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Five years after the horrific killing of two girls in Delphi, Indiana, authorities said they solved the mystery that had been the subject of wild speculation by true crime followers.

Yet the arrest of Richard Allen in the killings only marked the beginning of a series of chaotic developments including a defense theory about a pagan cult, a mans suicide and arguments about whether Allen was of sound mind when he allegedly confessed 61 times that many feel have subsumed the victims and what happened to them. On Oct. 14, the highly anticipated trial begins, and prosecutors, who have been largely silent on even basic facts of the case, will finally outline the evidence against the 52-year-old.

Will it lead to justice for 14-year-old Liberty Libby German and 13-year-old Abigail Abby Williams? True crime fans will be watching, but only the jury will decide.

The case, which came to be known as the Delphi murders, fascinated the true crime community from the start.

On the afternoon of Feb. 13, 2017, shortly before the girls disappeared, Libby shared an eerie photo on Snapchat of Abby standing on an abandoned railroad bridge and another of the bridge itself. Their bodies were found the next day, about half a mile away downhill from the bridge in a wooded area.

On Feb. 15, the police released two grainy images of a man walking on that bridge, asking the public for help identifying him .

It was years before the public learned that the girls had filmed their alleged killer.

Investigators shared audio and then, in 2019, snippets of the video from which the images were screenshotted and identified the man as a suspect in the girls abduction and killing. He was later dubbed Bridge Guy by true crime enthusiasts who analyzed the footage, offering vastly different theories about what he was wearing, his height, his gait and his voice.

Guys, down the hill, the man said to the girls in the video retrieved from Libbys cellphone. One of the girls could be heard in the video saying gun as he approached. The police said the video ended as they started going down the hill.

Despite the video that seemed to capture the killer, the case went cold. The girls families regularly spoke to local media and packed sessions at the yearly true crime convention CrimeCon in the hopes that someone would come forward with information to help identify the killer. Then, on Oct. 28, 2022, authorities said they would give an update on the case, prompting a frenzy in the true crime community, with people on Reddit and other social media platforms spending an agonizing weekend waiting for the news conference.

On Oct. 31, 2022, authorities announced Allens arrest and said he had been charged with murder and kidnapping in connection to the girls killings.

Their announcement that theyd arrested a local guy was staggering: For more than five years, and in spite of international scrutiny, the suspect was allegedly hiding in plain sight. Allen not only lived in Delphi, a small town of about 3,000 residents, but he also worked as a pharmacy technician at the local CVS drugstore. He and his wife lived in an unassuming house with a tidy front lawn on a quiet residential street.

The break in the case came when investigators unearthed (the circumstances remain unclear) a record of a 2017 police interview with Allen. The officer who met with him reported that Allen admitted being on the trail during the time period the girls disappeared, wearing clothes consistent with those worn by the man in Libbys video. According to an arrest warrant unsealed by a judge in December 2022 , other people on the trail said they encountered a man in similar clothing, and another witness said she saw a muddy and bloody man at 4 p.m. walking away from the area where the girls bodies were later found and toward the area where Allen had allegedly said he parked his car.

Although the girls had been killed with a sharp object, specified as a knife in a court filing released last year, police said an unspent bullet was found near Germans body and claimed that it had been cycled through a Sig Sauer handgun they found when they searched Allens home.

Apart from those details, little has been officially released on the circumstances of the girls killings; even the autopsy report has been withheld. That changes when the trial begins next week. Why and how do authorities suspect Allen killed the girls? Was it an opportunistic or carefully orchestrated crime? Were the girls specifically targeted? Were they sexually assaulted? Do prosecutors still believe, as Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland said in 2022 when arguing for court documents about the investigation to remain sealed, that there is good reason to believe Allen is not the only one involved ?