Mr. Allen would have been 44 years old at the time of the killings. The 50-year-old man lives in Delphi, which has about 3,000 people and is a small, close-knit town where the teenage girls and their families lived before they were killed. His family lives in a neighborhood southwest of the Monon High Bridge, which is less than a five-minute drive from where the bodies of Libby and Abby were found.
Online records show that Mr. Allen has lived in Delphi at least since 2006. He has also lived in Indiana his whole adult life. Mr. Allen is married to Kathy and has an adult daughter with her. He is also a trained pharmacy technician who got his most recent license in February 2018, one year after the murders
He currently works at the local CVS, where he meets people from the neighborhood as part of his job.
Mike and Becky Patty, Libby’s grandparents, said that Mr. Allen helped them get their photos developed at the store.
CVS told the families of the victims that it was sorry and would help with the investigation in any way it could.
“As members of the Carroll County community, we remain devastated by these murders and our hearts go out to the German and Williams families,” the company said in a statement to local outlet WRTV.
“We are shocked and saddened to learn that one of our store employees was arrested as a suspect in these crimes. We stand ready to cooperate with the police investigation in any way we can.”
Local residents reacted with shock when news broke on Friday of his arrest, saying that he seemed “like a normal guy”.
“When I will go into CVS as a customer myself, he would say ‘do you need any help?’ I would be like ‘no’,” Chandler Underhill, the manager of the local Brick & Mortar Pub, where he said Mr Allen was a regular, told Fox59.
“Just like a normal guy that I’ve seen for the last couple years, not really thinking anything.”
Mr Underhill said that Mr Allen always seemed “normal” when he would come into the pub where he works.
“I would talk; he wouldn’t say much. He seems like a normal guy,” he said.
“One of my servers was telling me that he wouldn’t speak much.”
Libby’s grandfather told reporters after Monday’s press conference that his granddaughter’s accused killer had been “hiding in plain sight” the whole time.
“As [Indiana State Police Supt] Doug Carter said that earlier, if you recall. He said he’s hiding in plain sight,” he said.
“And that’s the case. Didn’t know, I don’t know the gentleman personally at all. I’ve probably seen him. It’s a small county. But definitely I don’t know him.”
It has also come out that the person accused of killing the person smiled for a selfie in front of one of the police drawings of the murder suspect.
In a scary photo that Mr. Allen’s wife Kathy posted on Facebook in December 2021, Mr. Allen can be seen smiling in a Delphi bar with his wife. The 2019 police sketch is on the wall behind him. Some parts of Mr. Allen look like the drawing.
The selfie was posted on social media the same month that investigators put out a new call for people to come forward with information about an online catfishing account that they think has something to do with the murders.
Before he was arrested on suspicion of killing two people, Mr. Allen didn’t seem to have a criminal record.
But Mr. Allen is also known as Craigh Ross Rentfrow, according to the Carroll County Jail record.
What happened to Libby and Abby?
Libby and Abby didn’t come back from their hike on the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, Indiana, on February 13, 2017.
The next day, their bodies were found in a forest about half a mile from the trail.
Police haven’t said how the girls died and haven’t said much about the crime scene for years.
But in May, a podcast called The Murder Sheet got a hold of an application for a search warrant and shared it with The Independent. It revealed shocking new information about the murders.
The warrant, which was filed in 2017 by an FBI agent who was looking into the murders and was partly blacked out, was to search the home of a local man named Ronald Logan.
In it, the agent said that the girls had lost “a lot” of blood when they died and that their killer probably moved and posed their bodies before taking something from the scene.
The warrant also said for the first time that the teens had been killed by some kind of weapon. In the document, the word for the weapon was crossed out.
“A large amount of blood was lost by the victims at the crime scene,” the report says, so the killer would have been covered in blood after the killings.
“Because of the nature of the victim’s wounds, it is nearly certain the perpetrator of the crime would have gotten blood on his person/clothing.”
Chilling footage of suspect
On the day the girls went missing, Libby had posted photos on Snapchat of her and Abby walking along the trail.
The happy image of the two best friends is believed to be the last photo of them before they died.
In a move that propelled the investigation forward, Libby also captured a grainy video on her phone of a man dressed in blue jeans, a blue jacket and a cap walking along the abandoned railroad bridge.
Investigators released a grainy image from the video and a chilling audio of the man telling the two girls: “Go down the hill.”
Investigators have long suspected that this man is the girls’ killer and have praised the girls for documenting the video as evidence.
Up until now, the man has never been identified.
Police gave the description of the man as a white male aged between 16 and 40 years old, between 5’ 6” and 5’ 10” in height and weighing between 180 and 200 pounds.
Two police sketches – one in 2017 and one in 2019 – were circulated of a man matching the description of the man in the footage.
Mr Allen’s newly-released mugshot bears some likeness to these police sketches.
Other names tied to the case
The arrest of Mr Allen marks the very first time his name has been publicly tied to the unsolved murders.
Over the years, authorities have honed in on several other men.
A 27-year-old Indiana man fell under the spotlight last year when the online account he used to groom underage girls online was tied to the teenage victims. His home had been searched on suspicion of child porn charges just two weeks after the 2017 murders.
In December 2021, Indiana State Police announced that officials had “uncovered” a fake online profile called anthony_shots.
The profile was used from 2016 to 2017 on platforms including Snapchat and Instagram and used photos of a known male model, portraying him as being extremely wealthy and owning numerous sports cars.
Investigators said the person behind the account was Kegan Anthony Kline, 27-year-old man with addresses in Kokomo and Peru, close to Delphi.
According to an affidavit, Kline posed as the model in order to groom underage girls and get them to send nude photos and their addresses and try to get them to meet him. The male model whose photos were used had no connection to the case.
Kline was arrested on charges of child sexual abuse images and child exploitation tied to the account in 2020.
He allegedly admitted to investigators that he groomed underage girls online.
The affidavit said that Indiana State Police and the FBI carried out a search warrant on 25 February 2017 – less than two weeks after Abby and Libby were murdered – at Kline’s home in Peru after tracking down the user of the anthony_shots profile to the property.
Kline allegedly told investigators he would use social media accounts to talk to underage girls and had exchanged messages with and received about 100 sexual photos and about 20 sexually explicit videos from around 15 underage girls.
However, he denied any knowledge or involvement in the two teenagers’ deaths.
Kline was charged with 30 felonies in 2020 over the case.
The documents, filed in 2020 and heavily redacted, do not mention the murders of Libby and Abby and he was not accused of involvement in their deaths.
Libby’s grandmother Becky Patty told The Independent in December that the teenager had never mentioned speaking to anyone online prior to her death and that there had never been any indication that the two girls had arranged to meet anyone online the day they were killed.
Investigators urged anyone who had communicated with, met, or attempted to meet the individual posing as anthony_shots to come forward with information.
Prior to this, Ronald Logan had previously been on police radar, according to the 2017 search warrant application.
Logan owned the land on which Libby and Abby’s bodies were found and his home was just 1,400 feet from the crime scene.
The warrant application cites multiple complaints that he was violent towards women and that he owned multiple weapons, including handguns and knives.
Logan also allegedly lied about where he was at the time that the teenagers disappeared, claiming he was out of the area with a friend on the afternoon of 13 February when cellphone location data actually placed him in the area around the trail.
