Prosecutor Robert Ives details Delphi murders, crime scene, and signatures in interview with ‘Down The Hill’ Podcast.

Robert Ives was Carroll County, Indiana’s Chief Prosecutor when the Delphi Murders occurred. Now retired, Ives gave a fascinating interview to HLN’s ‘Down The Hill’ Podcast, providing an overview of the investigatory process, where he discussed everything from the legalities of securing search warrants and cell data, to Libby’s video, and even possible signatures left at the crime scene.

As part of an ongoing effort to document facts and interviews of significance relating to the Delphi Murders, the relevant portions of the episode has been transcribed below. Please be sure to listen to Down the Hill Podcast – Chapter 5: Signatures as you read along. The entire show is phenomenal and well-produced. Ives comes across as smart and well-spoken, and in this interview, he supplies some of the best insight into the inner workings of the case to date.

[Begin Robert Ives Interview Transcript / Down The Hill Podcast]

NARRATOR: From Ives’ perspective, crime scenes in Carroll County are generally routine. He says it’s usually pretty clear from the jump who did what… but that’s not the case here.

BARBARA [HOST]: You were quoted as saying that the evidence, or the crime scene, was “odd”. What do you mean by odd? 

ROBERT IVES: Well, in one sense, any murder scene is probably odd. But again this is where I have difficulty because I’m not sure what all has been released. There were a variety of things at the scene of the crime where I guess I would ask you to talk to the State Police about that. They have to decide what’s going to be released was not going to be released. It was just not your normal ‘a person was killed here’ crime scene. That’s probably all I can say about it.

ANDREW [HOST]: Maybe you could answer that in a more general way without being specific to this, this crime scene. We have our ideas about what a typical crime scene is. A person was shot in the head, the bullet casing is here…what [generally] to you would make an unusual or odd crime scene?

ROBERT IVES: I follow along with your example. The very first case I handled as a prosecuting attorney back in 1987… 1988, a fellow shot his wife in Deer Creek Indiana. He pinned her up against the refrigerator, shot in the back of the head, she fell on the floor, he shot her twice more in the chest. So, you had a dead person with three bullets in them. They were dead. He was seen at the scene, you know, things like that. All I can say about the situation with Abby and Libby is that there was a lot more physical evidence [there] than at that crime scene. And it’s probably not what you would imagine, or what people think that I’m talking about. It’s probably not. And so because of unique circumstances, which all unique circumstances of a crime are a sort-of ‘signature’, you think “Well, this unusual fact might lead to somebody, or that unusual fact might lead to somebody”. I wish I could tell you, but again that’s up to the State Police. There was nothing that seemed similarly identical that you think ‘well this is modus operandi’. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term modus operandi, where sometimes criminals will use a… commit a crime in such a way where it’s so distinct that it acts as a sort of signature for them.

ANDREW: Was there a signature in his crime, like would you characterize something as a signature? Like, without telling us what it is. 

ROBERT IVES: I would say there were two or three things. I’d say at least three.

ANDREW: Asking Barb’s question in a different way, even if there aren’t any active cases out there that you can say “Yeah, this is like this,” are there any other just generally famous cases or murders that you can compare this to?

ROBERT IVES: Yeah, I’m not the best history-of-serial-murders person but I will say this: initially I thought, and I think most people thought and I still think, that it was probably somebody local because it’s just not a tourist spot. It’s just not somewhere where any would be lurking. It’s such an unlikely place to be. You’ve all been there, it’s not that famous. It’s not like people come there and hang out “Well, maybe I’ll catch two girls here by themselves”. I tend to think it was a local. I still tend to think it’s a local, but a part of me also, as other people speculated, thinks maybe it was a random murder. Maybe it is a serial killer. And it’s a horrible thing but part of me hopes “Well, they’ll catch somebody committing some other crime” or having committed some other crime, and as it sometimes happens in the past, serial killers, they’ll confess to this crime. People ask me do I think it will be solved? And, I do think it’ll be solved, because it’s so odd and so unusual and people are so compelled to talk about the terrible things they do. I think either this person will talk about it to someone, or alternatively, they will commit another crime and get caught and hopefully confess to this one. Either because they want the fame, or alternatively, because they’re trying to make a deal. I don’t know. I’m not an expert on the investigation of serial killers. 

BARBARA: If this person does act again, and that is something Superintendent Carter asked at press conferences you know, ‘who’s next?’ He asks himself that all the time. Do you think those signature items would still exist?

ROBERT IVES: I think potentially that one or two of those things could pop up again, yes.

ANDREW IDEN: Have you seen the video?

ROBERT IVES: Yes.

ANDREW IDEN: What we’ve been told by Sheriff Leazenby and Kim Riley— they haven’t told us how long it was, they haven’t told us too much about what’s on it, but they’ve told us what it was like for them to watch it and their current relationship. You know, they still go back to it. How would you describe your thoughts about…

ROBERT IVES: –Well there’s two things about it, and I think this is pretty well understood now, but in the early days people would always question ‘Why don’t they enhance this?‘, and I would explain to people it’s a still frame from a video on a cell phone camera where he’s not fully in the frame. So there are very few pixels making up the video of this fellow. That’s why it’s so blurry. The best people I am aware of did their best, but there’s only so much you can do. You only have so much data. The audio is unbelievably good considering the circumstances — you’re outdoors and people are fairly far away — though, he was pretty close probably when they got that audio. There’s just less additional information than I think people would think there might be. That’s all I’d say about it.

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NARRATOR: Before retiring, Robert Ives was the Chief Prosecutor in Carroll County, and in 2017, the one who would be shaping a case against Abby and Libby’s killer. He’s sharing with us some of his experiences from those early days in the investigation.

ANDREW: Were you ever presented with possible suspects? 

ROBERT IVES: Not in the sense that somebody said “Rob do you think there’s enough evidence here to charge this person?”, but in the sense of “We have ‘this’, and ‘this’, and ‘this’… what do you think?” Yes… there was some of that. And, I would go so far as to say there’s at least one person — probably a couple –out there that I could believe could have committed the crime. But of course, I would never discuss such a thing because to accuse somebody of something is to destroy their lives. As I told you before I’m not even close to thinking it’s more likely than not that any particular person that I’m aware of committed this crime. Not even close. 

ANDREW: You mentioned that, especially in the early days, you were involved with drafting a lot of affidavits for search warrants. Can you put some sort of number in how many you were involved in?

ROBERT IVES: Dozens. I mean, a lot. There were a few search warrants. There weren’t so many search warrants, but there were lots of subpoenas. In this case, we were trying to get cell phone locations or numbers of cell phones, or identities of cell phone numbers, things like that, and similar things during that period of time. We cranked out a lot of that, but it didn’t lead to anything significant. 

NARRATOR: Let’s talk cell phones. For a lot of people who follow this case, the locations of cell phones– specifically the ones near The Monon High Bridge at the time of the murders– is a meaty topic of discussion. Whose phone is pinging where, and why? That was a major point of interest for investigators, too. And how that all works? There’s more to it than you might think.

ROBERT IVES: A frustrating thing… this is probably difficult to explain in the course of podcast… but the law on searches with relation to cell phones and cell phone locations was evolving right at the time this was going on, and I think some of the people discussing it didn’t always understand. Like, they would say “Well if you want to know a cell phone location, why don’t you get a search warrant?” And the problem with that is, let’s take this case, it’s a perfect example: There’s a tower near the crime scene and cell phones pinged off that tower around the time of the crime. We would like to know who they pinged off. Say, “well why don’t you get a search warrant?”. Because there is no probable cause to believe that any particular phone is going to tell us anything about the crime. There is no probable cause. People act like a search warrant is easy to get. No! Because we don’t think any particular phone is a criminal, but if we want to get a pool of 25 people who were in the area and therefore could possibly have committed the crime, you have to find out. And this is the difficulty of the modern electronic world. Of course, to look in your phone? I think clearly that’s a search warrant situation, that’s your private property. That’s like opening your house or going in your car in your person. But the location of your phone? I certainly understand people’s concerns about their privacy. ‘Why can the government figure out where I am?’ Then on the other hand, when your two little girls are dead and you want to find out who was nearby in the last 2 hours, it’s terrible not to be able to get that information. And the idea is, well, I’ll just get a search warrant. That’s not logically or legally practical. And so, this is something society has to think about more. Because cell phone location data for a case like this, which is a lot of what I was doing at that time, could potentially be really valuable. Because, you know, Carroll County: 380 square miles, 20,000 people. Very few people were out near that crime scene at the time. It’s not like…

BARBARA: –it’s a Monday afternoon.

ROBERT IVES: You aren’t going to ping on 500 phones at that period of time. 

ANDREW: There are a lot of Feds looking at their cell phones, too. 

ROBERT IVES: There were more FBI agents here than people can imagine! In my entire career, there was never in my entire career 1/10th as many FBI agents as who were here simultaneously!

BARBARA: A lot of people thought in the beginning that maybe they were lured there, or had been communicating with somebody and had, you know, a meeting time or something and that there could be a link like that. 

ROBERT IVES: That seems unlikely to me. 

ANDREW: And you’re not the only one we’ve talked to who has kind of characterized a 2 to 3-day period of like ‘We’re going to find this guy!‘. But I’m curious how long before everybody was kind of like ‘Uhh, this might take longer than we thought…’. 

ROBERT IVES: I don’t think there was ever particularly that feeling. I mean, after a few weeks I’m sure people were feeling disheartened. There were so many leads because of the phone-in system, tip system, social media and things like that. Police officers came from all over the state of Indiana, and would come and spend a day or two and they would just hand them assignments and guys would go out. And so, I can tell you in the very early days, any time there would be a lead, the lead officers would get really excited “I’ve got to be there!” because they think “We’re surely about it crack this”. Because there were what seemed to be potentially valuable leads, but they just didn’t leave anything. I don’t know there’s ever any point where they go “It’s going to go on for a long time”, I think it was more like, “Well surely we’re going to get something soon” and that went on for a long time. I can’t speak for the thoughts of the people who were actually doing the investigating. I mean people like Tony Liggett (Deputy Sheriff/Detective) and Kevin Hammond (Carroll County Detective) have spent endless hours on this case. Far more than I did. 

BARBARA: And so you worked on this case for 10 months, 11 months? 

ROBERT IVES: [Sighs] Yes, but particularly there was probably a stretch of a couple months where it was… it was really intense because it isn’t that there weren’t always things to do, but there was a period where we really were cranking out a lot of discovery material… investigative material as they say. Subpoenas and search warrants.

BARBARA: And in that flurry of activity, did you think we’re going to get this wrapped up?

ROBERT IVES: Well, with a crime like this if you’d asked me at the time I would have said within two or three days we’ll have figured out who did it and have a charge file, but the traditional crime… a murder in Carroll County, or I think in rural Indiana or probably rural America, is generally a crime of passion and the suspect is obvious. And it turned out there was no obvious suspect, and even though at the crime scene there was a lot of physical evidence of one sort or another — which would lead normally to logical paths of investigation — it never led to a particular person. So, I was surprised, I am surprised. I thought surely we would figure out who did it, and we really couldn’t do so. And we had some good leads there sometimes. There’s at least one person who was blowing off on the internet who was — it was total bologna — that if you’d taken seriously what they’re saying, you might have thought they committed the crime. But, they didn’t. In fact, it was a person under age. 

BARBARA: So you didn’t have, like, two or three people you were looking at early on like “It’s definitely one of them”. 

ROBERT IVES: No. I could imagine that there were people that came up in the course of the investigation that could have possibly committed the crime, but I certainly never had anybody I thought it was more likely than not that committed the crime.

ANDREW: You mentioned earlier on a few minutes ago about, you know, in the hours after thinking this was kind of a two to three days and you’d probably be able to have somebody in custody. Are there any reasons why you thought it was that time frame?

ROBERT IVES: Well, only in this sense is that I’ve been involved in… a county this size probably has a murder every two or three years, and I’ve been involved in the prosecution of numerous murders. And there may have been 20 years ago an unsolved murder involving a couple that was found in a burned-out car. I can’t think of another unsolved murder. When people died under violent circumstances, we knew who did it…or we were pretty sure we knew who did it very quickly thereafter. It’s usually obvious. Either they’re right there, or the person with the motive… you know, a fear in law enforcement is the obvious person didn’t do it, which is what a lot of crime fiction is about. But generally, the person who obviously did it, did in fact do it, and we didn’t find that person and that was surprising to me. But in hindsight, knowing that this is not your ordinary case. Right after this, or in the months after this, we had a love triangle murder. It was just absolutely classic, and you knew who probably did it and there’s just a question of putting the pieces together, it was obvious. And that’s generally the way a murder goes. To the best of my knowledge, we never had a stranger murder while I was Prosecuting Attorney. I was Prosecuting Attorney in this County over the course of several different times as Prosecutor, 18 years. There was never a murder where the victim didn’t know the perpetrator prior to the crime. 

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ROBERT IVES: One thing that people don’t understand is investigators make decisions about releasing evidence and not releasing evidence because they don’t want to give the game away. And if a person does confess, they want to know that the person is not giving a false confession, they’re not seeking publicity, and they’re not mentally ill. And so, I don’t know what all the reasoning of the people in charge of the investigation is, but I’m just a lawyer. I would leave it to them to determine what the best things to release and not release are. I’d be really careful about it. 

BARBARA: Right, and it also helps at the tips. They can, you know, better identify what might be a really good tip if somebody is telling them something that has not been released publicly.

ROBERT IVES: If somebody called in a tip and knows something that the public doesn’t know, correct. That makes it a tremendously good tip.

ANDREW: Was the physical evidence you’re talking about… was that one of the reasons why there seemed to be a feeling that this would be a few days before you had been able to make an arrest or have someone in custody? 

ROBERT IVES: I think any time a teenage girl was found murdered or a Junior High girl, and they were teenagers, was found murdered… I think we would expect to find who did it within two or three days… any time. So, that was the main reason I say that. The fact there were two girls, and as I say the fact there was plenty of physical evidence, it wasn’t very mysterious. If a person is simply killed like I was describing at first, okay, how do I say it… this person was killed… this person was killed with a gun, there’s more to it than that. That’s all I’m saying.

ANDREW: One thing that Sergeant Bradley told us is the crime scene was complicated in that, you know, there are people out there searching, you know, we didn’t even think of like maybe someone spit, whatever, and obviously we know the crime scene is huge. It starts at the bridge, it goes to where the bodies were found. Even just generally, have you ever dealt with a crime scene that large with that many complicating factors before? 

ROBERT IVES: As I told you, I’ve only dealt with a few murder cases, but generally a crime scene — a murder crime scene here — has [always] been in a room. It’s been in a ‘place’. So, I can’t recall one that had a big outdoor circumstance away from a house. Yeah, there’s a lot of stuff, you’re right. Those are some factors… and whatever Sergeant Riley says, it is so. Kim Riley is an excellent police officer. And that’s also true; the crime scene is unquestionably contaminated. Most crime scenes are contaminated to a certain extent.

ANDREW: On the subject of DNA, the police have said nothing to us about DNA in this particular case. We won’t ask you about that, but just in your experience, the role of DNA in a case. When people think about DNA they think about CSI. Like, you know, something happens and there’s just DNA everywhere. It’s not as simple, is it?

ROBERT IVES: No. You know we have incredible technology, and there’s contact DNA when people even touch your clothing. But of course, lots of people touch your clothing, so there’s lots of DNA and it may not be there at all. In sexual assault cases, I mean semen and the DNA from semen is tremendous evidence, but you have to have that and then you have to have somebody you can identify it with. Blood, blood DNA is tremendous evidence because the perpetrators of crimes often leave their blood at crime scenes for a variety of reasons. But when you’re just thinking ‘Oh, there’s contact DNA, somebody brushed somebody, somebody touched somebody‘. I mean all that’s really… there’s really a lot of stuff there to sort it out, to find out, particularly if it’s unknown. And then, to match an unknown. And even if it isn’t an unknown person, that doesn’t mean they committed the crime. And, you’d look at these two… I mean, these are two girls that are at school all day. I mean, there’s no telling how many people’s DNA might be on their clothing. 

ANDREW: We’ve talked a lot about this crime and it being… the possibility it [being] one of those crimes where the person who committed it just managed to step into all the right places to avoid being arrested. Not necessarily a mastermind that had some sort of grand scheme that has allowed him to get away with this. Would you characterize this crime as something where the guy just, you know, just stepped in all the right places?

ROBERT IVES: If you look at the overhead photos of this area there was maybe one house that could look down and see the crime scene and it’s unlikely anybody would be there. This was a daylight crime, it appears, almost certainly a crime during daylight in an area where people could have come along, and I just can’t see it as a big master plan. It’d be a crazy master plan. I think it’s more a person committed a horrible crime and then they took off and nobody… if anybody saw them, we haven’t been able to pinpoint it. You know, people were seen coming and going and there is some witnesses, and we may well have seen — and I say ‘we’ — someone may have seen this person leaving the crime scene or going to the crime scene, but we’ve never been able to put that information together with enough evidence to show who that person was and that they committed this crime. I do not believe it was a planned crime. That, personally… it doesn’t make any sense to me for it to have been a planned crime. Because you couldn’t know unless there’s something else out there. You know this ‘luring’ thing that I told you and I hope the State Police said this… I don’t believe there’s any evidence they were lured out there. I think they just decided to go for a walk. They were great friends, they just thought “It’s a nice day, let’s go walk the trail”. I think that’s all that happened. And so, for somebody to be there right then, to know they’d be there, I don’t believe that.  I wouldn’t be shocked if it turned out I’m wrong, but I don’t believe that someone knew that they were going to be there. 

ANDREW: If you look at it especially after you get past the creek, you’re in the trees it’s almost like the perfect trap in a way. If someone walks out there, you’re already out there. No one’s going to see you. 

ROBERT IVES: If you’re on the far side of the bridge there’s not a logical place to go. When you think about this in hindsight, you think “Well the girls should have run if two different directions”. Well of course they should have, but that’s easy for us to say! 

ANDREW: Who’s thinking that?!?

ROBERT IVES: You’re not at all! 

BARBARA: I’m not even sure I would think of that at my age, and certainly not at 13/14. And then to be up so high…. Robert Ives interview transcript by CrimeLights.com

ROBERT IVES: For her to pull out her phone and to film this or to video it was an amazing thing. What’s really heartbreaking about this is she did this thing, we have been unbelievable evidence of video and sound of this person, and to not be able to catch this person…we didn’t talk about that previously, but of course for the police, that’s what stunned…how can we not figure out who this is?! How are you going to have video and audio of a person about to commit a crime and not be able to figure out who it is?! It’s something out of a TV show.

[End Robert Ives Interview Transcript / Down the Hill Podcast]

Listen to Down The Hill: The Delphi Murders Podcast

Additional Delphi Transcripts:

–Delphi Murders 2019 Press Conference Transcript

–CrimeCon: The Delphi Murders (‘The Family Speaks” Panel Transcript)

–Indiana State Police Road Show Delphi Interview Transcript

HELP SOLVE THE DELPHI MURDERS: As police have said many times, this case is very ‘solve-able’. They are just missing a puzzle piece. Please, do your part to help finish that puzzle. Use the power of your voice. SHARE information about this case, and the suspect’s photo, video, and audio recording on social media. Talk to your friends and family about it. SOMEONE KNOWS THIS MAN. You never know if that one person you share it with will be the one person to say “Wait…I recognize him. We went to high school together / he worked at the store I used to frequent / he’s my neighbor’s son…” etc. Two brave girls deserve justice, and families deserves answers and closure. Please visit The Indiana State Police website at https://www.in.gov/isp/delphi.htmto download the information flyer, videos, and audio.