These Podcasters Were Digging Into A Murder Case. Then Someone Sent Them Graphic Crime Scene Photos.
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Two true crime podcasters investigating the 2017 killings of two young Indiana girls found themselves at the center of the turbulent high-profile case after they received gruesome crime scene photos leaked from a defense attorney’s office earlier this month.
“The Murder Sheet” co-hosts Áine Cain and Kevin Greenlee, who had turned over the photos and other confidential evidence to authorities after receiving them on Oct. 5, were in the Fort Wayne courtroom Thursday when the judge made a surprise announcement: Bradley Rozzi and Andrew Baldwin, the court-appointed attorneys who had represented Richard Allen since his October 2022 arrest in connection with the deaths of eighth-graders Abby Williams and Libby German, had just abruptly resigned.
Just minutes after walking into the courtroom — and hours after Baldwin admitted through his attorney that a friend had stolen the material from his office, but argued he should continue to represent Allen — the judge ended the proceedings. The trial, scheduled to begin in January, was effectively derailed, just another stunning development in the beleaguered case. Even Cain and Greenlee, who knew more than most about what had gone on behind the scenes, were caught off-guard, and witnessed firsthand the confusion of the families and supporters of the victims and Allen himself.
Greenlee, an attorney in addition to a podcaster who filed a court briefing to secure the release of a trove of previously sealed documents, told HuffPost that he was disappointed that “so much of what occurred [Thursday] happened behind closed doors. … I think it would have been far better for the case if the hearing had actually been held, and witnesses had been heard, so the whole public could hear exactly what happened and could understand why it was so serious, and why the judge felt it was important for these attorneys to be off the case.”
It remains to be seen whether Allen’s new defense team will press on with a theory presented by Rozzi and Baldwin in an explosive September memorandum that included previously undisclosed details about the crime scene and alleged that Abby, 13, and Libby, 14, were killed in a ritual sacrifice by Odinist cult members who painted a tree with the blood of one of the girls.
A photo of that tree was one of the images received by Cain, a journalist who previously worked for Business Insider, and Greenlee, the podcasting team told HuffPost Friday. (The following interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.)
Kevin Greenlee and Áine Cain host the "Murder Sheet" podcast.
You have gone from podcast investigators to being actively involved in this case — how do you feel about that?
Áine Cain: I would say that as a journalist, it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to be part of the story as well as reporting on the story. We try to be very intentional and communicative with our audience about what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, and how we’re doing it, mostly because of that discomfort. It’s definitely pretty weird in this situation. It was really surreal to be kind of blowing the whistle on the leak with both law enforcement and the defense team. Becoming involved seemed necessary, owing to the massive amount of harm that the publication of the leaked discovery materials could do, not only to the families of these victims, but also to defendant Richard Allen’s rights — you know, we have a constitutionally innocent man here. He’s not been tried. He’s not had his day in court. And incendiary materials going around the internet we just felt was not an acceptable situation for him, in particular.
How did these come into your possession? Did you work with the source before and knew it was coming?
Cain: We had heard from this source before regarding another accidental leak from the defense. We actually chose to not report on that because it just didn’t really seem like a huge deal — sort of one of those “accidental email” situations.
But there was an image [the bloody tree] floating out there on social media, that people purported to be a crime scene photo. We didn’t really pay that much attention to it, because if we can’t verify something, we just assume it’s fake. But in this case, that was incorrect — we were wrong to think that it was just somebody [taking a picture of a tree] in their backyard.
When our source reached out to us and provided us with seven leaked discovery images, which included graphic crime scene photographs, as well as unreleased suspect sketches, it kind of became immediately clear to us that these were real and this was very serious. This was like 2 or 3 in the morning, and we ended up staying up even later because we were so rattled.
The next morning, we contacted law enforcement and let them know that there had been a serious breach and what we had received. We also reached out to the defense later that day, saying, “Hey, there’s been a serious breach.” At that point, it was also getting out on social media — it turned out that multiple people ultimately received these images. Our source was not the original leaker — he was a man who received it down the line.
Our source began to feel quite bad about participating in something like this, and ended up asking us if we would basically provide his information — and his communications with the person who leaked it to him — to law enforcement. We ended up doing that and giving them a statement about our role in this. And from there we were just sitting and watching, unfortunately, the leak grow, because a lot of people ended up getting this.
The original leaker was a former employee of Andrew Baldwin’s criminal defense team law firm, and he was a good friend of Baldwin as well. So they were close personally. He left the firm a number of years ago to pursue other opportunities — not an acrimonious split, just you know, moving on, and he somehow was able to get access to the discovery files. He leaked them to a person [who died by suicide after an investigation into the leak began] who passed them on to our source as well as at least one other person.
It is one of the most horrifying situations you can imagine. If there’s no real clear motive for the leak, we can speculate certain things, but it just seems to be a lot of carelessness. And a lot of just not really thinking things through, that just snowballs into just an unmitigated, tragic disaster.
A makeshift memorial to Liberty German and Abigail Williams near where their bodies were discovered in Delphi, Indiana.
One question many people are asking is why your source didn’t go directly to law enforcement.
Cain: We were kind of curious too, because, obviously, that was our impulse. But ultimately, my perception is that this is somebody who is not really familiar with how any of this works and perhaps was a bit scared and intimidated by the process. And I think there was a lot of anxiety around it, alongside a determination to do the right thing, but perhaps not really knowing how to go about that.
Kevin, I thought I saw you say in another interview that these images could support the defense’s theory of the case. Am I interpreting that correctly?
Greenlee: From reading some of the text messages between some of the people involved in this leak, we got the impression that they believed that these images supported a defense theory. Without going into too many details about what was actually in the images, I can say that I did not see anything in those images that would either confirm or debunk any theory about the case. I think it’s an instance where if you already have a preconception about what happened, you can probably find something in the pictures that would support that, no matter what that preconception is.
I really feel that all of us as laypeople just don’t have the background, or the ability or the know-how to really interpret them. And so all I saw was ambiguity.
Cain: Yeah, I think everyone is going to have their own lens. Frankly, even if a crime scene expert examined them, if they didn’t have the context of the wider case file, I don’t really know how they could make an accurate or well-informed assessment either. It’s one of those things where it’s just going to be people injecting their own bias into what they’re seeing, as Kevin said.
This screenshot shows Special Judge Fran Gull in court in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on Oct. 19, 2023.
So…what’s next?
Cain: That’s a really good question. I think the next concrete thing that’s coming up in the case is we have this Halloween hearing. It’s really scary, because that was the date they announced [Allen’s] arrest at a press conference last year. I feel like we’re in some sort of bizarre déjà vu because before the announcement, we became aware that an arrest had been made or that some person had been detained in the case.
We ended up sitting on it because we did not want to endanger anybody or mess things up.
It just sort of feels like Groundhog’s Day. And I’m sure the families of the two victims are feeling that most of all because they’ve been waiting for answers. Now they have to start over. And Richard Allen’s family, I’m sure they want to have his day in court as well. It’s sad, because there is a way the system typically should work. And it just feels like there’s so many curveballs in this case that it’s sometimes really hard to predict this stuff. Unfortunately, it’s become a wider tragedy than even just a horrible leak of sensitive crime scene photos.
It’s important for people to remember that these are all human beings at the center of this, and they’re all going through a very difficult time, and we just encourage everybody to be empathetic to that.
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At his next court hearing on Oct. 31, Allen is expected to receive a new trial date. The judge has said new counsel will be appointed for him before then.
