INDIANAPOLIS (AP) — An Indiana man convicted in the 2017 killings of two teenage girls who vanished during a winter hike was sentenced to a maximum of 130 years in prison Friday in the case that’s long cast a shadow over the teens’ small hometown of Delphi.

Richard Allen, 52, was convicted on Nov. 11 in the killings of Abigail Williams, 13, and Liberty German, 14, known as Abby and Libby. A jury found him guilty of two counts of murder and two counts of murder while committing or attempting to commit kidnapping.

The special judge in the case, Allen County Superior Court Judge Fran Gull sentenced Allen on two of the four murder counts and imposed the maximum of 65 years for each count, to be served consecutively. The sentencing hearing, which included victim impact statements from six relatives of the teens, lasted less than two hours.

After the hearing concluded, one of Allen’s defense attorneys, Jennifer Auger, told reporters they plan to appeal and seek a new trial.

“Thoughts and prayers to the families of the victims. What they went through was unimaginable,” Auger said. She added that the defense plans to give a more detailed statement later, “but today is not the day for that.”

The Associated Press left messages for Allen’s attorneys Friday seeking additional comment on his sentence and their plans for an appeal.

Allen, who has maintained his innocence, had faced between 45 years and 130 years in prison in the killings of the Delphi teens, who were found dead in February 2017, their throats cut, one day after they vanished while hiking during a day off from school.

Allen also lived in Delphi and when he was arrested in October 2022, more than five years after the killings, he was employed as a pharmacy technician at a pharmacy only blocks from the county courthouse where he later stood trial. His weekslong trial came after repeated delays, a leak of evidence, the withdrawal of his public defenders and their reinstatement by the Indiana Supreme Court.

The case, which included tantalizing evidence, has long drawn outsized attention from true-crime enthusiasts.

With Gull’s long-running gag order in the case lifted at the end of Friday’s sentencing, police and prosecutors held a news conference where they thanked investigators for their work that helped with Allen’s arrest and prosecution.

“There is zero doubt that justice has been served and today is the day,” said Carroll County Sheriff Tony Liggett.

He and others singled out the work of a retired state government worker who volunteered in March 2017 to help police organize tips received as part of the investigation — and who discovered a key piece of information that led investigators to Allen.

Kathy Shank testified at trial that in September 2022 she found a misplaced “lead sheet” which stated that two days after German’s and Williams’ bodies were found, a man contacted authorities and said he had been on the trail the afternoon the girls went missing. His name was listed incorrectly as Richard Allen Whiteman and marked “cleared,” Shank said.

She determined the man’s name was actually Richard Allen and recalled that a young girl had been on the trail at the same location and time and had seen a man.

“I thought there could be a correlation,” Shank told the court, adding that she notified officers of her find.

Liggett thanked Shank at Friday’s news conference for her crucial discovery and for bringing it to investigators’ attention.

“When she would come across something she didn’t know she would always bring that to an investigator and every time she brought us something and said, `Did you know this?’ we knew it — except for the tip that she brought us that got us here today,” he said.

German’s grandfather, Mike Patty, thanked the jury, investigators, prosecutors and Gull as a photo of German and Williams, grinning in winter garb, was projected onto a screen behind him during the news conference.

“Justice has been served for the girls,” he said

Gull, the special judge who oversaw Allen’s trial, came from northeastern Indiana’s Allen County, as did the jury.