Still Not Occult Crime

As a fan of the True Crime genre, I am very familiar with cases in which false confessions get innocent people convicted. Such cases are practically cliche at this point. They usually are older cases from back when DNA evidence was not as easy to test, which means that testing evidence with today's techniques can yield an accurate result.

Richard Allen was convicted in 2024 of murdering two girls in Indiana. He denied killing them for months, but after being held in solitary confinement and interrogated repeatedly he finally confessed. His defense lawyers claimed that police had managed to convince him he killed the girls and he had "repressed the memory" of it.

Now that should throw up an immediate red flag with my readers. "Repressed memories" are not real unless you happen to be a police officer trained in a method called the Reid Technique. It is used by police departments all over the country, and whether you are innocent or not police can usually extract a confession using it. They often do so by convincing subjects that they committed the crime, but do not remember doing so because of "repression."

Prosecutors said Allen was armed with a gun and forced the girls off the hiking trail. They said he confessed to planning to rape them before a passing van made him change his mind and he killed them. An expert testified an unspent bullet found between the teens’ bodies “had been cycled through” Allen’s handgun.

Defense lawyers at his trial said no witness explicitly identified Allen as the man seen near the trail the afternoon the girls went missing. They also said no fingerprint, DNA or forensic evidence linked Allen to the murder scene. Allen was held in solitary confinement while awaiting trial. He denied killing the girls for months, but his attorneys said mental stress from isolation led to a steep psychological decline. Eventually, his mental state became so bad he convinced himself he killed the girls and confessed several times, his lawyers said.

“Allen lost forty pounds, was unable to care for himself, was tased, his face was black and blue and at times bleeding, and he was poisoned by fecal matter and toilet water,” attorneys Stacy Uliana and Mark Leeman wrote in their brief. Prosecutors said the statements coincided with Allen seeing evidence in the case including the conditions of the teens’ bodies.

“The discovery materials forced Allen to face the horrifying evidence of what he did ... images and events he had been able to ignore and repress over the five years in which his guilt had gone undiscovered,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita wrote in his office’s brief.

So far, so ordinary - at least as murder cases go. I'm not familiar with how you test if a bullet has "cycled through" a gun, so I have no idea how accurate that test is. The stress described by the defense is absolutely the sort of thing that could produce a false confession, so it is possible that this is another case of that. At the same time, there's no way to say for sure. If the bullet can be reliably traced to his gun, it sounds like that should be conclusive.

Now I know you're wondering - what does all this have to do with Augoeides' usual subject matter? I promise, we're just about there - because here's where the story goes weird.

Allen’s trial attorneys wanted to put an expert witness on the stand to testify the killings appeared to be a ritual sacrifice by people who worshipped Odin, the king of the gods in Norse mythology.

The expert was expected to say the positioning of the bodies, the branches on the remains, the outdoor location of the crime and knife wounds to the victims all were indications of pagan rituals. Prosecutors said the expert had limited examples and that defense lawyers shouldn’t be able to present just any theory without evidence to back it up.

Wait. WHUT??? I have to say, I was seriously considering the possibility that Allen might be innocent until I got to this. The reason is that as a theory goes, it's utterly insane. In the real world "Pagans" are not running around sacrificing people. Allen is clearly thinking of the horror movie world, but the thing is, that's not where this crime was committed.

Other issues Allen’s attorneys are expected to argue before the appeals court are inconsistencies in how witnesses described the suspicious man near the trail, pointing to a sketch of a potential suspect that didn’t look like Allen. They also question why an expert for Allen’s defense wasn’t allowed to question whether marks on an unfired bullet can be traced to a specific gun.

Now those are all good questions that should be explored. But what should not be explored is some horror movie plot that literally never happens, especially since the defense here is using that theory to slander minority religions. Statistically speaking there are barely any Pagans around compared to the vast majority of Christians.

It's far more likely that girls were killed by a Christian pedophile. To be clear, I'm not saying that's what happened, just that statistically speaking there are a lot more documented Christian pedophiles in the world than Pagans interested in conducting "sacrifices" - the latter number being basically zero.

During the 1990's law enforcement training videos for identifying "Satanic Cults" were widely circulated to police departments. These videos identified all sorts of "Satanic" things that had little to do with anything. Graffiti in a park that included a star (that is, a pentagram!) definitely indicated Satanic cults were meeting there. Branches covering up bodies was "ritualistic." Outdoor crimes were committed by Satanists or Pagans. And so forth. This nonsense sounds exactly like the ridiculous theory that Allen's defense wanted to throw around.

Indiana is a very conservative state, so I'm pleased to hear that prosecutors ruled out this line of inquiry. Allen might be an innocent man coerced into a confession - that happens a lot more often than most people realize. But "Pagans did it" is not a remotely viable defense. I would love to live in a world where experts on occultism presented at trials were actual practitioners, instead of fundamentalist nutcases who have no idea what real magical practices even are.