The unsolved brutal quadruple murder that took place in Ina,IL in 1987,a 10 year anniversary update
Joe1orbit
Hello,
As you know, when a certain true crime incident or case captures my
attention, I can get a little obsessive in my interest and fascination. Thus
it was a few hours ago, with the UPI article on the ten year old unsolved
quadruple homicide that took place in the tiny town of Ina, in Illinois, in
November of 1987.
Below you will find two detailed articles on this fascinating quadruple
murder, which provide many details that were not included in the initial UPI
wire report. These articles truly give us a feel for the case. We learn how
Keith's mother, as well as police officials in the area, are refusing to admit
that they very likely will NEVER capture our quadruple murderer.
Forensic tests show that all 4 victims were killed within one hour of each
other. But they were not all killed in the same place. Keith was killed and
had his penis cut off a mile away, in a field. Police are baffled as to why
and how Keith wound up a mile away, since all four murders took place within
one hour of each other. They are also puzzled by the extreme violence of the
killings, and puzzle over why Keith had his penis cut off and why the killer
even chose to beat the newly born baby to death.
Police cannot tell for certain if more than one killer was involved. My
person gut feeling is that all four killings were done by a single person,
acting alone.
We learn that a SMALL amount of marijuana was found inside the home, but
police do not believe that Keith or his wife had any significany connection to
drug dealers. They even say it is possible that the small amount of found
marijuana belonged to the killer, who might have accidently, or deliberately,
left it behind at the mobile home. Post mortems show that neither Keith or his
wife had any traces of drugs in their bodies.
There were rumors of cult involvement in the weeks following the murders, in
1987, but police there is no evidence of any ritualistic or cult-like aspects
to the murders. FBI profilers did work with local police to try and develop a
profile of the killer, but none of their advice or tips have led police to a
suspect.
Keith's mother, Joeann Dardeen, has been trying to drum up media publicity,
still hoping, after 10 years, to somehow find the killer(s). But guess what?
All of the TV shows she has contacted, including Oprah, America's Most Wanted,
and Unsolved Mysteries, have all DECLINED to have her as a guest, or to
feature this case on their shows. I guess it's just not juicy enough for them,
although I certainly see a lot of potential juicyness to the tale.
I also searched through an archive, and found a news article from 1987,
written just a few days after the quadruple murder took place. This article
provides some info on how Elaine gave birth DURING the actual attack, and how
the killer might have "terrorized" Elaine before killing her. The coroner says
that "It appears likely that labor was induced by either the fear that Elaine
felt, during the attack", or by the actual beating that the killer inflicted
upon her. She was not due to give birth until January 11th, 6 or 7 weeks after
this attack occured.
The newborn baby girl was definately born alive, and then beaten to death by
the killer. The coroner says that it IS possible that Mommy Elaine was already
dead when she gave birth to the baby! He says that it is possible for a
pregnant woman to die, and then give birth, for up to 15 minutes AFTER her
death! Seems pretty weird to me, but maybe the muscles that push a baby out of
a woman's body can somehow keep pushing, even after the woman dies??? Anyway,
it's not CERTAIN that is what happened. The coroner simply says that it's
possible.
He also says it is possible that Keith was murdered of the mobile home, and
then dragged out to a car, driven to the open field, and then dumped thee.
Although from a tactical point of view, it doesn't make much sense for the
killer to have done that.
Anyway, I guess I've dug up about as much info on this 10 year old case as I
can. Certainly was a nice way to liven up a slow Sunday afternoon.
Take care, JOE
The following appears courtesy of the 11/16/97 online edition of The St.
Louis Post- Dispatch newspaper:
Slaying of family remains baffling, horrific
Sunday, November 16, 1997
By Patrick E. Gauen
Of The Post-Dispatch
INA, Ill. -- Dardeen. The name resonates faintly across Southern Illinois, the
faded memory of something gruesome and long ago.
Dardeen. The name rings loudly in a village called Ina, where to this day,
people
lock their doors and cock their guns at the very thought.
Dardeen. The name labels a drab-green cabinet of reports that spill into extra
file boxes at the sheriff's office in Mount Vernon, where nobody gives up on
Case 87P6553, a quadruple homicide.
About once a week, the phone rings on Detective John Kemp's desk. It is Joeann
Dardeen, pushing or cajoling or offering new leads, just as she did with Mike
Anthis and Charlie Parker and Dick Evans and other investigators through the
last decade.
Ten years ago on Tuesday, Joeann Dardeen called police to check her son's home
because his boss said he missed work. She hasn't stopped calling the police
since.
"I carried Keith for nine months. I raised him. I worshiped the ground he
walked on. He was a good man and a good father. That's why I do it," she
explained in an interview last week. "And I will never give up."
Kemp said he welcomed Joeann's nudges. But he wouldn't forget this case anyway.
Not the Dardeens.
The people of Jefferson County, Ill., about 75 miles southeast of St. Louis,
already were on edge.
In November 1985, 19-year-old Thomas Odle murdered his parents and three
siblings one at a time as they arrived home in Mount Vernon. In May 1987, Amy
Schulz, 10, disappeared north of town. She was found raped and murdered. A man
has been sentenced to death in that case.
But 10 miles down Illinois Route 37, life remained relatively innocent in Ina,
a settlement consisting of a store, a gas station, a firehouse, a bank, a post
office and enough bungalows and trailers for 475 residents.
In 1986, Russell Keith and Ruby Elaine Dardeen, who used their middle names,
rented a neat beige-and-white mobile home in a wooded lot hard by Route 37
just south of town. Behind it, traffic zoomed along Interstate 57, close
enough to see but too distant to threaten the swing set out back for son
Peter, a toddler.
Their lives were open and uncomplicated. Keith was from Mount Carmel, Ill., a
90-minute drive northeast, on the Indiana border, and Elaine from Albion,
nearby. Both were hard-working churchgoers.
Keith Dardeen, 29, was a treatment plant operator for the Rend Lake Water
Conservancy District; Elaine Dardeen, 30, had a job as a clerk in an office
supply store in Mount Vernon.
The last time Joeann saw her son, he told her over lunch he was sorry he ever
moved to Ina and planned to take his family "home" to Mount Carmel soon - with
or without a new job.
"He felt it was too violent out there," she recalled. But she also said he did
not explain, or seem afraid.
They talked, too, of his pregnant wife. Keith said if the baby was a boy, he
would be called Ian. If it was a girl, they planned to call her Casey.
No witness, no motive
Three days later, Joeann Dardeen sat at home in Mount Carmel and waited
nervously for police to report back on the disturbing silence from Ina.
She could hardly grasp the news when they did: Elaine was bound and gagged with
tape and savagely beaten to death, ostensibly with a baseball bat found at the
scene. Peter, 3, was killed the same way.
Keith was missing, along with his car. So officers began a manhunt for a man
who seemed to have suddenly raged against his loved ones, just as Thomas Odle
did two years before.
But the next night, a mile south on Route 37, hunters found Keith dead in a
wheat field just over the Franklin County line - three bullets in his head and
his penis sliced off.
The bloodstained 1981 Plymouth turned up 11 miles further south, boldly parked
near the police station at Benton.
Two days later, police told the family one last grisly detail. Elaine gave
birth during that beating. The 3-pound, 13-ounce girl was battered to death
too. Grandparents named her Casey.
About 30 local and state police detectives poured in to find what many regarded
as the most confounding mystery of their careers. Bizarre circumstances.
Little evidence. No witnesses. No motive. No suspects.
They found no evidence of forced entry; the back door was unlocked.
Despite cash, jewelry and a video camera laying in plain sight, not a single
thing was ever determined missing. Investigators found no rape, no infidelity,
no big debts, no grudges.
And the killer took the time to clean up the blood before departing.
`All the pieces'
"We have all the pieces to the puzzle. We just have to put them in the right
order," said Anthis, who led the sheriff's investigation back in 1987 and is
now an Illinois attorney general's investigator.
But he and other officers find the work maddening.
Why wasn't everybody killed at the same place? (Forensic tests don't show who
died first, Kemp said, just that all were killed within an hour or two.) Why
kill Peter? Could he have identified someone? Why kill the newborn at all? Why
such dramatic violence? And why mutilate Keith?
"If you sit and think about it long enough, it will about drive you crazy,"
Kemp said. "It just about has driven some of us crazy."
Cops debate even the basics. Was it one killer or more? Nobody can tell.
Police are inclined to think the Dardeens were chosen, if only by mistake. "I
don't think it was a passer-by," Kemp said. "It's not the random act of a
hitchhiker off the road."
A small amount of marijuana was discovered in the Dardeens' home, but they were
never suspected to be dealers.
Joeann Dardeen said police told her it might even have been the killer's.
Kemp, who was working undercover narcotics when the killings occurred, said the
victims had no closer connections to drug dealers than might be found among
the families or friends of most people. Joeann said post-mortem tests
disclosed no drugs in the victims' blood.
Rumors of cult involvement abounded at first but were dismissed for absence of
systematic mutilations, rituals, candles or symbols.
FBI profilers provided some "guideposts," Anthis said, but left town as baffled
as everyone else.
Town locks doors
Kemp and Terry Campbell, an investigator with the Illinois State Police, still
track whatever leads come along. Joeann Dardeen provides some, usually from
news reports about violent crimes elsewhere.
"Truthfully, there are virtually none similar to this case," Kemp said. "It was
so brutal and so bad. I have never seen or heard of anything more brutal."
It was so traumatic the town will always bear the emotional scar, said Mary
Younger, who works in the town's market and feels the anxiety every year when
leaves fall and afternoons yield to early darkness.
"Before this, I never locked my doors," she explained. "Now I always do. It has
changed the way we live. Nobody is complacent anymore. Everybody stays aware
of their surroundings."
Younger said that immediately after the murders, her husband taught her to
shoot.
She said she was so afraid for her children that she used to lock her house
just to walk out to the mailbox in the yard.
Miracle needed
Older homicides have been solved, of course, but this one started off cold.
"After 10 years, it will take nothing short of a miracle," suggested Kemp.
Joeann Dardeen figures national television may hold that miracle, providing a
link to someone somewhere with answers. She has solicited attention from
"America's Most Wanted," "Unsolved Mysteries" and "Oprah" but without success.
She studies her own recollections for clues and sometimes worries about
reprisals if she ever does figure it out. "I'm still scared," she admitted.
"I think someone wanted Keith to sell drugs and he refused," she said. "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." Later she added, "We just
don't know."
The awful memories color every day for Joeann, a 59-year-old divorcee who works
as housekeeper for the funeral home in Mount Carmel that buried her only son.
She can't forget, and she won't risk letting the police forget. Investigator
Anthis said he wanted to solve the case if only for Joeann's sake.
"She's not a young woman," he said. "I hope she doesn't have to take this to
her own grave."
------------------
The following appears courtesy of the 11/22/1987 St. Louis Post-Dispatch
newspaper, via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch archives:
Baby Girl Born During Attack Was Murdered
Source:Post-Dispatch archives
Summary:This story ran in the Post-Dispatch on November 22, 1987.
BABY GIRL BORN DURING ATTACK WAS MURDERED
By Patrick E. Gauen
Of The Post-Dispatch Staff
INA, Ill. - A baby girl born during a brutal attack on her mother and brother
in their home in Ina, Ill., was beaten to death along with them, a source
confirmed Saturday.
Police have given no clue to whether they have an explanation for the killings.
The baby's father was also killed, but unlike the rest of his family, he was
murdered with gunshots and apparently dumped in a field about a mile and a
half from their mobile home.
Meanwhile, the Jefferson County coroner, Dr. Richard Garretson, said it
appeared likely that labor had been induced by fear or the beating suffered by
the mother, who was expected to give birth about Jan. 11.
''There are some indications the family was probably terrorized for some time
before the deaths occurred,'' he said. ''Whether it was for 15 minutes or two
hours, I couldn't begin to tell you.''
Funerals for Russell Keith Dardeen, 29, his wife, Ruby Elaine Dardeen, 30,
their son, Peter Sean Dardeen, 3, and their newborn are planned for today in
Mount Carmel, Ill. The town is Keith Dardeen's hometown. Both he and his wife
were known by their middle names.
The newborn was named Casey Elaine by other family members, a funeral home
spokesman said.
Meanwhile, residents of usually quiet Ina, about 75 miles southeast of St.
Louis, say they are locking doors, loading guns and keeping tight rein on
their children.
Ruth Jefferies, 40, knew the Dardeens casually and recently attended a rummage
sale at their neatly kept trailer in a small grove of trees just south of
town.
''I'm scared to death. Everybody is scared,' Jefferies said Saturday as she
emerged from the Country Market in Ina.
''I've never locked my doors before in my life. But yesterday I had to search
all over to find the keys.''
She said the Dardeens ''were real pleasant and did everything together as a
family.''
A resident of Ina for about eight years, Jefferies complained, ''You come to a
town like this to raise your kids in peace, and look what happens.''
The mood was especially tense at Lee-J's Catfish along Illinois Route 37 at the
Jefferson-Franklin county line. The restaurant is about midway between the
trailer and the field where Keith Dardeen was found.
''The guns are out, and the doors are barricaded at home,'' said a 17-year-old
waitress who said she was afraid to give her name. ''At home, we've got three
women and four children and no man,'' she said. ''So we got the gun.''
The source on the newborn's death said police agencies had clamped a tight lid
on information about the killings. The source confirmed that all three victims
in the mobile home had been beaten to death.
He also said that Keith Dardeen had been shot several times but was not beaten.
Franklin County Coroner Robert Lewis, in whose jurisdiction Keith Dardeen was
found, could not be reached Saturday.
Garretson said state police had asked him to give no details on the causes of
death of the trailer victims.
But Garretson said the baby girl had been born alive and then slain. He said
the mother might even have been dead when her child was born. That would be
possible for about the first 15 minutes after death, he said.
On his suggestion that the family may have been terrorized for 15 minutes to
two hours, he declined to elaborate, except to say that the victims may have
just been threatened - not necessarily beaten - for that duration.
He said it was possible that Keith Dardeen might have been slain at his home
and taken to the field near Rend Lake College, south of Ina, where hunters
found him late Thursday afternoon.
The other bodies were found a day sooner, leading police to suspect Keith
Dardeen because he was missing. His death could not have been a suicide,
authorities have said.
Garretson said he presumed the crime occurred before Tuesday, when Keith
Dardeen failed to report for work at the Rend Lake Conservancy District water
system.
The coroner said it might have occurred at night - especially if Keith
Dardeen's body was removed from the dwelling - because the trailer fronts on
busy Illinois Route 37 and is visible from traffic on Interstate 57, behind
it.
The Dardeens' car was found parked in Benton, about 11 miles south of their
home, around 1:30 a.m. Thursday.
Neither Jefferson County Sheriff Bob D. Pitchford nor state police detectives
on the case could be reached for comment Saturday.
Pitchford's dispatcher said there were no new developments to report.
Garretson discounted lingering rumors of a link between the murders and
devil-worshipers or cultists.
''I've never heard of anything like that going on in this area,'' he said.
One woman in Ina, who refused to give her name, said she had long heard rumors
of cattle being slaughtered and only their blood being taken.
Chief Donald W. Story of the Matteson, Ill., police, near Chicago, a cult-crime
expert, said in an interview Saturday that he was unaware of any particular
problems in the Jefferson-Franklin county areas.
But he said murders by cultists - often high on drugs - occur regularly ''and
are nothing to be scoffed at.''
He said cultists frequently mutilate bodies, remove organs, leave symbols on walls and burn candles in rituals.
Garretson insisted that none of those was a factor in the Dardeen family killings.
MALUM1979
> He also says it is possible that Keith was murdered of the mobile home, and
> then dragged out to a car, driven to the open field, and then dumped thee.
> Although from a tactical point of view, it doesn't make much sense for the
> killer to have done that.
It might not make much sense to you but if my family were being slaughtered
before my eyes you had better kill me or whatever restraints will not be
enough to keep me from killing the person.
Edge
Joe1orbit
Joe1...@aol.com Wrote:
>> He also says it is possible that Keith was murdered of the mobile home, and
>> then dragged out to a car, driven to the open field, and then dumped thee.
>> Although from a tactical point of view, it doesn't make much sense for the
>> killer to have done that.
malu...@aol.com (MALUM1979) Wrote:
>It might not make much sense to you but if my family were being slaughtered
> before my eyes you had better kill me or whatever restraints will not be
> enough to keep me from killing the person.
Hello Edge,
Interesting point. Of course if the killer was a true sadist, he would
SECURELY restrain Keith, and then FORCE him to watch, as he beat his pregnant
wife, son, AND the newborn baby to death. Believe me, anger and outrage only
give you a small amount of additional strength. The killer could have securely
restrained Keith, and forced him to watch as he murdered his family.
In my case, I would LOVE to have a killer allow me to watch as he tortured or
killed ALL of my relatives and family. I would ASK him to let me watch, if not
actively participate, in that slaughter.
Take care, JOE
>Edge
Hoover, J.E.
Joe1orbit wrote:
> >> He also says it is possible that Keith was murdered of the mobile home, and
> >> then dragged out to a car, driven to the open field, and then dumped thee.
> >> Although from a tactical point of view, it doesn't make much sense for the
> >> killer to have done that.
It would make more sense if Keith were killed first. I would suspect
also that the person who chopped off Keith's penis was either angry at
him or sexually jealous of him. There is no mention of what sort of
person Keith was, but if he were the bullying or confrontational type,
the murderer might be someone he had gotten into a previous
confrontation with. Perhaps it was delayed road rage. It might also be
someone whose woman Keith had "taken" or who was jealous of Keith's
marriage. Or it could have been a complete stranger projecting all of
this from some other confrontation onto Keith and his family, but I
doubt it.
