Delphi's Judge Buried Every Alternative Suspect. Then She Did Something Nobody Expected.

Tony Brueski (0:00)

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September 21st, 2026

A courtroom inside the Indiana State House. Three appellate judges sit above two attorneys who have come to argue whether Richard Allen deserves a new trial. Defense attorney Mark Lehmann stands and delivers a sentence that lands like a brick through glass.

For the first time in modern history, the state took a pretrial detainee directly to a cell known as the Hole, kept him there until he descended into psychosis.

Judge Elaine Brown listens. Then she turns to the prosecution and says five words the state of Indiana will not be able to take back.

You protected him into psychosis.

An appellate judge, speaking from the bench, telling the state that it destroyed a man's mind and called it protection.

The oral arguments lasted one hour and fifteen minutes. Each side received thirty minutes. The state sent Ellen Milander from the Indiana Attorney General's office. Her argument was simple. Richard Allen confessed more than sixty times. He placed himself on that bridge. It was Richard Allen himself who identified himself as Bridge Guy in his statements to police. Allen was lucid when he confessed. The confessions count. Lehman's argument was simpler. The state put a man with depression and dependent personality disorder into solitary confinement for thirteen months. It watched him lose nearly fifty pounds. It watched him eat his own waste. Prison psychiatrists deemed him gravely disabled. And then the state walked those confessions into a courtroom and told a jury they were the words of a guilty conscience. The three judges took the case under advisement. No deadline for a ruling. Indiana appellate courts average about two months. It could take a year. But the oral arguments are not the end of this story. They are the last thread in a pattern that stretches back to the first week of the investigation. The pattern runs through the entire case. Not what any single person did wrong. What the system did. Over and over for nearly a decade. Start with what went missing. February 2017

Two girls are found dead in the woods. Within days, detectives begin interviewing persons of interest at the Delphi police station. The station's DVR recording system has a problem. Then Chief Steve Mullen will later testify that the device was somehow engaged in a permanent record mode that caused it to overwrite itself. Every interview conducted at that station is erased. One of those interviews was with Brad Holder, the self-described odinist whose son was dating one of the girls who was killed. His interview was four days after the murders. Gone. Not a single subject is re-interviewed. The content of those recordings is never reconstructed. Asked about it years later, Mullen says, hindsight being 2020, yes.

The state's response to losing potential evidence of alternative suspects is a shrug.

Then the tip. Days after the killings, a man named Richard Allen walks up to a conservation officer in a grocery store parking lot and says he was on the Monon High Bridge trail that afternoon. The officer, Dan Doolin, writes it down. The form is entered into the system as Richard Allen Whiteman. Someone writes one word across it in red ink.

Cleared. That form goes into a desk drawer and sits there for five years. Prosecutor Nick McLeiland said at trial, We don't know to this day who wrote cleared. Sheriff Tony Liggett testified that Allen got lost in the cracks. The only person who placed himself on that bridge at that time, on the day two girls were killed, was cleared by a ghost and forgotten by the system that was supposed to find him. It took a retired child protective services worker named Kathy Schenck to fix the mistake. Schenck had volunteered as a clerk for the investigation. She spent months organizing roughly 14,000 tips that had come in since 2017

In 2022, she opened a desk drawer and found the form.

Richard Allen Whiteman, February 16, 2017, three days after the murders, cleared. Sheriff Liggett later credited her. The reason justice was served today was due to one person who gave herself literally for free to this investigation. A volunteer found what a police force with federal backing could not find in five years. The tip was not hidden. It was not encrypted. It was in a drawer.

Now follow the thread forward from the arrest. October 2022 Allen is arrested on a probable cause affidavit built on a single unspent bullet and a contested forensic method for linking it to his gun. No DNA, no fingerprints, no blood, no witness who saw Allen harm anyone. The state transfers him to Westville Correctional Facility. Not the Carroll County Jail, not a standard pretrial facility. A state prison, maximum-security segregated unit, solitary confinement, 24-hour surveillance, one hour of recreation, five days a week. The only pretrial detainee housed in that unit during the warden's four-year tenure. By April 2023, prison psychologist Dr. Monica Walla documented a grave disability. By May, she diagnosed brief psychotic disorder.