the direction I thought they were going to go. Eleven months after his arrest...

Allen's attorneys surprised many with a pretrial filing, claiming the girls might have been killed in those woods by members of a pagan religion called Odinism. This theory that these men who practice Odinism, which is this Norse pagan religion, were perhaps performing some sort of a ritualistic sacrifice in the woods and decided to target the

To explain that theory, Allen's attorneys met us in an area similar to the crime scene.

We should say these are not the woods where Abby and Libby were found. Jennifer Auger, Brad Rosey, and Andy Baldwin represented Allen. They say those sticks that were partially covering the girls' bodies were meant to send a message.

and demonstrated for us how some of them were placed. We had, you know, sticks that were arranged in a certain pattern. I mean, to me it's just plain silly to say that these were thrown on there to hide the body. And they certainly didn't hide the bodies. Did not. They believe the sticks formed letters from an ancient alphabet known as runes, a way Odinism followers can communicate. It sends a message out.

to the person that made them and created them. So what could it have meant in this case? It's only known to the person that created the rune. Their bodies were forming a V as well, and we think that that is likely symbolic to the person or people that did this.

And they point out that Libby's blood was found on a nearby tree and say it appears someone used it to create another odonistic symbol that looked like this, an F. There's just no natural way that that shape gets on the tree accidentally.

While some thought the ritualistic killing theory was far-fetched, Allen's attorney said they weren't the first to bring it up. If we're going to come up with a defense, we're not going to pull Odinism out of the air. That's fantastical, right? I mean, this was driven by the evidence that was given to us.

Soon after the murders, it was the police who had looked into the possibility of a ritualistic killing. It was definitely investigated very thoroughly by multiple people. No stone unturned. We did not have tunnel vision. Multiple officers spent multiple hours, multiple months looking into that connection. What did you make of that theory, Odinism theory? It needed to be investigated. They investigated that Odinism.

Sheriff Liggett says law enforcement concluded there was no connection between Odinism and the murders. I believe that that would have been the first ritualistic killing of two young girls. That's not what Odinism, it's a religion. I wasn't aware of it, but it's evidently not uncommon. Then, Allen's attorneys found themselves in hot water after some crime scene photos were leaked to several media outlets. Turned out, they came from their camp.

You've been accused of trying to put your narrative out there of this odinism by leaking these photos. True or false? 100% false and offensive. Allen's attorneys say a former associate who had access to their office copied the photos and unbeknownst to them sent the images around.

It is very upsetting to me that anybody would say that we intentionally made any of that happen. So this was unintentional? It's, yeah. Absolutely. There was nothing to gain by leaking those documents. I mean, there's just, there's no plausible gain from it. The judge was so angry, she took you off the case. Yeah.

What was your reaction to that? Deep despair, getting in a fetal position in my bed for days, you know, thinking my life is over, my career is over. The attorneys appealed the judge's decision and the state Supreme Court reinstated them. But the fallout from those leaked photos continued. Somebody said, I've got some pictures I want you to see, you need to see. A podcaster texted them to Becky.

It was the first time she and Mike had seen the gruesome images of the girls. The photos, the things that we learned, only confirmed our most horrible imaginations. Those photos should have been protected. Should have never got to that point. I'm sorry, I'll call it out. The defense team has culpability in that. Would you be open to saying sorry to them for what happened? I would love to do it in person. I would love to sit down and talk with them if they would want to do that. Absolutely.

The defense now had to focus on the trial, which was just weeks away. Did you feel it was an uphill battle going to trial? Well, it felt, you know, from a defense perspective, it felt like a stacked deck. The prosecution, on the other hand, had a possible ace up its sleeve. Prison calls that would reveal some stunning conversations. When you heard that, did you think, game over? And just confirm that we had the right guy. ♪

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In the summer of 2024, Richard Allen's lawyers were revving up for trial. At a pretrial hearing, they presented that key part of their defense, that followers of a pagan cult killed Abby and Libby. Richard Allen has the right to present these alternative theories if they have some basis. And then the judge says you can't bring them up in trial as alternate suspects. That's a blow to your defense. Huge.

Carroll County Prosecutor Nicholas McCleeland acknowledged that as strong as some of the evidence appeared to be, his case had holes too. Male DNA had been recovered at the crime scene, but the sample was too small to match to anyone. There was no DNA, no fingerprints, no text messages tying Richard Allen to the girls. The image from the phone was grainy. The voice isn't perfect. So many things that

Would be cons, you know, to a prosecution. Correct. I think you have bad facts in almost every case. So those are just hurdles that we had to overcome by other circumstantial evidence that we had. Was there anything you learned about Richard Allen's past that would explain why he could be capable of something like this? How do you explain this behavior that it suddenly just happens?

I am not the person asked to explain the criminal psychology of one's mind that convinces them that they need to kill two little girls. I don't think anything in his past would justify or explain why he did this. Nearly eight years after the murders, Richard Allen's trial got underway. People lined up, news crews from all over, tons of security. This little, quiet, sleepy town suddenly is ground zero.

for this trial. People from Australia, Finland, I mean, just everywhere. It's been a fascination for so many people, I think, because of how unusual it is. Libby's and Abby's families did their best to drown out the noise. They sat on the same side of the courtroom in a show of solidarity. There would have never been another option. We walked through this thing from the beginning together. Why, you know, we have to finish it together. This is everything.

And all eyes are on you when you walk in the courthouse. I didn't care about any of that. I cared about the 12 jurors in there and what they thought and how the information and facts are going to be presented to them. No cameras were allowed in court. Prosecutor McClellan set out to convince the jury there was only one man responsible for these murders, Richard Allen, a.k.a. Bridge Guy. He opened with this.

This is about Bridge Guy, this is about a bullet, and this is about two young girls who were murdered. You made it very straightforward. My openings are always very, very short and very, very to the point. I would rather just keep the jury kind of on the hook. He began his case by calling officers who described the crime scene and evidence gathered in vivid detail.

The prosecutor went with a little more of the emotion in the beginning to get the jury to really sense how horrific this thing was that happened to these two girls. He drove home the full horror of the murders by showing photographs of what had been done to Abby and Libby. To watch the jury during that was, they were visibly shaken and emotional. I wish that I had never...

seen those. It was awful. There were some members of Abby's family who chose not to be in the room. There were a few members of Libby's family that left as well. I remember that one juror, he could not, he would lean forward and put his head in his hands. He couldn't look. Becky testified for the prosecution. My goal was to tell the jury about Libby. I wanted them to know that those girls mattered and

They need to think of that throughout this whole trial. McClellan laid out for the jurors his theory of how Allen carried out the murders. He went out to the trails that day. He laid in wait. He then saw the two girls, forced them down the hill with a firearm. We believe there's a sexual assault that was going to occur. And then we believe he got spooked and he decided to kill them. He left the crime scene and continued on with his life.

The prosecutor put the state's firearms expert on the stand. Her opinion was the bullet found between Abby's and Libby's bodies had to have come from Richard Allen's gun based on marks matching the gun's mechanism. The bullet to me was huge because it tied Richard Allen to the crime scene where the girls were found. Racking the gun in that situation would be such a powerful statement that if you don't do what I say, I am going to shoot you.

or I am going to hurt you. And so we just believe that was how he was able to control the girls with this firearm. McCleland argued the moment Alan racked the gun could be heard on the 43 seconds of video captured by Libby. You're hearing Abby and Libby talk. You're hearing one of them say, is he behind me? The fact that Libby had the wherewithal to hit record on her phone and capture these images and keep rolling...

She was in death, almost your star witness. I agree. In her dying moment, she had to wear with all to pull that phone out and take a video and help solve her own crime. The prosecution said the phone provided a key timeline for the murders and a link to the killer. A number of witnesses testified the man in the video was the one they saw that day, including the woman who reported a man covered in mud and blood. All agreed he was Bridge Guy.

You didn't have them in court actually look at Richard Allen and say, is that the man you saw? Which is what we're all used to on TV, right? That's the big powerful moment. Is that the man? And you didn't do that. Why not? Just a strategic move. Was there fear that if you did say, is that the man that they would say, you know, honestly, I can't be sure. There's always that fear they're going to say that. But we had in our minds what we want to identify as bridge guy and then tie in that Richard Allen is bridge guy. That was our strategy from day one.

As the trial progressed, the prosecutor used Richard Allen's own words against him. He argued Allen told law enforcement, before later changing his story, that he was on the trails during the window of the murders. We believed he was on the trails from 1:30 to 3:30 like he had originally said in 2017. In 2022, he changed that from 12:30 to 1:30. McCleland also played Richard Allen's voice in court.

It turned out that while he had been in jail, officers recorded some 700 phone calls between Allen and his wife and mother. In some of those calls, he confessed. He told his wife, I wanted to apologize to you. I did it. No, I did it. I killed Abby and Libby. When you heard that, did you think, game over? It just confirmed that we had the right guy.

Libby's family listened intently to the recordings. Did they seem believable? Yeah, 100%. And it's like, oh yeah, by the way, I did kill those Delphi girls, you know. And she said, no, you didn't. They're messing with your mind. And he said, why would I tell you I did it if I didn't?

And Alan didn't just make confessions to his family. Over the course of 21 months in jail, he made more than 60 apparent confessions to corrections officers, inmates, and also to the jail psychologist, Dr. Monica Walla. She said he told her he marched the girls across the creek and killed them with a box cutter, that he had planned to rape them, but got spooked by a passing van on a nearby drive.

What can we confirm in that confession? He said he saw a van. Let's start looking around. Were there any vans in the area? A local man named Brad Weber took the stand. And sure enough, Brad Weber was coming home from work that day, and sure enough, he was driving a van. As the prosecution rested, it appeared it could be game over for Richard Allen. But Allen's attorneys argued nothing was what it seemed.

They would counter that those weren't real confessions, that it wasn't Allen's bullet, and there was no proof he was Bridge Guy. None of the people on the trail gave a description that matched Richard Allen. As Richard Allen's defense team saw it, even though they had some setbacks before trial, the case against their client was thinned.

There's just not much there. One of the things that really jumps out at you is that this is a man who had never been in trouble with the law. He works at CBS, and then suddenly he's responsible for this very gruesome crime with these young girls. And no forensic evidence. No forensic evidence.

But the defense had some major obstacles to overcome. What does look really bad for Richard Allen is that he places himself in that area that day. He didn't have to do that. I don't know how somebody's supposed to react when the law enforcement gets on the TV saying, we need help. The easiest thing for him to do would have been to say nothing and leave Delphi.

He did the exact opposite, which was he cooperated. One of the things the prosecution pounced on was they say that Richard Allen changed his story as far as the time that he was out there.

Five and a half years passed. Who, anyone here, anyone listening, who can tell you what they were doing to a specificity five and a half years ago? He wasn't the one that changed his story. It was the police who lost recordings of the initial conversation with Richard Allen. Richard says, I was on those trails between noon and 1.30.

What's more, they argued, none of the witnesses could say for sure that Richard Allen was Bridge Guy. None of the people on the trail gave a description that matched Richard Allen. Even the witnesses on the trail couldn't agree on what Bridge Guy was wearing. And, you know, it was jeans and a Carhartt-type coat. You're in a rural county in Indiana, probably half the men in that county have those clothes. ♪

And while Allen stands about 5'6", some witnesses described Bridge Guy as medium height or even tall. So many different opinions about how old this person was, how tall they were, how heavy. One of the key witnesses for the state, she described to the police a guy that was in his early 20s that had brown poofy hair. That's the guy that she said was Bridge Guy. And

That doesn't match the guy that's on the bridge. The defense attorneys also poured cold water on the 43 seconds of audio and video captured by Libby. They argued the audio was muddy, the video grainy. With everything in this case, on the surface you hear, okay, there's a video of the suspect, and then you find out, okay, well, it's grainy, and it's from far away, and it's not real clear.

But what about the unfired bullet found at the scene? The defense pushed back hard on the state's expert who said it was a match to Allen's gun. I was fairly well-versed in the ballistics arena. It's not what we would call or what a layperson would call science. You didn't trust the science behind this so-called match? It's not a science, no. He argued there's a difference between fired bullets and unfired bullets ejected from a gun after it's been racked. There's no dispute that...

that the round, the magic bullet that was found allegedly at the scene, was cycled and not fired. But when they conducted the examination, the test-fired rounds that they actually compared to our client's firearm were fired rounds. They were not test-cycled rounds. And so the simple way of describing that is they were comparing apples and oranges. I will say about this, Jerry,

They listened and took notes and leaned into every detail. But perhaps the most insurmountable evidence would be those 60-plus jail confessions. Richard Allen at one point says to his wife, I wanted to apologize to you. I did it. No, I did it. I killed Abby and Libby. Those conversations, he would later go on to say, I think I killed them. Maybe I killed them. Yeah, in the same conversation. Yeah, in the same conversation.

The defense argued they were false confessions made under duress. Following his arrest, Richard Allen was jailed for months in a maximum security segregation unit. The state said it was for his own safety. His lawyers disagreed. The three of us here have been in this business a long time. We've all represented some of the worst humans on this planet.

And none of us have ever seen somebody detained on a pretrial basis in the most secure unit in the state of Indiana. That made him lose touch with reality, they said.

When you're stuck in those circumstances, when you have no outside stimuli, you're stuck in a gray steel box day in, day out, lights on day in, day out. And you're trying to figure out why you might be held in this condition. It's not unrealistic that that's where you go. That's where your brain goes. It's medieval.

They argued those conditions also played into Allen's confessions to the psychologist.

It's textbook for an environment where somebody would spew some kind of false confession, where basically a man says, I give, I've had enough. At the time that these statements are being made, it's hard to believe that you could give a lot of credibility to anything he was saying. To bolster their argument, defense attorneys pointed to Allen's police interviews. Time after time, he insisted he was innocent. In the police interviews, he sang...

He's not admitting to anything at this point. No, he's insisting that he was out there on the trails to go for a walk, that he was looking at fish from the bridge, that he was looking at the stock ticker on his phone, said he never saw Abby or Libby. And with that, the defense rested.

I think a lot of people who were watching the trial thought, "There's a possibility this is going to be a hung jury, that this could go either way." For nearly three weeks, jurors in the Delphi community were consumed by a trial that was as grueling as it was heartbreaking. Enduring it all and sitting together were Abby's and Libby's families. We were brought together by an event. Even though we are totally two different types of families,

We are basically family and we are bonded forever. In closing arguments, the defense told jurors not to trust much of the state's case, especially the testimony about the crime scene bullet matching Allen's gun. The ballistics and the magic bullet, it's just, this stuff is totally unreliable. The prosecution hammered home that confession Allen gave to his prison psychologist about seeing the van on the day of the murders.

That's a big aha moment, if you will, something that only the killer would know. Yeah, it was. We felt that way. We felt that only person that would know a van went down that private drive on that day would be the two girls and the killer. The case was now in the hands of the jury. The defense felt confident. I felt like we tried a great case on reasonable doubt. That's what the case was about. There's reasonable doubt here.

A verdict wouldn't come quickly. Hours soon turned into days. The jury goes out and they're out for four days. That's a long time for a jury. It's a long time. There's a possibility this is going to be a hung jury. We've got breaking news coming out of Carroll County this afternoon. We have learned there is a verdict in the Delphi murders case. This is ridiculous.

Probably the biggest moment of our lives. Something we've been working so hard to get to this day, now this hour, this moment, this minute. The judge read the decision. I mean, there was a couple of gasps we could hear. Guilty on all charges. Outside the courthouse where the press and spectators had gathered, cheers erupted. We got our verdict, but that didn't bring the girls back. You know,

It doesn't give us closure. It gives us a little bit of peace to know that he can never hurt another person again and that he's where he should be. Libby's cousin Sadie was overwhelmed. I instantly started crying, and I called my mom, and my mom started crying. So it was like, I don't know if it was tears of happiness, tears of this nightmare is over,

Coming to a close. Good morning. A few weeks later at a press conference, the prosecutor recognized an unsung hero of the case, Kathy Shank. She was the woman who five years after the murders found that file that led to Richard Allen. Without her, we would not be here.

Without her, we would not have an arrest, a conviction, and a sentence. That sentence was 130 years, 65 years for Libby, and 65 for Abby. Allen is appealing. Yet out of all the pain and sorrow came a ray of light. People in the beginning didn't know what to do, so they started sending us money. And we didn't want that money. So we decided we would do something in honor of Libby.

They checked with Abby's family and together came up with a plan. We decided we were going to buy bleachers for the girls' softball field because their bleachers are horrible. But the money kept coming in and coming in. So they went bigger, much bigger. It started out as bleachers and ended up a 22-acre complex. We have three ball fields on it and we host tournaments.

They have an amphitheater where you can hold concerts, musicals, and car shows. Amazing. All in their honor. Yeah. It's called Abbey and Libby Memorial Park, a place where Delphi's heartbreak is slowly rewritten in every cheer, every moment of joy, a tribute to two best friends, forever, together.

What would you say to people watching? Keep your faith. In your deepest, darkest times, sometimes a good prayer or somebody saying a prayer for you, it does help. Don't ever take for granted what you have today. Hug those kids. Tell them all you love them.

That's all for this edition of Dateline. And check out our Talking Dateline podcast. Andrea Canning and Blaine Alexander will go behind the scenes of tonight's episode, available Wednesday in the Dateline feed, wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 Central. I'm Lester Holt. For all of us at NBC News, good night.

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