DELPHI, Ind. – Two years after a killer turned lives and a community upside down, Becky and Mike Patty still discover little pieces of Libby German they didn’t expect to find around their home in rural Delphi.

And not just the handwritten note, an IOU done up in gold Sharpie on a 3-by-5 index card and stuck with a magnet among dozens of family photos to the refrigerator, dictated by a couple of sisters, one in eighth-grade and the other a high school junior, who had somewhere else to be in February 2017: “We will clean the house when we get home.” Signed: Liberty German and her older sister, Kelsi German, the granddaughters the Pattys raised.

A few weeks ago, Becky Patty was going through a drawer and found a tablet of paper Libby kept tucked away for her poetry. Weeks before that, while rummaging through a bin of winter hats and gloves, she found a pink softball Libby had marked with her last name.

Policing an office she keeps in the home’s garage, Becky Patty saw a pencil mark she’d never noticed, “and I don’t know how many times I’ve swept up around there.” Next to the line on the wall: “4 feet, 1¾ inches. Liberty.”

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On Saturday, two mystery camera memory cards marked with Libby’s name fell out of a photo album. Becky Patty said she has thousands, probably tens of thousands, of photos of her granddaughter – “Libby and Kelsi were so into photography and just doing these photo shoots everywhere,” she said – but she was still anxious to see what was hidden on cards that date themselves by their 1GB capacity, relatively tiny by standards of 2017, the last time Libby would have used them.

“You’d have thought that we would have found everything by now, after she’s been gone,” Becky Patty said. “Things like that just pop up. … She’s still here.”

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Still, when he wakes up, and Libby German is not there getting ready for what would be the second semester of her sophomore year, Mike Patty walks past his granddaughter’s smiling picture in the hallway.

“I say, ‘Morning,’” Mike Patty said. “Then I spend time thinking for a while about the last 30 minutes of her life. Of Abby’s life, too. Of those girls’ lives. Every morning, that’s what I think about. …

“Because how did this guy get away with that?” Mike Patty asks. “How? Libby and Abby aren’t here. I can hardly get my head around it, some days. And it’s been two years of waking up that way. … Nobody thought we’d be talking about that a year later. So, you know nobody thought we’d be talking about it two years later. But here we are. This is life.”

Two years ago, on Feb. 13, Abby Williams, 13, and Libby German, 14, eighth-graders at Delphi Community Middle School, took advantage of an unseasonably warm Monday off from school and went hiking on the Monon High Bridge Trail, a popular spot just outside the Carroll County seat, about 17 miles northeast of Lafayette.

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When they didn’t return to meet their ride at an arranged time, police and families went looking on the trail, which led to the Monon High Bridge, a rough, unused rail trestle that towers over Deer Creek. The next morning, a search crew – one of several groups of community volunteers who came to scour the woods – found the girls’ bodies about a half-mile from the bridge, near the creek.

Hundreds of local, state and federal investigators set up in Delphi in the months that followed. Police released photos, taken on Libby’s phone, of a man crossing the Monon High Bridge. They played a portion of audio captured, again on Libby’s phone, of a man saying, “Down the hill,” hoping someone would recognize the voice. A police sketch artist drew a composite of a man a hiker saw on the trail that day.

HEAR THE VOICE OF THE SUSPECT

DELPHI DOUBLE HOMICIDE: A TIMELINE

But two years in, police haven’t arrested anyone in connection with Abby and Libby’s murders.

And police, who have interviewed more than 1,000 people and fielded tens of thousands of calls to a dedicated Abby and Libby tip line, haven’t released substantial information in more than 18 months.

Just like the lead-up to the first anniversary, the past two weeks have been rough for Anna Williams, Abby’s mom.

“I’m not going to lie,” Williams said. “Really rough.”

Williams said the milestones – the holidays, the girls’ birthdays, every six months the case goes unsolved – tend to be that way, with requests coming from all directions to relive moments she wishes she could forget.

An investigation that families figured would take a few days turned into a few weeks and then turned into months. The summer of that first year, the families sent fliers with details about the case – the suspect’s picture, the voice loop and tip line phone numbers – to police departments in every county in the U.S. A next round went to campgrounds across the country. A buddy of Mike Patty’s sells his yard sale find – “Fishing lures, mainly,” he said – on eBay and includes a flier in every box. (“Every little bit,” Mike Patty said.)

The families spent nearly every weekend that first summer and fall going to flea markets, festivals and trade shows, setting up booths to hand out fliers, hoping to reach people who hadn’t heard about Abby and Libby – and then hoping those people would show the fliers and tell the story wherever they were from.

“It was exhausting,” Williams said. “But who else was going to do it? Someone knows something, and we needed to be out there. … Even now, we’re asking, ‘What do we do next?’”

Williams said she knew the second anniversary might bring a similar crush and that people around town might look for the families to do something in a town where wanted posters hang in business windows in downtown and teal and purple ribbons – the girls’ favorite colors – are tied to lamp posts on the Carroll County Courthouse square. Orange porch lights still shine in the evening as a reminder of the girls and that their killer hasn’t been caught.

Williams said she would have preferred to mark the day quietly. But she said she suggested to Becky Patty that the girls – active in their school and always up to some sort of project – would have gone for a food and pet food drive. And that’s what they’ll do Wednesday evening at the Delphi United Methodist Church on U.S. 421, near the Hoosier Heartland Highway.

“But it’s been like it is before any event,” Williams said. “There’s the uptick in crazy. Mainly, people hitting me up on social media, swearing they know who did it and how, and asking why we don’t just go out and pick up who they say did it. You always just deal with that.”

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Williams said she’s had to get better at tuning out some of the true-crime online discussions dedicated to the Delphi murders that hash and re-hash theories and then try to draw her in. Over the weekend, one rumor getting replayed had her particularly frustrated – that Abby had been alive when the girls were found.

“They run out of things to talk about, so they run through the whole list of rumors,” Williams said. “You have to realize most of them mean well. Others of them, I just don’t know what to say.”

There’s been enough armchair sleuthing in Abby and Libby’s case that on several occasions, Indiana State Police have pleaded with people not to compare random photos and mug shots with the composite sketch or the grainy photos from the Monon High Bridge.

Mike Patty went on “Fox & Friends” in mid-January, hoping to tamp down growing speculation that a Randolph County man arrested on molesting charges on Jan. 8 might be a suspect in the Delphi murders. Mike Patty gave the same sort of answers on the national broadcast as he had when Daniel Nations, an Indiana man who was arrested in 2017 for threatening hikers on a Colorado trail, caught the attention of state police and his picture went up, side-by-side with suspect sketch in Delphi.

The upshot, Mike Patty said: Let police do their work. Keep phoning in tips. But don’t get in the way. And the time to get hopeful is when law enforcement makes an arrest.

“It took me eight months to get that Daniel Nations thing straightened out,” Mike Patty said. “We’d tell people about the girls, and they’d say, ‘Didn’t they already get that guy?’ That’s not going to help.”

Kelsi German, Libby’s sister, started a Twitter account – @libertyg_sister – in the past year to keep the girls’ case in people’s minds. Now a Ball State University freshman, she said she sends out information about the case on a daily basis and feeds posts about Abby and Libby on celebrity pages – “A lot on actors from N.C.I.S. and crimes shows,” she said – hoping her tweets get some steam. She also has become a clearinghouse for people who believe they have tips – which she funnels to police – theories or advice.

Her notifications and mentions on Twitter number in the hundreds, every day, Kelsi German estimates.

“It’s crazy,” she said. “Sometimes, I just need a breather.”

Kelsi German said she’s still trying to find the right way, two years later, to respond to people who want to share condolences or ask, “Hey, aren’t you the girl with the sister who …?” The whole time, she said, she’s thinking that Libby would be old enough to get her driver’s license.

“I think that’s crazy, too,” Kelsi German said. “I try to imagine her today, all the time. … It would have been fun to tell her that her driving was bad, instead of her saying it to me all the time.”

Williams said the social media feedback constantly asks why the families don’t hire a private investigator to speed the case. She said police haven’t come to the families and said they’re out of leads. Until they do, Williams said she has confidence in the investigation – “120 percent.”

Mike Patty said he has faith, too. Becky Patty posts every day on her Facebook account, some version of, “Today is the day.”

“And one day, she’ll be right,” said Mike Patty, who is spearheading development of Abby and Libby Memorial Park, a complex of softball fields at the corner of Indiana 218 and the Hoosier Heartland Highway.

But Mike Patty said he wonders how many more anniversaries and birthdays are left before Abby and Libby’s case fades a bit for the public and people stop asking about it as much. (For now, he does whatever he can when media outlets call, because, he said, “it’s better than me standing at the end of my drive with a bullhorn.”)

“It’s been two years,” Mike Patty said. “We’ve been saying it all along. Someone knows something. Someone’s going to talk. Someone’s going to think, ‘Maybe this one thing I saw might mean something.’ And maybe that’s the one thing that gets this guy.”

And maybe he won’t be waiting, still fielding the same questions, next February. Instead, he’ll be closer to moving the stacks of teal and purple picnic tables and benches – made from thousands of donated bottle caps – from his pole barn to the new ball fields a few miles away.

“That’s the idea,” Mike Patty said.

Williams said she’s made plans to take Thursday off from her job with a drywall company and take a day for herself, once another anniversary slides by without a suspect or arrest connected with Abby and Libby’s deaths. Next year, she said, she hopes an arrest and an impending trial are a given.

“I hope we’ll get to celebrate their birthdays and holidays, rather than it being the second year of their passing,” Williams said. “One of these days, we’ll finally get to grieve, get on a new normal. I don’t want to keep remembering the worst day ever.”

Becky Patty thought that when the first anniversary came along, it wouldn’t be much more than a day on the calendar. Then again, she said, she’s a procrastinator and generally puts things off until there’s a deadline. “And we’d been through the worst part, right?” she said.

She said she was wrong. The day hit hard. And she said she was gearing up for this Feb. 13 to do the same.

“We thank people, because they still talk about it and talk about the girls,” Becky Patty said. “That’s our drive. … I hope that guy is watching. We’re not going away. As far as we’re concerned, he’s never going to get a breather.”

For a few minutes, first, Becky Patty planned to go through a couple of 1GB memory cards to see what kind of poses and goofy faces Libby left for her to find two years later.

ABOUT THE SUSPECT

Police continue to look for a white male between 5-foot-6 and 5-foot-10, weighing 180 to 200 pounds, with reddish brown hair. The description was taken from images on Libby German’s cellphone of a man walking across Monon High Bridge that day – wearing blue jeans, a blue jacket and a hat – and from composite done by an FBI sketch artist, based on information from a witness who saw a man fitting that description.

WHAT YOU CAN DO

► Anyone with information about the case may call the Delphi Homicide Investigation Tip Line at 844-459-5786; the Indiana State Police at 800-382-7537; the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department at 765-564-2413; or by email to Abbyandlibbytip@cacoshrf.com.

► Donations to the Abby and Libby Memorial Softball Park Fund may be made in care of the Carroll County Community Foundation, P.O. Box 538, Delphi, 46923. Or online at: www.cfcarroll.org.

IF YOU GO

The Delphi United Methodist Church, 1796 U.S. 421, will host an evening of prayer and remembrance for Abby Williams and Libby German from 5-7 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 13. The evening is a chance for people to come and go, rather than a formal service. The families of Abby and Libby encourage people to bring non-perishable food and pet food to the church that evening. For those who can't make it to Delphi, the families say they're encouraging people to donate in Abby and Libby's names to a food pantry or animal shelter in their hometowns.

Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.