Delphi: How Many Failures Did It Take to Convict One Man and Let Everyone Else Go?

Tony Brueski (0:00)

April 22nd, 2019

Two years after two teenage girls were found dead on a creek bank in Delphi, Indiana, the state police superintendent stands at a podium and tells the public to forget everything they've been looking for. The composite sketch on every billboard, every gas station flyer, every news broadcast for 24 months. It's the wrong person. He releases a new face, younger, completely different. He looks into the camera and says the killer may be in the room. Days later, Indiana state police admit the two sketches are two different people. The first one, the face that launched one of the largest investigations in state history, was never their guy.

Two years. One face, wrong face.

This is the Delphi murders. And to understand how a system this broken convicted a man and buried every piece of evidence that pointed somewhere else, you have to go back to where it started. February 13, 2017

Delphi, Indiana. A town of about 3,000 people, 60 miles northwest of Indianapolis. The kind of place where people leave their doors unlocked and kids walk the trails alone. Kelsey German drops off her younger sister Libby, 14, and Libby's best friend, Abby Williams, 13, near the old Monon High Bridge Trail. It's a cold afternoon. The girls want to hike. Kelsey has plans and tells them she'll pick them up later. At 2:07 p.m., Libby posts a photo to Snapchat. It shows Abby walking along the bridge, an abandoned railroad trestle stretching across Deer Creek, 60 feet above the water. It's the last image of Abby Williams alive. Libby's phone records its last movement at approximately 2:32 p.m. At 3:15 p.m., the girls don't show up for their ride. Libby's father drives to the trail. They're not there. The family searches. Then police. Then hundreds of volunteers fanning out across the woods in the dark. They search all night. They find nothing. The next morning, February 14, Valentine's Day, searchers find the bodies. The girls are on the north bank of Deer Creek, roughly 1,400 feet from the front door of a man named Ron Logan. It's his property. What the searchers walk into is a crime scene that will haunt this case for nearly a decade. Abby is wearing Libby's clothes, a sweatshirt and jeans that belong to her friend. Libby isn't wearing anything. Pieces of their clothing, Abby's jeans, her jacket, Libby's shirt, are scattered in the creek.

Libby's phone, tucked inside a Harry Potter case, is found underneath Abby's body. And then there are the sticks, branches laid over both girls. A larger branch across Libby's arm, placed there, arranged. The FBI will later write in a search warrant that the killer moved and staged the bodies and may have taken clothing as souvenirs. The autopsy show both girls died from cuts to the neck. Libby's three main neck vessels were severed. She would have bled out in five to ten minutes. Neither girl had defensive wounds. Neither had been assaulted. The medical examiner suggests a box cutter may have been used. Between the bodies, less than two feet from one of the girls, a single 0.4 caliber bullet, unspent, never fired, just sitting there on the ground between two dead children. And the DNA results come back empty. No match to any suspect. No match to anyone. The only DNA recovered from the branches matched Libby.

A hair found in Abby's hand was later tested and matched Libby's sister Kelsey, the one who dropped them off. The crime scene that would eventually convict a man and lock him away for 130 years produced zero forensic evidence tying any human being to the murders.

Within days of the killings, police released something that Libby German left behind. She didn't just take a photo on that bridge, she hit record. A grainy image from her phone shows a man walking toward the girls on the bridge, hands in his jacket pockets, head down, closing the distance. And audio. A man's voice. Three words. Guys, down the hill.

Three words. A blurry figure. And a 14-year-old girl who had the presence of mind to start recording while a killer walked toward her. The full video runs 43 seconds. The public won't see it in full until March 2025, more than eight years later. That image and those three words become the center of the investigation. Police call the figure Bridge Guy. They ask the public for help identifying him. Tips pour in. More than 42,000 by one official count, with some estimates running above 70,000. Delphi becomes the most talked about unsolved case in Indiana. But the tips aren't the only thing pouring in. There are suspects. The first one lives 1,400 feet from where the girls were found. Ron Logan, 77 years old, owner of the land where Abby and Libby died. Within a month of the murders, the FBI serves a search warrant on his property. The agent who wrote the affidavit doesn't mince words. The document states there is probable cause that Ronald Logan committed the murders. The FBI says Logan asked a cousin to give him a alibi before the bodies were even found. He told police he was at an aquarium in Lafayette that afternoon. The FBI says his statements were factually and intentionally designed to deceive. His phone placed him near the bridge. His build was described as similar to bridge guy. His voice was called not inconsistent with the audio. Logan gets jailed on a probation violation. His property is searched. He is released. And then nothing. No murder charge, no public explanation, no follow up that anyone can find. An FBI agent swore under oath that this man probably killed two children on his own land and the state of Indiana did nothing with it. Logan dies in January 2022