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After Richard Allen was convicted of killing middle schoolers Abigail Williams and Liberty German, he has been sentenced to 130 years in prison.
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Richard Allen is facing over a century behind bars.
After the 52-year-old was charged and convicted of killing two middle school girls, Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, in a gruesome 2017 double murder, he has been sentenced to 130 years in prison, per NBC News.
Arrested for the crime in 2022, Allen was convicted following a four-week trial last month. His sentence is the maximum legal amount, with Judge Frances C. Gull telling Allen his act ranks “right up there with the most hideous crimes.”
Gull also expressed empathy for Williams’ and German’s loved ones, adding, “These families will deal with your carnage forever.”
Attorneys for Allen—who had pleaded not guilty in the case—noted that their client plans to appeal the conviction, saying in a sentencing memo obtained by NBC, “Richard Allen maintains his innocence.”
The initial arrest of Allen, for which authorities said at the time they found “probable cause,” occurred five years after the murders of Williams and German took place in the small Indiana town of Delphi. The 13-year-old and 14-year-old—who had been close friends—were found slain off the path of Monon High Bridge Trail after their parents reported them missing.
During the trial, the prosecution presented evidence captured on German’s cell phone the day of her death, which was a video depicting a man, whom the prosecutors argued was Allen, walking toward the girls on a bridge—later referred to as “the bridge guy.”
“Now all the pieces are clear,” Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland explained during the trial, per WTHR. “Richard Allen is the ‘bridge guy.’ He kidnapped them and later murdered them. He slit their throats. He stole the youth and life away from Abby and Libby.”
After his 2022 arrest, Allen, a former clerk at CVS, admitted he had been at the bridge the day of German and Williams’ killings, but repeatedly denied the act, per NBC News.
Jeremy Hogan/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
However, during a phone call from jail to his wife, he told her in a recording played by the prosecution during the trial, “I did it, I killed Abby. I killed Abby and Libby.”
Allen’s wife said on the call that she did not believe him and that medication must’ve been “messing with his mind.”
Indeed, defense attorney Brad Rozzi also attributed Allen’s confessions to a “mental health crisis,” caused by solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison noting, “How much can one human endure?”
Allen’s wife also told WTHR reporters after his conviction, “This isn’t over at all.”
(E! News and NBC News are both part of NBCUniversal.)
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