12 regular jurors + 4 alternates selected from two pools across two days. Judge Gull presiding. McLeland conducted all State voir dire; Rozzi led Round 1 defense voir dire; Baldwin handled subsequent rounds. Five rounds Day 1 (pool of 60); four rounds Day 2 (new pool of 52). Jurors sequestered for the duration of trial.
Strikes: State used 9 peremptory; Defense used 7. Four initially accepted jurors removed before trial. Gender (final panel): 8 male, 8 female.
| Voir Dire | Seat | Gender | Profile Notes | Credibility |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D1-Pool #39 | D1 R1 S01 | F | Nurse; aunt murdered in CA (before she was born); no opinion formed from media | Consistency: “if you're telling the truth, it's easier to tell the truth consistently” |
| D1-Pool #19 | D1 R1 S03 | M | No hardship; no media exposure; evidence-focused | Phones, location, testimony, witness evidence |
| D1-Pool #01 | D1 R1 S08 | F | Son is Fort Wayne police officer; watches kids; no effect on impartiality stated | Consistency of the story; skeptical of circumstantial alone |
| D1-Pool #42 | D1 R1 S10 | F | Fewest identifying markers of any seated juror; minimal biographical disclosure | Where was the person at the time; behavior, pacing, nervousness |
| D1-Pool #21 | D1 R1 S12 | M | Public school system; 3 prior criminal juries (all drug-related; 2 guilty, 1 not guilty); acquitted one because prosecution was “stretching it” Likely Foreman | Not extensively detailed; participated in group discussions |
| D1-Pool #36 | D1 R2 S04 | M, 73 | Prior jury service (criminal assault, ~40 years ago, found it difficult); no media opinion; oldest juror on panel | Body language |
| D1-Pool #08 | D1 R2 S06 | F | No prior jury service; no law enforcement connections; one of 3–4 undecided jurors; described deliberations as worst experience; post-trial Reddit reading Mia McHaffey | DNA, motive, weapon; acknowledged DNA won't be in every case; open to convicting without a weapon |
| D1-Pool #45 | D1 R2 S11 | M | Cousin is police officer; articulate about not requiring any single evidence type | Variety of evidence types; open to totality; “can't say have to have any one piece” |
| D1-Pool #54 | D1 R3 S02 | F | Has children and works; moderate media exposure; pragmatic about sequestration hardship | Not extensively detailed |
| D1-Pool #16 | D1 R4 S09 | M | Robbed at work (2017); confirmed would not hold frustration against officers in this case | Body posture, eye contact, voice: “all those things” |
| D2-Pool #01 | D2 R1 S01 | F | Family in law enforcement; prior murder case jury; both parties agreed without using strikes; most articulate and perceptive juror in Day 2 pool | Body mechanics, vocabulary, facial expressions; “probably guilty” is NOT enough to convict |
| D2-Pool #30 | D2 R1 S05 | M | Read media; no opinion formed; originally selected as alternate; promoted to regular jury when Juror 51 was struck for cause on Day 2 | Take all evidence, combine into “overall hypothesis”; consistency-based |
| Voir Dire | Alt # | Gender | Key Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| D2-Pool #11 | Alt 01 | M | Caregiver; no other caregivers available; formed opinion from media but says can set aside |
| D2-Pool #02 | Alt 02 | F | Works for Indiana Dept. of Education; family in law enforcement; formed media opinion; practical about sequestration work concerns |
| D2-Pool #10 | Alt 03 | M | Self-described “follower”: “I don't really speak out much”; would NOT call out improper deliberation behavior; alternates were present in deliberation room but barred from speaking |
| D2-Pool #09 | Alt 04 | F | Guardian of high school girl; last juror selected for the entire trial; evidence-first standard: “You can't just jump on somebody and say, ‘You’re guilty’” |
Cross-reference note: A juror who identified herself on a podcast as “Juror Number 5” and said she was in “the very first group called in” (Day 1 Round 1) cannot be matched to any seated juror from Round 1 pool records. Pool Juror #5 from Day 1 was a male excused for impartiality. “Juror Number 5” likely refers to trial seating number, not voir dire pool number. She first came forward May 28, 2025 on The Unsolved YouTube channel (Tim’s juror), then appeared April 21, 2026 on “True Crime Tak With Frankmeister” under the alias Lucy Lou 29. Both presentations treat her as the same person; detail and emphasis differ across the two interviews.
Juror notes provenance: Handwritten notes attributed to “Juror #5” were circulated through The Unsolved channel. The notes shown in the May 2025 video record October 30 testimony by Monica Wala (clinical psychologist, Westville Dept. of Corrections) and include the notation “only publish 303”; the juror herself noted during Wala’s testimony that Exhibit 304 was not published to the jury. The 4/4/23 and 4/5/23 confession phrases (“Am I dead?”, “Can I die now?”, “Poor little girls”, “didn’t want them to suffer”) appear in the notes under the Oct. 30 / Monica Wala entry. A separate provenance analysis disputes these notes as mechanically inconsistent with genuine jury notes, arguing this phrase cluster does not appear in any in-court source and that the “didn’t want them to suffer” phrasing derives from a sustained objection; the notes’ own attribution to Wala’s in-court testimony directly conflicts with that conclusion. Whether Wala testified to this content on Oct. 30 is not resolved from available sources.
The Murder Sheet podcast juror confirms the foreman was male, chosen by nomination and vote, and “had been on juries in the past.” She describes him as “the absolute best choice,” “a very like professional, well spoken person.” She did not vote for him personally.
The foreman directed the deliberation structure: timeline-building on Day 1, small-group breakouts on Day 2, and the “know vs. believe” framework on Day 4. His question to undecided jurors: “What do you know? What do you believe? Does what you don't believe create reasonable doubt?” That question was the pivot that led to the unanimous verdict.
Assessment: Juror #21 is the stronger candidate by a significant margin. Three prior criminal juries in an institutional work environment, and a demonstrated willingness to acquit, matches the Murder Sheet juror's description of the foreman as professional, experienced, and unbiased.
Mia McHaffey publicly identified herself as a trial juror on Sept. 25, 2026 on the Ashleigh Banfield Facebook post. She is the first juror to attach her real name to public post-trial statements. She went on to engage in an extended public comment thread over multiple days, discussing the evidence she weighed, what she excluded from deliberation, and her view of the appeal. Full transcript: Juror Thread.
When a commenter (Christine Salzer) claimed she broke the sequester order, Mia rebutted directly:
The courtroom seating reference (proximity to the families of the victims and one of Richard Allen's family members in the gallery) is corroborating detail a fabricator would not have. She also responded to a question about her juror number with “#2,” which appears to be a trial seating number (not her voir dire pool number).
The 3.5-week sequestration claim is internally consistent with the trial record.
Assessment: The parallel on the van confession is highly distinctive. The van mention was the sole confession element she found credible in both accounts. Combined with the no-prior-jury-service match and the emotional profile, this strongly suggests Mia McHaffey is the Murder Sheet podcast juror, most likely Juror 08 (Day 1, Round 2, Seat 6). Her self-reported trial seat number of #2 is not necessarily inconsistent, as jury box seating assignments do not track voir dire pool numbers.
In response to a commenter asking for specifics, she laid out a multi-factor cumulative framework:
She later elaborated on what specifically connects presence to guilt:
On the question of whether she believed he was the only person involved:
On the missing phone from his collection:
In her opening statement she said she did not take into account “any of the confessions.” In a later detailed comment she explicitly cited the van detail from a confession to Dr. Wala as compelling. This is reconcilable in one of two ways:
Either reading is consistent with the Murder Sheet juror profile, which states: “Only confession she found compelling was the van mention.”
She also addressed the Holeman interrogation specifically in the podcast: she criticized it as “overdone” and said Allen “was just too calm and really didn't know anything to have done” in that context, suggesting she found the style counterproductive, not that the confession content was irrelevant.
All physical evidence was in the jury room in large containers, not in the courtroom as some media reported. Deliberations ran across four days (Thursday–Monday).
On the deliberation dynamic when challenged about other suspects being on the trail:
She is careful to limit her statements to her own reasoning on evidentiary questions, while speaking collectively about emotional experience. The distinction matters legally: she is not characterizing how other jurors weighed evidence.
From the Murder Sheet interview: the jury noted negative sentiment toward the defense throughout trial: “people did express to me negative feelings about the defense.” Rozzi's voir dire approach “felt almost like it was an interrogation” and his trial performance was described as “intimidation” and “smoke and mirrors.” Prosecution tech failures (monitor issues) frustrated the jury: “our time is very valuable.”
This is the most significant statement for the appeal. A now-named juror is publicly open to a retrial, not on the basis of innocence, but on constitutional process grounds. She draws a clear line between the verdict outcome and procedural legitimacy.
The Odinist comment directly addresses one of the appeal brief's central arguments. Mia's position is that the exclusion was proper and would not have affected the verdict. Courts generally do not weigh juror post-trial speculation on excluded evidence, but this is a named juror's counter-statement to a core appeal argument. Her unfamiliarity with “the drug angle” is also notable: it suggests at least some allegedly excluded material was genuinely unknown to the jury.
Mia explicitly did not weigh the bullet/cartridge match. This is directly relevant to the appeal if the cartridge methodology is successfully challenged: at least one named juror confirms the conviction did not rest on that evidence for her. The statement cuts both ways. It may undercut an appeal argument that the cartridge evidence was prejudicial, while also confirming the evidence was not unanimously relied upon.
The defense brief argues Allen was “gravely disabled” when making statements to investigators, rendering those statements inadmissible. Mia's public statements complicate this argument in a specific way: she says she did not rely on the confessions generally, with one exception. The van detail is the one fact she describes as something only the killer could have known. If the confessions are suppressed on appeal and a new trial is ordered, that van detail (from Dr. Wala's interrogation) would presumably also be excluded. Her own stated reasoning shows that detail was load-bearing for at least one juror.
She separately addressed the Holeman interrogation: she criticized it as “overdone” and said Allen “was just too calm and really didn't know anything to have done”, suggesting she found that interrogation less credible, not more. This undermines the prosecution's argument that the Holeman confession was compelling to the jury.
“If not Allen, then who?” The Murder Sheet juror reports at least one juror asked “if it wasn't Richard Allen, then who could it have possibly been?” She identified this as “a wrong question to ask because that's not what this is about. We're not seeing if it could be anyone else.” This reverses the burden of proof. If this argument influenced other jurors, it could support a claim of improper deliberation.
Pressure on undecided jurors. The Murder Sheet juror stated: “At some point, someone alluded to, we don't need to make a decision out of sympathy for people that are undecided to feel bad. And that really got to me that day.” This suggests social pressure on holdout jurors to conform, which could support a coercion claim if the undecided jurors felt pressured into a verdict.
Juror moved backward after viewing evidence. The vote went from 9–3 (guilty–undecided) on Friday to 8–4 on Saturday after watching the Holeman/Mullin interrogation videos. At least one juror who was initially guilty became undecided after rewatching the videos. The final unanimous vote on Monday raises the question of whether that juror was genuinely persuaded or pressured.
Alternates present during deliberations. The Murder Sheet juror confirms alternates were in the deliberation room but “weren't allowed to say anything at all. And their notes were not allowed to be used.” Their mere presence is standard in some jurisdictions but could be challenged if it created pressure or if any alternate spoke. Cross-reference: D2-Pool #10 (Alternate 3) self-described as a “follower” who would not call out improper behavior; if this alternate was present and observed misconduct, they would not have reported it. Note: Lucy Lou separately states that the alternate she refers to as “Fig” was housed in a completely different location from the rest of the jury during sequestration, and was seen only when walking into the courtroom. If accurate, at least one alternate was effectively excluded from the deliberation environment, and the question of which alternates were in the room during deliberations requires further clarification.
Ballistics divergence between named jurors. Mia McHaffey states she “did not take into account any of the confessions or any of the ballistics” and specifically says she “threw out the science of the bullet.” Lucy Lou (Juror #5 / Frankmeister interview) states the witness who made the most impact on her was Melissa Oberg, the firearms/weapons expert, describing the cartridge mark comparison as “just like a fingerprint.” The Unsolved interview independently corroborates this: in response to the question about compelling witnesses, the juror names “Melissa Oberg, forensic firearms examiner. She was on the stand the entire day. We watched videos of how to look for specific markings that a particular firearm could cause as the inside toolings are not the same.” She also named “C. Cecil” as compelling. Two named jurors from the same deliberation reached opposite relationships to the same physical evidence. This divergence cuts both ways for the appeal: it establishes the ballistics evidence was not uniformly relied upon, but also that at least one juror found it dispositive.
Bridge Guy video re-watch during deliberations. Lucy Lou confirms the jury requested to re-watch Libby’s Bridge Guy video during deliberations. The request was not unanimous: a few jurors wanted to re-hear it; not all needed to. During the re-watch, jurors were permitted to sit closer to the screen rather than in their assigned seats, and the room was quieter. Lucy Lou states she heard “that be a gun” on the audio. The request to replay evidence during deliberations, and the physical repositioning of jurors, is on the record as a deliberation room event.
Timeline inconsistency as deliberation factor. Lucy Lou specifically identifies Allen’s changing timeline as a key factor in the verdict: he stated he was at the trail between 1:30 and 3:30 in his original statement; told investigators “a little before noon, around noon, 1, 1:30, 1:45” in his interrogation; and “kept changing” across three different accounts. The jurors used a “big poster of the entire trail” to map each witness’s stated time and location, with Allen’s shifting placement as the central inconsistency.
Lucy Lou / “Juror #5” post-trial contamination. Lucy Lou confirms she learned specific facts after the trial that she referenced as though they were trial knowledge: the wife’s lawnmower phone story (“at the time and during trial, I did not know that”); the Cass County jail threat video (judge excluded as too prejudicial, jury never saw it). She may be conflating post-trial media consumption with trial testimony across other claims as well. Her sex addiction attribution (to “one of the doctors”) may also be a post-trial conflation: the trial record attributes that claim to Dr. Gate Closure, whose notes were subsequently destroyed. This pattern of contamination materially limits her reliability as a source on what the jury actually heard and weighed.
A 27-page claim-by-claim review of the April 21, 2026 interview against the trial record. The following contradictions are most significant for evaluating her reliability:
The Unsolved interview: additional disclosures (May 28, 2025). The juror’s written responses to viewer questions in the May 2025 Unsolved interview add several details not present in the Frankmeister interview. On voice recognition: “When I watched the 1st interview video and heard RA speak, the hairs stood up on my arms”; she states she immediately believed Allen’s voice was Bridge Guy’s. On Sarah Carbaugh (the defense-challenged witness who testified she saw a muddy, bloody figure on County Road 300 North): “I believed her.” On Allen caught lying during interrogation: he initially said he did not go out on the bridge; when confronted, he admitted being on the first platform. He also stated he would have worn a black Carhartt-type jacket that day; shown the Bridge Guy photo, he said he “could have been wearing a blue jacket,” a clothing contradiction the juror flagged. She also noted Allen’s missing 2017 cell phone: “When they searched his house he had a whole bag full of other old cell phones”; the specific phone from the day of the murders was never found. On Kathy Allen: “RA’s wife. You tried to keep him quiet on the phone. You knew.” On Allen’s daughter: she confirmed Richard Allen’s daughter was present in the courtroom as a defense witness, contradicting claims circulating online that she was not there.
Lucy Lou (Frankmeister/Ickmeister, April 2026) and The Unsolved juror (Tim’s channel, May 2025) make essentially identical points on several key issues despite claiming not to have coordinated:
Confessions predated Haldol. The single most consistent talking point across both interviews. Lucy Lou states the first confession was 19 days post-arrest, before any medication. The Unsolved juror’s notes confirm Haldol wasn’t introduced until 5/2/23. Both frame pre-medication confessions as dispositive on voluntariness. That framing is precisely what the State wants, and exactly what the defense’s appellate brief challenges on different grounds (the Banks negligence standard; fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree).
Feigning mental illness. Both jurors asked or noted whether Allen was faking symptoms to avoid general population. Lucy Lou says she personally asked a psychiatrist and was told yes, it’s possible. The Unsolved juror cites Dr. Dwenger confirming “it is possible he was feigning his mental health.”
Allen’s voice = Bridge Guy’s voice. Both describe a visceral reaction to hearing Allen’s voice. Lucy Lou calls it one of the most compelling moments. The Unsolved juror wrote: “the hairs stood up on my arms”; she says she “absolutely believed that was the same voice.”
Melissa Oberg / firearms testimony. Both name her as a compelling witness. Both also characterize the defense’s firearms experts as having reviewed only photographs, while the prosecution’s experts handled the physical evidence directly.
Missing 2017 cell phone. Both flag it independently. Lucy Lou: “he had all these other phones, 20 cell phones and two pagers… but they didn’t have that one.” The Unsolved juror: “where is his cell phone from 2017! When they searched his house he had a whole bag full of other old cell phones!”
Kathy Allen. Both express belief that Allen’s wife recognized something was wrong and tried to keep him quiet. Lucy Lou describes phone calls where family cut him off from confessing. The Unsolved juror: “RA’s wife. You tried to keep him quiet on the phone. You knew.”
Allen’s daughter. Both describe her as emotional and not looking at her father during testimony. Lucy Lou: “she wouldn’t even look at him… she was up there balling.” The Unsolved juror confirms she was a defense witness, correcting misinformation that she was not present.
Defense strategy. Both characterize the defense as focused almost entirely on Allen’s mental state and prison treatment, with neither identifying strong exculpatory evidence from the defense.
Ballistics: confirmed jury-room fault line across all three named jurors. This is not a difference in interview framing; it is a documented split in how jurors individually weighted the same physical evidence:
Lucy Lou presents ballistics as if it was a shared slam dunk. Mia’s account reveals it was genuinely contested and that at least one juror convicted without it. For the appeal, this matters: the State’s brief leans on the cartridge match, but the jury’s actual reliance on it is not uniform. The keepsake box bullet follows the same pattern: Lucy Lou says she took it “with a grain of salt”; The Unsolved juror doesn’t mention it; Mia doesn’t credit it. It was less powerful in the jury room than outside observers assumed.
Sarah Carbaugh: a direct three-way split. The Unsolved juror explicitly says “I believed her” and found her testimony “very powerful and believable.” Lucy Lou discusses the muddy/bloody sighting context favorably without naming Carbaugh directly. Mia says “kind of as a whole, we decided to just throw that one out.” She adds that the defense “did a good job trying to discount her.” Two jurors found Carbaugh credible; the deliberation record shows the jury effectively triage-removed her testimony as a group.
The Holman interrogation: sharpest tonal split. Lucy Lou reads the interrogation videos as exposing Allen’s guilt and treats them as evidence of deception. Mia is openly troubled: “he just kept going on and going on and going on” and says she “felt like it was overdone.” She describes the jury’s reaction as “kind of mixed” and says personally the videos made Allen seem like “a guy that never been in with the law before” who “really didn’t know anything to have done.” At least one juror switched from guilty to undecided after rewatching those videos on Saturday, pulling the vote from 9–3 back to 8–4. The Holman interrogation is simultaneously the evidence Lucy Lou credits as damning and the evidence that moved a guilty juror to undecided.
The van. Lucy Lou calls it one of her two “aha moments.” Allen telling Dr. Walla he was spooked by a van explains, in her view, why he made the girls cross Deer Creek and why the crime scene showed signs of interruption. Mia says “what stands out to everyone is the van” and identifies it as the confession detail that most moved her toward guilty. The Unsolved juror doesn’t mention it. The van appears to have been more persuasive than the volume of confessions across both named jurors who address it.
What each juror names as most damaging. Lucy Lou leads with placement/timeline: Allen putting himself on the bridge at the same time as the girls, in Bridge Guy’s clothing, across the interrogation videos. The Unsolved juror leads with confessions, voice match, and contradictory statements about the bridge. Mia provides the clearest analytical framework: the jury established “Bridge Guy = Allen” first (Allen placed himself there, described his own clothing matching Bridge Guy’s), then worked forward to the murders. “Really, just things that he reported himself is really what got me closest.”
“And when I went back.” Only Lucy Lou reports this: she claims Allen made an inadvertent admission during interrogation, saying “and when I went back.” She interprets it as evidence he was at the trails earlier that morning scoping. Neither the Unsolved juror nor Mia mentions it. If accurate, this would be significant consciousness-of-guilt evidence; it does not appear in the other two accounts.
The two Juror #5 accounts are broadly consistent in ways that suggest both women were in that courtroom: the same witnesses, same exhibits, same emotional weight. Their differences are mostly in emphasis and which details stuck with each person, which is what you would expect from two genuine independent observers. If they were coordinating or one was copying the other, you would expect more uniformity in what each highlights as pivotal. The van, for example, is central to Lucy Lou and absent from The Unsolved juror’s account; the “caught lying on the bridge” framing is central to The Unsolved juror and handled differently by Lucy Lou.
The Murder Sheet juror is clearly distinct from both: younger, first-time juror, describes herself as emotional and “a gossip person,” decided to pursue law school after the trial, and was one of the undecided holdouts who switched to guilty on the final day. Her account is the most valuable for appellate analysis because she provides the vote progression (9–3 → 8–4 → 12–0), discloses what evidence she discarded (bullet, Carbaugh), and is transparent about what troubled her (Holman interrogation, the possibility of psychosis-driven confessions). She is the only named juror who acknowledges excluded evidence as a genuine unknown rather than dismissing it outright.
Mia McHaffey's public statements remain the most substantive named-juror disclosures in this case. Cross-referenced against the voir dire profiles, she is a strong candidate for Juror 08 (Day 1, Round 2, Seat 6), identified as the Murder Sheet podcast juror, based on the near-identical approach to the van confession, disregard for the cartridge evidence, no prior jury service, and emotional profile consistent across both sources.
The deliberation record from the Murder Sheet interview adds significant texture: a jury that moved backward on Day 3 (8–4 after video review, down from 9–3), that heard at least one juror shift the burden of proof, that had alternates present in the room throughout, and that reached unanimity only after a foreman-directed structured framework on Day 4. Multiple of these details are independently relevant to the appeal.
Mia simultaneously defends the verdict on evidentiary grounds and opens the door to a retrial on constitutional process grounds. Her most significant contributions: (a) she is the first named juror to confirm she did not rely on ballistics, (b) she did rely on the van confession detail, the very statement the defense argues should have been excluded as obtained while Allen was gravely disabled, and (c) she is unfamiliar with “the drug angle,” suggesting excluded material was genuinely withheld from the jury's deliberation rather than merely argued around it.
The juror identified as “Juror #5,” who appeared as Tim’s juror on The Unsolved (May 28, 2025) and as Lucy Lou 29 on the Frankmeister interview (April 21, 2026), adds a competing data point across two separate disclosures: she found Melissa Oberg (forensic firearms examiner) to be a singularly impactful witness, described the cartridge comparison as “just like a fingerprint,” immediately recognized Allen’s voice from the interrogation video as Bridge Guy’s, found Sarah Carbaugh credible, and placed Allen’s shifting timeline as a central deliberation factor. Cross-referenced against Mia’s account, these two named jurors had fundamentally different evidentiary anchors: Mia weighted the van confession and disregarded ballistics; Juror #5 weighted Oberg, voice recognition, and timeline inconsistencies. Her handwritten notes shown in The Unsolved video contain the notation “only publish 303” (the juror’s own record that Exhibit 304 was not published to the jury) and attribute the 4/4/23 confession phrases to Monica Wala’s in-court testimony; a separate provenance analysis disputes this attribution, and the conflict is unresolved. Her Frankmeister interview contains confirmed post-trial contamination across at least three specific factual claims.