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The Independent UK
The Independent UK
National
Rachel Sharp

Delphi murders: Killer staged bodies and may have taken souvenir, new documents reveal

Indiana State Police

The killer in the unsolved Delphi murders is believed to have moved and staged the victim’s bodies and taken a souvenir from their 2017 slayings, according to newly-surfaced police documents.

Best friends Libby German, 14, and Abby Williams, 13, lost a lot of blood during their murders with an unspecified weapon and were not killed in the same location where their bodies were discovered close to a trail where they had set off on a fun day out together just hours earlier.

The shocking new details about the murders that have rocked the community of Delphi, Indiana, for more than five years came to light in a search warrant obtained by podcast The Murder Sheet and shared with The Independent.

The warrant, filed by an FBI agent investigating the murders back in 2017, was to carry out a search on the home of Ronald Logan.

Mr Logan’s home was just 1,400 feet from the location where Libby and Abby’s bodies were discovered on Valentine’s Day 2017. He died in 2020 and the case remains unsolved to this day.

In the search warrant application – parts of which are redacted – the agent reveals that the murderer would have been covered in the victims’ blood due to the “large amount of blood was lost by the victims at the crime scene”.

“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,” the agent wrote.

Investigators have never revealed how the girls died or disclosed details about the crime scene.

For the first time, the warrant reveals that they were killed by some type of weapon but the word is redacted in the document.

Libby and Abby went missing on 13 February 2017 after they set off on a hike along the Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, Indiana.

Their bodies were discovered the next day in a wooded area around half a mile off the trail.

For more than five years, the families of the two girls have been searching for answers as to what happened and who was responsible for their murders.

But no arrests have ever been made with several promising leads or theories arising over the years, only to go cold.

On the day the girls went missing, Libby had posted photos on Snapchat of her and Abby walking along the trail.

The 14-year-old also captured a grainy video on her phone of a man dressed in blue jeans, a jacket and a hoodie walking along the abandoned railroad bridge.

Investigators released a still 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.

The man has never been identified. He is described 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.

This grainy image was taken on Libby’s phone on the trail the day the girls went missing. Investigators believe the man is the killer.

The release of the search warrant comes several months after Indiana State Police announced that they were investigating a fake online profile called anthony_shots in connection to the case.

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 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.

The male model whose photos were used has been identified and is not a person of interest in the case, investigators said.

The creator of the bogus online profile had already been identified as Kegan Anthony Kline, a 27-year-old man with addresses in Kokomo and Peru, close to Delphi.

He was arrested on charges of child sexual abuse images and child exploitation tied to the account and admitted to grooming underage girls online.

The affidavit states 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 Mr Kline’s home in Peru after tracking down the user of the anthony_shots profile to the property.

Mr 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.

Mr 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 has not been accused of involvement in their deaths.

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