A photo has revealed how the local man charged with the 2017 Delphi murders posed for a smiling selfie in front of a police sketch of the suspected killer.
The photo shows Richard Allen, 50, smiling alongside his wife Kathy in a local bar in Delphi, Indiana – the small, closeknit community where he has lived for more than 15 years and where victims Libby German and Abby Williams lived with their families before their brutal killings.
On the wall behind him is a police sketch released by Indiana State Police in 2019 of the man suspected of murdering the teenage best friends. Mr Allen bears some likeness to the drawing.
The selfie was posted by Mr Allen’s wife on Facebook in December 2021 – the same month investigators issued a fresh appeal urging members of the public to come forward with information about an online catfishing account thought to be tied to the murders.
Now, 10 months later, Mr Allen has been arrested and charged with Libby and Abby’s brutal deaths.
The 50-year-old from Delphi was taken into custody on Wednesday and booked into Carroll County Jail. He has since been moved to a state facility for his own safety.
On Monday, Indiana State Police announced that he had been charged with two counts of murder. He has pleaded not guilty and is said to be refusing to cooperate with the investigation.
It is not clear what information has led to Mr Allen’s arrest now, more than five years on from the 2017 murders.
Officials would not rule out the possibility that other individuals were also involved in the teenagers’ brutal murders and, if so, vowed that they will also face charges.
The affidavit is currently under seal, with officials declining to provide additional details about the bombshell development in the high-profile case that has rocked the small, close-knit community of Delphi and gone unsolved for more than half a decade.
Family members of Libby welcomed the charges, with her sister writing on social media: “We got him.”
Before his sudden arrest, Mr Allen’s name was never publicly linked to the case.
At the time of the murders, Mr Allen would have been 44 years old. He appears to have no prior criminal record though jail records list him as also going by the alias of Craigh Ross Rentfrow.
The 50-year-old is a local resident of Delphi, the small, close-knit town of around 3,000 people.
His family home is less than a five-minute drive away from where the bodies of Libby and Abby were found, residing in a neighborhood southwest of the Monon High Bridge.
According to online records, Mr Allen has lived in Delphi there since at least 2006, and in Indiana his whole adult life.
Married to his wife Kathy with whom he shares an adult daughter, Mr Allen is a trained pharmacy technician, receiving his most recent pharmaceutical licence in February 2018 – one year on from the murders.
He currently works at the local CVS store – coming into contact with members of the community as part of his job.
Libby’s grandparents Mike and Becky Patty said that they recalled Mr Allen processing photos for them at the store.
CVS offered its condolences to the victim’s families and said it would cooperate with the investigation in any way it can.
“As members of the Carroll County community, we remain devastated by these murders and our hearts go out to the German and Williams families,” the company said in a statement to local outlet WRTV.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn that one of our store employees was arrested as a suspect in these crimes. We stand ready to cooperate with the police investigation in any way we can.”
Local residents reacted with shock when news broke on Friday of his arrest, saying that he seemed “like a normal guy”.
“When I will go into CVS as a customer myself, he would say ‘do you need any help?’ I would be like ‘no’,” Chandler Underhill, the manager of the local Brick & Mortar Pub, where he said Mr Allen was a regular, told Fox59.
“Just like a normal guy that I’ve seen for the last couple years, not really thinking anything.”
Mr Underhill said that Mr Allen always seemed “normal” when he would come into the pub where he works.
“I would talk; he wouldn’t say much. He seems like a normal guy,” he said.
“One of my servers was telling me that he wouldn’t speak much.”
Libby’s grandfather told reporters on Monday that his granddaughter’s accused killer had been “hiding in plain sight” the whole time.
On 13 February 2017, Libby, 14, and Abby, 13, set off on a hike along the Monon High Bridge Trail in their hometown of Delphi.
During the walk, Libby posted a photo of her best friend walking along the Monon High Bridge. It was the last known photo of Abby before she was killed.
Later that day, the teenagers were reported missing when they failed to return to a spot where a family member was picking them up.
The next day – Valentine’s Day 2017 – their bodies were discovered in a wooded area around half a mile off the trail.
For the last five years, no arrests were made and police remained tightlipped about the crime scene and how the girls died.
Investigators have long been searching for a man captured on Libby’s cellphone before she died.
A grainy video shows a man dressed in blue jeans, a blue jacket and a cap walking along the abandoned railroad bridge.
Investigators released a still image from the video and a chilling audio of the man telling the two girls: “Go down the hill.”
Prior to Mr Allen’s arrest, other names have fallen under suspicion but no one has ever been charged.
Investigators zeroed in on local man Ronald Logan back in 2017, according to a search warrant application filed by an FBI agent back then before being obtained by podcast The Murder Sheet and shared with The Independent this May.
The partly redacted document reveals law enforcement wanted to carry out a search on Mr Logan’s home which was just 1,400 feet from where the girls’ bodies were found.
He had also allegedly lied about where he was at the time that the teenagers disappeared, claiming he was out of the area with a friend when cellphone location data actually placed him in the area around the trail.
The document gave further details about the brutality of the murders, revealing that they were believed to have been killed elsewhere before the murderer moved and staged their bodies at the scene.
The girls had lost “a lot” of blood during their deaths and had been killed by some type of weapon – with the word redacted – the document states.
The murderer would have been covered in the victims’ blood in the aftermath of the slayings due to the “large amount of blood was lost by the victims at the crime scene”, it reads.
The killer was also believed to have taken some sort of souvenir from the scene.
Mr Logan was never charged and he died in 2020.
In December, investigators also honed in on Kegan Anthony Kline, a 27-year-old man with addresses in Kokomo and Peru whose home was searched on suspicion of child porn charges just two weeks after the 2017 murders.
Kline had allegedly confessed to investigators to using the fake social media account @anthony_shots to groom underage girls online and get them to send him nude photos and to arrange to meet him.
The account is believed to have been used to contact one of the victims around the time of her death.
Kline denied any involvement in the murders.
Indiana State Police announced details of the fake account to the public and urged anyone who had communicated with, met, or attempted to meet the individual posing as @anthony_shots to come forward with information.
It is not clear if this is tied in any way to Mr Allen’s arrest or what may have led to his arrest now – more than five years on from the 2017 slayings.
