DEPUTIES RACED DOWN the white marble staircase of the Allen County Courthouse. A quarrel had broken out between two middle-aged YouTubers, one an aspiring courtroom sketch artist who had been previously incarcerated and the other a bar bouncer. They were both there in Fort Wayne on March 18, 2024, on the fringes of the pretrial hearings for an accused killer, sharing a mutual fascination with a case the world had come to know as the Delphi murders.
The YouTubers were not alone in their fixation, of course. The story of the two girls in Delphi had been lingering in the collective consciousness for years, the details of their murder a grim refrain we knew by heart. On February 13, 2017, 14-year-old Libby German and 13-year-old Abby Williams went for a walk on the forested trails of their small, close-knit community at the seat of rural Carroll County. They hiked across the Monon High Bridge, an abandoned railroad trestle that spans Deer Creek. For many Delphi teenagers, crossing this rickety, creaking remnant of rail’s Golden Age was a rite of passage.
A man followed the girls out there. We know this because Libby surreptitiously filmed him as he approached her and her friend, lifting her phone to capture his heavy gait and his voice as he ordered them “down the hill.” We know the remaining details of this horrific crime through information from court testimony: He marched Abby and Libby across Deer Creek and, at some point, forced them to take off their clothes. Then he cut their throats, covered their bodies with sticks, and left them in a small clearing beside the creek.
Perhaps one of the reasons the Delphi murders have haunted our nightmares for all these years is that nearly everyone can relate to two innocent kids going out to enjoy an unseasonably warm winter’s day. Such adventures are the essence of Midwestern childhood. But beyond that, people were certain they could solve this crime. The fact that Libby captured the image and voice of her killer played a major role in the case going viral. The visual and audio evidence provided something to analyze and endlessly discuss, and many true crime enthusiasts were bolstered by the idea of crowdsourcing a break in the case. The pixels were too blurry to make out a face, but online sleuths messed around with contrasts on the image and created “side-by-side” comparisons with possible suspects. Though the audio of Bridge Guy, as he came to be known, was brief, sleuths scoured social media to find similar voices.
The brutal nature of the crime, as well as the lack of answers, attracted interest and speculation from all over the world. Everyone from concerned Hoosier parents to armchair sleuths in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, and Australia became obsessed with the murders, forming communities to discuss the case on Reddit and Facebook. Others created low-rent online videos and participated in live shows to opine about the case.
That’s how two YouTubers found themselves squaring off at the Allen County Courthouse attempting to settle a long-simmering personal feud. Only these were not run-of-the-mill observers. The bar bouncer, stockier and bespectacled, was due to offer testimony in a hearing in the case with two other conspiracy theorists, but those plans were derailed when Judge Frances Gull, who was appointed to the Delphi case, promptly banned both from future hearings.
We know this because we were there, too. Perched on a wooden bench in the courthouse’s tiled hallway, we watched the deputies rush off to handle the fight. We attended all but one pretrial hearing. We made it into all but one session of the murder trial. And we witnessed the chaos, the parade of clownish witnesses, commentators, interlopers, and attorneys, and the carnival atmosphere created by adults both inside and outside the system. It baffled us then. It still does. But we think we can piece together what happened to make a circus out of the murder of two young girls.l
Like the YouTubers, we belong to the wave of new media outlets that have cropped up since the advent of social media. We are a husband-and-wife team with a podcast, The Murder Sheet, where we tackle cold and historical cases as well as ongoing trials. We bring some professional experience to the table [Kevin is an attorney, while Áine is a journalist who worked at a national outlet for six years]. We recently published a nonfiction book, Shadow of the Bridge: The Delphi Murders and the Dark Side of the American Heartland, a comprehensive chronicle of the murders, the subsequent yearslong investigation, and Indiana’s trial of the century.
The book is the culmination of years spent researching and reporting on this crime. On several occasions, we have dropped whatever we were doing and sped up to Carroll County on a moment’s notice to meet with sources. We cut short vacations and birthday dinners. We got to know the men and women who worked on this case, and we saw seasoned law enforcement officials break down in tears.
Our journey began four years after Abby and Libby disappeared, when we traveled to Delphi for the first time. We were thinking about covering the murders for the podcast but were uncertain about tackling an ongoing case. We walked the trail, taking a fork in the path toward Deer Creek and ending up on its banks. The shallow greenish water burbled before us as we stared up at the Monon High Bridge. The looming heap of metal and wooden planks unsettled us. We thought about how scared the girls must have been, confronted by a strange man up there. They had nowhere to run. They were trapped. It was then that we decided to cover the story in depth. We wanted answers.
On March 23, 2021, we published our first-ever Delphi episode. We thought we could apply the lessons from our professional backgrounds—law and journalism—to our coverage of the murders. At that point, reports from the mainstream media were sporadic. Understandably, journalists at the news stations and newspapers were often pulled in many directions. Few had the time to focus exclusively on this case. But we did.
As independent podcasters without obligations to a network or media corporation, we could pick and choose the cases we covered and allow ourselves to be guided by our audience. When we started, Áine still worked for a national news outlet, but Kevin was working solely on The Murder Sheet. Only vaguely aware of the expansive online community that followed the case, we thought we could add to the flow of information by taking a more granular style.
We avoided talking about unconfirmed rumors or conjecture, instead only reporting on stories for which we could nail down facts with multiple sources. We developed sources and spoke on and off the record with people in the know and criminal justice experts, including defense attorneys, former prosecutors, mental health professionals, correctional officers, and former Indiana Department of Correction inmates. We sought court and investigative documents whenever possible. Our goal was simply to report on and document what the investigators were doing, which meant that sometimes we had to get creative. We tracked state police helicopter flight plans to corroborate reports of Delphi-related meetings and stood on a pedestrian bridge in Peru, Indiana, to watch dive teams wade in the Wabash River searching in vain for a possible murder weapon. Since 2021, it has felt like our lives largely revolved around Delphi.
As we broke news and reported exclusive stories, we realized that for a sliver of the people obsessed with the Delphi murders, new information about the case was unwelcome unless it validated their existing theories. People even adopted their own “persons of interest” and, like rabid sports fans, cheered on their guilt while bitterly attacking anyone who shared information that went against their beliefs about the case.
Our fact-based approach was not good enough for those members of the true crime community who saw this reporting as a threat to their hobby. Almost immediately, we began experiencing waves of online harassment. People brutally mocked our appearances and spread unfounded rumors about our employment, our relationship, and even our sex lives. Some of these claims were downright funny. We passed screenshots back and forth, amused at the speculation that we, husband-and-wife podcasters leading pretty quiet lives, were CIA plants or undercover police.
But some of the theories and harassment were shockingly dark. Wild lies came out about us trying to assassinate people, stealing case files, or wrecking other investigations during alcoholic binges. We found photographs of our home posted online. People reached out to our relatives with questions about our alleged sins. We received death threats—direct and indirect. It went far beyond getting some bad reviews.
The message was clear: Certain members of the true crime community built their identity on having their suspicions confirmed. Some wanted to believe that Delphi was a hopelessly corrupt quagmire populated by a rogue’s gallery of violent predators, drug kingpins, and corrupt law enforcement. Some attacked Abby and Libby’s families. Perhaps they did these things because they believed in their theories so deeply they felt they needed to violently defend them, and doing so provided comfort as the case remained unsolved. We didn’t realize until later that our experience matched that of many at the center of the case. Investigators, prosecutors, witnesses, and even Abby and Libby’s relatives got it worse.
This all came to a head in 2022, when Richard Allen was arrested and charged with the murders. Allen was a middle-aged man who worked as a shift manager at the Delphi CVS. His colleagues mostly knew him as a quiet, competent boss who could be surprisingly funny at times. Only a handful of them saw a different side—his controlling, leering attitude toward women. Shockingly, he had come forward to a Department of Natural Resources officer just days after the murders, but that lead was misfiled and buried under a mountain of tips.
Kathy Shank, a retired Child Protective Services worker who volunteered to organize the heaps of case files, rediscovered the confession in September of 2022. Investigators pounced. They seized Allen’s firearm and found that it matched a cartridge ejected at the crime scene. They reviewed surveillance footage and found a car identical to Allen’s driving toward the entrance to the trails a little over an hour before the murders. In interviews, Allen admitted he had worn the exact same outfit as Bridge Guy on the day in question, had seen some of the witnesses who reported seeing Bridge Guy, and had no explanation for the cartridge left between the bodies.
As reporters, we first saw Allen during a hearing that November. His expression was inscrutable—scared, embarrassed, struggling for control. He wore manacles and a rumpled yellow jumpsuit with a black flak vest. His small stature was so striking that internet cranks began to doubt that someone so slight could have pulled off the murders by himself. The ending to their favorite story was shaping up to be unsatisfying. They wanted a bigger conspiracy, a better twist.
Just as disturbingly, Allen’s defense team seemed to treat the internet conspiracy theorists as allies in the fight to free their client. YouTubers met with Allen’s team and became sources of information to the attorneys. They helped organize a bizarre fundraiser for Allen’s defense—even though the defense was being funded by the state—and appeared as witnesses in a pretrial hearing. For those of us watching in the courtroom, the difference between the Allen defense and a random person ranting from his basement on YouTube seemed almost nonexistent.
As for us, the chaos culminated just after midnight on October 5, 2023, when someone from a Texas area code sent us graphic crime scene photos, including images of the girls’ bodies. The next day, we warned police and Allen’s defense team about what we regarded as a catastrophic leak that not only violated the privacy of the victims but also potentially threatened Allen’s right to a fair trial. Then we set about unraveling its source. We were no longer respectful observers analyzing the case of two young girls murdered in the winter-bare woods of Carroll County. By being sent privileged information from an unknown source, we now found ourselves in the unenviable position of being part of the story.
The Texan told us he obtained the images from a Hamilton County man named Robert Fortson. Digging deeper, we found that Fortson was good friends with Mitch Westerman, the former operations manager for Allen’s defense attorney, Andrew Baldwin. Police later discovered texts on Westerman’s mobile account sent to a person simply called “Andy” discussing the importance of facilitating leaks to the media. We believe those involved in the leak thought the photos were good for the defense, that they would lead the public to speculate about the meaning of the shapes and symbols formed by the sticks placed over the bodies. To us, the sticks looked like nothing more than a killer’s hasty attempt to cover up his crime.
Behind the scenes, we encouraged YouTubers and case obsessives to delete the leaked photos of the girls and forgo sharing them. But that effort was futile. None of the people who received the images reported it to authorities; instead, they passed around the images like prized trading cards.
Days after we got the pictures, news of the leak spread. And then we learned that Fortson had died by suicide. He was a young man with a family. The whole thing was devastating. We stopped working and spent the afternoon walking along the trails of a local park. We talked about quitting the case altogether but decided not to, refusing to cede ground to those who could not treat the murders with reverence.
We stayed on the case as it went to trial, as Allen’s defense collapsed and the evidence against him swept away the fringe theories, ad hominem attacks, and last-ditch attempts at jury nullification. Twelve of Allen’s peers convicted him. We saw justice done. Unfortunately, justice doesn’t make everything right.
We view Delphi as a warning flare. True crime is becoming increasingly illogical and conspiracy-obsessed. When people treat cases as their playthings, they don’t care if they hurt others, even grieving loved ones. They want to insert themselves into cases, cause chaos, even dictate trial strategy. They traffic in lies to get clicks.
During the nearly monthlong trial, we spent hours in line outside the courthouse for one of the coveted spots in the gallery. Every day, the line started forming a little earlier. Some nights, we barely slept, knowing we had to be back at the courthouse to queue up at midnight. Other times, kind locals held our spots for us. Before the end of the trial, we started receiving desperate emails and texts from our listeners and others who followed the case. These were not true crime rubberneckers but people who truly cared about the girls and about justice. They sent us links to the leaked crime photos, wanting to know what they could do to get the pictures scrubbed from the internet for the sake of the girls’ families.
Huddled in lawn chairs under portable electric blankets, we struggled to respond. We didn’t know how to answer. We’re not psychologists or sociologists who can truly explain this behavior. We’re not brilliant detectives who pieced everything together. We’re just two podcasters who got pulled under by the gravity of this case—who thought that maybe if we followed it closely enough and with enough integrity, we could bring some clarity. What we ended up doing is simply bearing witness to a story brimming with cruelty. Maybe that is important, too. Maybe by speaking about this, we can help stop it in the next case.
On the bridge that day, before the horror truly began, Abby told Libby, “Don’t leave me up here.” Libby did not leave her friend. To be silent about all that we have seen is to leave the girls. We refuse to do that. For that reason, we will never be done with Delphi.
