Who Is Kegan Kline, Another Suspected Lead In The Delphi Murders?
On Monday, October 31, 2022, Indiana State Police investigators and prosecutors held a press conference to announce the arrest of Richard Allen, 50, who had been charged the previous Friday with the murder of 14-year-old Libby German and 13-year-old Abby Williams in February 2017. The two friends had been hiking the popular Monon High Bridge Trail in Delphi, Indiana, when they were brutally murdered by an unknown assailant.
According to WRTV, their bodies were discovered a mile from their last known location, and while Indiana State Police refused to encourage copycats or generate false leads by giving details of what happened to the two teenagers after they went missing or how they were killed (via WISH-TV), the case received a huge amount of attention following the release of video and audio clips of the girls' suspected murderer that was recorded on German's phone, leading to investigators receiving more than 18,000 tips from members of the public.
As noted by The Independent, it took a full 2,086 days from the day of the murder for charges against a suspect to be officially announced, with family members, including Libby's sister Kelsi, taking to social media to share their relief, while at the same time mirroring the insistence by police and prosecutors that Allen should be considered innocent until proven guilty in court. However, Allen was not the first suspect to be publicly linked to the Delphi murders.
An accused pedophile linked to the cased
Though Richard Allen is the first and only person so far to have been charged in connection with the double murder, other names have been made public. One was Ron Logan, the owner of the land on which the girls' bodies was discovered; though Logan reportedly lied to the police about where he was on the day of the murder, he was never charged and died in 2020 (via The Independent).
The other was Kegan Kline, an accused pedophile, who, like Allen, was an Indiana resident at the time of the murders, with an address in the city of Peru less than 40 miles from the center of Delphi. Kegan Kline first came to be linked with the Delphi murders in December 2021, when Indiana Police revealed that Kline was the owner of fake social media accounts featuring the image of a male model that he used to contact underage girls online. Per the same source, police had conducted a search of Kline's property just two weeks after the Delphi murders, suspecting him of child sex offenses.
If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.
The arrest of Kegan Kline
As reported in The Independent, though Kegan Kline had been suspected of being involved in child pornography around the time of the Delphi murders in 2017, it wouldn't be until 2020 that he was finally arrested, and his being charged with child pornography and exploitation led to the revelation of his online grooming tactics. Using the fake account, Kline had allegedly groomed 15 girls and manipulated them into sharing hundreds of explicit photos and videos with him, having gained their trust.
According to WLS-TV in Chicago, Kline's name became overtly linked with the Delphi murders when it was revealed police had taken the Indiana resident — who remained in custody with 30 felony child pornography charges — out of jail for questioning over potential contact he had made with Libby German, suggesting he may have been attempting to groom the teenager as he allegedly had numerous others around the time of her murder.
According to Fox 59, Kline had been attempting to leverage information he claimed to have in relation to the murders in exchange for a plea deal that would shorten his sentence, as he potentially faces multiple consecutive 12-year spells behind bars if convicted, though no deal was brokered between Kline's defense team and federal prosecutors.
Kegan Kline and The Murder Sheet
In recent months, the true-crime podcast "The Murder Sheet" has emerged as one of the media outlets closest to the Delphi murder case, so much so that its two creators, attorney Kevin Greenlee and journalist Áine Cain got in touch with Kegan Kline — who, having reportedly been planning to meet German the day after the murder, was for many the case's number one suspect — for an interview in which the accused pedophile, who has never yet been officially charged in relation to the Delphi murders, could share his side of the story, according to the New York Post.
The interview, however, never went ahead. As the New York Post reports, though the creators of "The Murder Sheet" did in fact manage to speak with Kline, the accused pedophile was extremely agitated with the two podcast hosts.
Kline said: "Don't message me again. You have put out so much b******* against me. I get you have a podcast and want money from this, but it's wrong what you're doing ... There is a lot of misinformation. People doing interviews that don't even know me ... and lying all about me. I'm very upset about it. I'm having a hard enough time." Though he accused "The Murder Sheet" of circulating false information, Kline refused to identify exactly what elements of their story he took issue with. Instead, he cynically offered to share information related to the killings in exchange for $400, a deal the podcasters believed would undermine their journalistic integrity and which they flat-out refused, ending their contact with Kline.