Delphi: Richard Allen Confessed — Then Said Something Indiana Won't Repeat

Tony Brueski (0:03)

Prison Surveillance Footage from Westville Correctional Facility shows a man alone in a cell, disrobed, smearing his own waste on the walls, banging his head against concrete. The man weighed 180 pounds when the state of Indiana locked him up. Thirteen months later, he had lost nearly 50 pounds. He told a prison psychologist that Satan killed two girls in the woods. He told his wife on a recorded phone call that he did it himself. The state played those confessions for a jury and called them evidence. The jury never heard what thirteen months of solitary confinement did to the man who made them.

This is the story of what Indiana did to Richard Allen between the day it arrested him and the day it convicted him. Not what he allegedly did on a bridge in February 2017

What the state did to him inside a concrete box in 2023 And how it used the wreckage to put him away for 130 years.

October 13, 2022 Five and a half years after the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German, a Carroll County detective sits down with Richard Allen for a second interview. The first one happened in a grocery store parking lot days after the killings, when Allen told a conservation officer he had been on the Monon High Bridge Trail that afternoon. That tip sat in a box marked cleared for five years. Now someone has finally read it. Allen tells the detective the same thing he said in 2017

He was on the trail between about 1.3 and 3.3 that afternoon. He wore blue jeans and a blue or black Carhartt jacket. He said he was there to watch the fish. He said he never let anyone else use or borrow his gun, a Sig Sauer P226 he'd owned since 2001

The next day, investigators execute a search warrant on Allen's home. They seize his firearms. Within five days, the state police crime lab completes a ballistics comparison. They conclude that a 0.4 caliber unspent round found between the girls' bodies had been cycled through Allen's Sig Sauer. Not fired from it, cycled through it, meaning the gun's mechanism left microscopic marks on the brass casing. On October 26, Allen voluntarily surrenders to police. Two days later, he is formally arrested. The probable cause affidavit runs eight pages, but the public sees only seven. One page is withheld. Witness names are redacted throughout. The physical evidence connecting Allen to the murders consists of a single unfired bullet and a contested forensic method for linking it to his gun. No DNA, no blood, no fingerprints, no murder weapon recovered at the scene. No witness who saw Allen harm anyone.

One unspent round and a pair of scratches under a microscope. Allen is not sent to the Carroll County Jail. He is not housed at a standard pretrial facility. The state of Indiana transfers him to Westville Correctional Facility, a state prison, and places him in a maximum security segregated unit known as A-Pod. His cell measures 12 feet by eight and a half. It contains a bed frame, a mattress, a toilet and a Bible. He is the only pretrial detainee housed in that unit during the warden's entire four-year tenure. A correctional officer is stationed outside his door around the clock. A surveillance camera records every movement inside the cell 24 hours a day. He is allowed to wash three times a week. He gets one hour of recreation outside his cell five days a week. When he is moved anywhere in the facility, he is placed in chains, hands, feet and torso.

Other inmates in adjacent cells can hear him. According to testimony at trial, they called him a baby killer. They told him to take his own life.

The warden acknowledged at a court hearing that Allen lost considerable weight after arriving at Westville. Defense psychologist Dr. Polly Westcott later testified that Allen arrived with pre-existing depression and anxiety, along with what she diagnosed as dependent personality disorder, a condition characterized by an extreme reliance on others, particularly his wife Kathy. Then the state put him in a box alone and cut him off from everyone he depended on.

Dr. Westcott testified that solitary confinement can change brain chemistry. She described a progression, depression into hallucinations, hallucinations into psychosis, psychosis into complete detachment from reality. She compared the experience to being trapped in a funhouse where your brain can no longer tell what is real.

Prison psychologist Dr. Monica Wala documented what happened next. Her clinical notes show that after Allen received prosecution documents detailing the evidence against him, his behavior changed dramatically. He began disrobing in his cell. He consumed his own waste. He rolled on the ground. By April 2023, Wala noted a grave disability. By May, she diagnosed him with brief psychotic disorder, characterized by disorganized speech and behavior. It was during this period, beginning in April 2023, approximately six months into his solitary confinement, that Allen began confessing. The confession started after Allen began reading the Bible and told staff he had found God. According to Indiana State Police Detective Brian Harshman, Allen made more than 60 direct confessions over approximately two months. He confessed to the prison warden during cell visits. He confessed to inmates assigned as suicide companions. He confessed to guards stationed outside his door. He confessed to his wife and mother during recorded phone calls. He confessed to Dr. Wala during a clinical session. Dr. Wala testified that during one session, Allen described the murders in what she called a concise and chronological manner. He said he followed the girls across the bridge, ordered them down a hill and into the creek and cut their throats. On a recorded phone call with Wala present, Allen told his wife, I did it. I killed Abby and Libby. The prosecution presented these confessions as the words of a guilty man unburdening his conscience after finding religion. The defense presented them as the words of a man whose mind had been destroyed by the conditions of his confinement. Dr. Westcott testified that Allen also made up stories during his psychotic episodes. One of them? That Satan killed the girls. She testified that the confessions were fabricated narratives produced by a brain that could no longer distinguish reality from delusion. Prison surveillance footage shown to the jury depicted Allen banging his head against the walls of his cell and consuming his own waste. Jurors were visibly distressed. But the jury was asked to do something extraordinary. They were asked to watch footage of a man in psychosis, a man who ate his own waste, who said Satan committed murder, who lost 45 pounds in solitary confinement. Then they were asked to accept that when that same man said, I did it, he was telling the truth. The prosecution argued that people experiencing psychosis can still say accurate things. The defense argued, you cannot cherry-pick which statements from a psychotic man count as real. The state's own prison psychologist, Dr. Wala, believed Allen faked his bizarre behavior. Westcott, the defense psychologist, had conducted formal neuropsychological testing. Wala had not. A psychiatrist named Dr. Stuart Grassian, who specialized in the effects of solitary confinement, also examined Allen's records and testified that he displayed symptoms consistent with delirium. Grassian testified that prolonged isolation affects a prisoner's ability to retain memories and distinguish between real and imagined events. Three experts. Two said Allen's mind was broken by his confinement. One said he was faking. The jury sided with the one. Before the trial reached a courtroom, Allen nearly lost his lawyers. In October 2023, crime scene photographs from the case were leaked. The photos had passed through defense attorney Andrew Baldwin's office. Baldwin later said he had trusted someone with access to his workspace and had been betrayed. Judge Francis Gull characterized the attorney's handling of the material as grossly negligent. On October 19th, both Baldwin and his co-counsel Brad Rossi withdrew from the case.