The Delphi Murders - Part 1: Gone

DEVIANT

Cold Open Media

Education, Documentary, Society & Culture, True Crime

4.8 • 610 Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2026

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On February 13, 2017, two girls went for a walk near Delphi, Indiana. They never came home. Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, vanished from a popular hiking trail near the Monon High Bridge. The next day, they were found murdered. What followed was not a clean investigation or a tidy path to justice, but a six-year saga that would fracture a town, divide the public, and raise uncomfortable questions about policing, media, and truth itself. This is the first chapter in DEVIANT’s definitive series on the Delphi murders. In Part One, host Dan Szematowicz goes back to the beginning. The town. The trail. The timeline. The last known movements of Abby and Libby. The search. And the moment everything changes. This series does not pick sides or ask you to accept conclusions upfront. It lays out the facts, piece by piece, and lets the story speak for itself. Since Dan's original coverage from the podcast "Down The Hill: The Delphi Murders" ended in 2022, there has been an arrest, a trial, a conviction, and an explosion of new information and controversy. Some believe justice has been served. Others believe the truth is still out of reach, and that an innocent man sits behind bars. This series re-examines the entire case as it stands today, starting here, at the very beginning. If you think you know this story, you may want to listen anyway. If you don’t, you’ll soon understand why it refuses to let go. This is DEVIANT. We’re all wired differently. Some of us step outside every boundary. These are those stories. SEE THE EVIDENCE AND SUPPORT THE SHOW: http://deviantpodcast.com INSTAGRAM AND SOCIAL: @deviant.podcast Copyright 2026 Cold Open Media LLC All rights reserved Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is it. The world, as you know, it is over. Completely done. It's not about to be over. It's over.
0:09.1	Some of the scientists who helped build AI are now sounding the alarm.
0:13.5	I was selling AI as a great thing for decades, and I was wrong. I was wrong. There is a longer term existential threat
0:24.4	that will arise when we create digital beings that are more intelligent than ourselves. We have
0:30.1	no idea whether we can stay in control. While others say that AI will usher in unfathomable abundance,
0:36.6	I've always believed that it's going to be
0:38.2	the most important invention that humanity will ever make.
0:41.2	This really will be a world of abundance.
0:44.0	And among these fears and these fantasies,
0:46.6	we seek the story of our future.
0:49.4	Listen to the last invention
0:51.2	on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music,
0:53.5	or wherever you get your podcasts.
0:59.2	This episode contains details that are disturbing.
1:03.1	Listener discretion is advised. Delphi, Indiana is about halfway between Chicago and Indianapolis.
1:23.6	It's a rural part of northwest Indiana, just outside of Lafayette, near Purdue University.
1:30.3	I know that in true crime stories that the small town thing is kind of cliche, and not going to lie here, for this, it kind of fits.
1:41.3	There's a lot of farming, a lot of agriculture, there's a hog plant.
1:45.8	There's even a Main Street.
1:48.6	And on that main street, there's a courthouse.
1:51.8	It's one of those old school courthouses that you would see in the 1950s movie,
1:56.7	maybe with Atticus Finch banging a table in the courtroom.
	...

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