According to Fox59, “50-year-old Richard Allen was arrested and taken into custody at the Indiana State Police’s post in West Lafayette on Wednesday, October 26. He was formally charged with two counts of murder two days later on October 28.”
On Monday night, HLN’s Barbara MacDonald reported that Delphi suspect Richard Matthew Allen’s home and property was searched by investigators on Thursday, October 13.
What prompted investigators to knock on Richard Allen’s door that mid-October day, and can the nearly two week gap between the search and his arrest shed any light on how Allen ended up on their radar? If the account MacDonald gleaned from Allen’s neighbors is accurate, it would appear that Richard Allen may have only become a suspect that morning, and investigators, most likely, had not yet acquired much evidence against him prior to arriving at his home that day.
MacDonald reported neighbors “noticed a lot of activity outside his house, a lot of cars that appeared to them to be unmarked law enforcement vehicles, a lot of men not in law enforcement uniforms, but in suits and khaki pants, all arriving at the house just before noon. They asked Richard and his wife to exit the home and to remain outside of the home throughout the day. They weren’t allowed back into the home until around 11:00 p.m. that night. During that time, Richard stood outside. His wife sat in a van. He stood outside that van for several hours. One of the photos shows that, that we’ve exclusively obtained. Another photo shows him sitting in the van with his wife, with the passenger door open for another several hours. At some point, as it was starting to get dark out, these neighbors noticed that the Carroll County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Tony Liggett arrived. He had a piece of paper with him. He showed it to Richard Allen. At that point a tow truck arrived and started taking the car away…one that he (Allen) routinely used. They began a search inside the house and also in the yard using some sort of a device, perhaps like a metal detector or something like that, to search a flower bed and an area around a shed. They did dig around the shed and some small areas. They took a lot of photos in the shed….Officers came out of the house carrying several bundles of cloth, dark cloth, perhaps clothing, a Macy’s shopping bag, a shoe box, and a stack of books. At this point we don’t know what any of that means for the investigation.”
If the above account is accurate, and investigators are removing the Allen’s from their home while a search warrant is being obtained, it would seem likely that Richard Allen only became a suspect that very morning. Why would they not have arrived there with a warrant in hand unless this was a spontaneous event? Also, if they’d had conclusive evidence pointing to Allen, why would they not have arrested him the day of the search? Whatever evidence or information led to his arrest, it likely was obtained during the search and required an additional thirteen days of examination before authorities felt confident enough to arrest Allen.
It seems doubtful that DNA led to Richard Matthew Allen. If this was the case, then they probably would have arrived at his home with a search warrant and possibly an arrest warrant in hand. It seems more likely that some tip or cyber discovery resulted in the identification or location of his home. While there is yet no known linkage between Allen and Kegan Kline, does anyone honestly believe that this guy was not a consumer of online pornography? If the killings were the realization of some fantasy, like many experts speculate, then it would be almost a cosmic certainty that the suspect Richard Allen was immersed in a world of online child sexual abuse material. And if that’s true, could Richard Allen, or his online profile, have ended up in the orbit of Kegan Kline? Was Richard Allen just a profile or an anonymous acquaintance of Kegan Kline’s before he became known by name to authorities on October 13?
Whatever prompted investigators to rush to the suspect’s home on October 13, it would be the granddaddy of all coincidences if one of the victims was in social media communication with a child predator in the morning and then was pursued and ultimately murdered by another child predator in an unrelated incident that afternoon. It is heartening to see law enforcement continuing to investigate until they are certain that all involved are apprehended and justice can prevail for Libby, Abby, and their families.
If there is something 