The Dardeen Family Murders
During the fall of 1986, Keith and Elaine Dardeen of Mount Carmel, Illinois, were in the beginning stages of starting a family.
They already had a two-year-old son named Peter, but Keith’s unemployment meant they had nowhere to live, and no means of providing for their infant child. Yet one day, Keith’s relentless job search paid off, and he landed the role of Plant Operator at the Rend Lake Water Conservancy facility over in Ina, Illinois.
Ina is a small town of around fifteen hundred people, set on the shores of Rend Lake.
First settled by Cherokee refugees in the 1840s, Ina has had a long association with tragedy and bloodshed. For many years, it was contemptuously referred to as “the Reservation” by those in neighboring settlements, but by the early 20th century, Ina’s citizens were mostly of European or African American.
However, as the population demographics slowly began to shift, strange things began occurring around town; and perhaps the most disturbing of those events involves a man of the cloth, named Reverend Lawrence Hight.
By 1924, the Reverend Hight had become a pillar of Ina’s community.
He was well liked, well trusted, and well visited by the townsfolk, who often sought his advice and mediation on a variety of different matters. Yet during the spring of 1924, neighbors noticed that the Reverend was being visited by one members of the community a little too often.
Elsie Sweeten was young, pretty, and appeared devotedly pious. Yet in reality, she and the Reverend Hight were conducting a shockingly illicit affair; one that would only be brought to light after a pair of suspiciously sudden deaths.
In July, Elsie Sweeten’s husband passed away from an agonizing and protracted illness, yet local coroners were at a loss to his cause of death. Then, less than a month later, the Reverend Hight’s wife suddenly died by the hands of a rapid and violent affliction.
This time, the coroners checked for poisoning, and discovered that both corpses tested positive for lethal doses of arsenic.
Hight and Sweeten were both promptly arrested, and searches of their homes uncovered significant quantities of the deadly poison.
Both were convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, yet in the coming months, a rather strange thing happened. Despite being outright convicted of murder, with poison being found in her residence, Elsie Sweeten was granted a retrial, acquitted, and released.
A judge ruled that Elsie had been thoroughly corrupted by the Reverend, who had been so overcome with jealously and lust that he’d seen fit to break the sixth commandment. Yet as resolute as Ina’s townsfolk were that the Reverend should face justice, the idea that he had been the corrupter seemed impossible.
What’s more, how had Sweeten herself landed an acquittal despite playing an integral part in her husband’s murder?
It seems reasonable to believe that something else was going on, something invisible working just beneath the surface, and it was this place that the Dardeens chose to call home in the fall of 1986.
Keith Dardeen secured some temporary accommodation for the family, in the form of a trailer situated on some farmland. To call it “humble” would be an understatement, but until the paychecks started rolling in, it would have to do.
To supplement their income, Elaine Dardeen found a job at an office supply store in nearby Mount Vernon; and the couple began socializing by joining a small musical ensemble at a local Baptist Church.
By mid-1987, the couple had really started to put down roots in the area, and although they were still living in the old trailer, they were happy. Their low overhead costs meant they lived extremely comfortably, and their living situation afforded them additional savings intended for the purchase of a more permanent home.
Yet despite appearances, all was not well beneath the surface.
By the fall of 1987, Elaine had started to notice a change in her husband’s mood.
He seemed to be surviving on less and less sleep, and was noticeably more irritable and stressed than usual. On more than one occasion, Elaine asked him if everything was okay, yet Keith would simply brush off her concern with some vague excuse.
Ever the patient spouse, Elaine assumed her husband’s disposition would brighten following a change of scenery, but failing that, she soon discovered some other good news to share with him.
She was pregnant.
Elaine and Keith had been discussing another child for quite some time, with the former believing that the latter would greet news of the conception with joy.
Yet to her surprise, Keith was not overjoyed at the news. In fact, he was horrified.
When asked what his problem was, Keith only alluded to the couple needing to move as soon as possible. His behavior had worsened to the point of extreme paranoia, yet still he refused to share his fears with his increasingly concerned wife.
Finally, after Elaine threatened to move back in with her mother, Keith relented, and told her the truth.
Ina, and the wider region of Jefferson County, was very, very violent place; with fifteen homicides having been recorded over the previous two years. On top of that, some of these homicides were truly horrifying, and defied any kind of rational explanation, and perhaps the worst of those were committed by a young man named Tom Odle.
Odle was convicted of killing his parents, fourteen-year-old sister and two brothers, ages thirteen and ten, in 1985. He claimed to have been high on LSD at the time, and was taking revenge for years of abuse he’d suffered at the hands of his mother. Yet witnesses stated that, although it was fair to characterize Odle’s mother as authoritarian, she was by no means abusive; and that Tom’s claims that he’d been tied up and starved were patently false.
In reality, Tom had been engaged in drug use and petty theft since his early teens, and once his 18th birthday rolled around, his parents gave him a choice. Grow up and get a job, or move out of the house.
Tom found a third option - complete familial annihilation.
The Odle family murders was just one of fifteen separate incidents of homicide, most of which remained unsolved, and to Keith, Jefferson County was no place to raise a family.
Then, after a fifteen-year-old girl was violated and murdered, just a few miles away from where the family lay their heads, Keith reached breaking point. He purchased a firearm, and once threatened to brandish it at a stranger who called at the Dardeen’s trailer one night, asking to make a phone call.
Keith seemed convinced it was some kind of set up, and when Elaine asked why they as a family might be targeted, Keith gave a cagey and rather unconvincing reply. He was so scared that he was willing to quit his new and well-paying job just to get the hell out of town, and by November of 1987, he was frantically searching for a new place to live.
But it was already too late, and what came after has become a chilling and enduring mystery.
During his time working at the water plant, Keith had been a reliable and punctual employee. So on the morning of November 18th, when he failed to show up for work, his supervisor began calling him at home to see if he was okay.
After his calls went unanswered, the supervisor then called Keith’s parents back in Mount Carmel, but neither had heard from him, and assumed he was at his trailer.
With the call having raised his concerns, Keith’s father, Don Dardeen, contacted the Jefferson County sheriff's office, and arranged to meet them at his son’s trailer in order to perform a welfare check. Don then drove over to the patch of land between Route 37 and the Union Pacific Railroad tracks, just north of the Franklin County line, where he found the officers waiting for him.
After getting out of his car and greeting those in attendance, Don produced a spare key to the trailer; and after handing it over to the officer in command, he stepped back and allowed them to do their work.
Don later said he’d had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach for the whole ride over there, but he hadn’t once considered the possibility of the horror which greeted him inside that trailer.
In the bedroom, the police discovered the lifeless bodies of Elaine and Peter Dardeen, along with the corpse of a newborn baby girl.
They had been bound, gagged, tortured, then beaten to death with a child-sized baseball bat later found at the scene. Elaine had been so badly pulverized that she had gone into labor, unwillingly giving birth to her newborn child, before she too met the same grizzly fate.
Keith, nor his car, were anywhere to be found, and at first, law enforcement assumed that he’d murdered his family and was attempting to flee. A heavily armed SWAT team rushed to his mother's house in Mount Carmel, but she’d neither seen nor heard from her son in days.
The search continued until late the following day, when a group of hunters came across Keith’s body, lying in a wheatfield near Rend Lake College. He had been shot, stabbed, and castrated.
Although his body had been located, Keith’s vehicle remained missing. It was identified as a red 1981 Plymouth, but just as deputies were about to put out an all points bulletin on the vehicle, they realized something shocking.
There was an identical red Plymouth pared right outside the police station in a town called Benton, about eleven miles south of the Dardeen’s trailer. The inside was splattered with blood, blood which had once belonged to Keith Dardeen himself.
As word of the murders spread through the local community, the already palpable sense of fear only intensified.
Some residents went about their business while openly carrying firearms, and a total curfew was imposed on anyone under the age of eighteen. The local high school cancelled all outdoor gym classes, and additional police officers from neighboring departments were called in to aid in the investigation.
Residents were desperate for information, and the limited flow from law enforcement only fueled the fear-based rumor mill. Some purported that Keith was involved in criminality, while others blamed a hidden cult of Satanists for the murder of Elaine’s unborn child. However, a third theory, while equally grim, was much more feasible.
A family physician based in Jefferson County later told a regional newspaper that many of his patients had confessed to how deeply disturbed they were. One man, who lived fairly close to the Dardeens' trailer told the doctor he was having difficulty sleeping, and had lost 14 pounds as a result of the stress. The Dardeens' landlords' daughter also suffered a great deal of trauma and told her parents that she kept her bedroom light on, and was sometimes so scared to fall asleep that she stayed up all night long.
When contacted for comment, the Franklin County coroner stated that he felt much of the fear was unjustified. “I don't think there is a rational basis for the near hysteria”, he told one newspaper, “people are frightening each other”.
Yet although it was arguably a form of hysteria, people’s fears were very real. It was said that if someone ran out of gas in Jefferson county they would not seek assistance in any nearby homes, but would instead walk to the nearest highway and hitch a ride.
Such was the level of fear and distrust around Ina.
In the aftermath of the coroner’s verdict, a taskforce of around thirty different homicide detectives began working full-time to follow leads and carry out interviews.
Yet despite their efforts, progress was hard-won.
A man taken into custody early on was released after being questioned, as was a coworker of Keith's who he apparently didn’t get along with. Aside from that particular coworker, no one who knew the couple had anything bad to say about them.
The autopsies found no drugs or alcohol in any of the victims, leading police to believe that the small amount of marijuana found at the scene was actually left there by the family’s killers.
It was determined that the entire family had been murdered at night, and within the space of one hour of each other.
Inside the trailer, the killer had apparently taken the time to not only tuck Elaine's body into bed along with her children's bodies, but also to clean up the scene, suggesting they did not feel any urgency to leave, and that they were fully cognoscente of their actions.
But despite the scene yielding many clues, the motive of the killer confounded the detectives.
The back door had been left open, and there was no evidence of forced entry. A VCR and portable camera were in plain sight in the living room, and elsewhere in the house, equally valuable cash and jewelry remained untouched.
These facts essentially ruled out robbery as the motive, and the lack of any carnal violation on any of the bodies precluded any theories of criminal perversion.
Both Keith and Elaine were found to be innocent of any kind of extramarital affair, and no such evidence of chronic gambling were discovered, meaning there was no chance the family had been killed due to exorbitant underworld debt.
While some suggested that the Dardeens had been randomly targets by an unhinged criminal element, the Franklin County coroner disagreed.
“I believe it was a very personal, deliberate thing” he told a regional newspaper, and a police expert on cults agreed that the rumor that Satanists were responsible was untrue. In his experience, such groups often would mutilate bodies more extensively, harvest organs, and leave symbols and lit candles at the scene of their crimes. No such items had been found at the Dardeen's trailer.
However, police did allow for the possibility that there’d been a case of mistaken identity by the killer or killers.
Keith's mother, Joeann Dardeen, later opined that there’d been some other motive for killing her son and his family.
“I think someone wanted Keith to sell drugs and he refused”, she said during a 1997 interview, “Or there's a possibility someone liked Elaine and she wouldn't accept his advances and he took out his rage on both of them ... We just don't know”.
Before the case officially grew cold, it perplexed two FBI profilers, who had travelled down from their Chicago headquarters in order to review evidence. One stated that the crime “defied their typical analytic methods”, and that it was rare for so many possibilities to all hold sway.
Joeann Dardeen continued her efforts to keep the public from completely losing interest, and throughout the 1990s, she regularly contacted law enforcement to offer possible leads and request new information.
However, as time went by, the most likely explanation was whittled down to an early theory, that the Dardeens had fallen victim to a serial killer.
For a short time, law enforcement showed interest in Ángel Maturino Reséndiz, then known by his alias Rafael Resendes Ramirez, following his apprehension by Texas police in 1999
Resendiz often traveled around the country by hopping freight trains, choosing his victims near the tracks he traveled, and often beating them to death. While those elements suggested the Dardeen killings, authorities in Illinois were never able to connect him to the crime.
However, it wasn’t long before yet another serial would come to the attention of local authorities.
On December 31st of 1999, a man by the name of Tommy Lynn Sells cut the throats of two girls near Del Rio, Texas.
Sells claimed to have suffered blackouts prior to each bloodthirsty crime, which he described as a coping mechanism to deal with the abuse he’d endured as a child.
Miraculously, one of the girls survived the ordeal, and went on to aid the police in identifying her attacker. Sells was eventually convicted and sentenced to death, but while he was awaiting trial on the first murder charge, he began confessing to a whole host of other murders.
One was the Dardeen family.
In the mid-1980s, Sells mostly resided near St. Louis, Missouri, and made money from working at traveling carnivals and fairs, as a day laborer, or through theft.
He hopped railroad cars as his primary mode of transportation, and on one such trip through Jefferson County in November 1987, he claimed to have met Keith at a truck stop near Mount Vernon.
Sells then claims that Keith invited him home for dinner, and that after the meal, Keith apparently angered him by proposing they engage in intimate homosexual relations. Sells’ reaction was to force Keith to drive at gunpoint to the location he was killed, and after castrating him, Sells returned to eliminate the witnesses.
“I was just so pissed off that I took it to the maximum limit”, Sells later explained, “rage don't have a stop button”.
However, Sells later brought his reliability into disrepute by completely changing his story.
In his second version, after spotting the Dardeen trailer with its "For Sale" sign outside, he saw an opportunity to commit a heinous act of violence. He could main, kill, then dispose of the Dardeens, and people might assume they’d just moved on.
After all, Sells knew first hand that little attention is afforded to the poor and the destitute.
After drinking beers and waiting for the right time, he knocked on the door and told a wary Keith he was interested in buying the trailer. Then, after gaining entry, Sells overpowered his unsuspecting victim, and forced him at gunpoint to bind and gag his wife and son with duct tape.
Once the act was completed, Sells drove Keith out to the field, where he castrated him, shot him, then left him there to die.
To some, Sells' eventual execution was justice for the Dardeens.
Even though he was never charged with their murders, both the Jefferson County state’s attorney and Sheriff Roger Mulch agreed that he “remained the No. 1 suspect”. This was down to the fact that, although Sells had completely changed his story at one point, he was privy to information that only a select group of investigators knew.
In their eyes, there was no doubt that Sells had committed the murders, or had at least been present when the crimes had occurred. The fact some of his statements completely contradicted the evidence didn’t seem to bother the investigators, who deduced that Sells was attempting to cover for an accomplice by taking sole responsibility.
Regardless of his involvement in the Dardeen murders, police in Texas confirmed Sells was responsible for 22 murders. However, many began to suspect that Sells was inflating his body count in order avoid the death penalty. By continually confessing to murders he was not connected to, Sells could either arrange a plea bargain, or could delay his demise for as long as he could deceive the authorities for. And in the process, scores of killers might potentially avoid justice.
Yet one thing was abundantly clear, Sells wasn’t telling the whole truth regarding his interactions with Keith.
For one, friends, family and investigators were extremely skeptical that Keith would have just invited a stranger home for dinner.
“If he wouldn't let a young girl in to use the phone, he wouldn't let a [grown] man in”, a friend later said.
They also refuted Sells' claim that Keith made advances on him. The detectives who interviewed Sells believed that if he did indeed kill the Dardeens, he invented that detail to make the crime seem more justified.
At first, Keith’s mother was convinced of Sell’s guilt, and actually wanted to meet with him at one point, in order to obtain a degree of closure.
“I’ve always wanted to know every detail," she said. "Some people may think that's gory. But when someone does something to (my family), I want to know why."
Sells, on the other hand, remained averse to any potential meeting.
"Joeann wants to talk to me. If she wants to come here and talk to me, scream at me, yell, kick me, hit me, she should have that right”, he said, “but sorry ain't gonna cut it. So what is there to say? I could tell her sorry every day the rest of my life. It's not going to stop her pain, and one thing I do know about is pain, and it don't go away”.
However, on the eve of Sell’s execution, Joeann Dardeen revealed that doubt had crept into her mind of late. “There's just a little bit of doubt there”, she told journalists, “Not that he didn't do it; I'm wondering if maybe somebody helped him”.
The two never did get around to having that meeting, but by the time of Sells' 2014 execution, Joeann had come to believe he was not the man who killed her son, daughter-in-law and grandchildren.
“I wanted him to stay alive until I know positively he didn't do it”, she told the Associated Press shortly following Sell’s time of death. “The things he said do not match up with what I know about Keith, a lot of people think it's done and over with, but to me, it’s not. For me personally, it’ll never, ever be over”.