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On November eighteenth, nineteen eighty seven, twenty nine year old Russell Dardine, who went by his middle name Keith, did not show up to his seven am shift at a local water plant.

This was very unlike Keith, who lived in a mon noble home in the tiny town of Anna, Illinois.

The area back then had a population of just four hundred and sixty people.

Keith lived with his family, thirty year old Ruby Elaine, who also went by her middle name, and their three year old son, Peter.

Elaine was seven months pregnant.

They were excited about the new baby, due January eleventh, and already had potential names picked out.

If the baby was a girl, they were going to name her Casey.

If it was a boy, he would be Ian.

Keith worked for the Wrend Lake Conservancy District and Elaine worked part time at an office supplies store in Mount Vernon.

They were very active in their local Baptist church, where Elaine played the piano and Keith sang in the choir.

Both Keith and Elaine were very reliable, so his family immediately knew that something was wrong.

Keith's shift supervisor went to the mobile home and knocked on the door, but no one answered, so then he called Keith's parents, Russell and Joanne Dardine, who were divorced but lived fairly near each other and had an amicable relationship.

Neither of them had heard from Keith or anyone else in the family.

Both Russell and Joanne spoke with the Jefferson County Sheriff's office, and the police agreed to do a welfare check.

Joanne said that she remembered telling the officer where he could find Keith and Elaine's spare key, but in the end, they didn't need it.

We called Joanne and she talked to us about what happened that evening when police came to that trailer.

The state police officer came.

He knocked on the front door, no offesser, So he went around to the back door and I had told him if the back door is locked, there's the key, and I told him where the key was dead.

All he did was just turning the doorknob and the door open.

So he shined his flashlight in because it was getting dark.

The bedroom door was right there.

He shined the flashlight into that bedroom and he'd seen people laying there.

Keith and Elaine had been living in their mobile home by the train tracks for just over a year.

It had formerly been used by the Illinois Central Railroad, and according to joe Anne, they had been planning on moving soon.

Keith had told his parents that he wanted to move, partly because they wanted a bigger place for their growing family, and also because he said crime in the area had gotten bad.

There had been a recent rape in the area near their trailer, and there had reportedly been fourteen bodies found in the two year period before in Jefferson County.

With three confirmed murder cases.

Many of those mysterious deaths were unsolved.

There was a familicide committed in nineteen eighty five by eighteen year old Thomas Odele, who killed his parents and siblings one by one, stabbing them with a butcher knife, except for his younger brother, who he strangled, and it was also reported the local community had been in fear since July second, nineteen eighty seven, when the nude body of ten year old Amy Schultz was found in rural Jefferson County.

Amy's clothes were found strown along the access road.

It was later determined that she had been raped and murdered, Her throat had been slit, and her killer had stepped on her to exsanguinate her.

Eventually, a local man named Cecil Sutherland was arrested, and in nineteen eighty nine he was tried and convicted for Amy's murder, but it took months for police to process evidence and make an arrest, and in the meantime, Amy's killer was still at large.

The brutality of her murder terrified the community in Jefferson and in surrounding counties.

Keith had been so worried by the news that one night, when a young woman showed up at the house asking if she could use Keith and Elaine's phone, Keith refused.

When police entered the trailer, they found three dead bodies in the main bedroom, all in the same bed.

There was blood everywhere.

The victims had been beaten to death.

It was Elaine and her son Peter, and police later said that during the prolonged attack, the killer beat Elaine so severely that she went into labor and gave birth to her daughter, and then the killer or killers beat the baby to death.

Then they neatly wrapped Elaine, her baby, and Peter in the bedding and tucked them into their waterbed.

Keith was nowhere to be found.

Even now, thirty eight years later, people in the area of Ana, Illinois and law enforcement who worked this case are still describing it as the most horrific murder that anyone has ever seen.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

Over the past seven years of making my true crime podcast Helen Gone, I've learned that there's no such thing as a small town where murder never happens.

I have received hundreds of messages from people all around the country asking for help with an unsolved murder that's affected them, their families and their communities.

If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six one four five.

That's six seven eight seven four four six one four five, or you can send us a message on Instagram at Helen gonepod.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

Police and Ana Illinois were processing a horrific and strange crime scene and they couldn't understand it because Keith and Elaine were very well liked in the community.

Keith's friend Kevin Harris, who was the best man in the couple's wedding, told local news station KFBS twelve that Keith and Elaine were two of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet.

At first, police theorized that because Keith was the only one missing, he had killed his family.

They were trying to locate Keith because they thought Keith had murdered them, and I said, no, no, no, no, My son would not do that.

He loved his family dearly.

And they had me getting on the phone, falling his friends and whoever I could to see if Keith possessed their house, and of course they were all shocked.

She said, no, Keith's not here, and so it just, you know, it just was really hard to bear.

Joanne, Keith's mother, was still trying to process the shock of learning that not only had her daughter in law and two grandchildren been brutally beaten to death, but that her son Keith was the main suspect and Keith was missing.

Joanne said that the police stayed at her house and told her that this was for the family's protection because presumably they didn't know where Keith was and if he was the main suspect, who he could target next.

After quite a long time, they said, well, you are not allowed to leave the house until we say so, and you'll have a bodyguard outside the house.

So they had to be golf parked outside my home for our benefit, and they were looking for Keith.

They were there all night long, which we tried to get some rest, which I didn't, and then I got a strange phone call in the middle of the night.

It was somebody calling for somebody and I said, they don't live here.

I don't know you are, I don't know who you're talking about.

Joanne said that she told law enforcement about the strange phone call, but then nothing more ever came.

Of it, But already word was spreading.

Through the small community about the horrific murders that happened at that trailer.

The next day, Joanne was asked to go down to the police department.

There she heard for the first time the brutal and horrific details of what really happened to her daughter in law and grandchildren.

They took me into a room and they ended up telling me that Elaine delivered the baby during the feeding and the baby was born alive, and then they killed the baby.

That was the first I had heard of it, and I was just totally shocked.

But they didn't know the baby was there until their corner got there and they started to remove the bodies to the mortuary.

The baby was laying between her and Peter.

The police were still trying to track down Keith as their primary suspect, but the next day everything changed.

At around five point fifty pm, two hunters were walking through a wheat field in Franklin County, the neighboring county, and they saw something horrifying.

It was Keith's body and it had been mutilated.

Keith's mother, Joanne, told us that the entire investigation into her daughter in law and grandchildren's deaths changed.

Law enforcement no longer believed that Keith killed his family because they had found Keith's body.

My daughter she took me out to the hospital to get me something to help me relax and sleep.

And while we was at the hospital, somebody was about ten feet away from us, and they were talking on the phone and they said, do you mean they found that Dardine man?

And my daughter heard him and she walked over there and they told her that they had found Keith.

Police found one of the Dardine family's cars parked near a police station Inventon, about eleven miles from anah A nineteen eighty one Red Plymouth.

The car interior was covered in blood, and police later said that they believed that Keith was shot multiple times in the head.

Inside the car, he was also shot in the chest.

Then his killer or killers dragged him outside to that wheat field on the campus of Red Lake College, which was about a mile and a half from the Dardine's trailer.

Then he was mutilated.

His killers had severed his penis.

The body seemed to have been left out in an area where people could pretty easily find it.

And then it seemed as though the killer drove the car away from the site of where they shot Keith to the place where it was found abandoned near the police station.

There was a road to the right that took you to the college, and then there was a road that slung around and went out to a lake and parks and stuff like that, And just as you turned that corner, they had drugged Keith's body out of the car into that field, and they pulled his clothes down in the cutting.

They left him that way.

Keith's exact time of death could not be calculated precisely.

According to the Saint Louis Post Dispatch, the coroner of Franklin County said that Keith had been dead for between twelve and forty eight hours, while other sources said he had been dead between twenty four and thirty six hours.

So was Keith killed before his family at the same time or afterwards.

Doctor Richard Garretson, the coroner, said that Keith had a completely different cause of death than that of the rest of his family.

The coroner said Keith had not been beaten, but police were not saying much about this investigation, even though local rumors were already flying.

Some people believed that Elaine's baby had been cut out of her womb, or that Keith's murder had been part of some kind of satanic ritual.

Our foury request was denied.

This is still open investigation, even though it's been almost forty years.

Keith's body was found right across the county line from their trailer, so the investigation was initially handled by two different police departments.

Separate inquiries were opened for Keith's and Elaine's deaths, and Elaine's family, according to Keith's mother, retained an attorney.

Joanne said that the relationship between her family and her daughter in law's family began to deteriorate.

They went on ahead and made arrangements for Elaine before we even found Keith's body, which her side.

The family didn't want to agree to anything because they just knew Keith killed them, and when they actually found Keith's body, they realized Keith didn't do it.

Joanne told us that even though police knew that Keith was a victim and that he did not harm his family, she felt as though they believed he was somehow responsible for what happened to them.

They felt like it was his fault.

They felt like even though they found Keith, they still felt like it was Keith's fault that it happened.

We have reached out to Elaine's family.

We spoke to one of her sisters, who indicated that neither she nor anyone else in the family wished to comment about this case.

Joanne said, no one who talked to Keith's friends and family could find any reason why someone would have targeted him or why he would have wanted to hurt his family.

The police told me that they had talked to over a thousand people, and they said that they never found not one person to say one bad word against Keith, not one.

This case was complicated.

There were two separate crime scenes, and the primary and secondary crime scenes were so different, at least from what we know now, that in my opinion, it seemed like the work of two different killers.

I seemed to believe that whoever did it Keith was friendly with him Keith Newan.

It was reported that Elaine, Peter, and the baby were beaten to death using a baseball bat.

The bat was a present that Keith had given to his son, So whoever killed Elaine, the baby and Peter did not bring a weapon with them.

We asked Joanne about the murder weapon that was used to kill Keith, and she said that Keith did own guns, but those were not the ones that were used to shoot him.

She said one of Keith's guns was found in a closet and his other one, a shotgun, had also not been used in the killings.

So it seemed as though the killer shot Keith with a weapon that they brought with them.

But what about the other physical evidence?

Surely with two such brutal crime scenes, the killer left a trace of hair, skin, or other DNA.

Back then, in nineteen eighty seven, DNA testing was in its infancy, But I still wonder what happened to the evidence, the baseball back covered in blood, the bedding, the DNA from the bodies and from the field where Keith was found.

Was there any usable DNA collected and if so, where is it now?

And is there any way that it could be tested.

Police were also struggling with motive because, according to media reports, nothing was taken from the trailer, no cash, not their BCR or their camera, Elaine's jewelry was also found there, untouched.

Robbery did not appear to be the motive.

Also, the back door was open and there was no sign of forced entry.

Police interviewed the family's friends, trying to figure out if there was another motive that wasn't immediately obvious.

They asked if either Keith or Elaine had had affairs, but found no evidence that either of them had.

They also checked to see if there could be a financial motive.

At the home, there was a stack of papers with sports scores on them, and apparently this motivated police to ask if Keith had a problem with gambling or if he possibly had gambling debts.

His mother told police that Keith was careful with money and that that would have been very out of character for him.

With no motive, police considered the possibility this could have been a random drifter, a serial killer, or, as some members of the community had wondered, some kind of satanic cult.

The Post dispatched it a story on the case.

They quoted a police expert on cults who told the paper that Satanists would mutilate bodies and leave satanic symbols at the crime scene, among other things, and the nineteen eighties was prime time for Satanic panic, a period marked by these sensationalized and false media stories about alleged Satanic cults and ritual abuse.

But almost all of these claims in the Dardian case were discredited.

There was no evidence that the Dartian family murders were in any way connected to Satanism, so were the Dardenes killed by a random drifter or by someone closer to home.

The Franklin County Coroner, for one, did not believe the Dardans were random victims.

He told the Post Dispatch, quote, I believe it was a very personal, deliberate thing, end quote.

But the crime scene seemed to perplex even outside experts.

At one point, two FBI profillowers were brought in, and they reportedly said the crime fell outside the scope of their usual analytic methods.

Joanne Dardine never gave up talking to the media.

She asked the Oprah Winfrey Show to cover the case, but they turned her down due to the violent content of the killings.

America's Most Wanted agreed to cover the killings, but the show generated no real leeds.

Keith and Elaine led a quiet, family oriented lifestyle, Friends and families that they didn't drink, party or do drugs.

There was a small amount of marijuana found at the trailer, but police said they weren't sure whether this was the Dardine's pot or whether it could have been left there by the killer.

The autopsies showed no trace of drugs or alcohol in anyone's system, and the small amount of marijuana found didn't raise any red flags about possible drug dealing.

Eventually, the Illinois State Police joined in the investigation.

It was reported that thirty detectives interviewed over one hundred people in all.

One detective told Keith's mother, Joanne, they had interviewed over one thousand people.

They also publicly stated there were several binders full of information and leads about this case and yet no arrests.

They talked to one of Keith's coworkers, someone he reportedly had some kind of a disagreement with, and another local man, but both of these people were quickly by law enforcement.

The crime reverberated through the small community.

The Franklin County Coroner described what people were experiencing as hysteria.

People were scared.

One man who lived nearby told local media he couldn't sleep at night and lost fourteen pounds.

Because of the stress from these murders, people were driving around with guns in their gun racks and becoming suspicious of each other.

Kids were told to come straight home from school.

Then in March of two thousand, there was a big potential break in the case.

A man confessed to the Dardine murders.

It was the convicted serial killer Tommy Lynn Cells.

Serial killer Tommy Lynn Cells grew up in Saint Louis, about ninety miles away from where the Dardines lived.

He claimed that he committed his first murder when he was just fifteen years old.

He was finally apprehended by police in two thousand days earlier.

In Del Rio, Texas, on December thirty first, nineteen ninety nine, ten year old Crystal Searles and her friend, thirteen year old Kayleen Harris, were having a sleepover at Kayleen's trailer.

Crystal woke up in the middle of the night to see a stranger assaulting Kayleen.

She watched with horror as he murdered her friend, and then he turned to her and slipped Crystal's throat, but Crystal survived.

She managed to stay calm and escaped to a neighbor's house.

The neighbor called nine one one, and Crystal was rushed to the hospital.

Even after that trauma, Cristel was able to help police.

She gave them a description and they put out an APB.

Tommy Lynne Sells was arrested the next day and quickly confessed not only to those killings, but to many more.

He told police that he was a serial killer and that he had been killing people for over twenty years.

He said that during his years drifting around the United States, many of them working temporary jobs in carnivals, he killed up to seventy victims.

He was eventually linked to over twenty murders.

He was sentenced to death for Kayleen's murder and placed on death row in Texas, and that's where in March of two thousand, he confessed to the Dardane family murders.

But did he really kill the Dardines or was he just confessing to as many killings as possible as some killers do in order to messed up, as it sounds, potentially gain respect and become a bigger deal in prison.

There were definitely questions about the authenticity of his confessions because Tommy Lynn Sells told several different stories.

He said that he was living near Saint Louis, which would have been about ninety miles away from where Keith and o Lane were living at the time.

He said that he was riding trains, jumping on and off of them to get around, and working odd jobs, mainly at various carnivals.

He claimed to be familiar with the area near where Keith and Elaine lived.

In one version of the confession, he said that he met Keith in a gas station that Keith propositioned him and asked him to come back to his house to have a three way sexual encounter with Elaine.

But he claimed that once they were at the trailer, Keith made a homosexual proposition to him, and that he was offended by that and became very angry, so he said he drove Keith at gunpoint to where he was found.

He told police, quote, I was just so pissed off that I took it to the maximum limit.

Rage don't have a stop button.

End quote.

In another version of the story, he told the authorities that he was on a freight train and jumped off near Aina that he saw for sale sign outside Keith and Elaine's trailer.

That's when he said he decided he was going to kill them, so he said he knocked on the door.

He claimed that he told Keith he was interested in buying the trailer, which led to him drinking beers with Keith before overpowering him at gunpoint.

This story completely left out any kind of a sexual mode.

It again, he claimed that he forced Keith to drive to a nearby field, and then he said he sliced Keith's penis off.

This time he added another detail.

He said that during this attack, he told Keith that he was going to take his penis back to Elaine.

Then he claimed he went back to the trailer, raved Elane and beat her, Peter, and Elaine's baby to death.

He then stole the car, which he claimed he drove to Benton, where it was found abandoned.

At the time, a local news report quoted John Kemp of the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office stating that because of a detail that Tommy Lynn Sells gave police something about seeing a set of watermelon ceramics inside the Dardine home, ones that John Kemp said match the crime scene, police believed that he was the killer.

On the other hand, law enforcement have publicly said some of the details of Tommy's confession just don't match the facts.

Police have stated that Elaine was not raped or sexually assaulted.

Keith's mom, Joanne, has changed her opinion about whether or not Tommy Lynne Sells could have been the killer.

At first, she said she felt the confession could be legitimate, but then years later, when a newspaper asked her again, she said she felt less certain.

She said she believed that it was very unlikely that Keith ever would have propositioned a stranger to be sexually involved with his wife.

She said that Keith was very protective of his family.

Another reason why Joeanne does not believe Tommy Lynn Sells was the killer was because Tommy Lynn Sells would have been a random stranger.

He told police he waited outside the trailer, drinking beer and waiting for his chance to attack.

And given the fact that.

Keith had turned away a young woman who wanted to use the phone, Joanne said she does not believe that it would be in character for him to let a random twenty two year old man into his home at night.

Then there's the fact there was no sign of forced entry and no sign of a struggle at the home, and that whoever killed Joanne and her children took the time to clean up the crime scene, which suggested whoever it was was not in a hurry.

I've seen the believe that there were two people that did it.

I don't have anything that based it on or prove it, but I believe it was a woman involved.

Could the killer have been Tommy Lynn Sells or another random drifter.

In nineteen ninety nine, police considered a different serial killer named Angel Mattino Risendi's who was also known by the alias Raphael Ramirez.

Angel had been dubbed the railroad Killer.

He was from Mexico originally and is believed to have been responsible for his many as twenty three murders because his mo was to travel around by hopping on and off trains.

Authorities did briefly consider the fact that he could have been involved in the Dardinane killings.

However, he was also later ruled out and we can't ask Tommy Lynne says about the murders because he was executed in Texas.

In twenty fourteen.

He was forty nine years old.

Joe Anne doesn't think her son, daughter in law, and grandchildren were killed by a serial killer.

She has said she believes that the killer was someone who Keith knew and trusted.

Joanne told us she believes that it's possible that the mob or someone else may have tried to convince Keith to sell drugs, and that after he refused, they lashed out in a rage against Keith and his family.

She has also said in the past she has considered the possibility that someone might have been at their home and made sexual advances toward Elane, who refused, and that that might have set off the horrific series of events that followed.

I think Keith knew who did it.

I really do.

I think he walked out voluntarily to be friendly.

Joanne did say that back in the beginning of the investigation, police did ask her if Keith had ever shown any homosexual tendencies.

She said that to her knowledge, he had not.

When they first was questioned me, you know, by Keith's penis being cut off, They was questioned me about him being gay, and I said, no way whatsoever.

And they said, well, the mom could be the last to know.

I said, yeah, that's true, but not in this case because I knew Keith, and then they thought about, well what about evena I said, no, no way, I really and truly think that whoever did it do drugs maybe filter drugs through his mobile home, and he refused.

We still don't know a lot of details about the timeline, who was killed first, Keith or family.

Joanne also said she has been given Keith's autopsy report, but she said that the time of death was inconclusive because there had been bad weather before Keith's body was found, and at the home, the waterbed had a heater.

Because of those elements, Joanne said she was told that the time of death could not be exact.

These questions still haven't been answered officially.

The Dardine family murders are still an unsolved case and the killer could still be out there.

It's not part of my every day, but my four grandkids they know that they had Annie Laine, and uncle Piece and cousin Peter and Casey, and we talk about him a lot.

Their mom takes them to the cemetery and they helped put stuff on the stone for Peter and Casey and they loved doing that.

Joanne said that as long as she is alive.

She will never give up on getting justice for her son and his family.

I talked to the priests every day for months and months and years and years, and I still call one be Techie, my favorite one.

I still call him and talk to him.

He always told me, he said, Joanne.

He said, this is like a puzzle.

You've put one piece in at a time.

One of these days, that final piece is going to be put in, and you're going to know who did it.

And I said, well, I'll never give up, Mike, And he said, I know you won't.

I'm Catherine Townsend.

This is Helen Gone Murder Line.

Helen's Gone Murder Line is a production of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts.

It's written and narrated by me Catherine Townsend and produced by Gabby Watts.

Special thanks to Amy Tubbs for her research assistance and to James Wheaton for legal review.

Noah Camer mixed and scored this episode.

Our theme song is by Ben Sale, Executive producers of Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, and LC Crowley.

Listen to Helen Gone ad Free by subscribing to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel.

On Apple Podcasts.

If you were interested in seeing documents and materials from the case, you can follow the show on Instagram at Helen Gonepod.

If you have a case you'd like me and my team to look into, you can reach out to us at our Helen Gone Murder Line at six seven eight seven four four six' one four or five at six seven eight seven four four six' one four or.

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