Five years before he was charged with killing two middle school students near an Indiana trail, Richard Allen reached out to authorities about the double murder: He’d been in the area the day the girls were killed, he told an investigator at the time.
That information, contained in a “lead sheet” maintained by law enforcement, was inadvertently marked clear, and it wasn’t until 2022 when a volunteer clerk tasked with helping organize thousands of tips in the investigation discovered it and set into motion the events that led to Allen’s arrest.
The revelation emerged in a Carroll County courtroom this week, where law enforcement officers, witnesses and others detailed their involvement in the case during the first full week of testimony about the Feb. 13, 2017, killings of Liberty German, 14, and Abigail Williams, 13.
Lawyers for Allen, a 52-year-old former CVS employee, have…
