The Clancy Effect: Richard Allen convicted Delphi killer claims psychosis defense

An attorney for a man serving 130 years in prison for killing two teen girls in Indiana said police were so determined to find him guilty they used confessions gathered while he suffered from psychosis and withheld from trial a witness sketch that looked nothing like him, reported The Associated Press.

Jurors convicted Richard Allen of murder in 2024 in the deaths of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, known as Abby and Libby. The case in the tiny town of Delphi went unsolved for more than five years before Allen was arrested, becoming a magnet for true-crime enthusiasts.

After Allen told investigators he had been on the trail near where the girls died, authorities found any way they could to convict him and make sure no evidence surfaced that any other man was on that walkway, attorney Mark Leeman told a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals on Monday.

“We live in a world where one or two things happen here,” Leeman said. “A pharmacy tech with no criminal history goes out for a walk to watch a stock ticker and look at fish and decides to gruesomely murder two girls. Or, we live in a world where the police through confirmation bias failed to find the right guy.”

Judges have plenty of questions about the trial’s fairness

The three judges handling the appeal questioned why the trial judge didn’t allow the defense to call an expert to testify that it looked like the girls were killed by unknown participants in a pagan ritual. They also asked why a police sketch of someone seen near the trail was omitted from trial, noting that the sketch looked nothing like Allen.

The panel also questioned why a defense expert wasn’t allowed to question whether marks on an unfired bullet can be traced to a specific gun, as prosecutors had asserted. And given that videos of Allen’s odd behavior in prison were shown to jurors, the appeals judges wanted to know why the trial judge did not allow the audio to be played as well, audio in which Allen claimed to be a king and that he had started World War III.

But the judges also asked the state several times if the decisions were harmless and whether the jury would have convicted Allen anyway even if the trial decisions being weighed had gone his way.

Indiana Deputy Attorney General Ellen Meilaender said Allen provided the strongest evidence himself when he told police before he was arrested that he was on the trail, but said he didn’t see the girls.

“Allen denied seeing Abby and Libby there, even though the timeline evidence indisputably shows he must have done so, which was consciousness of guilt,” Meilaender said.

The judges will rule at a later date.

Crime scene had plenty of strange evidence

The girls’ bodies were found down a steep hill from an abandoned railroad trestle on a hiking trail just outside of Delphi on Feb. 13, 2017. The eighth graders were dropped off and never made it to their pickup point.

The teens’ throats were cut, and a few branches were scattered over their bodies. One was found nude while the other was wearing the first victim’s clothes. There was no evidence they had been sexually assaulted.

One of the girls took a brief video of a suspicious man nearby saying, “Down the hill.”

Prosecutors said Allen was armed with a gun and forced the girls off the hiking trail. They said he confessed to planning to rape them before a passing van made him change his mind and kill them. An expert testified an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s handgun.

Defense lawyers at his trial said no witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen near the trail the afternoon the girls went missing. They also said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the murder scene. They wanted to call an expert to dispute that guns can mark bullets in unique ways, but weren’t allowed.

Allen’s lawyers say isolation led to mental breakdown and false confessions

Allen was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. He denied killing the girls for months, but his attorneys said mental stress from isolation led to a steep psychological decline. Eventually, his mental state became so bad he convinced himself he killed the girls and confessed several times, his lawyers said.

Prosecutors said the statements coincided with Allen seeing evidence in the case including the conditions of the teens’ bodies.

Expert testimony of possible pagan ritual also excluded

Allen’s trial attorneys wanted to put an expert witness on the stand to testify the killings appeared to be a ritual sacrifice by people who worshipped Odin, the king of the gods in Norse mythology.

The expert was expected to say the positioning of the bodies, the branches on the remains, the outdoor location of the crime and knife wounds to the victims all were indications of pagan rituals.

Prosecutors said the expert had limited examples and that defense lawyers shouldn’t be able to present just any theory without evidence to back it up. They said it would have turned the trial into a sideshow.

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Judge calls bite marks 'junk science' grants man new trial for 1985 slaying

Charles McCrory was convicted and sentenced to life in an Alabama prison for the May 1985 slaying of his wife, Julie Bonds McCrory. The case rested predominately on two small marks on Julie’s arm, which the state and its expert said were bite marks that Charles McCrory made in a rageful, brutal killing, reported AL.com

Today, the technique of matching bite marks to a person’s teeth is considered junk science. And the dentist who long ago testified against him has recanted, saying he can’t even be sure the mark was made by teeth at all — much less McCrory’s teeth.

“The bitemark evidence clearly prejudiced the outcome of McCrory’s trial, especially in light of the other evidence presented at trial,” wrote Chief U.S. District Judge Austin Huffaker Jr. in his Monday order.

“The non-bitemark evidence from which the jury could convict McCrory was thin.”

Huffaker’s order said the Alabama Attorney General’s Office has 180 days to begin a new trial for McCrory or release him from prison.

The state did not respond to a request for comment on Monday afternoon. The office could appeal the decision.

McCrory, a 26-year-old tech worker and volunteer paramedic, was always the main suspect in his wife’s murder. There was no DNA implicating McCrory, no confessions or clear motive. No blood was ever found on his clothes or in his apartment.

But Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist in Florida who matched a victim’s wounds to Ted Bundy’s crooked teeth in Bundy’s 1979 trial, testified at McCroy’s trial that the two small marks on Julie’s arm matched McCrory’s teeth.

That testimony was the sole physical evidence against McCrory, and Huffaker said it “resulted in a fundamentally unfair trial.”

The judge said on Monday that the state court’s decision in 2022, which denied McCrory’s request for a new trial, was “both an unreasonable application of clearly established federal law and was based on an unreasonable determination of the facts.”

McCrory lived in a small apartment down the street from his wife and toddler son in Andalusia, in Covington County. He and Julie McCrory, then 24, were in the middle of a divorce. But McCrory said he was at the family home on the night of May 30, 1985. The two went to couple’s therapy, spent time with their son, and had sex before McCrory went back to his apartment, he said. The two were often together, and Julie’s date book showed the possibility of her husband moving back in.

McCrory heard about the murder the next morning, when his paramedic radio signaled a call for help at his wife’s home and he responded to the scene.

Julie was found laying in the front doorway of her home. She had been severely beaten with five “chop” wounds to her head, 11 puncture wounds to her chest, fractures of her jaw bones, various bruises and two small marks on the back of her upper right arm.

No one ever confirmed what made the puncture marks that riddled her body.

At trial in October 1985, the case hinged on circumstantial evidence like McCrory’s behavior and disputed witness statements as to cars at the family home. The two small marks that Souviron said were made by McCrory’s upper teeth were the only physical evidence.

The lack of physical evidence didn’t matter. McCrory was convicted and sent to prison for the rest of his life.

But, in the years after the conviction, bite mark evidence was questioned. By 2022, national groups called the technique “junk science” and said bite mark analysis isn’t supported by data.

And in 2019, Souviron took back his testimony.

“I no longer believe the individualized teeth marks comparison testimony I offered in his case was reliable or proper,” he said in an affidavit. He added that he “would not” and “could not” give the same testimony today in McCrory’s case.

The dentist fully recanted his statements from 40 years ago, adding that he no longer believes there is a scientific basis for saying the injury— “assuming that the injury is in fact teeth marks” — could be matched to McCrory. He also said he never actually examined Julie’s body, and relied on photographs.

“My experience has taught me that human dentition is not totally unique,” he said. “I also believe that only in certain, very limited circumstances — not present in Mr. McCrory’s case — can the features of human dentition accurately be recorded in human skin.”

The evolving science and the expert’s recantation didn’t persuade Alabama. When McCrory’s team of lawyers from the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Innocence Project asked for a new trial in the state courts in 2020, it was shot down.

Huffaker, the federal judge, called the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals ruling ambiguous and unreasonable, and said the state prosecutors’ arguments were not persuasive. Neither side disputes that the original 1985 testimony was unreliable and could not come into court today, he wrote.

Bite mark identification methods are “grossly unreliable and unsupported by relevant scientific bodies,” the judge added.

“It amounts to nothing more than rank speculation.”

Prosecutors from the Alabama Attorney General’s Office argued in 2021 that, even without Souviron’s testimony, jurors could have looked at the photographs of Julie’s body and matched the markings themselves. The Alabama Criminal Court of Appeals agreed.

McCrory’s team found the suggestion preposterous. Huffaker did, too.

“This finding blinks reality in light of the evidence,” wrote Huffaker. “If an expert could not testify about bitemark identification because it is junk science, a jury should not have been allowed to consider it either.”

Huffaker added the dentist’s recantation was not rebutted by prosecutors and the state didn’t identify anyone who could say that the marks matched McCrory’s teeth.

“It makes little sense that a lay jury could permissibly form a conclusion that no forensic expert could... There is also no evidence that the two markings on (Julie’s) body are a human bitemark.”

Huffaker also noted other rulings across the country where people who were incarcerated solely on bite mark evidence have been exonerated.

McCrory’s lawyers cited 39 known wrongful convictions and indictments from bite mark forensics. Souviron’s past testimonies alone have led to at least two documented wrongful convictions, they added.

In those cases, the dentist said the suspects’ teeth matched marks on the victims. Each man — one in Massachusetts and one in Florida — was later exonerated after DNA proved who the killer was. Each served more than 30 years in prison.

AL.com reported on the case in depth, and the state’s reluctance to accept evolving scientific methods, in the 2025 series, Alabama Vs. Science.

Six years ago, the state offered McCrory a deal: If he said he killed his wife, he could walk out of prison.

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Mangino discusses Philadelphia 'House of Horrors' on Law and Crime's On the Case

 

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Alabama executes man for 1998 double murder

The 27th Execution of 2026

Alabama executed Jeffrey Lee by lethal injection on September 17, 2026 for a 1998 double murder. His execution comes three months after a judge’s ruling blocked the state from putting him to death with nitrogen gas, reported The Associated Press.

Lee, 49, was pronounced dead at 6:22 p.m. at William C. Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, authorities said. Twenty-seven people have been executed around the U.S. this year. Lee’s execution was the second in Alabama this year.

Lee was convicted of killing two people during a Dec. 12, 1998, robbery at Jimmy’s Pawn Shop in Orrville, a small town about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Montgomery. Jimmy Ellis, the store’s owner, and Elaine Thompson, a store employee, were shot and killed. Another employee survived by playing dead.

Lee’s supporters and attorneys made an unsuccessful bid for clemency, noting that the jury that convicted him wanted him to receive a life sentence and filing a legal challenge to the change in execution methods.

The execution got underway just after 6 p.m.

“All is well. I just want to say to my family, I love them. To my brothers on life row, I love them,” Lee said in his final words.

As the injection began, Lee clenched his fists on the prison gurney. His spiritual adviser held Lee’s feet and appeared to pray. Lee closed his eyes and did not appear to open them again.

Ruling blocked Alabama from using nitrogen gas method

The execution was carried out 98 days after Lee won a last-minute reprieve when a judge ruled the state’s nitrogen gas method violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Lee had been scheduled to be executed on June 11 by nitrogen gas, but the execution was called off that night when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to lift the judge’s ruling. The decision was a loss for the state, which began using the gas method in 2024.

The Alabama attorney general’s office on June 12 filed paperwork to set a new execution date for Lee, this time using lethal injection. Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday evening that “justice was finally served.”

“In June, after Mr. Lee attempted to avoid his deserved death sentence, I reaffirmed my commitment that justice would ultimately be served,” Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey also said in a statement. “Tonight, that promise was fulfilled for his victims, Jimmy Ellis and Elaine Thompson, as well as for their loved ones who have long-awaited his sentence to be carried out.”

Lee’s attorneys and supporters made an unsuccessful bid for clemency, noting the jury in his case had made a recommendation of life imprisonment, which the judge overrode.

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A jury voted 7-5 to give Lee a sentence of life imprisonment. However, a judge overrode that and sentenced him to death.

In 2017, Alabama abolished judicial override and stopped allowing judges to change juries’ sentencing decision in capital cases. But the law was not retroactive. Supporters of Lee’s clemency bid held a rally Tuesday outside the Alabama Capitol under the banner, “HONOR THE JURY.” They gathered in a vigil Thursday night outside the Alabama Governor’s Mansion.

“His death sentence rested solely on judicial override — an old law that Alabama has repealed,” Lee’s attorneys said in a statement after the execution. “The State itself concluded this practice was wrong enough to abandon yet still put a man to death under it. That is a moral failure, not just a legal formality.”

Ivey, who declined to intervene, said in her statement that the case “underscores exactly why” the law passed in 2017 did not apply to existing death sentences

Two killed in 1998 pawnshop robbery

The surviving witness testified that Lee entered the store, asked to see wedding rings and said he would be back after getting money from his grandmother. Lee returned a short time later with a sawed-off shotgun and shot Ellis, Thompson and the other employee. The surviving witness fell to the floor, pretending to be dead, and called 911 once Lee left the store.

Ellis, a singer whose voice resembled Elvis Presley’s, had gained a national following for a time as an Elvis impersonator. He performed as the masked singer “Orion” and was the subject of a 2015 documentary.

Lee was convicted in 2000 of capital murder and attempted murder.

Supreme Court turns back stay request

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday afternoon denied Lee’s request to stay the execution to consider if the state was allowed to make the switch to lethal injection. Justices turned back the request without comment.

Lee filed a lawsuit in 2016 challenging the state’s lethal injection protocol. After Alabama authorized nitrogen as an execution method, Lee selected it as his preferred method. He agreed to dismiss the lethal injection lawsuit in 2018 because the state agreed that “if he is to be executed, defendants will carry out that execution by nitrogen hypoxia.”

Lee’s lawyers argued the state was bound by the terms of that agreement to not use lethal injection. The state attorney general’s office asked the high court to let the execution proceed, arguing that nothing precludes the switch to lethal injection.

For decades, lethal injection was the generally preferred U.S. execution method until problems procuring and administering the drugs led states including Alabama to consider alternatives.

Lethal injection remains Alabama’s primary execution method. But in 2024, the state began carrying out some executions using nitrogen gas, which involves replacing breathable air with gas through a respirator mask, causing death from lack of oxygen. Nitrogen has now been used in seven executions in Alabama and one in Louisiana.

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Texas executes man for triple murder in 2005

The 26th Execution of 2026 

LeJames Norman, 40, was put to death by lethal injection on September 16, 2025 at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas, reported The Associated Press. He was put to death for the 2005 fatal shooting of three people during an attempted robbery at his neighbor’s home in rural Texas, the state’s fifth execution this year.

Norman been sentenced to death in the fatal shootings of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, inside the home they shared in Edna, located about 100 miles (161 kilometers) southwest of Houston.

Ker’Sean Ramey was also convicted in the shootings and sentenced to death. His execution is set for next week.

Court records indicated Norman and Ramey believed there was cocaine in the house and hoped to steal it, but they never found any drugs. Norman was arrested about five months after the killings while trying to cross back into the U.S. from Mexico.

Norman pleaded guilty to capital murder, leaving a jury to decide his punishment. The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request on Wednesday from Norman’s attorneys to stop his execution.

No last words before execution

Asked by the warden if he wanted to make a final statement, Norman shook his head.

He was laying on a thin mattress atop a steel table, his head on a white pillow. He nodded toward a window through which a sister, two of his children and a friend watched and made eye contact as one of them danced.

As the lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital began taking effect, he took a couple of deep breaths, appeared to yawn and made snoring sounds — six of them. All movement then stopped.

Thirty minutes later, after a physician examined him, he was pronounced dead at 6:44 p.m. and covered with a white sheet. Only his right hand and lower forearm, covered with an elastic bandage, were visible.

No relatives or friends of the three murder victims in his case witnessed Norman’s punishment.

Judge halts Georgia execution

Stacey Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in the 2003 killings of 33-year-old Cyndi Williams and 21-year-old Lori Brown in an Atlanta suburb. He too had been scheduled to die by an injection of the same drug at 7 p.m. EDT at the state prison near Jackson.

However, a judge halted Humphreys’ execution late Tuesday after his lawyers filed a petition seeking a resentencing under a new state law that allows victims of abuse to have their sentences reconsidered and reduced, if they can tie their crimes to abuse they suffered.

The state appealed that ruling, asking the Georgia Supreme Court to find that Humphreys is not entitled to have his sentence reconsidered under the new law. But the high court declined to hear that appeal before the scheduled execution time and left the lower court’s stay in place.

Georgia’s high court said it would consider the questions raised about the new law in the state’s appeal “in the ordinary course of business and according to a forthcoming scheduling order.”

Killings at a model home and allegations of a biased juror

The two women who Humphreys killed were working as real estate agents for a new subdivision in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs. He entered the sales office in a model home around midday on Nov. 3, 2003, and forced them to strip naked and give him their bank PINs before fatally shooting them, according to evidence presented at trial.

Humphreys withdrew more than $3,000 from the women’s bank accounts, according to court filings. He told police after his arrest that he had recently taken out some high-interest payday loans and needed money for a payment on his truck.

Witnesses told police they saw a man fitting Humphreys’ description at the sales office and a vehicle in the parking lot that matched his black Dodge Durango. Police zeroed in on Humphreys and tried to question him at his Dunwoody home days later. He fled and was arrested in Wisconsin after leading police on a high-speed chase.

In addition to the petition for a reduced sentence, Humphreys’ lawyers have argued that he should be resentenced because his death sentence was tainted by a biased juror who lied during jury selection and bullied other jurors into voting for a death sentence. Courts have repeatedly rejected those arguments for procedural reasons, though U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberal justices, argued last year that the issue should be further explored rather than leaving it “caught in a web of procedural barriers.”

Additionally, Humphreys’ lawyers have argued that it was not fair that his clemency application was heard by only four members of the five-person State Board of Pardons and Paroles. A judge had ordered one member of the board to recuse herself, agreeing with Humphreys’ legal team that there was a conflict of interest because she previously worked as a victim advocate with the Cobb County district attorney’s office and had worked with the victims in his case. The parole board on Tuesday denied clemency for Humphreys.

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Trump attacks his appointees to the Supreme Court after vote by mail slap down

President Trump assailed the Supreme Court’s decision to block his administration’s efforts to change mail voting and issued a blistering criticism of the three justices he appointed during his first term, reported The New York Times.

“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court,” he wrote on social media, referring to Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch. “They are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an executive order by Mr. Trump that would have drastically changed how Americans vote by mail ahead of the midterm elections. Mr. Trump has long railed against mail-in voting and suggested it is rife with cheating — even though he has voted by mail in recent elections.

In his post on Truth Social, Mr. Trump slammed the decision as “horrible, highly political.”

“It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left ‘Dumocrats,’ on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do - And now they have an open field to do so!” he wrote.

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Mangino discusses thefts from area booster organizations on WFMJ-TV21

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