Richard Allen and his defense attorneys have rested their case. Have they done enough?

DELPHI, Ind. ― At 9:07 a.m. on Wednesday, just after jurors in the double-murder trial of Richard Allen entered the downtown Delphi courtroom to start the day's proceedings, Special Judge Frances Gull asked the defense to call their next witness.

Instead, Bradley Rozzi uttered three words that caught prosecutors off-guard: " The defense rests ."

Allen's defense attorneys rested their case after less than a week of testimonies, an indication that the long-awaited trial might have a resolution sooner than expected. Closing arguments will begin Thursday.

Legal experts who have been watching the case say that Allen's attorneys were handicapped by Gull's decision to bar them from presenting a key part of their defense ― that the real killers are a group of Odinists who murdered Abigail "Abby" Williams and Liberty "Libby" German during a bloody ritual in the woods. But, experts say, the defense team has also been able to meaningfully challenge some of the prosecution's strongest evidence against Allen by calling experts with the credentials to rebut critical testimonies from state witnesses.

The latest on Richard Allen's trial: Delphi defense rests its case.

"I think they did an excellent job in showing two main points of their defense," said John Tompkins, an Indianapolis defense attorney who's been following the case. "One was that the mental condition that Mr. Allen was in when these purported confessions and statements accepting responsibility ... are demonstrably unreliable."

The other, Tompkins said, is a forensic analysis of Libby's phone data that revealed new information about what might have happened to the girls hours after they disappeared from the Monon High Bridge trail on Feb. 13, 2017.

These testimonies happened Tuesday . Stuart Grassian, an expert on solitary confinement, told jurors that Allen's bizarre behavior and mental state while he was at Westville Correctional Facility were "perfectly consistent" with the effects of prolonged isolation. The Massachusetts-based psychiatrist's testimony was meant to discredit the dozens of confessions Allen made at Westville, where he was held in solitary confinement for a little more than a year, and to bolster the defense's argument that a severe mental health crisis caused him to falsely confess.

Later that day, Stacy Eldridge, a digital forensics expert hired by the defense, told jurors that a headphone jack was inserted into Libby's phone for nearly five hours after she and Abby vanished. The only explanation she could think of, Eldridge testified, was that someone was with the girls from 5:45 p.m. to about 10:30 p.m., when prosecutors alleged their bodies had already been laying near Deer Creek for hours. By then, defense attorney Andrew Baldwin said in his opening statements , Allen had long left the trail and was already home.

State rests: Prosecutors rested their case in Delphi murder trial, but is it enough to convict Richard Allen?

"I think they've done all they can do. The experts they brought in were very credible experts," said Indiana University professor Jody Madeira, referring to Eric Warren, a Tennessee-based forensic consultant who raised questions about an Indiana State Police examiner's findings that tied Allen's pistol to an unspent round found between the girls' bodies.

Madeira also said that Grassian came off as a "sophisticated" expert whose testimony went a long way in potentially convincing jurors that Allen's confessions are unreliable.

"I think a lot of it depends on what experts jurors find the most credible," Madeira said. "They have what the prosecution says and they have an alternative."

Allen is on trial for two counts of murder and two counts of murder while kidnapping the girls. Prosecutors alleged that he followed Abby and Libby on the Monon High Bridge, threatened them with a gun and forced them into the woods, where he killed them by slashing their throats.

Defense attorneys countered that Allen is an innocent man who was caught in a bungled investigation and whose already fragile mental health escalated to psychosis after months of solitary confinement. They've put forth an alternative theory that Odinists , members of a pagan Norse religion hijacked by white nationalists, killed the teenagers during a sacrificial ritual.

But Gull has ruled, repeatedly, that the attorneys have failed to produce admissible evidence related to Odinism. This hampered the defense, Madeira said, because even if they can point to allegedly grievous mistakes and misconduct during the investigation and provide jurors with alternative expert testimonies, they can't give them the full picture of what they believe happened.

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"In other words," Madeira said, "they can answer the what but not the how."

Absent the ability to present the bulk of their case, the attorneys focused on driving home their position that Allen was suffering from genuine mental health crisis when he confessed to the crimes.

They also called a neuropsychologist who testified that Allen, contrary to testimony from his therapist at Westville, was not faking psychotic behavior. They showed jurors hours of silent footage of Allen's life in prison. And they called Allen's half-sister and daughter who testified he never molested either of them ― testimonies meant to prove that Allen's psychosis caused him to confess to things he never did, like molesting family members.

Tompkins, the Indianapolis defense attorney, said hearing from Allen's family members, albeit briefly, allowed jurors to "relate to the person who's sitting at the defense table."

"They are the people who know him best," Tompkins said. Having the family members testify was "a very effective way to ... show that the reality of the people who know him is backed by the science of people who studied the conditions he was in."

After the defense rested Wednesday morning, prosecutors called witnesses to undercut the dire conditions of incarceration that Allen's attorneys portrayed to jurors and to establish that Allen's psychosis was not consistent.

Brian Harshman , the Indiana State Police master trooper who listened to hundreds of Allen's calls from prison, testified that Allen has been in a one-man cell for much of the last two years since he was arrested. The implication of Harshman's testimony was that Allen, except during three months in 2023, was mostly stable.

At Westville, he was allowed recreation and had the ability to communicate with neighbors from his cell, Harshman said. The conditions of his incarceration were similar at Wabash Valley Correctional Facility , where he was transferred after about a year at Westville. At Cass County Jail, where he is being detained during his trial, he has a small dayroom and a table.

The more critical testimony of the day came from Dr. John Martin, a psychiatrist at Westville who saw Allen multiple times between April 2023 and June 2023. Martin said he saw signs of psychosis on April 13, 2023, when Allen was found lying naked in his cell with feces smeared on his body. But Allen gradually improved after he was injected with antipsychotic drugs.

Martin's testimony centered on a key date: June 20, 2023.

That day, he told jurors, he saw no evidence of psychosis from Allen and decided to stop the medication. And during a meeting with Allen ― at a time of apparent sanity ― he, again, admitted responsibility to killing the girls.

"That day, he said to me," Martin testified, "'I'd like to apologize to the families of Abby and Libby.'"

But during cross-examination, Rozzi played a video of Allen taken on that same day.

Allen sat motionless while strapped in a wheelchair during a medical examination. Dressed in a white T-shirt and bright orange pants, a frail-looking Allen gazes forward and hardly moves as doctors take his blood pressure and scan him with a stethoscope. As the video played, Allen put his hands over his eyes and craned his head to look at his wife, sister and mother, all of whom kept their heads down as they quietly wept in the courtroom.

"Does that video make you question your diagnosis that Mr. Allen was no longer in a state of psychosis on June 20, 2023?" Rozzi asked Martin, who had not previously seen the video.

What defense revealed to jurors: New details about Libby's phone and the impact of isolation

"Yes," Martin said.

Responding to questions from jurors, Martin said it's possible to slip in and out of psychosis within the same day. Jurors also asked Martin if, after watching the video, he believes Allen faked his condition, as testified by Dr. Monica Wala, Allen's therapist at Westville.

"No," he said. "I don't think so."

Contact IndyStar reporter Kristine Phillips at (317) 444-3026 or at .