Down the Hill: My Descent into the Double Murder in Delphi
By Susan Hendricks

The crime:

13-year-old Abigail “Abby” Williams and 14-year-old Liberty “Libby” German were killed by a stranger while hiking a woodland trail in 2017. In October 2022 a suspect named Richard Allen was taken into custody and charged with the murders.

The book:

Not my thing. As the subtitle indicates, it’s part of the sub-genre of true-crime memoir, where the author/reporter becomes the star of the show. Susan Hendricks is a television journalist who has done a lot of crime reporting at CNN and HLN. She covered the Delphi double murders at the time and interviewed the victims’ families, establishing a close personal relationship that has lasted over the years (Libby German’s older sister Kelsi has written a foreword to this book). Down the Hill is very much the story then of Hendricks’ involvement with the case rather than an account of the crime itself.

Do you want to know more about the actual murders and the police investigation? You’re not going to get it here. In large part that’s because the police haven’t been talking and there hasn’t been a trial yet. This leaves Hendricks spending a lot of time talking about her reporting and other things going on in her life, even to the point of describing a couple of her dreams about the murdered girls and how she had to work to overcome her fear of public speaking when attending CrimeCons (yes, there are such things). There are 16 pages of colour pictures, which is lavish, but only a few of them have a direct bearing on the case. For example there are a bunch of blurry screen grabs of Hendricks appearing on TV, as well as a full-page snap (also blurry) of an old newspaper story about the murder of Hendricks’s cousin over thirty years earlier. Also included is an old picture of that cousin, standing alongside her sisters and brothers. This despite the fact that her murder is only briefly mentioned in the book and doesn’t have much to do with anything.

I don’t know why the memoir angle has become such a big part of true crime publishing. Is it an outgrowth of “me journalism”? I guess it must be popular, but as I’ve said, I’m not a fan of memoir so it’s an approach that doesn’t appeal to me. As for the writing, I found it just passable. It’s easy to read in the modern style. Though I’ll register just in passing how much I dislike the tendency now to break sentences down into individual words to give them emphasis. I think this got started on Twitter (as it then was) years ago. So Abby’s grandfather here is said to miss her. “Every. Single. Day.” I think writing like this is just being lazy, and it’s something I don’t even do online.

Leaving all that aside, what I really wonder about is why this book even exists. And more specifically, why now? The case still hadn’t gone to trial at the time of publication. Indeed, as of the time of my writing this review it still hasn’t. I’m not sure if a trial date has even been set. So isn’t Hendricks jumping the gun? Almost no information has been released to the public about the murders or the investigation. We know next to nothing about the accused aside from the fact that he was married and had a daughter and that he worked at a drug store. We don’t know anything about how the two girls were killed. We don’t know if the killer (whoever he was) worked alone or with somebody.

But the biggest blank spot has to do with why it took so long for the police to arrest a suspect, and what evidence finally led to that arrest. There were two different police sketches made of someone who might have been a suspect, but neither of them looked much like Richard Allen. Meanwhile, there was a short video clip of someone walking on the bridge the girls had last been seen on, and a recording of this same individual saying a few words. It baffled me how such evidence didn’t result in someone being charged immediately. The town the girls lived in (Delphi, Indiana) only had a population of 3,000. Given the location of the crime it was felt early on that the killer was a local. And they had video of the prime suspect! Of course his face couldn’t be made out, but you could tell how big the guy was and exactly what he was wearing: a fairly distinctive cap and a blue jacket of a particular make. And Allen, if he was the guy in the video, wasn’t a recluse but someone who dealt with the public every day. Even if it wasn’t Allen, I would have thought that in a small town like Delphi there would have been a couple of dozen people able to recognize the man in the video immediately.

There are rumours that the police somehow dropped the ball on Allen at some point (a “clerical error”), but there’s nothing in Hendricks’s reporting to substantiate this. There’s a lot here that needs explaining, and I’m sure that in time more will come out. But it hasn’t yet.

Instead, the book ends with two long interviews Hendricks does with a couple of experts who weren’t directly involved with the case: retired cold case investigator Paul Holes and criminal profiler Ann Burgess. These read like transcripts of the sort of talking-head interviews you get on TV. Unfortunately, the experts can only speculate in the most general way on what might have happened. The second interview, the one with Burgess, ends with her saying “Obviously something happened . . . We’ll have to wait and see . . . I hope they get the right person. When the trial finally starts . . . I’ll be watching.”

So stay tuned! What a way to wrap things up.

Noted in passing:

It’s not often I flag something so early in a book, but here’s the first paragraph of Down the Hill:

When Kelsi woke up on the morning of Monday, February 13, 2017, it seemed to be a day just like any other – well, almost. The unusually warm winter in Delphi, Indiana, had brought in fewer snowstorms than administrators had predicted earlier in the academic year, leaving unclaimed snow days in its wake, to the joy of teachers and students alike. On this snow-free “snow day” Monday, the morning rippled with glimmering promise and endless possibilities – a free day with no classes, volleyball practice, or softball.

Now as a kid growing up on a rural school bus route I can testify to having enjoyed many snow days. But never have I heard of snow-free snow days. The school board planned in advance for how many snow days they thought there were going to be, and then when it didn’t snow they took them off as holidays anyway? That’s soft!

Takeaways:

This one is for authors: True crime writers often feel the need to be timely, to get a book into print while the crime is still fresh in the public’s mind. But you can be in too big a rush.

True Crime Files