Keith and Elaine Dardeen: A Family Trying to Escape Death

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"You're listening to 10-minute murder."

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November 1987, a young family in rural Illinois was weeks away from escaping a wave of

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unsolved murders. Keith didn't show up for work. Police found his pregnant wife, his

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toddler son, and a newborn baby girl, dead in their water bed. Keith was in a nearby

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field, shot and mutilated. The crime scene was so brutal that detectives who worked the

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case still can't talk about it. 30 years later, a serial killer on death row confessed,

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but his story has holes. The evidence is still sitting in storage. The DNA is still waiting.

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And somebody out there knows exactly what happened that night.

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[Music]

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Keith and Elaine Dardin were planning their escape. They lived in a mobile home just outside

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of Ina, Illinois, population 460. It's the kind of place where you know your neighbors,

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where kids ride bikes until dark, where people leave their doors unlocked, at least they

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used to. Something had changed in southern Illinois. Between 1985 and late 1987, at least

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10 people had been murdered across Jefferson and Franklin counties. Could have been 15.

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Nobody really knew. The cases stayed unsolved. Local police had leads that went nowhere.

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Fear started creeping into conversations at the grocery store, at church, at the water plant,

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where Keith worked. Keith felt it deeply. People close to him said he talked about the murders,

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about wanting to get his family out, get somewhere safer, so he and Elaine decided to move back

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to Mount Carmel, her hometown. They were packing up, making plans, looking forward to a fresh start.

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Elaine was seven months pregnant. Their second child. They already had three-year-old Peter,

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who was excited about becoming a big brother. They'd even picked out names, Kasey if the baby was a

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girl, Ian, for a boy. The due date was January 11, 1988. They had time. They thought they had time.

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Keith showed up for work every single day, reliable, steady. The kind of employee Supervisors love.

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He worked at the local water plant, and his shift started at 7 a.m. on November 18, 1987.

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When he didn't arrive that morning, his supervisor immediately knew something was off. He called Keith's

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parents, Russell and Joanne Dardine. They called the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office and asked for

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a welfare check. Debuties got to the Dardine home and found the front door locked. They walked around

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back, tried that door, and it opened. The second they stepped inside, they saw blood everywhere.

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The kind of crime scene where you take a breath, steady yourself, and prepare for the worst thing you've

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ever seen. They walked to the master bedroom and found three bodies in the water bed. Elaine

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Dardine, 30 years old, Peter Dardine, three years old, and a baby. A newborn baby girl.

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The coroner pieced together what happened. Someone had beaten Elaine with such force, such sustained

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violence that her body went into shock and premature labor. She gave birth in that bedroom while she

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was dying. The baby came into the world and lived for maybe minutes before the killer beat her to death, too.

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Peter died the same way. Blunt forced trauma. A baseball bat. The same baseball bat Keith had given

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to Peter for his birthday earlier that year. Elaine and Peter had been bound with duct tape,

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gagged, unable to scream, unable to fight back, unable to do anything while someone beat them to death.

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Detectives who worked this case, people who'd spent decades in law enforcement, people who'd seen

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horrific things, called this the worst murder scene of their entire careers. Think about that.

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They are professionals who've worked countless homicides, and this one still haunts them.

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After all that rage, all that violence, the killer did something really strange.

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They took the bedding and carefully wrapped up at Elaine, Peter, and the newborn baby.

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Then they tucked all three of them into the water bed neatly, like tucking children in for the night.

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That kind of shift tells you something about the person that did this, going from absolute fury

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to this careful almost tender arrangement of bodies. That's rare. That suggests someone who

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either knew the family personally or someone had a ritual they needed to complete. The staging meant

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something. Keith was gone. Police initially wondered if maybe he'd done this and run away.

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That was the first theory you explore when a husband and father is missing from a crime scene like

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this. The next day, November 19th, they found Keith in a nearby field. He'd been shot three times,

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execution style, and then someone had mutilated his genitals after he was already dead.

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His penis was severed from his body. That kind of mutilation seems deeply personal.

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It's about power, about rage, about destroying someone's masculinity. It screams Vendetta,

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whoever killed Keith wanted him to suffer in a very specific way. They wanted to send a message.

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The medical examiner determined Keith died within an hour of his family. Everything happened

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in one compressed window of time. Late on November 17th, into the early morning hours of November 18th,

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one person, or maybe more than one, killed four people in less than an hour. Keith's car turned up

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near the police station in Vinton. The killer had driven it there and left it. Blood was

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spattered inside. The car itself had probably been the place where Keith was shot. Why leave it there?

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It cleared up the confusion about Keith being a suspect right away. The car, sitting there told

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investigators that Keith was a victim, but it also felt like the killer was playing with them,

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leaving evidence right where they'd find it, showing off. Jefferson County pulled out all the stops.

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30 full-time detectives got assigned to this case. They tracked down more than a thousand leads.

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They interviewed over a hundred people. They collected about 150 pieces of evidence from the

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mobile home and sent samples to labs all over the place. They came up empty. The back door had been

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unlocked. There were signs that the killer came through the back. The front door was locked.

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Valuables were still there. Cash sitting in plain sight. Jullry, a video camera. Nothing had been

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stolen. Police were dealing with a crime that was clearly targeted. Someone had gone to that

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mobile home specifically to kill the Dardines. But why? What was the motive? Rumors in a small town

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spread fast. People started whispering about Satanism, about occult rituals. I mean it was the 1980s,

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so Satanic panic was alive and real. Investigators looked into that and ruled it out quickly. They also

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dug into possible drug connections, gambling debts, affairs. None of it panned out. Keith's mother,

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Joanne, spent years thinking about why someone would do this to her son and his family. In 1997,

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she shared some theories with investigators. Maybe someone had wanted Keith to sell drugs and he

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refused. Maybe someone was obsessed with Elaine, tried to pursue her and she turned him down.

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Maybe that rejection turned into rage directed at the whole family. Another theory on the table was

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mistake and identity. Maybe the killer thought the Dardines were someone else entirely.

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Maybe they'd gone to the wrong mobile home by accident. The physical evidence pointed to a

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targeted attack. But the lack of obvious motive meant the case went cold within months. Detectives

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exhausted every lead they had and came up with nothing. The case sat quiet for years. Then sometime

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in the early 2000s, a serial killer on death row in Texas claimed he'd done it. His name was Tommy

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Lynn Cells. Cells was already convicted of murdering a teenage girl. He was waiting for execution.

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And he was a talker. He confessed to dozens of murders across the country. Some of those

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confessions were real. A lot of them were probably lies. Cells had a pattern of inserting himself into

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famous unsolved cases, changing his story, making things up. He was like Henry Lee Lucas, another

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serial killer who confessed to hundreds of murders he probably had nothing to do with. But Cells said

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he killed the Dardines. His confession included a lot of accurate details. Things that had been in

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newspaper articles. Things anyone could have looked up. The stuff that was public knowledge lined

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up with what he said. The problem came with the details that had never been made public. Things

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only the killer would know. When Illinois investigators dug deeper into his story, they found inconsistencies.

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Facts about the crime scene that Cells got wrong. And he changed his story three times about how he'd

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even met the Dardine family in the first place. One version, he said he met Keith at a truck stop,

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or maybe a pool hall. Keith invited him to dinner. Then Keith supposedly propositioned him for

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a threesome with Elaine. Another version, he saw a four-sale sign on the trailer. Nocton the door

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pretending he wanted to buy it. Overpowered Keith and forced him to bind and gag his own wife and

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son before driving him to the field. Detectives rejected these claims. They'd investigated every aspect

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of Keith's life back in 1987. Nothing in their investigation supported anything Cells was saying.

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Keith had been so protective of his family after a local girl was raped and murdered. In May 1987,

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that he once refused to let a young woman use his phone when she knocked on the door late at night.

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The idea that he'd invite a stranger home for dinner or that he'd proposition that stranger sexually

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made absolutely zero sense to anyone that knew him. Illinois investigators wanted to bring Cells to

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Eina. Walk him through the crime scene. See if he could provide information that only the real killer

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would know. Texas refused. State law prohibited moving death row inmates out of Texas for any reason.

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That was it. That was the end of the road. The Jefferson County State's attorney declined to

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file charges based on a confession that had way too many holes and couldn't be properly verified.

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Tommy Lynn Cells was executed in Texas in 2014. He never came to Illinois. The Dardine case stayed cold.

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All that evidence collected in 1987 is still sitting in storage. DNA samples from the victims

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are preserved in catalogued. Those 150 items from the scene are logged and ready for testing.

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The killer spent significant time in that mobile home. They beat three people to death,

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moved bodies wrapped bedding staged the scene. There's biological material somewhere in that evidence.

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Skin cells, hair, sweats, blood. Maybe they left something behind. Modern forensic genetic

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genealogy has cracked cases that seemed impossible. The Golden State killer dozens of other cold cases.

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Investigators can take a DNA profile and match it to distant relatives through genealogy databases.

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Then build family trees that lead straight to a suspect. The Dardine case is perfect for this work.

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The challenge is isolating a clean suspect profile from the evidence. Once that's done,

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once investigators have one solid genetic profile, they can submit it for analysis.

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Someone walked into that mobile home on November 17, 1987. Someone who bound a pregnant woman

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and a toddler with duct tape and beat them to death with a baseball bat. Someone who killed a new

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born baby minutes after she was born. Someone who then shot and mutilated Keith Dardine in a field.

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That person either died years ago carrying the secret with them or they're still alive,

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living with what they did. Keith and Elaine were trying to escape. They were weeks away from

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safety. They almost made it. The science exists. The evidence is there. After 38 years,

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the Dardine family deserves answers.

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Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder. Bingeable True Crime Stories. My name is Joe. I'm the host.

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And here's an email from Brysing Cleveland, Subjects, Accidental Podcast Evangelist.

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Hello, Joe. I've turned so many people on to your podcast that it's basically my personality now.

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That reminds me of this murder I heard Joe talking about. Do you ever get recognized or hear stories

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