INDIANAPOLIS, Nov 12 —A jury found an Indiana man guilty of the murder of two teenaged girls who went missing during a hike outside their small hometown of Delphi in 2017, Court TV reported on Monday, bringing a long-running cold case to an apparent conclusion.

Richard Allen, 52, was charged with two counts of murder and two additional counts of murder while kidnapping for the killings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14.

The girls’ bodies were found on February 14, 2021, at a stream near Delphi, a town of about 3,000 people about 60 miles (97 kilometres) northwest of Indianapolis.

Their throats were slashed, and an unspent bullet was found between the bodies, which were found a short distance from the abandoned railroad bridge where they had been dropped off for a hike.

Prosecutors said the bullet came from a gun owned by Allen, and that he was the man seen at the bridge by eyewitnesses and in a cellphone video recorded by German on the day the girls disappeared.

Allen, who worked in Delphi as a pharmacist, had been on the trail that afternoon, and was interviewed at the time by investigators as a possible witness.

The case went cold. Allen was not arrested until 2022. Once in jail, he repeatedly confessed to killing the girls, said prosecutors, who played jurors recordings of him telling his wife in phone calls that he did it.

Allen’s defense lawyers told jurors that by the time he was in jail he was under immense mental anguish, and the apparent confessions were false. He had been held in solitary confinement for long stretches, they pointed out, putting him in a state where he could not clearly distinguish reality from fantasy.

They said the prosecution’s evidence did not prove that the unspent bullet found at the crime scene came from Allen’s gun. — Reuters