Keith and Elaine Dardeen had bought a mobile home in Ina in 1986, so Keith could be closer to his job as treatment plant operator at the Rend Lake Water Conservancy District facility there. Elaine worked at an office supply store in town. The couple had a two-year-old son named Peter, and in November of 1987, Elaine was pregnant with their second child, a girl which they planned to name Casey.
Ironically, considering what the ghastly fate of the family would be, the Dardeens had recently decided to put their trailer up for sale and move away. The area around where they lived had seen an alarming increase in violent crime over the past two years, with more than two dozen murders taking place in Jefferson County alone. Keith thought it would be best to move his family somewhere much safer. Unfortunately, he would never get the chance.
On Wednesday, November 18th, 1987, Keith Dardeen didn’t show up for work, and his supervisor became concerned; Keith was a conscientious employee, and never would have missed a shift without calling in. The supervisor phoned Keith’s parents, but neither of them had seen their son. They called the police and agreed to meet officers at the Dardeens’ trailer with their spare copy of the key.
Inside one bedroom of the mobile home, investigators found an absolute bloodbath. Thirty-year-old Elaine and two-year-old Peter were both tucked into bed, their heads obliterated by what was presumed to be Peter’s baseball bat. Even more appallingly, it appeared that the killer or killers had beaten Elaine so ferociously that she had gone into labor; the baby girl she had delivered had also been brutally beaten to death and placed in the bed next to her mother and brother.
At first, the whereabouts of twenty-nine-year-old Keith Dardeen and his 1981 red Plymouth were unknown, and detectives initially surmised that he had murdered his family and gone on the run. This hypothesis was only sustained for one more day, as on November 19th, Keith’s body was recovered by hunters in a field a short distance from the trailer. He had been shot three times and had had his penis cut off. Subsequently, Keith’s blood-spattered vehicle was found parked at the Benton police station, eleven miles away from the scene of the crime.
Because of the unbelievable savagery of the quadruple homicide, rumors began to spread that a Satanic cult might be responsible, though police were quick to try to dispel these theories. It seemed that they didn’t have many other leads to pursue, however; the Dardeens had been a quiet, well-liked family seemingly untainted by scandal of any sort, and there was no obvious motive for their deaths, particularly in such a beastly fashion. The presence of cash and valuables in the house belied the notion of a robbery, and Elaine had not been sexually assaulted. Further, there was no sign of forced entry. In fact, the only vaguely sketchy evidence discovered in the trailer was a tiny quantity of marijuana, which investigators believed might have been left by the murderer.
The case very quickly began to stagnate, and though Keith’s mother Joeann worked tirelessly to keep the homicide in the media, new avenues of inquiry were frustratingly scarce. For a time in the late 1990s, authorities were focused on train-hopping serial killer Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, who turned himself in to Texas police in 1999 and was known to kill people by beating them to death. He was ultimately unable to be linked to the Dardeen slayings, however.
One more promising candidate appeared on investigators’ radar a little later that year. In December of 1999, serial killer Tommy Lynn Sells was arrested in Del Rio, Texas after murdering one girl and wounding another by slashing their throats. Sells was eventually convicted and received the death penalty for the Del Rio murder as well as an earlier one in San Antonio, and after he was imprisoned, he began confessing to many other crimes he had allegedly committed as he rode freight trains around the country.
One of the murder cases he admitted responsibility for was the slaughter of the Dardeens, but there were a few glaring problems with his confession. Though he did seem to know a few details about the multiple murder, he changed his story several times and misidentified some aspects of the crime scenes. For example, he first told police that he had met Keith Dardeen at a pool hall or a truck stop, was later invited over to the trailer for dinner, and became enraged when Keith supposedly sexually propositioned him, and/or offered a threesome with Elaine.
In another version of the story, Sells claimed that he had not previously known the Dardeen family at all, but had hopped off a freight train near their trailer and had seen their “For Sale” sign, at which point he had gone to the door and told Keith that he wanted to purchase their house. In this iteration, he gave no compelling reason why he had decided to murder the family, and he also claimed that he had raped Elaine, which the coroner’s report suggested was not the case.
He also gave an incorrect answer when asked which seat of Keith’s car the victim had been sitting in when he was shot, and he initially misidentified the position in which Elaine’s body had been found. Further, friends and family of the Dardeens claimed it was highly unlikely that Keith would have willingly let a stranger inside the trailer for any reason, especially in light of all the previous homicides in the area that had left the family wary and paranoid.
While Tommy Lynn Sells remains the prime suspect, authorities are leaning toward the idea that he was simply confessing to the murders in order to forestall his death sentence. If that was the plan, it ultimately failed; Sells was executed in Texas in 2014, and if he did massacre the Dardeens in Ina, Illinois, he took the knowledge with him to his grave.
Crime Immemorial 