Three Appeal Exhibits Are “Corrupted”. These Are Not Insignificant Files.
Published on August 22, 2026
On August 18, 2026, the Indiana Court of Appeals issued a remarkable order in Richard Allen’s appeal.
Three audio/video exhibits - Defendant’s Exhibits HHH, III and KKK - “appear to be corrupted and are unplayable.”
In context, it means more than just random exhibit references. One exhibit concerns a major alternative-suspect investigation whose original evidence was already destroyed; another shows the condition of Richard Allen’s mind while the State obtained the “confessions” used to convict him; and the third concerns another man investigated in connection with the alternative-suspect evidence.
This requires more than just another shrug from Carroll Circuit court and Judge Gull.
HHH: The Brad Holder Interview
Defendant’s Exhibit HHH is the August 2023 law-enforcement interview of Brad Holder.
Its significance is difficult to overstate because the original February 2017 recording of Holder’s police interview no longer exists. Law enforcement recorded that interview and then recorded over its only copy. What survives from 2017 is a brief written narrative.
That narrative said Holder had never met Abby Williams.
When police interviewed Holder again in August 2023, however, he said he had met Abby once. By his 2024 deposition, the number had become twice. Allen’s appellate attorneys specifically rely on Exhibit HHH, down to the timestamp, to document that changing account.
This matters because Holder is not a name randomly pulled from the internet years later. His son had been communicating with Abby shortly before the murders. Holder told police he participated in pagan practices with Patrick Westfall. Investigators examined his activities during the original investigation, and subsequent evidence raised questions about how thoroughly his alibi and other information had actually been checked. Allen’s appellate brief argues that law enforcement mishandled this line of investigation.
To understand the importance of this exhibit going missing, consider the history.
The 2017 Holder interview was destroyed.
The surviving 2023 Holder interview is now unplayable in the appellate record.
Perhaps the second event has an entirely innocent technical explanation. But Indiana cannot reasonably expect the public to pretend the first event never happened when they are assessing the second.
III: Richard Allen Inside Westville
Defendant’s Exhibit III is not a deposition volume, despite the confusing duplication of Roman numerals elsewhere in the appellate record.
It is Westville prison video evidence showing Richard Allen during his mental collapse.
Allen’s appellate brief cites Exhibit III at specific timestamps. One April 12 recording shows him naked, hitting out at the air, counting objects that were not there, handling feces and marching in place. Another portion cited in the appellate brief records him pacing for hours and banging his head against his cell.
This evidence goes directly to one of the central questions in the appeal: what was the mental condition of the man whose prison statements the State subsequently presented as reliable confessions to murder?
The State relied heavily upon Allen’s words.
The defence says the videos show what those words cannot; a man whose mind had disintegrated after months of extraordinary pre-trial solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison.
There is an additional irony here. At trial, the jury was permitted to see prison footage of Allen but Judge Gull ordered the sound to be muted. Allen’s appeal specifically attacks that decision, arguing that the audio would have allowed jurors to appreciate the irrationality of his behaviour.
Now, the Court of Appeals, the court being asked to determine whether those “confessions” were constitutionally and factually reliable, reports that Defendant’s Exhibit III cannot be played at all. This is deeply alarming.
Perhaps there is an innocent explanation, but this is not an inconsequential corrupted file among hundreds.
It is evidence of what the State had done to Richard Allen before it began calling his words proof of guilt.
KKK: The Rod Abrams Interview
Defendant’s Exhibit KKK is the 2018 interview of Rod Abrams.
Abrams was interviewed as investigators examined Elvis Fields and other alternative-suspect leads. Abrams told investigators that he, Fields and Ned Smith had been in Muncie visiting somebody in hospital on February 13, 2017.
That alibi became problematic.
In Jerry Holeman’s deposition, the defence put it directly to him that Abrams had claimed the men were in Muncie and that investigators had determined the claim was not true. Holeman agreed that law enforcement had been able to validate that.
The 2023 defence memorandum went much further into the Abrams interview and the conflicting accounts surrounding Fields’ whereabouts, arguing that investigators had failed adequately to pursue information which pointed away from Richard Allen. The memorandum identified three separate Abrams interview videos among the evidence provided to the court.
None of this proves Abrams, Fields, Holder, Westfall or anybody else murdered Abby and Libby. We do not need to go that far.
The point is that Richard Allen was entitled to expose to a jury whether law enforcement competently investigated other evidence before deciding that he, and only he, was the answer.
Exhibit KKK is part of that question.
How Many “Accidents” Does Due Process Absorb?
The Court of Appeals has not yet declared the original exhibits permanently lost. It says the copies before it appear corrupted and unplayable, and it has ordered replacement copies to be filed.
If intact originals are promptly produced and verified, the immediate problem may prove to be another serious but recoverable failure in assembling a vast and complex appellate record.
But Richard Allen’s case does not exist in a vacuum where evidence-management failures can sensibly be viewed one at a time.
The original Holder recording was overwritten.
Patrick Westfall’s original interview was not recorded.
Important investigative material was lost or mishandled.
The appellate record itself has already required supplementation.
And now the Indiana Court of Appeals cannot play three defence audio/video exhibits, all three relevant to major issues Allen says the jury was prevented from properly considering.
HHH concerns the abandoned Holder investigation.
KKK concerns another alternative-suspect lead and an alibi investigators themselves determined was false.
III concerns Allen’s mental state when the State was creating what would become the centrepiece of its case against him.
For those three exhibits to fall would be an extraordinary piece of luck for anyone who benefits from Richard Allen's continual incarceration.
A criminal justice system asking the public to trust it carries a corresponding obligation to preserve the evidence upon which that trust depends. When the State seeks to imprison a man until he dies, “we lost it”, “we recorded over it”, “we did not record it”, and “the file will not play” cannot become recurring excuses of the same prosecution without eventually becoming something more meaningful and more pressing.
Richard Allen’s appeal is already, in substantial part, an argument about institutional reliability: whether investigators reliably reported witnesses, reliably preserved evidence, reliably pursued other suspects, reliably represented facts to a judge, and reliably interpreted the statements of a mentally broken prisoner.
The latest order adds another question.
Can Indiana reliably preserve the evidence needed for a court to decide whether it convicted the right man?
For Richard Allen, that question is not an academic one.