In one of the many confessions Delphi murders suspect Richard Allen allegedly made from prison, he claimed that he was spooked by a white van which caused him to abandon his plan to rape two teenage girls on a hiking trail in the small Indiana town and quickly kill them instead.
But now the credibility of Allen’s confessions is once again in question after a witness testified about a detail that only the killer would know.
Brad Weber, who is a key witness for the prosecution in the case, claims he drove his white van home from work on February 13, 2017, the day Abigail “Abby” Williams, 13, and Liberty “Libby” German, 14, were murdered. At around 2:30 p.m. on that fateful day, he drove by the stretch of Deer Creek where the girls’ bodies were discovered a day later.
The timeline appears to line up with the case laid out by the prosecution which claims that the killer led the girls down the hill at 2:31 p.m., according to pings from Libby’s phone. The phone’s last ping was at 2:32 p.m.
Allen, 52, is on trial for the murders of Abby and Libby, whose slain bodies were found a day after they went missing on February 13, 2017 while walking on a trail at the Monon High Bridge near Delphi. Allen was arrested five years later in October 2022.
Weber was recalled to the stand by the defense this week as attorney Andrew Baldwin tried to discredit his testimony by pointing out that he had given conflicting statements about his timeline to investigators in the days following the murders.
Weber acknowledged that he gave two different stories during two separate interviews in February 2017. In one, he said he drove his white van straight home from work on February 13, 2017, the day of the murders. In the other interview, he said he left work and went to service some ATM machines.
This difference is significant because if Weber did not go straight home from work, the state’s timeline for Allen seeing the van just before the murders does not match up with the way it was told to the jury, Fox 59 reported.
And it further raises questions on the credibility of Allen’s prison confessions, which his attorneys say were made in the throes of a mental health crisis brought on by months of solitary confinement.
Last week, the court heard from psychologist Dr. Monica Wala, who told jurors how Allen confessed to the crimes in detail to her while he was at the Westville Correctional Facility.
She claimed that Allen told her that his intention was to rape the girls but said he was “spooked” by a white van. He then forced them into the woods and slashed their throats before covering the girls with sticks, a detail which matched the crime scene.
Allen, who said he had been following the girls on the bridge, had “messed with his gun,” which he speculated might’ve led to the round being found at the scene, he told Wala.
Weber, who owns the white van, took the stand after Wala. He also owns property next to the Monon High Bridge trails that was searched in the initial hours after the girls went missing.
During cross-examination, Baldwin pressed Weber about his timeline, claiming that according to one of the previous interviews, he had not gone straight home, but had gone to drop off a trailer. Weber denied this multiple times in an exchange that grew heated.
