There But for the Grace of God Go I

Everyone who knows me well knows that I am a voracious reader. As soon as I got the hang of reading through the Dick and Jane series of books in first grade, I was off and running … to the library. Five decades later, I am never without a book and a backup anywhere I go. I typically take three or four books along on a week-long vacation and I always have a tablet or my phone with the Kindle app at the ready with several hundred titles just a download away in my purchased digital library.

All my life, I’ve felt happiest and most at home when surrounded by books. When I was in elementary school, I was obsessed with anything by Judy Blume, Beverly Cleary, Richard Chase, or Thomas Rockwell. I was a fiction girl and I had read nearly everything in the kids’ section of our, then, tiny Huntersville Public Library. I became a school library assistant in fifth or sixth grade and kept the “job” through high school. Mrs. Gardner, my beloved librarian at Long Creek Elementary School, recognized my love of all things book related and drafted me as her helper. I loved helping her select which new books to purchase for the library and getting to be the first reader when they came in. 

In junior high, S.E. Hinton floated my boat. My junior high history classes also led to a love of biography. I enjoyed reading about the lives of presidents, writers, and other famous people. One day in 1980, when I was 15 years old, I was shelving books for the librarian, Ms. Jones, at Alexander Junior High School and a certain book entitled The Stranger Beside Me caught my eye. I had never read a true crime book before, but decided to check it out.

The Stranger Beside Me was a firsthand account by author Ann Rule about serial killer Ted Bundy whom she had previously worked with on a Crisis Hotline. Bundy was a crafty, charismatic, ice cold killer who took the lives of at least thirty young women across the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, and Florida. Always interested in psychology, I was fascinated by the book and couldn’t put it down. By the time I finished it, I was hooked on true crime books. For many years, I read every new title related to serial killers that came out. Over the course of my teens, twenties, and thirties I read every book written about Bundy as well as books about the Boston Strangler, the Zodiac Killer, The Golden State Killer, and on and on and on.

With the advent of cable television, documentaries about true crime began popping up. I became obsessed with watching Cold Case Files, Forensic Files, 48 Hours, and Dateline. I would often learn about cases on these shows, then head to the bookstore or Amazon to buy a book so I could learn more about the details of cases like the Casey Anthony child murder case or the O.J. Simpson case.

I first learned about the murders of Abigail Williams (known as “Abby”) and Liberty German (known as “Libby”), also known as the Delphi murders, on one of those crime shows. I began to read everything I could find on the case. News articles and books reported that on February 13, 2017 the two girls, ages 13 and 14, were dropped off by Libby’s sister at a remote trail in rural Indiana for what was supposed to be an afternoon of hiking on the Monon High Bridge Trail. The photos and video shown on the show and in books I read about the case showed a dangerous looking “bridge” which was really an old, defunct railroad crossing over a gorge with a creek at its bottom. There were no rails on the bridge and many of the railroad ties were rotten. One would have to look down constantly as they crossed to make sure of their footing or else they could trip and fall sixty-three feet to the creek below.

After the girls were dropped off, they sauntered along the trail, posting to Snapchat, talking and laughing, enjoying a rare Monday off school. The day off was a fluke. Their school system had allotted a certain number of snow days when their calendar was created for the 2016-2017 school year. The anticipated snow days had, so far, gone unused, so the system gave the students February 13th off school to burn up one of those allotted snow days. The girls were reportedly bored hanging out at Libby’s grandparents house, where she lived, and asked her older sister to accompany them to the Monon High Bridge Trail for an afternoon hike. Libby’s sister had to work, but agreed to drop the girls off on her way. The two middle schoolers were dropped off around 1:35 pm. At 2:07 pm Libby posted a picture of Abby on the bridge to SnapChat. At 2:13 pm Libby activated the video feature on her phone and recorded a 45 second video of a man approaching them from the opposite end of the bridge.

At 3:15 pm Libby’s father pulled into the lot where it had been agreed he would pick up the girls on his way home from work. The girls were not there. He called home to ask if someone else had picked them up, raising the alarm for the first time that the girls were missing. Everyone rushed to the trail and began searching for them, fearing that one or the other may have fallen from the bridge or twisted an ankle or otherwise been hurt and unable to walk back to the meeting point. They checked the route between the trail and Libby’s home, thinking maybe the girls had tried to walk home. When they had not been found by 5:30 pm, the family contacted the police, kicking off a grand scale search that stretched into the next day.

Around noon on Valentine’s Day, the girls’ bodies were found about half a mile from the far end of the bridge. Libby was nude and Abby was wearing some of Libby’s clothes, indicating that she, too, had been undressed at one point. Both had had their throats slashed, though that detail was withheld from the public at the time. Libby’s phone was located nearby. Police were amazed to find a video on her phone of the man who would become known as “Bridge Guy”. They released a still frame photo of the man, head down, walking towards the girls as well as audio of him commanding the girls to go “Down the hill.” They urged anyone who knew who “Bridge Guy” was to contact police. Two months later, in April, they released 5 seconds of the 45 second video clip, hoping that someone would recognize “Bridge Guy” by his gait as he walked towards the girls on the bridge.

Though thousands of tips had poured in since the girls were initially found murdered, the case would not be solved until five years later with the arrest of Richard Allen in October 2022. It turns out that Allen had self-reported his presence at the bridge three days after the girls’ bodies were found, but claimed he had not seen the girls that day. That report had been misfiled at the time it was taken and, therefore, was never followed up on. The misfiled report was only discovered when a volunteer file clerk came across it in September 2022 and brought it to the attention of investigators. Things moved quickly after that. Once in jail, Allen confessed to his wife, his mother, the jail psychologist, the warden and many others. Yet, at trial, he pleaded not guilty. The jury convicted him on all counts. On December 20, 2024, Judge Gull sentenced Allen to 65 years for the murder of Libby and 65 years for the murder of Abby, with the terms to be served consecutively, resulting in a total of 130 years in prison. 

When I first heard about this story and began seeking more information about it, my almost 52 year old self thought and said, “Who would drop off a 13 and 14 year old in this remote, dangerous looking place???” I must admit, after over forty years of immersion in every true crime book I could read or show I could watch on television, I saw the world as a much scarier place at age 52 than I did at age 13 or 14.

Looking back, I think a lot of us romanticize about how things were during our childhood. Growing up in the Long Creek community in Huntersville, North Carolina in the 1970s, I walked on nearby trails, deep in the woods, and rode my bike miles away from home, usually with little or no fear. However, Abby and Libby’s story stirred some memories in me that I had not thought of in decades. 

My entire childhood, I lived exactly a mile from Puckett Brothers’ Store. It was the spot where my parents got their gas, where Mama stopped on her way home from work for a last minute chicken to fry for dinner, and where all the neighborhood kids walked or biked for a cold Coke and a cellophane sleeve of salted peanuts on hot August days. One such day when we were about 11, my best friend, Angie, and I decided to walk to the store for snacks. Our allowance was burning a hole in our pockets. The walk to the store was uneventful. We chose our chips and drinks in frosty glass bottles and headed back down the road towards my house. About halfway there, we moved to the side of the road as we heard a vehicle approaching behind us. We weren’t alarmed when we heard the vehicle slowing as it came abreast of us, figuring it was a neighbor. As we glanced to the left (yes, we were walking on the wrong side of the road … in the grass), we saw an unfamiliar older white pickup truck. The driver, who we did not recognize, cranked down his passenger window and asked if we wanted a ride somewhere. Schooled by our parents to never accept rides from strangers, we declined and the stranger drove on down the road. We hadn’t walked all that far before we heard a car behind us once again. We moved off the road and glanced over to see the same guy. Immediately, I felt panic rising in my chest. The only way for this person to end up behind us again was for him to make a several mile loop out onto Mt. Holly-Huntersville Road, a turn on Beatties Ford Road, and then several turns through the neighborhood. Everything was wrong about the fact that he was there, again, speaking to us out of his passenger window. He asked if we were SURE we didn’t want a ride somewhere, considering how hot the day was. I looked from him to Angie and saw cold fear in her eyes that I knew was mirrored in mine. Without a word both of us took off running. Serendipitously, we were one house away from the Whitleys’. I knew that Jane Whitley, the mom of the house, was usually home during the day. We ran into the open garage and pounded on the interior door. In seconds, Mrs. Whitley let us into her kitchen. Panting, we told her what was going on. Ironically, her husband was a longtime employee of the FBI. I can’t remember if she called the police. It was a moot point. The guy had gunned his motor and driven off as we were admitted to the Whitley home.

I hadn’t thought of this occurrence in decades until I sat thinking about what had happened to Abby and Libby. It gave me chills to come to the realization that Angie and I could have ended up just like they did … missing, dead in the woods somewhere. 

I don’t know what prompted Libby to videotape “Bridge Guy” as he approached the girls on the Monon High Bridge. I wondered if she had a sixth sense that something was wrong with him. I’ve experienced that myself on a few occasions. Once, in my twenties, my husband and I were on a trail in the scrubby dunes that runs from Atalaya, the former winter home of industrialist and philanthropist Archer M. Huntington and his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington through Huntington Beach State Park in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina. It was a beautiful May day and we were enjoying a leisurely stroll on the shaded path when I spotted a lone guy walking towards us. I could never explain what is was about him that alarmed me, but, immediately, my body was covered in chill bumps and my fight or flight response kicked in. I turned to my husband and said, “We need to get the hell out of here … RIGHT NOW!” We kicked our feet into another gear and almost ran up the path until we were back in the sunlit parking lot, surrounded by other park goers. I trembled for an hour after we left the park. On two occasions in our forty years of running our family printing business I have had two walk-ins that activated that same feeling in me. I can’t tell you exactly what it was about their behavior or aura that made me start looking around for a handy weapon … just in case.

I wonder if something similar was happening to Libby. If it was, she was in the worst place in the world for that to happen: a narrow, decrepit bridge, over sixty feet in the air. The only way forward meant they would have to turn sideways to even let him pass them if they met on the bridge. The only way back meant they would have to run back 1300 feet, over the length of four football fields, across rotting railroad ties on a bridge with no handrails to prevent someone who tripped from plunging sixty-three feet to the creek or ground below. “Bridge Guy” planned well. The girls basically fell into a trap he had set for them that had no way out.

In the forty-five years I have been reading true crime books and the many years of binge-watching every true crime show I could find, none have stuck with me like the story of Abby and Libby. Maybe that is because of what happened that August day to Angie and I, when we were just walking in the neighborhood where I grew up and felt completely safe. Maybe that day is what led to my fascination with crime and killers. I don’t know if, subconsciously, those shows reinforced how lucky I felt that day when the door to the Whitley’s kitchen opened for us. There but for the grace of God …