The voice on the recording is calm, low, deliberate. Two words, spoken by a man on an abandoned railroad bridge in northern Indiana, captured on a cell phone by a fourteen-year-old girl in the last minutes of her life. Nobody knows exactly what made Libby German reach into her pocket and press record as she crossed the Monon High Bridge on the afternoon of February 13th, 2017. Maybe she sensed the man behind her.

Maybe it was instinct. She got forty-three seconds of footage, shaky and grainy, but it was enough to change everything. That afternoon, two girls went for a walk and never came home. What followed was a case that went cold for five and a half years.

The killer kept living in the same small town, going to work, coming home, while the families of those girls went to press conference after press conference and begged the world for answers. And in 2026, nine years later, this case is still not over. Abigail J. Williams was thirteen years old, from the Delphi area.

Liberty Rose Lynn German was fourteen, also from the Delphi area. The authorities called it a double homicide investigation. Before going anywhere near that bridge, it helps to know who Abby and Libby were, because the story only lands the way it should when you understand exactly what was lost that day. Delphi, Indiana, sits in Carroll County, north of Indianapolis, population just under three thousand.

It is the kind of town where the same families have lived on the same streets for three and four generations, where everybody knows your name, where kids still roam free after dark, and nobody locks their doors. On the edge of town, a stretch of walking paths called the Delphi Historic Trails leads out to an old abandoned railroad trestle known as the Monon High Bridge. It was built in 1891. The last train crossed it in 1929.

By 2017, it was rotting, the wooden ties weathered for nearly a century, no handrails, sixty-three feet above Deer Creek. Kids, families, and teenagers had been hiking out there for years. It was a local landmark. Nobody worried about that trail.

Abigail Joyce Williams was born on June 23rd, 2003. Everyone called her Abby. She was raised by her single mother, Anna Williams, in Delphi. She loved helping other people, being around her nieces, playing games, drawing, and art, being creative.

She had a way of making you feel like everything was going to be okay just by walking into the room. Warm, bright, easy to be around, she was in eighth grade at Delphi Community Middle School. Abby wanted to be a forensic scientist, to study crime scenes, analyze evidence, and bring answers to families who had none. She had no idea her own death would become one of the most analyzed cases in the history of Indiana.

Liberty Rose Lynn German was born on December 27th, 2002. Everyone called her Libby. She lived with her grandparents, Becky and Mike Patty, who raised her as their own. She was very giving, always sticking up for the underdog.

She played volleyball, was in the school band, athletic, funny, full of the kind of energy that fills up a room. Libby wanted to work for the FBI, to investigate crimes, track down people who hurt others, and make people safe. She had no idea that one Monday afternoon she would end up helping catch her own killer. The morning of February 13th, 2017, started like any unexpected day off.

Schools across Carroll County were closed for a snow makeup day. Libby asked her grandmother Becky if she and Abby could go out to the Monon Bridge Trail. They had been there before. It was a normal thing to ask.

Becky said yes on one condition: arrange your own ride there and back. Libby called her older sister. “I was getting ready for work, and Libby burst open the bathroom door as I’m just sitting there getting ready, and she says, ‘Hey, can we go to High Bridge today? ’” Kelsey German agreed to drop them off.

At 1:30 in the afternoon, Kelsey pulled up to the trailhead on County Road 300 North, just east of the Hoosier Heartland Highway. The girls got out. As Abby stepped out of the car, she turned back to Kelsey and said she loved her. Kelsey would later say that was the last thing she ever heard Abby say.

“The moment I dropped them off, Libby got out of the car and turned around and told me she loved me. And just from knowing that those were the last words is one of the most helpful things to me. ”

A pickup was arranged within the hour. The trail was familiar.

The weather was mild. Everything seemed completely fine. It wasn’t, because somewhere on that trail, a man was already there, and he had already seen them. At 2:13 in the afternoon, while crossing the Monon High Bridge, Libby took out her phone.

Nobody knows exactly why she pressed record. What we know is that she did it, and what the camera caught changed everything. The footage, forty-three seconds long, grainy and shaky, shows a man: blue or black jacket, jeans, hands in his pockets, hat pulled low, walking behind them on the bridge, moving with purpose. And then one of the girls, investigators believe it was Libby, says: “There’s no path down here.

We’ve got to go down here. ” And then his voice, low, calm, deliberate. That was the last known recording of Liberty German. She was fourteen years old.

By 5:00 that evening, the girls hadn’t come back. By 5:30, their families called the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department. Search parties moved through the woods along Deer Creek within the hour. Families, volunteers, and law enforcement searched through the night.

Nothing. The next morning was February 14th, Valentine’s Day. At 12:15 in the afternoon, a man named Pat Brown was moving through the brush near the north bank of Deer Creek, half a mile east of the bridge. Pat Brown was a friend of Mike Patty’s, Libby’s grandfather.

He was out there because he knew this family. He pushed through the tree line and stopped. He later told the court: “I thought they were mannequins. I turned around and I yelled, ‘We found them.

’”

Another searcher, Jake Johns, found disturbed ground nearby: shoe prints, rocks and dirt that had clearly been moved. A friend ran up to one of them and said her husband had called her and told her the girls had been found, but she wouldn’t say anything more. The bodies of Abby Williams and Libby German were found fifty feet from the north bank of Deer Creek, partially covered with sticks, placed there deliberately. Both girls had their throats cut.

Abby was found wearing Libby’s clothes. Libby was found without hers. Some clothing was recovered from the creek south of the bodies. And between them, less than two feet from one of the girls, lay a single unspent bullet: a .

40 caliber round. Nobody knew whose gun it came from. ISP crime scene investigators Brian Olehy, Jason Paige, and Dwayne Datsun processed the scene alongside Carroll County Deputy Darren Johncola. More than fifty photographs were taken.

When jurors saw those photographs seven years later, many of them wept. The land where the girls were found belonged to a man named Ron Logan. He had lived on County Road 300 North for more than fifty years. His property sat fourteen hundred feet from where those girls took their last breath.

Within days, investigators served search warrants on his home, his vehicle, and his outbuildings. The FBI noted his physical build matched the man on the bridge. His voice, in the words of investigators, was not inconsistent with the recording Libby captured. He lied about his alibi.

His cell phone data contradicted him. He even gave reporters tours of his own property, walking them to the exact spot where the bodies were found. But no physical evidence tied him to the murders. He was released.

He died in 2020. There was one detail investigators could not explain: the sticks. The girls’ bodies hadn’t just been covered; they had been arranged deliberately. Within two days of the murders, Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett called in the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit to evaluate the placement.

The FBI did not rule out ritual involvement. Their assessment stated: “It remains possible that a new believer or rogue believer in Odinism was involved in this case. ” Odinism, a form of Norse paganism. A Purdue University professor told investigators the stick pattern was quite plausible as inspired by Norse runes.

An ISP undercover trooper identified a blood mark on a nearby tree as a Fehu rune. And then there was this: February 13th, 2017, the day Abby and Libby were killed, was Valasblot, a Norse pagan holiday honoring the son of Odin. This theory was looked into, then quietly set aside. It comes back later in a way nobody expected.

While investigators were still trying to make sense of those sticks, a man three miles away was about to pick up the phone and call the police. He was going to tell them he had been on that trail the same day, at the same time. He was going to report himself. February 15th, 2017, two days after the murders, Indiana State Police held a press conference and for the first time showed the world what Libby had captured on her phone: a grainy still image, a silhouette on a bridge, a man in a jacket with his hands in his pockets.

The internet named him immediately: Bridge Guy. A week later, on February 22nd, police released the audio. That voice: “Down the hill. ”

Twelve anonymous tips were coming in every hour.

Within a day, the volume forced the FBI’s Major Case Contact Center in Washington, D. C. , to take over. Six thousand electronic billboards were deployed across forty-six states.

The reward climbed, first to $96,000. Then, on March 1st, former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee and team owner Jim Irsay donated $97,000. The reward hit $200,000. And still no arrest.

Three days after the bodies were found, on February 17th, something happened that nobody paid much attention to at the time. A man named Richard Allen called DNR Captain Dan Doolin and said he wanted to self-report. He said he had been on the trail on February 13th between 1:00 and 3:30 in the afternoon. He said he saw three young girls.

He said he wasn’t paying much attention; he was checking a stock ticker on his phone. He refused to meet at a police station. They met in a store parking lot. Doolin took the report and filed it.

The report was entered under the name Richard Allen Weidman, Weidman being the street he lived on, and labeled cleared. Richard Allen disappeared into a box of tips. Five and a half years passed. In the meantime, investigators were chasing other names.

In July 2017, ISP released a composite sketch of Bridge Guy: an older man, forties to fifties, reddish-brown hair. Tips poured in. No arrest. In April 2019, police released a second sketch, completely different: younger, curly hair, no facial hair.

Two sketches, two different faces, same case. At that 2019 press conference, ISP Superintendent Doug Carter looked directly into the camera and said: “We know who you are. ”

Somewhere watching was Richard Allen, a CVS pharmacy technician from Delphi, whose name was already in that box, misfiled, forgotten. Other names came and went.

In September 2017, Daniel Nations was declared a person of interest after being arrested in Colorado Springs for threatening hikers with a hatchet. DNA cleared him. James Brian Chadwell surfaced based on social media activity. He was never charged.

The case was going cold. Then, in September 2022, a retired child protective services worker named Kathy Shank was volunteering to help digitize thousands of old tips and documents. She pulled a report out of a folder. She read the date.

She read the location. She read the name: Richard Allen. February 13th, 2017, Monon High Bridge Trail. She brought it to the detective in charge.

Within weeks, Allen’s . 40 caliber SIG Sauer P226 handgun was matched to the unspent bullet found between the girls’ bodies, through the quality and quantity of marks left on the cartridge, by ISP crime lab technician Melissa Oberg. Five years, eight months, thirteen days. A misfiled piece of paper, a retired volunteer, a box nobody had opened yet.

That is how close this case came to never being solved. But before the arrest, there is someone else who belongs in this story. The night before the girls walked onto that trail, Libby was at a sleepover, messaging someone she had never met, someone who was not who he said he was. Between 2016 and 2017, a social media account called anthony_shots was active on Instagram and Snapchat.

The profile looked like a lifestyle page: sports cars, designer clothes, stacks of cash. None of it was real. The photos were stolen from a male model in Alaska who had no idea his image was being used. The man running the account was nothing like the person he pretended to be.

The account also used a second persona, a girl named Emily, to build trust with girls who might have been suspicious of a male stranger. Police forensics later determined at least two people had access to the account, based on differences in messaging style. The man whose name was eventually tied to it was a twenty-two-year-old named Kegan Anthony Kline, from Peru, Indiana, about thirty miles from Delphi. Kegan Kline had been talking to Libby German the night of February 12th, 2017, the night before the murders.

Libby was at a sleepover messaging anthony_shots. Investigators who reviewed those messages later said: “Unfortunately, she was completely enthralled with anthony_shots. ” Somewhere in those conversations, the account told her to meet at the Monon High Bridge. The night before she was killed, someone told Libby German to go to that bridge.

Twelve days after the murders, on February 25th, 2017, investigators served a search warrant on Kegan Kline’s home in Peru. He admitted the account was his. He admitted talking to underage girls, soliciting photographs, and using the Emily persona to gain their trust. He also admitted deleting his phone’s search history between February 10th and February 15th, the exact days surrounding the murders.

He was given a polygraph. When asked whether he knew who killed Abby and Libby, he failed. “I gave up my DNA, a hair follicle test. I’ve done everything they wanted me to.

” No physical evidence placed Kegan Kline at the scene, but the questions, the timing, the deleted history, the failed polygraph, and the message telling Libby to go to that bridge did not go away. In August 2020, Kline was arrested: child exploitation, child solicitation, child pornography, obstruction of justice, identity deception. In March 2023, he pleaded guilty to twenty-five counts. On July 27th, 2023, a Miami County judge sentenced him to forty-three years in prison.

Deputy Prosecutor Courtney Alwine told the court: “He is someone who has made children his prey. ” Before sentencing, Kline addressed the court. He said: “I made fake profiles because of my loneliness. ”

Kegan Kline has never been charged with the murders of Abby Williams and Libby German.

Whether the anthony_shots account helped lead someone to that bridge remains officially unanswered. And while all of this was unfolding, the actual killer was still in Delphi, going to work, coming home, living among the same families, putting up orange porch lights, and begging for answers. Richard Matthew Allen was born in September 1972 and grew up in Mexico, Indiana. He played football and ran track at North Miami High School in Denver, Indiana, graduating in 1991.

He attended Ivy Tech Community College and had short stints in the Army and National Guard. He married and had one daughter. In December 2006, he moved to Delphi. He worked as a store manager at Walmart in Logansport, then joined CVS Pharmacy.

Quiet, unremarkable, the kind of person you pass on the street and forget immediately. He processed photos at that CVS counter for families all across Carroll County, including, it would later emerge, for families connected to this very case. And he had been on that trail the afternoon the girls disappeared. He had told police himself.

On October 13th, 2022, Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett and Investigator Steve Mullen brought Allen in for a second interview. He said he went to the bridge that day to watch the fish. He said he wore jeans and a blue or black jacket. He said he and his wife owned multiple guns.

Investigators executed a search warrant on his home. Inside, they found a . 40 caliber SIG Sauer P226, a blue Carhartt jacket, multiple knives, and ammunition in a wooden keepsake box pulled from a dresser between two closets. ISP crime lab technician Melissa Oberg matched the unspent bullet from the crime scene to Allen’s specific gun through the marks left on the cartridge.

On October 26th, 2022, Allen was brought back in, this time to the ISP post in West Lafayette. ISP lead investigator Jerry Holman sat across from him and laid out what they had. Asked whether the man in Libby’s video was him, Allen answered: “If it was taken with the girls’ phone, it is absolutely… I mean, it’s not me, but I never have met these girls before, so even if I thought it looked like me… If it was taken with the girls’ phone, there’s no way it could be. I’ve never met them.

I’ve never seen them. ”

He was taken into custody that afternoon. His wife, Kim, was brought into the room. He told her: “I know you know I didn’t do this.

I guess that’s what I’m saying. You know, I’m not even… I’m not going to sit here and try to convince you. I know you know me. I know you know that I didn’t do this, have anything to do with it.

Let’s talk about scheming or something. ” She asked: “How did the bullet from your gun get out there? ” He answered: “I don’t know. ”

On October 28th, 2022, the arrest was made public.

Delphi was stunned. Mike Patty said: “How can somebody do that and just go on living life like nothing happened? ” Anna Williams said: “We really had somebody living amongst us that had done this and never let on. ”

Allen pleaded not guilty.

In April 2025, interrogation videos were released publicly for the first time by YouTuber Tom Webster. Over three hours of footage showed Allen being questioned and speaking on prison phone calls with his wife and his mother. He wasn’t just denying everything. He was also confessing, over and over again: “I killed Abby and Libby.

” “No, you didn’t. ” “Yes, I did. ” “No, you didn’t, Darren. ” “Yes, I did.

It’s okay, honey. I did it. I cannot stop. ”

Before a single juror was seated, this case had already become one of the most legally chaotic in Indiana history.

Defense attorneys Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rossi had been removed from the case for seventy-nine days before the Indiana Supreme Court reinstated them. In September 2023, they went public with an alternative theory: that the murders were ritualistic killings tied to Odinism, Norse paganism. They pointed to the sticks, the date, the blood, and a man named Brad Holder, a confirmed Odinist whose son was a friend of Abby Williams, who had posted images on social media mirroring unreleased crime scene details. Defense expert Dr.

Don Perlmuter identified seven hallmarks of Norse pagan ritual at the scene. On September 4th, 2024, special judge Frances Gull blocked the Odinism defense entirely. The jury would never hear it. Jury selection began October 14th, 2024, one hundred miles away in Fort Wayne.

Twelve jurors and four alternates were sequestered for the entire trial. On October 18th, the trial opened at the Carroll County Courthouse in Delphi, two miles from where the girls were found. Prosecutor Nicholas McClelland told the jury Allen was the last face those girls saw. Defense attorney Andrew Baldwin said his client was truly innocent and the case had been mishandled from the start.

Over three weeks of testimony, Kathy Shank took the stand and told the jury how Allen’s name had sat in a box for five years. Sarah Carbaugh testified she saw a man walking away from the bridge on February 13th, muddy, bloody, head down. She identified him as Richard Allen. On October 22nd, ISP forensic expert Brian Bonner played the forty-three-second video for the jury.

For the first time in a courtroom, they saw what Libby German captured on that bridge. Pathologist Roland Koor testified Libby would have bled to death within five to ten minutes. There was no sexual assault, no defensive wounds. On October 28th, the jury heard that no DNA evidence found at the crime scene matched Richard Allen.

Not one sample. The defense leaned into that: no DNA, no fingerprints, no named eyewitness on the bridge. Then came the confessions. Westville correctional psychologist Monica Walla testified Allen told her directly: “I killed Abby and Libby.

” According to her report, Allen said he ordered the girls down the hill, saw a van, panicked, and killed them, then covered their bodies with sticks and left. Prison phone calls were played for the jury. He said it no fewer than sixty times: to his wife, to his mother Janice, to his psychologist, to corrections officers, to other inmates. Sixty confessions.

He still pleaded not guilty. The defense had one final point. Allen had confessed to shooting the girls. The girls were not shot.

Dr. Polly Westcott testified Allen had spent thirteen months in solitary confinement, housed alongside Indiana’s most dangerous offenders. He had deteriorated severely. He had experienced psychosis.

A man in that condition is capable of saying anything without it being true. ISP investigator Steve Mullen confirmed on the stand that a DVR error in September 2017 had erased every recorded police interview from the first seven days of the investigation. Not one of those persons of interest was ever re-interviewed. The jury deliberated for four days, eighteen hours.

On November 11th, 2024, the verdict came back: guilty on all four counts. Kelsey German posted one word that night: “grateful. ”

On December 20th, 2024, at the Carroll County Courthouse, Judge Frances Gull looked at Richard Allen and said: “You rank right up there with the most heinous crimes in Indiana’s history. These families will deal with your carnage forever.

” She sentenced him to sixty-five years for Abby and sixty-five for Libby, consecutive, one hundred thirty years total. Allen showed no reaction. Abby’s grandmother Diane Erskine addressed the court: “I’ve watched her friends graduate college and wonder how many great-grandkids were murdered that day, too. ”

Richard Allen’s attorneys were already preparing their next move, and what they found was something the jury never got to hear.

In December 2025, Baldwin and Rossi filed a 113-page appeal with the Indiana Court of Appeals. Three arguments. First, the search of Allen’s home was unconstitutional: investigators omitted and altered key facts in the warrant application. Second, the confessions: thirteen months of solitary confinement broke Allen; what the jury heard as admissions were the fractured words of a man who had lost his grip on reality.

Third, the jury never heard the full story. Allen said he panicked when he saw a van. Prosecutors told the jury that van belonged to Brad Weber, and the timing proved the confession was real. But here is what the jury never knew: Libby German’s cell phone was still transmitting, still moving, for twenty-five minutes after security footage showed Brad Weber’s van arriving home, miles from the trail.

The defense was never permitted to present that. And Allen confessed to shooting the girls. The girls were not shot. In November 2025, twelve hundred pages of Odinism-related evidence were filed publicly for the first time.

At the center stood Brad Holder, the confirmed Odinist whose son was a friend of Abby’s, with social media posts mirroring unreleased crime scene details. A painting defense experts say resembles one of the girls’ bodies. The FBI never ruled out Odinism. Dr.

Don Perlmuter identified seven ritual hallmarks. The jury saw none of it. On May 15th, 2026, the Indiana Court of Appeals granted oral arguments. September 21st, 2026, ten o’clock in the morning, at the Indiana State House in Indianapolis, the hearing was webcast live, thirty minutes per side, three judges.

If persuaded, Allen’s convictions could be overturned. Less than five percent of Indiana convictions are reversed on appeal, but this case has defied statistics before. Ron Logan is dead. Whatever he knew, he took it with him.

Connie Dielman still believes he was involved. He was never charged, never tried, never made to answer. Kegan Kline is serving forty-three years for what he did to children. He has never been charged with the murders of Abby and Libby.

Whether anthony_shots led someone to that bridge remains officially unanswered. Becky Patty learned how Libby died from a funeral director, who told her to bring clothes with a scarf so the wounds on Libby’s neck wouldn’t show. Mike Patty attended press conference after press conference for eight years. When the verdict came, he said justice had been served.

Then he said there would never be closure. Anna Williams asked people across Indiana to turn on an orange porch light. Thousands of lights came on. The Abby and Libby Memorial Park is still being built one mile north of Delphi.

The library at their school now bears their names, in wood, in stone, and on shelves full of books. On the morning of February 13th, 2017, Libby German asked her grandmother if she and Abby could go for a walk. Becky said yes. On a bridge above Deer Creek, something made Libby reach into her pocket and press record.

We don’t know what she was thinking. We only know what she left behind: forty-three seconds, a voice, a case that, because of her, was eventually solved. Abby Williams, June 23rd, 2003 to February 13th, 2017. Thirteen years old.

Libby German, December 27th, 2002 to February 13th, 2017. Fourteen years old. They deserved more time.