ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. — Around 300 summons were sent to prospective jurors in Allen County to start the process of jury selection for the trial of Richard Allen.
A dozen jurors and four alternates will be chosen starting Monday to be sequestered for up to a month, hearing evidence that may solve the killings of teenagers Abby Williams and Libby German near the Monon High Bridge in Carroll County in 2017.
Allen was arrested in October 2022, more than five years after the killings, based on his reported acknowledgement that he was on the bridge that day and an Indiana State Police claim that an unspent bullet found at the crime scene matched a gun seized during a search of Allen’s house.
Investigators also have video images of the suspected killer captured on Libby’s cell phone that day as well as a recorded voice ordering the girls to walk down the hill to the riverbank where their bodies were found.
Witnesses told police they saw a man who may have resembled Allen in the vicinity of the bridge the day the girls were killed.
Delphi’s population is approximately 2,500 and the residents of Carroll County were mobilized in the search for the girls once they were reported missing.
Many people in the community know either the families of the victims or Allen.
Saturation coverage from both traditional and social media has raised the issue of excessive pre-trial publicity leading Allen County Special Judge Fran Gull to select a jury from Fort Wayne to then be transported two hours to Delphi for the duration of the trial.
According to some lawyers, asking jurors to sacrifice a month of their lives away from home to sit in judgement of crime that did not happen locally may make jury selection problematic.
“The length of the trial is also gonna be a big issue. Can people afford to be away from work or family or child obligations for a prolonged period of time?” asked former Johnson County Prosecutor Joe Villanueva. ”Juries can be a hardship on everybody. Everyone is gonna have something.
”There’s a lot that can happen throughout the day and depending on how the judge wishes to address it, how far you get in that jury selection each day, it very well may take all of three days to do those things.”
Madison County Prosecutor Rodney Cummings said the length of the investigation may raise doubts among some jurors.
”The time from when the investigation started until now has been very long and drawn out,” he said. ”I think it gets complicated because the investigation took so long and there are so many avenues that the police take, they have to follow up so many things.”
Gull turned down a request to televise the trial proceedings, even a closed circuit feed, and the size of the Carroll County courtroom and the necessity to set aside seats for dozens of potential jurors in the Allen County courtroom will limit the availability of space for media and the public to observe and report on this case.
“Not everyone that wants to be in that courtroom is probably gonna be able to get in,” said Cummings. ”People who aren’t familiar with the system don’t always understand why things occur the way they occur but I think that when the trial is had, when that happens, and the light is shined on the evidence and the process, I think people will understand much better.”
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