Delphi defense team claims interviews with 'key suspects' deleted

ALLEN COUNTY, Ind. — The Delphi suspect’s defense team is calling for the murder charges leveled against their client, Richard Allen, to be thrown out after claiming that interview recordings with “key suspects” were deleted in acts the attorneys call either negligent or intentional.

In the latest legal maneuvering in the high-profile murder case, defense attorneys Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi filed their motion to dismiss on the grounds of destruction of evidence key to their defense of Richard Allen.

Allen is accused of killing Abby Williams and Libby German near the Monon High Bridge in Delphi in February 2017. After being arrested in October 2022, Allen was charged with two counts of murder. The prosecutor recently filed to expand the charges against Allen, however, moving to add two additional counts of murder along with two counts of kidnapping.

Long before a public spat between Rozzi and Baldwin and the special judge assigned to the case, which wound up going before the Indiana Supreme Court, Rozzi and Baldwin announced a conspiracy-fueled alternative theory to the Delphi murders that not only didn’t involve their client, Richard Allen, but invoked a ritualistic murder seeped in the occult.

While the Carroll County Prosecutor’s Office deemed the Odinist cult killing theory “unfounded” with “absolutely no proof,” Rozzi and Baldwin point out that investigators did speak with key suspects whom the defense team believe are at the center of the cult theory.

Two of these key suspects were even interviewed by police in the days following the girls’ murders, with at least one of the interviews being specifically noted as being recorded.

Rozzi and Baldwin alleged in their latest motion that documents exist summarizing these two interviews which are paramount to the defense team’s ritualistic killing theory. But these interviews only exist in summary documents, not raw recordings or direct transcriptions of what these two individuals said.

Rozzi and Baldwin state that while attempting to track down the recordings, the pair discovered that the interviews were recorded over due to a “DVR program error” and therefore deleted.

“The destruction of material interviews of key suspects, early in the investigation, demonstrates negligence, if not intentional conduct on the part of the State,” the attorneys wrote.

The attorneys claim these interviews were a key part of their defense, with an important part of their defense strategy being questioning the credibility and accuracy of these two suspects’ statements — two suspects whom the defense team paints as being behind the Delphi murders.

“That evidence is critical to the theory of defense,” Rozzi and Baldwin said.

Baldwin and Rozzi point out one of the possible “discrepancies” they wished to further examine, now jeopardized by the missing interview tape.

The defense team states in August 2023, police conducted a second interview with one of the “key suspects.” In this recorded interview the man reportedly claims to have only met Abby Williams once. But the attorneys said this doesn’t line up with the summary of his interview in 2017 (the one with the deleted recording) where he supposedly claimed to have never met Abby Williams.

“It is therefore plausible that many more contradictions would be available to the defense but for the State’s intentional or negligent failure to preserve all of the evidence,” the attorneys wrote.

This won’t be the first time Allen’s defense team has pushed to throw out his murder charges or to throw out evidence against Allen. Part of Rozzi and Baldwin’s motion to dismiss includes accusations from their denied Franks hearing which called on evidence seized during a search of Allen’s home to be thrown out.

The defense team claimed police misled a judge in applying for the search warrant and claimed police attempted to cover up the identity of a professor whom investigators spoke to about the possibility of Odinist rituals being present at the crime scene.

These previous efforts have all been defeated, however, with the court finding the search of Allen’s home was warranted and that false statements or omitted statements were not used by police to mislead a judge into granting the search warrant. Gull also struck down a separate defense motion to throw out ballistics evidence in the case.

So far, a hearing has not been set to discuss the defense’s latest attempt to exonerate their client.

A Feb. 12 hearing, set to discuss the new charges being leveled against Allen and the prosecution’s attempt to hold Rozzi and Baldwin in contempt of court, remains contested as Allen’s defense team tries to have the hearing pushed back.

A third attempt by Rozzi and Baldwin to have Special Judge Fran Gull thrown off the case was also rejected the same day the defense lawyers filed their motion to dismiss Allen’s charges.

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