DELPHI, Ind. — Surrounded by police and prosecutors, a retired government employee stood with a stoic expression as those around her heaped praise.

She was the key to solving one of Indiana’s most infamous crimes in recent memory. 

Kathy Shank, who volunteered as a clerk, came across a box of tip sheets in a desk drawer that led to an arrest in the 2017 killings of Abigail “Abby” Williams and Liberty “Libby” German in Delphi. 

On Friday, the man Shank helped identify, Richard Allen, was sentenced to the maximum punishment of 130 years in prison in their deaths. 

“Without her, we would not be here,” Carroll County Prosecutor Nick McLeland said during a news conference after Allen’s sentencing. “Without her, we would not have an arrest, conviction and a sentence.” 

Before her retirement, Shank worked for 40 years as a child protective service investigator. 

“As soon as I saw (the tip), I just thought this was something we’d been looking for,” Shank said after the news conference Friday. 

She was also hailed as a hero by Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett after Allen’s sentencing. Even after finding the tip, Shank played a role in the prosecutor’s office.

“She was the grandmother of our office, if you will,” McLeland said. “She made sure that whatever we needed, she took care of and she never complained.”

Shank said she was happy to be at the news conference and that there was justice for the families of the victims. 

McLeland also thanked law enforcement and his team of prosecutors for their support in securing Allen’s conviction. He hopes the families of the victims can take a sigh of relief that this part of the trial is over, McLeland said. 

On a large screen during the news conference, a photo of Abby Williams and Libby German was projected. In the photo, the girls appeared to be sitting in the back of a vehicle, with winter hats on, smiling into the camera. 

Next to the podium was another photo of the girls with the following message: “Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while, leave footprints on our hearts, and we are never, ever the same.” 

Allen was convicted in November of two counts of murder and two counts of murder while kidnapping the girls. Special Judge Frances Gull imposed the maximum 65-year punishment for each murder charge.

“I have been a criminal court judge in the state of Indiana for 25 years, and I have presided over some of the most hideous cases in the state of Indiana,” Gull told Allen before announcing her sentence in a packed courtroom, “and you rank right up there.”

Allen has maintained his innocence and will appeal.

Richard Allen was not on Delphi investigators’ radar. Then a volunteer found a box of tips

A few days after the girls’ bodies were found, Allen self-reported to investigators that he was on the Monon High Bridge trail on Feb. 13, 2017. He was later contacted by Dan Dulin, an Indiana Department of Natural Resources captain who was helping with the investigation, and the two met at a grocery store.

Allen said he was on the trail that day between 1 and 3:30 p.m. on Feb. 13, Dulin told jurors during the trial in October. Allen told the investigator he saw three girls near the Freedom Bridge as he headed toward the trail, Dulin testified.

Allen was ultimately cleared, and for the next five years, he was not on investigators’ radar. That changed on Sept. 21, 2022, when Shank came across a “lead sheet” about Allen.

That day, she opened the box and began going through the files, thinking she had to log them into a database. Then, she came across Allen’s file, which appeared to have been mislabeled as “Richard Allen Whiteman,” Shank testified during Allen’s trial.

It’s unclear where “Whiteman” came from, but Allen, a white man, lived on Whiteman Drive in Delphi.

The file seemed to catch Shank’s attention. She’d previously read that someone, a girl, had reported seeing a man on the trail on Feb. 13 at about the same time that Allen, based on his own self-reporting, was on the trail.

“I thought there could be a correlation,” Shank testified.

Shank took the file to Tony Liggett, who was chief deputy at the Carroll County Sheriff’s Office at that time. He alerted Steve Mullin, who was chief of the Delphi Police Department when the girls were killed and later became an investigator at the prosecutor’s office.

The investigation then focused on Allen, leading to his subsequent conviction in November and sentencing on Friday.

Contact Jake Allen at [email protected]. Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, @Jake_Allen19.