The .40-caliber pistol is the centerpiece of the physical evidence against Richard Allen. The search warrant that produced it now faces de novo review at the Indiana Court of Appeals — meaning three judges owe no deference to Judge Fran Gull on that issue. If they rule the warrant was deficient, the weapon is gone. Not suppressed for this appeal. Gone from any retrial. Gone from the case permanently.

Defense attorney Bob Motta walks through the de novo standard with Tony Brueski and what it means that this is the one issue where the appellate panel starts from scratch. He also addresses what the rest of Indiana's response brief tells you about the strength of the conviction it's defending. The defense raised a confession that named the wrong method — Allen said shooting, the medical examiner said a blade. They raised an alternative suspect whose interview was allegedly recorded over, whose weapon and phone were never touched. They raised FBI cell data contradicting the van timeline. Indiana answered most of it with procedural objections. Not substance. Paperwork.

Motta gets into the oral arguments motion — the defense formally requested to stand in front of the panel. Indiana did not join. At the Court of Appeals level, that split tells you something about which side trusts its written record and which side would rather the judges never look up from it.

He also addresses the jailhouse calls the jury never heard, including Allen asking his father how much longer he could hold it together. The State played one call and buried two. Three judges now have all of them. Allen remains in an Oklahoma prison over a thousand miles away. The appeal is fully briefed. A decision is coming.

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The Delphi appeal is now fully briefed. Three judges at the Indiana Court of Appeals are reading the full written record. The defense has formally asked to stand in front of them at oral arguments. The State of Indiana has not joined that request. Richard Allen is sitting in an Oklahoma prison for safekeeping while the courtroom that will decide his fate sits more than a thousand miles away.

This is where the procedural posture sits. And this is what it actually contains.

The defense's reply brief lays out a van timeline contradicted by FBI cell data and surveillance footage, a confession to shooting two girls who were killed with a blade, and an alternative suspect whose interview was allegedly recorded over by investigators. Indiana's response brief answers most of it with waiver and harmless error rather than rebuttal.

The reply brief also documents the 13 months Allen spent in solitary at Westville — well past the Indiana Department of Correction's own 30-day cap for inmates with serious mental illness. He lost 45 pounds. He stopped knowing whether he was alive. He ate his Bible. Then he confessed. The State's theory now is that he found religion.

And the search warrant — the foundation for the .40-caliber pistol recovered from Allen's home — gets de novo review. No deference owed to Judge Fran Gull. If three judges rule the warrant was bad, the State's central piece of physical evidence is gone for good.

Defense attorney Bob Motta joins Tony Brueski for a three-part panel on all of it. Three collision points. One fully briefed case. Three judges with the power to take this conviction apart at the seams.

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Richard Allen is not sitting in an Indiana prison. He is in an Oklahoma facility, designated for safekeeping, more than a thousand miles from the courtroom that will decide his appeal. The State of Indiana moved him out of state. The State of Indiana is now also the side telling the Indiana Court of Appeals that the conditions of his pretrial confinement at Westville did not amount to coercion.

That is one of the strange geographic facts sitting underneath the Delphi appeal as it heads into its final procedural stretch.

The case is now fully briefed. The reply brief was filed at the end of April. The motion for oral arguments was filed alongside it. The State has not joined the request. Three judges are reading the record. A decision is coming.

Defense attorney Bob Motta sits down with Tony Brueski for Part Three of a three-part panel on the Richard Allen appeal. They get into the strategic asymmetry of the oral argument request. They walk through the de novo standard on the search warrant — the one issue in this appeal where the panel owes no deference to Judge Fran Gull, and where a ruling against the State would erase the .40-caliber pistol from this case and any retrial forever.

They sit with the broader question that the procedural posture quietly raises. A State that moved a defendant out of state for safekeeping. A State that broke its own solitary confinement policy by more than a year. A State that has now built an appellate defense around asking three judges not to look too closely at any of it. And a defense team that has now formally asked the panel to look at all of it, on the record, in person.

Three judges. One panel. One decision left in this case.

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After five and a half months in solitary confinement at Westville, Richard Allen had reached a state his own defense team described as gravely disabled. He was no longer sure whether he was guilty or innocent. He was no longer sure whether he was dead or alive. According to the appellate brief, he stayed in solitary for another seven and a half months after that. He lost 45 pounds. He confessed.

The Indiana Department of Correction's own written policy says inmates with serious mental illness cannot be held in solitary for more than 30 days. Richard Allen was held there for 13 months. The State is now asking three judges to find that none of this constituted coercion.

Defense attorney Bob Motta sits down with Tony Brueski for Part Two of a three-part panel on the Delphi appeal. They walk through the documented timeline of Allen's decline at Westville. They examine the State's religious-conversion narrative against the contemporaneous medical and behavioral record. They get into the jailhouse calls — one the jury heard, two it was never allowed to hear, including the call where Allen asks his own father how much longer he is going to be lucid.

And they sit with the institutional question hanging over all of it. Indiana knew solitary could push Allen into psychosis. The State's own policy contemplated that risk. The State broke that policy by more than a year. And the State is now arguing that a confession extracted from the resulting wreckage is voluntary.

Three judges are reading the full record. The State broke its own rulebook to get those confessions. Whether the Court of Appeals lets that stand is the entire question of Part Two.

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The Delphi appeal is fully briefed. The defense's reply brief landed in late April. Three judges at the Indiana Court of Appeals are now reading the full written record, and what Richard Allen's appellate team has put in front of them is a record Indiana clearly does not want them to read carefully.

The defense laid out the van timeline contradicted by FBI cell data and surveillance footage. They laid out a confession in which Allen told his prison psychiatrist he shot Abby Williams and Libby German, when the medical examiner concluded the girls were killed with a blade. They laid out an alternative suspect whose interview was allegedly recorded over by investigators, whose weapon was never collected, whose phone was never searched.

The State's response to almost all of it was procedural. Harmless. Waived. Defaulted. The State spent the appellate brief telling three judges the underlying facts do not need to be reached, because the defense filed in the wrong way at the wrong time.

That is not the brief of a State confident in its trial record. That is the brief of a State trying to keep three judges from ever opening that record.

Defense attorney Bob Motta sits down with Tony Brueski for Part One of a three-part panel on the procedural-versus-factual collision now sitting at the center of the Delphi appeal. They walk through Indiana's strategy, what the recorded-over interview means in front of an appellate panel, why the cause-of-death mismatch survives every procedural argument the State has filed, and what happens when three judges decide to ignore the State's invitation and look anyway.

Three judges. No more paper. A decision waiting to happen.

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Abby Williams was thirteen. Libby German was fourteen. They were best friends who went to a bridge on a February afternoon in 2017 and never came home. Their families have been living inside this nightmare for over nine years.

Richard Allen was convicted. He’s serving a hundred and thirty years. And his defense team just told the Indiana Court of Appeals that the jury only heard half the story.

Your questions about this case are the kind that keep people awake. You’re asking what it means that Allen confessed to shooting girls who were never shot. You’re asking why the jury heard a psychologist call his confessions logical but never heard the audio of what his attorneys describe as confused screaming in solitary. You’re asking why investigators allegedly recorded over an interview with a potential suspect and never took his weapon.

You’re asking about Kegan Kline — whose catfish account was reportedly the last to contact Libby — and why that was ruled a separate investigation. You’re asking about a composite sketch that was shown to the public for years but never shown to the jury. And you’re asking the question that nine years of waiting has earned these families the right to have answered: did the investigation follow every lead, or did it stop when it found Richard Allen?

Robin Dreeke and I sit with these questions. Not because the answers are comfortable, but because Abby and Libby’s families have waited long enough for someone to ask them out loud.

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He confessed to killing them. He told his prison psychiatrist he shot Abby Williams and Libby German. They were not shot. They were killed with a blade. And in ninety-four pages, the Indiana Attorney General's response to Richard Allen's appeal does not explain why a man supposedly confessing to the murders he committed described a method of killing that did not happen.

That is not a minor inconsistency. That is the foundation of a 130-year sentence — because without the confessions, there is no case. No DNA links Allen to the crime scene. No murder weapon was recovered. No direct eyewitness placed him with the victims. The confessions were everything. And the confessions contain a cause of death that is factually wrong.

The AG's response follows the same pattern on every issue the defense raised. The search warrant built on alleged omissions — the State says it still establishes probable cause. The confessions extracted after more than thirteen months of pretrial solitary confinement — the State says the conditions were not coercive and offers a religious conversion as the explanation. The evidence excluded at trial — the eyewitness sketch the jury never saw, the firearms expert who would have challenged the bullet evidence, the phone calls where Allen questioned his own sanity before and after confessing, the alternative suspects with documented ties to the case — the State calls all of it speculative, hearsay, or improperly preserved.

Harmless error. Over and over. On everything.

Defense attorney Bob Motta breaks down the full response across a three-part panel — the procedural strategy designed to prevent the appeals court from reaching the substance, the two factual problems the State cannot answer, and what comes next. The defense has filed its reply brief and requested oral arguments. Three judges will decide whether the conviction stands.

The families of Abby and Libby were told a verdict meant it was over. If the State's evidence is as overwhelming as the AG claims, the question that will not go away is the one Bob keeps asking — why did they need to keep so much of it from the jury to get there?

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The Indiana Attorney General's response to Richard Allen's appeal was supposed to shut down the defense's arguments. It didn't. If anything, the State's brief — filed in March 2026 — raises more questions about what Indiana is willing to do to protect this conviction than it answers about whether the conviction was fairly obtained.

Allen's appellate attorneys laid out a detailed, sourced case: a search warrant affidavit where a detective changed witness descriptions and omitted information that undercut probable cause, confessions made during a psychotic break after over 13 months in solitary confinement at a facility where no pretrial safekeeper had ever been placed before, and a trial where the defense was blocked from presenting a composite sketch, a firearms expert, solitary confinement audio, exculpatory phone calls, evidence of ritualistic crime scene features, and documented alternative suspects whose investigations were abandoned, whose interviews were recorded over, whose weapons were never collected, and whose phones were never searched.

The AG's response to this record: harmless error, waived, speculative. The same words, applied to every issue, as though repetition equals rebuttal.

This episode pulls apart the State's brief and asks the question the Attorney General seems determined to avoid. When the detective alters witness statements, when a psychologist destroys her notes, when law enforcement records over interviews with alternative suspects and declines to verify alibis, when a predator's catfish account is the last contact with the victim and his entire criminal case grows out of this investigation but gets walled off as "separate" — at what point does the pattern stop looking like incompetence and start looking like something worse?

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