New Release: Down the Hill — The Delphi Murders

Our new full-length case file, Down the Hill: The Delphi Murders, is available now. It is the story of Abigail Williams and Liberty German — Abby and Libby — and of the small Indiana town that loved them, lost them, and then spent five years afraid of the wrong people.

They were children. Abby was thirteen. Libby was fourteen. On a mild winter afternoon in February 2017, they went for a walk on a trail they knew well, the kind of walk that ends with a ride home and a normal evening. They did not come home. We will not narrate their last hours for spectacle, and you will not find that here. What we owe them is dignity, and the discipline to remember them as people first: two girls with phones and inside jokes and futures that should have been long.

What This Book Is

Down the Hill tells the Delphi case at the town’s own pace — in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. We resist the instinct that makes most true crime feel tidy: the instinct to skip ahead, to let you watch the investigation knowing how it ends. The people of Delphi did not get to skip ahead. They lived inside the not-knowing for more than half a decade, and that experience — not a tidy timeline — is the real subject of this book.

Because the real subject of Down the Hill is suspicion itself. How does a frightened community decide whom to fear? How does certainty get spent — confidently, publicly, sometimes cruelly — on the people who happen to be standing closest to a tragedy? Delphi is a case study in exactly that. For five years a town’s suspicion landed on a series of men, and for five years it was wrong, while the answer the community was looking for stood quietly within its own borders, in plain sight. The book follows that misdirection honestly, as it happened, and asks what it cost.

This is restrained, literary true crime written as a moral reckoning rather than a thriller. It is built to make you sit with the uncomfortable distance between suspecting someone and knowing something — the distance where real harm to innocent people lives.

The Honest A.I. AL Angle

Like our other case files, Down the Hill uses A.I. AL — our disclosed, human-overseen analytical lens. We are direct about what that means, because the honesty is the entire point.

A.I. AL is a reasoning tool. It works through evidence and geography — timelines, distances, what the established facts can and cannot support — and it is held, every step of the way, under human judgment. What it does not do is name anyone. It does not point a finger, generate a suspect, or convert probability into an accusation. It is structurally forbidden from doing the one thing the internet most wants a true-crime “AI” to do.

And here is the part most books would bury: in the Delphi case, A.I. AL did not solve anything. It could not have. We say so plainly in the book. A lens that reasons about evidence is valuable precisely because it knows the edges of what evidence permits — and a story about the danger of false certainty would be a lie if it pretended a tool had cut through that uncertainty. The restraint is not a limitation we apologize for. It is the argument.

On the Men Who Were Wrongly Suspected

Over the years, several men in and around Delphi were suspected, scrutinized, and ultimately cleared. This book does not name them. That is a deliberate choice, made on principle.

These were people whose lives were touched by suspicion they did not earn — and naming them again, even to say “this person was innocent,” only re-stages the harm. The whole moral spine of Down the Hill is that a community spent its certainty recklessly. We are not going to repeat the error in the act of describing it. You will understand exactly what happened to them. You will not learn their names from us.

Richard Allen, a Delphi resident, was charged in the case and convicted in November 2024. His appeal remains unresolved. We hold that fact carefully and without triumph, and the book treats it the way it treats everything else: as something the record establishes, not something we get to celebrate.

Two Ways to Read It

Start free. Our Living Edition dossier on the Delphi case is part of what subscribers receive — an evolving brief that we keep current as the appeal and the record develop. If you want to follow this case responsibly, with the facts kept honest over time, join the newsletter and we will send it your way.

Or read the whole thing. The full-length book, Down the Hill: The Delphi Murders, is available now for $5.99. It is the complete account — the town, the timeline, the long misdirection, and the disclosed A.I. AL lens applied with the restraint the case demands.

Read more about the book at the full sales page →

Get Down the Hill — $5.99 →

---

Abby Williams and Libby German were thirteen and fourteen years old. The headlines will keep orbiting the man convicted of killing them, and the appeals will run their course. But the loss belongs to two girls and to the families and the town that still carry it. We wrote Down the Hill to keep that center clear — and to ask, honestly, what we owe the innocent while we search for the guilty.