DELPHI, Ind. — Standing in front of a projected image of Abigail “Abby” Williams and Liberty “Libby” German, Indiana State Police Sgt. Jeremy Piers said it is important to keep the girls at the forefront of why the public and media had gathered at the Wabash and Erie Canal Park.
The reminder came after Friday’s sentencing of Richard Allen, who received 130 years in prison in the 2017 murders of Williams and German.
Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett said the end of 2016, a reference to the fatal house fire in Flora that claimed the lives of four young sisters, and the beginning of 2017 changed the fabric of Carroll County.
“Carroll County is a tight-knit community of about 20,000 people. It used to be a place where people didn’t lock their doors,” Liggett said. “I believe that the verdict will help keep some of that sense of security.”
After Allen’s Nov. 11 conviction, Liggett said he frequently had people ask whether he was “glad there was finally closure.” But, Liggett said, there will never be closure.
“The Germans and the Williams families lost their daughters, their granddaughters, their siblings,” Liggett said. “A form of justice was served, but it does not bring Abby or Libby back.”
Countless milestones for those families will be missed, Liggett said, because of “a lowlife coward.”
“Today is not closure, it was just turning the page and starting a new chapter,” he said. “My heart is, and always has been, broken for these families. I want them to know that we stand with them, and I want to apologize that it took eight years.”
Liggett said it took 36 additional outside agencies to help with security for the trial, and that more were there to assist in the early days of the investigation.
But both Liggett and ISP Superintendent Doug Carter credited justice being served to one person: Kathy Shank, a volunteer and retired child protective services investigator with a career spanning 40 years.
Through the investigation, Liggett said Shank would frequently bring pieces of evidence to investigators. All had been previously known, he said, except for the tip that led police to Allen.
Carter said that over the last few years of the investigation, he and other officers had been ostracized for their emotions and inability to answer questions at times. “Any notion of a cover-up, any notion of us deciding the outcome,” Carter said, “is not correct.”
Carter said he and other officers “lived by the gag order” Special Judge Fran Gull set, while Allen’s attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, did not.
They took aim and people online and on social media who shared leaked crime scene photos of the girls.
“Anybody who shared those photographs of those two little girls should be held accountable,” Carter said of leaked evidence. “Whether they’re in the public sphere, or if they’re emailed to you, or if you found them in places where others can see: I hope you if ever seen them, you will picture your own children as Abby and Libby. I will never forgive that. I will never, ever forgive that.”
After Allen’s trial, Carter said he was listening to an Indianapolis-based lawyer on the radio discuss that the only people who mattered in the courtroom were the jury, something Carter hadn’t thought about before in his career.
“We have a system of justice that allows them to decide the fate of the human being; that’s what our founders had established, and that’s what they did,” Carter said.
While acknowledging that mistakes were made during the investigation, Carter said he “would crawl across shards of hot glass” for Jerry Holeman, the ISP lieutenant who interviewed Allen in 2022.
Recalling squabbles with Holeman and former Carroll County Sheriff Tobe Leazenby, Carter said Allen’s defense attempted to use those arguments to show their incompetence, calling the efforts “ridiculous.”
With the investigation over, Carter said it is time to heal.
“Tone down the rhetoric. Stop all of the politics and all of the nonsense and all of the conspiracy theories,” he said. “Understand that we all did the best we could.”
Carter paused, double-tapping the podium’s platform, with one last comment.
“Well done.”
This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Indiana police defend Delphi investigation, call Richard Allen a ‘coward’