The prosecutors — Richards's twenty years and the chief deputy who waited

1981–2026 · THE ALLEN COUNTY PROSECUTOR'S OFFICE

Karen Richards: The prosecuting attorney is the county's most powerful elected servant after the judges, and for twenty years the office was Karen Richards's. She had entered it in 1981 as the first woman to serve as a deputy prosecutor in its criminal division, and she won the office itself at the election of 2002 — the first woman elected Allen County prosecutor — taking her seat in January 2003 and holding it through five terms. Her office formed a sex crimes unit and a homicide prosecution unit that, by her 2014 account, had lost only one murder case since 2003; her chief deputy through the whole twenty years was Michael McAlexander. She retired at the end of 2022, and Governor Eric Holcomb awarded her the Sagamore of the Wabash, the state's highest civilian honor, that December — presented to her, in a neat closing of the office's own circle, by McAlexander, by then prosecutor-elect. Richards also carried the office into the city's historical life: her public lectures on Fort Wayne's notable and notorious women, drawn from the prosecutor's-eye view of the record, are part of why this history can cite her as a source elsewhere.

McAlexander: Michael McAlexander's service is the deputy's story entire: chief deputy prosecutor for all twenty years of Richards's tenure, he was elected on 8 November 2022, at seventy, to succeed the only elected chief he had served, and took the office in January 2023. The succession is the cleanest example in this record of the career service producing its own head — twenty years of waiting in the second chair, then the office by election rather than appointment.

Sources:

1. WBOI Northeast Indiana Public Radio, 22 December 2022 — the Sagamore of the Wabash, the 1981 first, the 2003 election, the sex crimes unit; via ACGSI, R surnames.
2. The Indiana Lawyer, 2022 — Richards's first election in 2002, four re-elections, and McAlexander's candidacy; Leadership in Law profile, 2021. News-Sentinel, 30 January 2014 — the fourth-term announcement and the homicide unit's record.