Dardeen family homicides

Both Dardeens went by their middle names. Keith, a native of Mount Carmel, bought the trailer in 1986 after completing the training required for his job as a treatment plant operator at the Rend Lake Water Conservancy District's nearby facility. Elaine, who was from Albion, a little closer to Ina, moved there later with their 2-year-old son, Peter. They rented the land it sat on from a nearby farming couple. Keith worked; his wife found a job at an office supply store in Mount Vernon, the Jefferson County seat. When not working, the couple were part of the musical ensemble at a small Baptist church in the village. Keith sang lead vocals while Elaine played the piano. ==Discovery of bodies==

On November 18, Keith, who had been a reliable worker at the treatment plant, did not report for his shift. He had not called to inform his supervisor that he would be unable to come in, and calls to his house went unanswered all day. His supervisor called both of Keith's parents, who were divorced but still lived near each other in Mount Carmel. Neither of them knew what could have happened to their son. Social effect News of the killings made area residents even more fearful than they had already been. Many residents began going about their daily business with shotguns visible in their vehicles' gun racks. After high school basketball games, students would wait in the school building for their parents to come in and accompany them to the parking lot for their ride home instead of socializing outside as they normally did. Dr. Richard Garretson, a family physician who doubled as the Jefferson County coroner, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in early December that many of his patients talked to him about the case and how it had disturbed them. One man who said he lived a half-mile (900 m) from the Dardeens' trailer told Garretson he was having difficulty sleeping and had lost as a result of the stress. Robert Lewis, the Franklin County coroner, felt much of the fear was unjustified. "I don't think there is a rational basis for the near hysteria," he told the newspaper, "The people are frightening each other." People were so afraid, he said, that if someone ran out of gas in the county he would not seek assistance in any nearby homes but would instead walk to the nearest highway and hitch a ride. ==Investigation==

Local police agencies joined forces with the Illinois State Police to investigate the crime. A total of 30 detectives worked full-time following leads and interviewing 100 people. None of what they found proved fruitful. The coroners put the time of death for all the Dardeens at within an hour of each other. The bodies in the trailer had been killed 12 hours before they were found, and Keith Dardeen had been dead for 24 to 36 hours when he was found. It was also an open question as to whether there was one killer or multiple. ==Apparent Tommy Lynn Sells confession==

Another serial killer in Texas would soon bring himself to the attention of the investigators in Illinois. On the last day of 1999, Tommy Lynn Sells cut the throats of two girls near Del Rio, Texas. One survived and helped police identify him; he was eventually convicted and sentenced to death for that murder and another one earlier in 1999, where he had killed a girl in San Antonio. While he was awaiting trial on the first murder charge, he began confessing to other murders he had committed while drifting around the country, sometimes by hopping freights as well. Their counterparts in Illinois thus wanted to take Sells to Ina so they could see how well he knew the area and the locations relevant to the crimes; he claimed he could lead them to missing evidence. However, Texas law does not allow prisoners on death row to be taken out of state, In his 2010 interview, Sells was skeptical of what such a conversation might accomplish. "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 he said that no apology he could make could possibly give her closure. "[S]orry 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." The two never did talk. 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 afterward. "[T]he things he said do not match up with what I know about Keith," she told Pat Gauen, the Post-Dispatch reporter who had originally covered the case in 1987. "A lot of people think it's done and over with, but to me it's not." ==See also==