Abby & Libby - The Delphi Murders - Richard Allen Arrested - #180

[TTF14]

how long will we have to wait for the prosecution to come back with a counter? ( that’s if they do)

They probably know JG will strike it down, so maybe they won't bother.

 

[AugustWest]

There is NO EXPECTATION OF PRIVACY in jail for any inmate. None (except when speaking with attorneys). If RA was blabbing confessions to everyone coming and going, those are not protected conversations. How many defendants have been convicted in part by the testimony of cell mates or other prisoners? Countless.

Being yelled at all hours of the night by other inmates, the size of his cell, his suicide watch precautions are standard. That is what happens while incarcerated, I can only imagine it would have been worse for RA because of the charges against him, ie child killer etc. It would have been the same in a local jail IMO, but much harder to protect him.

RSBM

What you have stated about the expectation of privacy is generally true. However, the problem here is that RA is not an inmate. He is considered a pretrial detainee. Generally, the rules are similar for pretrial detainees (no expectation of privacy) but is much more nuanced than with the rules for an inmate. Several rights are retained by pretrial detainees that inmates are not granted. These rules are very complicated, usually are visited on a case-by-case basis by the courts, and differ from one Circuit court to the next. This is likely why the defense is arguing that inmates were acting as agents of the state. If the state uses trickery to elicit a confession, or uses coercion through the inmates, the likelihood that the confessions will be suppressed is higher.

 

[TL4S]

And risk disbarment? Nah.

Is it possible there were no confessions to the wife and mother? I can't remember where we heard he confessed to his wife and mother, but if it was a game of telephone like what seems to have happened here (with the "prisoners as guards" telling other prisoners what he said, then they passed it on to family members on the outside....)....

I really need more coffee so forgive me if my brain is not yet keyed up.....

Indiana man confessed to murders of teenage girls in phone call with his wife, documents say

“Investigators had the phone call transcribed and the transcription confirms that Richard Allen admits that he committed the murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German,” reads a motion filed April 20 by Carroll County prosecutor Nicholas McLeland. “He admits several times within the phone call that he committed the offenses as charged. His wife, Kathy Allen, ends the phone call abruptly.”

 

[steeltowngirl]

KAK confirmed he was the anthony_shots account in his 194 page LE interrogation.

Thank you!! And not that I did not take your word for it, but you prompted me to keep digging.

But to Libby, Kline may have been known by another name: his online persona Anthony Shots, a social media account that used fake pictures of a male model to solicit nude photos of teenage girls between 2016 and 2017. Kline admitted to police the anthony_shots account was used to talk to underage girls. He told police he’d find girls, both people he knew and didn’t know, on Instagram and ask them to message him on Snapchat or other apps.

A break in the Delphi murders? Transcripts reveal new details

DELPHI, Ind. — For five years, the murders of 13-year-old Abby Williams and 14-year-old Libby German have hung over Delphi, ghosts that couldn’t be put to rest. On Feb. 13, 2017, the two best…

fox59.com

 

[StarryStarryNight]

And risk disbarment? Nah.

Is it possible there were no confessions to the wife and mother? I can't remember where we heard he confessed to his wife and mother, but if it was a game of telephone like what seems to have happened here (with the "prisoners as guards" telling other prisoners what he said, then they passed it on to family members on the outside....)....

I really need more coffee so forgive me if my brain is not yet keyed up.....

Yes, there are confessions recorded that were made to his wife and mother. RA’s defense attorney’s said as much in open court.
The defense attorneys are certainly capable of coming up with this strategy. Honesty is not their strong point.
They don’t worry about disbarment. They have a large fan base that sees this as a tough and vigorous defense.

 

[Salah11]

Indiana man confessed to murders of teenage girls in phone call with his wife, documents say

“Investigators had the phone call transcribed and the transcription confirms that Richard Allen admits that he committed the murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German,” reads a motion filed April 20 by Carroll County prosecutor Nicholas McLeland. “He admits several times within the phone call that he committed the offenses as charged. His wife, Kathy Allen, ends the phone call abruptly.”

I can not imagine the horror of a man you have been married to for decades and have a child with admitting he brutally killed two teenage girls. I can see why she hung up. That’s a lot to process.

 

[layer]

I can not imagine the horror of a man you have been married to for decades and have a child with admitting he brutally killed two teenage girls. I can see why she hung up. That’s a lot to process.

I wonder if she will testify as to why she hung up.

 

[layer]

While we're on the subject of the confessions, I'm curious about the other girls RA confessed to molesting. Do we even know if that was ever investigated?

 

[steeltowngirl]

I wonder if she will testify as to why she hung up.

I will be surprised if she testifies at all, due to spousal privilege. Unless she does it to assist defense.

 

[steeltowngirl]

RSABBM
With utmost respect, this is where I must disagree. If he was BG, would not all that he was subjected to since his arrest have broken him to the point of revealing who the accomplices were? I cannot take the leap and believe he was involved or that he was BG. He didn’t even know the COD. JMHO

Food for thought. Perhaps an accomplice who is already now behind bars was the one who identified RA.

 

[Salah11]

While we're on the subject of the confessions, I'm curious about the other girls RA confessed to molesting. Do we even know if that was ever investigated?

Nope we only know what the defense have claimed.

 

[WildHuncher]

I don't know if or how any of these things were said.

For all we know, someone in the jail could have asked why did you shoot them? To which he hypothetically answered, I did after I told them to undress.

I have a heck of a hard time believing that there isn't A LOT being left out... otherwise, why does the defense want the confessions thrown out?

I still believe that the correct man being accused.


JMO

Yes. You don’t make a big show of getting a confession tossed that’s wrong on the face of it unless you’re selectively leaking via motions. MOO

 

[WildHuncher]

i wonder whether this is a serious effort to suppress in the first place when they left out the most damaging confessions of all. This motion provides no argument or basis to exclude the apparently multiple recorded confessions. They literally make no argument as to why those should be excluded as they don’t even address them.

so is this just more narrative setting for the galleries?

Bingo!

 

[OldCop]

Hi @OldCop , I have questions regarding evidence storage, if you have time.

How does LE make sure homicide case evidence is secure/preserved? What type of measures are typically put into place to avoid loss of data?

In your career, did you ever witness loss of 2 months + 2 weeks and 6TB of homicide case evidence? Or loss of 2 weeks of evidence from the first week after the body(ies) were discovered? If so, what were the circumstances? I understand there can be natural disasters like floods, or fires.

If you were collecting evidence or taking a statement, were there any things that you did individually to secure important information (I.e., make like make duplicate copies that were stored in different places or on a private server)?

To clarify, the reason I ask is because in the transcript from the March 18 (2024) hearing, LE Stephen Mullin testifies that interviews/evidence collected Feb 13-Feb 20 2017 (the first week) stored on a DVR system was lost/it was overwritten-apparently 6TB of interviews missing, which would be approximately 48 hours of constant video recording (p. 49, 52, 55). He also testified investigative data collected between April 28 2017-June 30 2017 was either lost or corrupted (p. 66-76).

How could this lost data potentially influence a homicide case, whether the defendant is guilty or not guilty? Would you consider this a big deal or does it happen often?

Thank you so much for your input!

Source: page 49, 52, 55, 66-76
Transcript: Record of Proceedings at Hearing on Motion to Dismiss, Held MARCH 18, 2024
March 18, 2024 Motion to Dismiss Hearing.pdf

Sorry it has taken so long to respond, @zh0r4 and sorry for the rambling answer. You ask some good questions, some of which are tough to answer because we have so many different sizes of LE agencies and each have their own way of doing things. Some have many more resources than others. That being said any size agency has the absolute responsibility to collect and maintain, in a safe and secure manner, any available evidence in relation to a crime. This includes hard evidence, circumstantial evidence, forensic evidence, digital evidence, and any and all paperwork accumulated during the course of an investigation.
A small town police department may only have one locked evidence room filled with file cabinets and boxes and may contain anything from murder weapons to drugs to recovered stolen goods whereas a big city police department has separate evidence rooms in each division and for each type of crime; homicide, drugs, sexual assault etc.
But I digress.
Recorded interviews should be backed up, duplicated whenever possible, and they should be accompanied by the officer’s hand written notes. Additionally, the officer should type up a report detailing the statements provided by the witness or suspect during the interview or interrogation. The statement should be signed and dated by both the interviewing officer(s) and by the witness/suspect. This provides a good backup up to a recording.
“Securing and protecting digital evidence has always been a problem. Officers and detectives fear that their digital evidence, which is usually stored on a DVD or flash drive, will become lost, broken, or corrupted. The DVR-type systems many agencies use are notorious for being unreliable, recording choppy or digitizing sound (robot noises instead of words).”

5 reasons digital recordings are valuable for suspect interviews

The formal recording of investigative interviews is critical to any criminal case

www.police1.com

Even when LE has good supporting evidence in the event a recording has been damaged or lost, it still may not be enough to convince a jury. They want to see it. When it is missing, some people will believe that the material was intentionally hidden. This in turn causes some jurors to lose trust in the all the prosecution’s evidence. So, yes, when a vital piece of evidence cannot be produced in its original form, it can have a detrimental effect on the prosecution’s case.
I have seen cases where digital evidence was lost or damaged in a current case, but not to the extent we see here. It seems the record keeping in this case was shoddy at best at the local level. I also think there was an over reliance on the FBI ORION system to keep track of everything.
It is more common for files on old cases to be lost. This usually occurs because old files are shifted around, maybe sent to a storage warehouse, to make room for newer cases and make accessibility easier for investigators.

https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/stories/2008/september/orion_092208

Unfortunately, even records at the highest level of government can be compromised.

DHS, DOJ And DOD Are All Customers Of SolarWinds Orion, The Source Of The Huge US Government Hack

A review of government contracts show the use of the hacked Orion tool is widespread, as the impact of the latest cyber espionage campaign is likely to be global.

www.forbes.com

“The National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy, the DHS and the FBI are also amongst the many branches of the U.S. government that have previously bought the tool.”

All the new high tech reporting and collection systems are amazing, but due to conditions of human error, equipment breakdowns, weather/fire loss, it is sometimes the old fashioned handwritten report that saves the day.
There has been a huge push to go paperless in all factions of society, but electronic storage is fallible, too.
I still find it hard to believe that it was months before Investigators realized that the interview tapes had been overwritten. In a case such as this I would have thought investigators would be poring over the tapes to make sure they had not overlooked anything in a witness interview or suspect interrogation. The way the recording system was set up in the interview room leaves much to be desired. From what I understand, you flipped a switch when you entered the room to start recording and then you flipped it back as you left to stop recording. How many times have any of us “left the lights on” when we left a room? The fact that no one else noticed the issue in the intervening months would seem to show that there was little oversight, but also how few serious cases were being investigated in this small town.
I think most if not all of the many mistakes made in this case were due to poor management and inexperience. However, that is no excuse. No matter the size of your town or your budget, you have a moral responsibility to protect any evidence collected in a criminal matter whether you have all the high tech tools available to law enforcement or a pen, paper, and camera.

 

[Emma Peel]

I too and baffled by this. Like are they not challenging those ones? Which makes no sense as they were 'obtained' in the same unconstitutional way according to the defence?

Agree that a lot of detail is missing from this submission, IMO.

FWIW I had this thought:
Maybe both the D and P would submit the family phone confessions, and papers discussing them, in a
sealed-from-public manner? Too sensitive, etc.?

JMO

 

[vinayd]

Excellent @OldCop. It happens. And when it does you better have documentation. I wonder if the number of tips was overwhelming… more than most cases. Surely for that small town.

 

[mrjitty]

Just as baffling to me is why NMcL only mentioned the phone confessions at the June hearing. He didn't mention any of these other confessions to "state actors", yet the D claims the State plans to use them at trial. It's hard to say what strategy is at play here, IMO.

It's interesting to go back and look at the reporting at the time given what we now know. It looks like Rozzi mentioned confessions first in the Safekeeping hearing back in mid june '23 and then McL responded to that, giving the confessions as a reason that he had to be protected from the general prison population. It doesn't look like either attorney was that specific about the nature of the confessions. IIRC that came some days later - i don't recall the details.

But perhaps McL did seem to imply that the other prisoners knew about the confessions?

Here is the MS reporting at the time. I don't know if we have a transcript of any of this.

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[Emma Peel]

I'm really curious about the medication situation. If he was on meds prior to arrest, if they were genuinely being administered incorrectly during the "psychosis" time period, if the "psychosis" stopped with treatment, etc.

One would think a timeline re: meds vs psychosis notes is in order.
They haven't linked his armed service to his depression; wonder when he first sought treatment; wonder if it waxed and waned and for how long. We see the need for the neuropsych expert now. JMO

 

[mrjitty]

We have a right to privacy regarding our mental and physical health records. HIPAA
We have the right to share those records only with the people of our choice.
When we are forced to share those records, there are procedures in place to properly access them.

There would be no reason for his attys to bring his mental records into the picture until it was necessary.
It's been necessary ever since they began to see a decline. They asked that he be transferred out multiple times. There's not much more they can do except continue to put it all on record.

MOO

I guess the counter argument is they moved away from their early claims that he had a psychosis like condition because it would have brought those records in to play, and towards the odinist intimidation stuff as the cause of the confessions - that is explicitly in the Franks.

It does suggest a change of direction to me.

 

[Jade]

We have a right to privacy regarding our mental and physical health records. HIPAA
We have the right to share those records only with the people of our choice.
When we are forced to share those records, there are procedures in place to properly access them.

There would be no reason for his attys to bring his mental records into the picture until it was necessary.
It's been necessary ever since they began to see a decline. They asked that he be transferred out multiple times. There's not much more they can do except continue to put it all on record.

MOO

The D’s deliberately exposing “bona fide mental disorder” RA to known conditions of detainment furthermore denying him mental health considerations and in fact saying completely otherwise as to his mental health needs does not reflect the best for their client.

If you care about RA its best they don’t do too much more for him considering they themselves are putting their neglect of consideration and defense of his mental health on record.

It was necessary before RA’s so called decline. But yeah let’s keep it a secret so he can put on a big show for the D’s.

RA’s mental health is on the D’s who denied it and then entertained themselves with his case.


all imo