Delphi murders: State says deleted interviews were ‘not evidence’

CARROLL COUNTY, Ind. — Prosecutors in the Delphi, Indiana, murders case responded to the defense team by saying a pair of interviews conducted in the days after the killings, which were accidentally recorded over at the police station, were “not evidence at all related to this case.”

A few weeks ago, defendant Richard Allen’s attorneys filed a motion to dismiss murder charges leveled against their client on the grounds of destruction of evidence. Allen is charged with two counts of murder in the killing of Libby German and Abby Williams near the Monon High Bridge near Delphi in February 2017.

Allen’s attorneys, Andrew Baldwin and Bradley Rozzi, claimed in early February that police interviews conducted with two men in the days following the discovery of the teenager girl’s bodies were paramount to their alternative theory that the girls’ deaths were part of a ritualistic killing with ties to Odinism. However, the raw footage of these interviews does not exist, only documents that summarize the interviews with the two men whom Rozzi and Baldwin call “key suspects.”

Prosecuting Attorney Nicholas McLeland confirmed these interviews were destroyed inadvertently at the Delphi Police Department. According to McLeland, a DVR error caused the device to continually record for an unknown number of days, recording over all the existing footage already on the device. All interviews conducted in the Delphi police investigation room prior to Feb. 20, 2017, were lost due to this error.

“They were not destroyed by the state purposefully or in bad faith,” McLeland wrote in his response.

While recordings of the raw interview no longer exist, McLeland argued the judge should throw out the defense team’s attempts to dismiss the charges against Allen for destroyed evidence because the two interviews in question “are not evidence related to this case.”

“The evidence in question is not exculpatory evidence nor is it potentially useful evidence,” McLeland said.

The prosecutor stated the interviews with the two men instead is just the defense team’s attempt to prop up their “wild theory of this case that has no evidentiary support whatsoever.”

The theory in question is Rozzi and Baldwin’s previous claims that Allen wasn’t responsible for the deaths of the two young girls and best friends who went for a walk on the historic Delphi trails only to be killed. Rozzi and Baldwin instead have presented a conspiracy-fueled theory of a ritualistic murder seeped in the occult.

But this theory has been shot down by McLeland before as being “unfounded” with “absolutely no proof.”

While footage of these interviews no longer exists, documents summarizing the interviews still do.

McLeland pointed out that the defense team only speculated these interviews would include some new wrinkle that would aid in their defense theory.

“Mere speculation is not enough,” McLeland said.

McLeland said the defense team could still interview both men, if they so wished.