The Dardeen Family Murders, the Long Search for Answers, and the Confession That Changed Nothing
On the night of November 17, 1987, in the small southern Illinois village of Ina, population 475, someone entered a white mobile home along Illinois Route 37 and committed an act so savage that Franklin County Coroner Robert Lewis said the deaths were, “as brutal a murder as I’ve seen in twelve or thirteen years.”
Inside that trailer, Ruby Elaine Dardeen, 30 years old and seven months pregnant, and her 3-year-old son Peter Sean were beaten to death. The beating was so severe that it forced Elaine into premature labor. A baby girl was born alive inside that trailer either during or after the attack. She was then beaten to death as well. Her grandparents would later name her Casey Elaine, as the Dardeen’s planned to name their baby if it were a girl. If it were a boy, they had chose Ian.
The body of Elaine’s husband, Russell Keith Dardeen, 29, was found the following day by hunters in a wheat field near Rend Lake College, just across the Jefferson-Franklin county line. He had been shot three times in the head. His genitals had been severed. His red 1981 Plymouth Horizon had been found abandoned near the Benton police station, eleven miles south of the family home, its interior spattered with blood.
No money was stolen. A VCR and portable movie camera sat in plain view in the living room. There was no evidence of forced entry. There was no evidence of rape. There was no clear motive for any of it.
The Dardeen family murders have remained unsolved for nearly four decades. The case produced more than 3,000 leads, hundreds of interviews, a 25-member task force, a $30,000 reward, two segments on national television, examination of at least two serial killers as possible suspects, and a confession from a man who told three contradictory versions of what he claimed to have done.
None of it resulted in a charge. None of it brought Joeann Dardeen, Keith’s mother, the answer she spent the rest of her life searching for.
The Family
Russell Keith Dardeen was born June 22, 1958, in Mount Carmel, Illinois. His friends called him Keith. He was 5 feet 8 inches tall, 145 pounds, with brown hair and green eyes. He worked as a treatment plant operator for the Rend Lake Conservancy District’s Inter-City Water System in the Benton area. His supervisor described him as, “fine, very punctual, a very dependable worker.” The water district superintendent said Keith was such a reliable employee that when he failed to show up for work on the Tuesday morning after the killings, the superintendent personally went to Keith’s home, did not get an answer, and notified Jefferson County authorities.
Ruby Elaine Cowling was born August 10, 1957, in Fairfield, Illinois. She was from Albion and had worked as a secretary and part-time bookkeeper for Davenport Office Supply in Mount Vernon. Her employer called her, “a jewel and an excellent employee.” She had worked there seven months and was planning to take maternity leave in January when the baby was due. She married Keith in August 1979 at the Olive Congregational Christian Church.
Their son Peter Sean was born July 5, 1984, in Evansville, Indiana. He was 3 years old. His father had bought him a baseball bat that summer, too big for the boy but purchased because Keith believed Peter would grow into it. Keith kept a video camera to record every milestone of his son’s life. The family had wrapped a present for Peter’s third birthday with a card that read: Happy Birthday, big brother, from January 10th, a reference to the baby they were expecting.
The minister who had known Elaine since she was 9 years old and later officiated at her wedding described her as a china doll. A friend who had known Keith for years said it was genuinely difficult to imagine he had an enemy in the world. The couple had been active in the small Baptist church in Ina, where Elaine played piano and Keith led the singing. Their landlord, Jo Ann Settle, remembered them as a likeable, friendly couple, very active in the community and in the church. Her favorite memory of the family was Halloween 1987, just weeks before the murders when Keith dressed as the Tin Man, Peter as the Cowardly Lion, and Elaine as the Scarecrow. They won best costume that year.
They had lived in Ina for about two years, having moved from the Albion area when Keith took the water district job. But by late 1987, they were planning to leave. The trailer had a For Sale sign in the window. Keith had told his mother that the area was becoming too violent and that he planned to move the family back to Mount Carmel whether or not he found work there first. Jefferson County had seen fifteen homicides in the two years preceding the Dardeen murders, including the 1985 killings by Thomas Odle, a Mount Vernon teenager who had murdered his parents and three siblings as they arrived home one by one. Keith had become so protective of his family that when a young woman came to the door one night that year asking to use the phone, he refused to let her in.
He knew the area had become dangerous. He was trying to leave it.
He did not leave in time.
The Night of November 17 and the Days That Followed
Authorities placed the time of death for all four members of the family within approximately an hour of one another, in the late hours of November 16 or the early hours of November 17, 1987. The bodies in the trailer had been dead for approximately twelve hours before they were found. Keith had been dead between twenty-four and thirty-six hours when hunters discovered his body.
On Tuesday, November 17, Keith did not report to his shift. He did not call in. His supervisor spent the day attempting to reach him by phone with no answer. By early evening, the supervisor called both of Keith’s parents. Keith’s father, Don Dardeen, was divorced from his mother Joeann but lived near her in Mount Carmel. Don called the Jefferson County Sheriff’s office and agreed to drive to Ina with the house key.
Deputies met Don at the trailer. When the door opened, they found Elaine and Peter and the newborn girl, all three tucked carefully into the master bedroom, laid out on the bed. Elaine had been bound and gagged with duct tape. She and Peter had been beaten to death, apparently with a baseball bat recovered at the scene. The newborn had been beaten to death within minutes of her birth. The duct tape had been almost entirely removed from the bodies before the killer left. Officers discovered that all but the most microscopic traces had been stuffed into the killer’s pockets and taken away.
Keith was not there. His car was not there. Jefferson County Sheriff Bob Pitchford told reporters at a news conference, “it was a surprise to him. He was a suspect in the homicides.”
The search for Keith continued through the night and into the following day. At approximately 1:30 a.m. Thursday, November 19, Benton police discovered the red Plymouth Horizon abandoned near the police station, its interior blood-stained. Four DCI agents and two Jefferson County Sheriff’s officers had been, in Pitchford’s words, beating the bushes for signs of Dardeen. Late Thursday afternoon, hunters near Rend Lake College, a short distance from the family’s trailer, alerted maintenance workers that they had found a body. It was Keith. He had been shot three times in the head. His penis had been severed and left at the scene. His injuries were not the same type as those suffered by Elaine and Peter, who had been beaten. The coroner confirmed that Keith’s death was definitively not a suicide.
The killer had taken Keith’s car after murdering him and driven it eleven miles south to Benton, parking it near the police station with what investigators interpreted as an act of deliberate contempt. The bloodstained car parked with impudence near the station, as one reporter later wrote, was as if the killer was thumbing his nose at the authorities and the community.
The killer then cleaned the scene with meticulous care. He wiped surfaces for fingerprints, cleaned pools of blood, removed all but trace amounts of the duct tape from the bodies, and laid Elaine and her children carefully on the bed before leaving. One investigator later observed that the methodical cleanup spoke of a man who had killed before and would kill again.
The Community and the Fear
Ina in November 1987 was a village of 475 people, surrounded by freshly harvested farmland, bounded by Interstate 57, Illinois Route 37, and Union Pacific railroad tracks. It was not Jefferson County. It was a pocket inside Jefferson County, and that distinction mattered to the people who lived there. The county around them had been accumulating violent death for years. Ina had not. Residents of the village told reporters in the days after the murders that they had thought nothing of leaving their doors unlocked. They said it with the specific bewilderment of people who had been watching a storm move across a landscape and believed, until the moment it arrived, that it would pass them by.
It did not pass them by.
Jefferson County had recorded fifteen homicides in the two years before November 1987, a rate that had unnerved residents across the region and had been part of the reason Keith Dardeen was planning to move his family out. The 1985 Odle murders in Mount Vernon, ten miles up Route 57, had broken something in the county’s sense of safety. Other unsolved killings had followed. The violence was real and documented and widely known. It simply had not, until now, entered Ina itself.
That changed overnight.
Within days of the killings, shotguns appeared in the gun racks of pickup trucks throughout the county. After high school basketball games, students waited inside the school building for parents to come in and escort them to the parking lot. A resident who lived near the Dardeen trailer told reporters she prayed that the Lord would protect her when she answered the door, and asked that her name not be published. She had lived through the county’s years of rising violence without changing her habits. Now she locked her doors.
Ina Cafe owner Joan Sneed said what everyone in the village was saying, “It’s unbelievable that it could be somebody walking the streets and you might know him.” The postmaster said the entire community, “was in shock.”
What made that shock so complete was not simply that four people had been murdered. It was the specific nature of what had been done to them, and the fact that no one in Ina had seen anything, heard anything, or noticed anything at all. The killer had come and gone without leaving a single witness. He had taken a family from a village of 475 people and disappeared as if he had never been there.
Rumors spread quickly. Because of the genital mutilation and the circumstances of Casey Elaine’s birth, speculation that the killings had been a satanic ritual ran through the county. A cult expert consulted by police said the satanic theory was baseless. Satanic groups typically mutilate bodies more extensively, harvest organs, and leave symbols and candles at the scene. None of that was present. Police also explored whether the killings were related to other unsolved homicides in Jefferson County but found no evidence connecting them. Franklin County Coroner Robert Lewis said he believed the murders were personal and deliberate rather than random, “a very personal, deliberate thing.”
No one who knew the Dardeens had anything bad to say about them. No one who was questioned recalled anything suspicious. They were church people, family people, quiet and conservative. Investigators found a small quantity of marijuana in the trailer but concluded it was more likely left by the killer than by the family. Autopsies found no drugs or alcohol in any of the victims.
No money was stolen. No evidence of rape. No forced entry. No motive. A killer who cleaned the scene and laid the bodies out before leaving. The Dardeen murders produced no theory the evidence could sustain.
The Investigation
The initial response was substantial. The Jefferson and Franklin County Sheriffs’ Departments, the Illinois State Police Division of Criminal Investigation, and the Mt. Carmel Police all joined forces. A 25-member task force was formed at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Mount Vernon. Thirty investigators worked the case full-time when it first broke. Within weeks, authorities had received more than 600 leads and conducted more than 200 interviews.
By January 1988, a $30,000 reward had been assembled from multiple sources: $10,000 from the Dardeen family, $10,000 from the American Publishing Company that owned several area newspapers including the Carmi Times and the Benton Evening News, and $10,000 added by WSIL-TV in Harrisburg. The Dardeen family offered to double the reward to $60,000 if information was received by midnight on Christmas Day 1987. No credible tip materialized.
The investigation was built around a basic analytical problem. The case had no clear motive. No money stolen. No rape. No known enemies. No extramarital affairs involving either Keith or Elaine. A stack of sports scores in the house briefly led investigators to wonder about gambling debts, but Keith’s mother told police her son was so frugal that he sold 50-cent cans of soda at work for a small profit to build his son’s college fund. A coworker with whom Keith reportedly had a dispute was investigated and cleared. A man taken into custody early in the investigation was released after questioning.
Police did have theories. Some believed the family was chosen by mistake and were the wrong target. Some believed it could be drug-related, not that the Dardeens were involved in drugs, but that someone tried to recruit Keith and he refused. Joeann Dardeen developed her own theory over the years. She believed the killer was someone Keith knew and brought to the trailer that night, possibly someone he encountered after work or near their home. She thought the killer left with Keith, murdered him, returned to the trailer, and then stayed long enough to clean the scene because he was afraid of witnesses.
Captain Mike Anthis of the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department, who led the investigation for years, said plainly, “The thing that makes this case baffling is that you can’t come up with a direct motive.” He used the Dardeen case to train new investigators on the importance of avoiding tunnel vision, because you have to, “consider every possible theory.”
Investigators also retained FBI profilers, who came to the area and reviewed the evidence. They provided what Anthis described as guideposts, but left no more certain than when they arrived. The crime defied standard analytical methods.
By 1988, the task force remained active but the full-time contingent had begun to shrink. By 1992, five years after the murders, approximately six officers were working the case part-time. By 1997, a single detective, John Kemp, was keeping tabs on whatever leads came in. The Southern Illinois DCI office confirmed the case was still being worked, but the pace of incoming leads had slowed to about one per month.
Joeann Dardeen never stopped calling. Through the 1990s, she contacted Kemp approximately once a week, pushing new leads she had heard about, asking for updates, and refusing to let the case settle into silence. I worshipped the ground he walked on, she told a reporter in 1997. He was a good man and a good father. That’s why I do it. And I will never give up.
In 1991, Keith’s high school class of 1976 presented a check to the Wabash County Museum in his memory. His mother suggested the memorial gift go to the museum because Keith was something of a historian. She accepted the check alongside a museum official in a photograph published by the Mount Carmel Register. Her expression in that photograph is the specific kind of grief that comes from years of waiting.
In 1994, Joeann gathered more than 3,000 signatures from area residents and sent them to The Oprah Winfrey Show, asking producers to run a segment on the killings. The producers declined, saying the crime was too brutal for daytime television. America’s Most Wanted ran a segment in 1998, but it produced no credible leads.
The Suspects Who Were Not
In the summer of 1999, a Southern Illinoisan investigation raised the possibility of a connection between the Dardeen murders and Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, a Mexican national known as the Railroad Killer, who was then wanted for eight killings in Texas, Kentucky, and Illinois. Resendez-Ramirez had been identified as a serial killer who traveled by hopping freight trains, chose his victims near railroad tracks, and often beat them to death. The Dardeens had lived near Union Pacific tracks. The method of killing was similar. And Resendez-Ramirez had been arrested in St. Louis in April 1988, just 90 miles from Ina, on weapons and other charges, within months of the Dardeen murders.
Former chief Dardeen investigator Charles Parker, who by 1999 worked for the Jefferson County state’s attorney’s office, said the similarities were coincidental but worth keeping in mind. Captain Mike Anthis said no theory should be overlooked but that personally he found the connection unlikely. State police officials reviewed the Dardeen evidence and noted geographic and methodological similarities, but Illinois investigators were never able to connect Resendez-Ramirez to the crime. After his arrest in Texas later in 1999, no physical or testimonial evidence placed him in Jefferson County in November 1987.
The case had been featured on America’s Most Wanted in 1998 and in 1997 was the subject of a ten-year anniversary investigation by the Southern Illinoisan, which noted that authorities were still working more than 30 theories and that the five missing pieces of the 5,000-piece puzzle, as Anthis put it, might still surface. They had not surfaced yet.
Tommy Lynn Sells
On the last day of 1999, Tommy Lynn Sells cut the throats of two young girls in a mobile home near Del Rio, Texas. One of them, 10-year-old Krystal Harris, survived and gave authorities a description that led police to Sells within two days. He was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to death for that murder and for the 1999 stabbing death of a 13-year-old girl in San Antonio.
While awaiting trial in Texas, Sells began confessing to murders he said he had committed while drifting across the country for two decades. He claimed responsibility for as many as 70 killings across multiple states. He was convicted of one additional murder in Texas and executed on April 3, 2014.
Among the crimes he confessed to were the Dardeen family murders.
Sells had been born in Oakland, California, and raised in Missouri, spending time in St. Louis and in the Missouri Bootheel. He supported himself through carnival work, day labor, and theft. He traveled constantly, riding freight trains and hitchhiking. By his own account, he had committed his first murder at age 15 and had been living on the streets and moving across the country since. He claimed the childhood sexual abuse he endured between the ages of 7 and 14 had turned him into what he described as a dark soul.
He told investigators that in November 1987, he had been passing through southern Illinois and encountered Keith Dardeen. His account of how they met changed across multiple tellings. In one version, Keith picked him up while he was hitchhiking and brought him home for a meal. In another, he met Keith at a pool hall in the area. In the third and most detailed version, recounted in Diane Fanning’s 2004 book Through the Window, Sells got off a freight train near Ina, spotted the Dardeens’ trailer with its For Sale sign, drank beer while watching the home, and then knocked on the door claiming he was interested in buying the trailer.
In the first two versions, Sells claimed that after the meal, Keith made a homosexual advance toward him, which threw him into a blind rage.
In the third version, there was no invitation, no meal, and no proposition. There was only opportunity and calculated predation.
In all three versions, the violence that followed was the same. Sells forced Keith at gunpoint to find rope or tape to bind his wife and son. He forced Keith to drive to the field near Rend Lake College, where he severed Keith’s genitals, telling him he was taking them back to Elaine, then shot him and left him there. He returned to the trailer, where he beat Peter, then Elaine, then the newborn, to death.
In the Fanning book account, Sells watched Casey Elaine be born. He looked at Elaine, saw her desperation and hope, smiled, and then raised the bat.
He told three different stories about how the night began. In all three, the ending was the same. The question investigators could never answer was whether any of the stories were true.
The problems with the Sells confession were significant and documented.
Jefferson County prosecutor Gary Duncan, who had handled the case for seventeen years until his retirement in 2008, laid them out with precision. When Sells was asked about details of the crime that had never been made public, he initially answered incorrectly. He then self-corrected and gave the right answer. Duncan said it was possible Sells simply deduced the correct response. He also claimed to have shot Keith in a specific seat of the victim’s car, but physical evidence disproved that claim. In another account, he said he sexually assaulted Elaine with a blunt object after her death, a detail that was consistent with evidence but also the kind of detail that had appeared in earlier reporting and could have been absorbed by a man who followed media coverage of crimes he may or may not have committed.
Sells had a documented history of making false confessions. Authorities in multiple states investigated his claims and found them either unverifiable or contradicted by evidence. Texas authorities refused to allow Sells to be transported to Illinois to assist investigators with a direct examination of the crime scene, saying they would not let him leave the state.
In a 2010 interview with the Southern Illinoisan conducted at the Polunsky Unit death row facility in Livingston, Texas, Sells confirmed his confession to the Dardeen murders. He said he couldn’t swear he’d give the reporter the answers she wanted, but that he’d try. He acknowledged knowing people had doubts. He said Keith met him at a Mount Vernon truck stop, invited him for a meal, and then made a sexual advance. He said he killed Keith first, then went back for the family.
When asked why he killed the children, he said, “I don’t have an answer for you. I can’t answer it. If you’ve never been that pissed then it’s hard to … you know. Rage don’t have a stop button.”
He said he could not remember half the murders he had committed. He said his memory was fogged in the way all his memories were fogged, as a survival mechanism developed during years of sexual abuse as a child. He said death was a welcome relief. He said he had come to peace with himself in the last ten years. He said Texas would kill him first.
Joeann Dardeen, asked about Sells before his execution, said, “Tommy deserved to die for what he did, but I wanted him to stay alive until I know positively he didn’t do it.” She was not convinced he had. She dismissed his account of Keith making a sexual advance as contrary to everything she knew about her son. Keith was not the type of man to invite a stranger home to his family, she said. He was not the type of man to make a homosexual proposition. The conclusions of everyone who knew Keith were blended with portions of Sells’ recollections to reconstruct the most likely sequence of events, but those reconstructions rested on a confession from a man who had given three different versions and had known histories of embellishment.
Gary Duncan said the case against Sells was built on a questionable confession and no physical evidence. He said there was a fair possibility that the actual killer was still out there. He said it was the kind of case that would haunt everyone involved. There’s just no end to that.
Jefferson County State’s Attorney Douglas Hoffman, however, said a week after Sells’ execution in 2014 that Sells remained the number one suspect. Sheriff Roger Mulch agreed. A county deputy who had interviewed Sells in his Texas cell told reporters that Sells knew confidential details of the crime that had not been made public. Whether those details were genuinely confidential, or whether Sells had pieced them together from sources investigators had not identified, was never established with certainty.
Tommy Lynn Sells was executed by the state of Texas on April 3, 2014, for the murder of Kaylene Harris. He was never charged with the Dardeen murders. The case remains officially open and unsolved.
What Joeann Dardeen Did
In the nearly three decades between the murders and her own death, Joeann Dardeen of Mount Carmel did not stop.
She called the investigating detective, John Kemp, approximately once a week throughout the 1990s. She sent signatures to Oprah. She wrote letters to area media. She spoke to every anniversary reporter who came calling, from the first anniversary in November 1988 through the tenth in 1997 and beyond. She gathered petitions. She watched America’s Most Wanted air a segment and produce nothing. She developed her own theory of the crime. She tolerated and then dismissed the Sells confession with characteristic clarity.
She did not believe the killer was a drifter who happened upon the For Sale sign. She believed the killer was someone her son knew, someone Keith invited into the trailer that night, who left with Keith, murdered him, and then came back to eliminate the witnesses. Someone who knew the family well enough to know the layout of the home, who took the time to clean the scene and arrange the bodies because he was afraid of recognition rather than afraid of witnesses in the usual sense.
She said in 1997, “Police tell me they’re hoping whomever did it will have one drink too many in a tavern and say something. I’m just hanging in there.”
She said in an interview marking the tenth anniversary, “I worshipped the ground he walked on. He was a good man and a good father. And I will never give up.”
She never got the answer.
The last major public accounting of her search appeared in the 2014 reporting around Tommy Lynn Sells’ execution, when she was 76 years old. She was skeptical of Sells. She wanted justice for the right man. She did not believe Tommy Lynn Sells had given her that.
Whether she died knowing who killed her son, his wife, her grandchildren, and a baby girl who lived only long enough to be given a name, the record does not say.
What the Record Leaves Behind
The Dardeen case was not ignored. It was covered in newspapers across Illinois for years, investigated by dozens of detectives, examined by FBI profilers, featured on national television, and the subject of a true crime book published in 2004. The case file at the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department contains thousands of pages.
And it remains unsolved.
The back door was unlocked. No forced entry. No robbery. No rape. A killer who bound a pregnant woman with duct tape, beat her 3-year-old son to death, watched a premature infant be born and then killed her, removed almost all evidence of the duct tape before leaving, wiped the surfaces clean, laid the bodies carefully on the bed, took the dead man’s car eleven miles south and parked it near a police station, and then was never identified, charged, or convicted.
Those facts, taken together, produce an uncomfortable conclusion- this was not random. It was not panicked. It was not the act of a man who lost control and fled. It was deliberate and methodical and organized, and the person who did it has, as of this writing, never faced consequences.
Investigators say the case is still open. The passage of nearly four decades means witnesses die, memories fade, and physical evidence loses whatever evidentiary value it once held. The Sells confession created the appearance of resolution without providing the reality of it. Jefferson County has a number one suspect who was never charged, a confession with documented inconsistencies, and a prosecutor who retired saying the actual killer might still be out there.
Joeann Dardeen called her son’s case a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. She said she had 4,995 pieces in place.
She died waiting for the last five.
What We Know and What We Do Not
The following has been established through coroner’s reports, court records, police statements, and contemporaneous reporting:
Keith and Elaine Dardeen and their son Peter were killed within approximately an hour of one another, in the late hours of November 16 or early hours of November 17, 1987. Casey Elaine was born during or immediately after the attack on her mother and was killed within minutes of her birth.
All four were killed by blunt force trauma to the head, with the exception of Keith, who was also shot three times in the head. The likely murder weapon for the trailer victims was a baseball bat Keith had bought Peter earlier that year.
Keith was transported in his own car to the field near Rend Lake College, where he was mutilated and shot. His car was then driven to Benton and parked near the police station.
The killer cleaned the scene, removed nearly all trace evidence of duct tape, and arranged the bodies on the master bedroom bed before leaving.
No forced entry. No robbery. No rape. No clear motive. No identified suspect who was charged.
The following remains unknown:
Who killed the Dardeen family. Whether Tommy Lynn Sells was responsible or whether his confession was fabricated, embellished, or partially accurate. Whether the crime was the work of one person or multiple. Whether the killer knew the Dardeens personally or selected them randomly. Whether the killer has ever faced consequences for any crime related to that night. Whether the case will ever be officially resolved.
The Dardeen family murders are considered unsolved in Jefferson County, Illinois.
It has been nearly four decades.
New Timeline: Timeline of Events: The Dardeen Family Murders – American Crime Journal |
Resources & Further Reading
Timeline of Events: The Dardeen Family Murders – American Crime Journal |
Dardeen family homicides – Wikipedia
Gruesome murder of an Illinois family remains unsolved as the main suspect is executed
Warning: Graphic Excerpts From Tommy Lynn Sells’ Transcripts
