Autopsy in Delphi murders trial shocks jury as girls’ cause of death is revealed for the first time
Images of the gruesome wounds sustained by Liberty German and Abigail Williams were displayed in court during the Delphi murder trial Wednesday.
As Richard Allen’s high-profile trial for the teenage friends’ murders entered its fifth day jurors were visibly stricken as forensic pathologist Dr Roland Kohr gave evidence regarding the autopsies he had conducted on both girls and testified that both had bled to death.
It is the first time any details of the girls’ injuries and cause of death have been made public.
Pictures of both girls’ gaping neck wounds were displayed on a large screen placed directly in front of the jurors. One man put his head in his hands, breathed deeply and reddened. Behind him a woman put her hand over her mouth.
Libby, 14, and Abby, 13, were killed outside their home town of Delphi, Indiana, in February 2017
The abandoned Monon High Bridge outside Delphi, Indiana, where Abby and Libby were murdered
In pictures both girls were seen lying on the mortuary table on their backs, their neck wounds gaping wide. Both were 5ft 4, Abby weighed 95lbs and Libby 200lbs
James Luttrull Jr told the court that there would not be any images from the internal examination of the girls and a female voice could be heard uttering ‘Oh thank God,’ from where Allen’s wife, Kathy, sat with supporters.
Abby sustained just one cut, between 5 and 6 cm in length and less than an inch deep. It ran right to left and was deep enough to partially cut her jugular vein meaning her death would not have been quick. The doctor estimated it would have taken the 13-year-old five to ten minutes to bleed out.
He told the court she would have ‘felt pain,’ before going into ‘fight or flight mode’ and panic setting in.
He said, ‘Her heart rate and her blood pressure would rise, and her breathing become more rapid.’
The bleeding would, he said, be ‘passive’ as no arteries were injured. He said, ‘It’s going to take some time before you lose enough blood…[for] the onset of shock.’ From there, he told the hushed courtroom, organs would start to fail, and consciousness be lost. ‘She was not dead immediately,’ he said.
Libby’s wounds were more severe and also made for distressing viewing. On first glance it appeared that the 14-year-old had three deep slashes to her throat to the left, the center and the right.
In fact, Kohr testified, she had sustained four or five deep cuts as at least one of the wounds showed evidence of overlapping cutting.
The slashes partially severed Libby’s left carotid artery and fully severed both her right carotid artery and her jugular vein. She would have bled more quickly than her friend, but her death was not instantaneous either as, the pathologist testified, swelling in her brain was evidence of a more protracted death.
In pictures both girls were seen lying on the mortuary table on their backs, their neck wounds gaping wide. Both were 5ft 4, Abby weighed 95lbs and Libby 200lbs.
Neither, the court heard, showed any physical signs of sexual trauma – though it was pointed out this did not mean no sexual activity occurred – nor did they display any defensive wounds. But Libby’s hands were covered in blood suggesting, the doctor said, she may have desperately tried to stem the bleeding at her neck.
Eyewitness Sarah Carbaugh told the court she had seen a ‘bloody and muddy’ man fitting Bridge Guy’s description walking away from Monon High Bridge trail around 4pm the day the girls’ went missing
The trail in Delphi, Indiana, where Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, were killed
A faint red line across Abby’s chin and under her mouth suggested, he said, that either duct tape or some sort of material restraint had been placed over that portion of her face at the time of her death.
Asked if the girls’ state of livor mortis – the skin discoloration that occurs when blood settles postmortem – was consistent with them having died 40 to 41 hours prior to autopsy Kohr answered ‘Yes.’ But under cross examination he admitted that establishing time of death was challenging and speculative at best.
Earlier, jurors had heard from a final eyewitness, Sarah Carbaugh, who told the court she had seen a ‘bloody and muddy’ man fitting Bridge Guy’s description walking away from Monon High Bridge trail around 4pm the day the girls’ went missing.
She said that she looked at him as she drove by in the opposite direction, but he did not make eye contact with her.
When challenged over the consistency of her recollection – transcripts of her three interviews with law enforcement show she did not mention ‘blood’ until a 2019 interview – Carbaugh insisted that she had always mentioned both mud and blood.
She argued that she may have mumbled during her first interview and pointed to the fact that more than an hour of video of her second interview has been lost.
Richard Allen denies murdering Liberty and Abby who were killed while hiking in their hometown of Delphi, Indiana
Prosecutor’s struggled to have the witnesses positively identify that Allen was the suspicious man on the trail
In an increasingly ill-tempered exchange with defense attorney Andrew Baldwin, Carbaugh snapped, ‘I saw Bridge Man walking along the road. He was covered in mud and blood and that’s that.’
Forensic Digital Examiner First Lieutenant Christopher Cecil took the stand to tell the jury what information could be gleaned from Libby’s cell phone which was recovered from underneath Abby’s body at the scene.
He told the court that after she took the video of Bridge Guy at 2.13pm there was a failed attempt to open the phone using biometric data (a fingerprint) at 2.14pm.
At 2.18pm information retrieved from Apple’s Health App showed that the phone had stopped moving but started moving again at 2.25pm. It then stopped moving for the last time at 2.32pm.
During that time, it covered 50.64 meters and had an elevation change – which could have been both up and down – totaling two floors or 20 feet.
More than two hours after the last known movement of the phone a frantic message from Libby’s grandmother, Becky Patty landed stating, ‘You need to call me right now!!!!’
Richard Allen is slight, gaunt, with closely cropped hair and barely five-feet, yet witness Breann Wilber described ‘Bridge Guy’ as tall and muscular
There was no activity of any kind recorded from that moment until 4.33am the next morning when 15 messages and numerous FaceTime call attempts and iMessage’s populated the cell phone.
The prosecution could not explain this twelve hour ‘black out’ but Cecil said that the phone had not been powered down during that time.
But while the state had no explanation the defense has forwarded one. Their theory is that Libby and Abby were moved, in a vehicle, and taken out of range of the nearest cell tower and only returned there in the early hours of the morning to be murdered and dumped at which time the cell phone reconnected to the network.
Cecil conceded he did not know if the Health App would register movement if the phone were in a car.
