The Most Brutal Unsolved Crime In Illinois History - The Dardeen Family Murders

In 1986, a man named Scott McLean was killed in broad daylight. Police quickly found their suspect, prosecutors convicted him. But now, almost 40 years later, I'm re-examining this case. I really didn't believe any of it was real, and I was like, "Well, they're going to figure out this is not me, they're going to do their police job." Has the wrong man been in prison this whole time? Listen to examined, the backfire effect wherever you get your podcasts. Uncarta Roy, the host of Murder True Crime Stories. If you listen to True Crime because you want more than just what happened, this show is for you. Each episode takes a deep dive into history's most notorious murders, looking beyond the crime scene to focus on the people and communities impacted the most. Their case is solved, or unsolved, the goal is simple, to understand why these stories still matter. New episodes drop every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Follow Murder True Crime Stories on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen. Every town has a dark side. What happened in today's case is so extreme that even investigators struggled to put it into words, not because the facts were unclear, but because the intent behind them never was. The violence here wasn't fast or chaotic, and it wasn't random, it was very brutal and totally deliberate. This episode involves the murder of an entire family, and I won't dwell on the graphic details but the reality of what was done here matters, because it shaped the entire investigation, and it's an ugly one. If you're listening, somewhere quiet or late at night, you might want to take that into account before we go any further. Hey guys, it's Andrew. Welcome to every town we're today, we're checking out one of the most violent, unsolved murders Illinois has ever seen, and this is the case, so the Dardine Family Murders. Ena Illinois is the kind of town that you can miss if you blink. That's about 2,000 people in it, one stoplight. There's an Uncle Joe's barbecue where you can grab a solid fried baloney sandwich. We have a gas station, a funeral home, and then we'll just space. The kind of place where people know who you are before you even meet, but for a long time people didn't think twice about leaving their doors unlocked at night. By the late 1980s, that sense of ease had started to slip a bit, and just two years Jefferson County had seen 15 homicides. On paper that might not sound alarming, especially if you're thinking in terms of cities but here, in farm towns and back roads and places where violent crime was something that happened somewhere else, it felt enormous. When people most definitely started double checking their locks around this time, the shotgun stayed propped up in truck windows and behind front doors, required confidence that defined small town life here had been replaced with something tighter and more watchful. Keith and Elaine Dardine arrived in Ena the year before all this came to a head, and Keith was 29, working at a local water treatment facility. Elaine was 30, commuting to Mount Vernon where she worked at an office supply store. At a two-year-old son, Peter, and by the fall of 1987, Elaine was 7 months pregnant with their second child. It already chose in names, even if it was a boy, Casey, if it was a girl, decisions made in the ordinary, hopeful way that young families make them. Nothing about the Dardines was especially noteworthy or even interesting. That's not a dig, it's just the reality. They were a quiet and predictable family, living in southern Illinois, attended the local Baptist church where Keith sang in Elaine played piano, and in party or get into trouble around town. Keith was careful with money in a way that bordered on meticulous, buying 50 cents sodas and reselling them at work for a few cents' profit, quietly funneling every spare dollar into a college fund for Peter. When he was already planning years ahead, thinking about a future his son was still too young to imagine. This wasn't a family living recklessly, this wasn't a family on anyone's radar, but Keith, he'd been uneasy, and whatever was bothering him, he hadn't been wrong. Keith's mother, Joanne, would later say that he told her he wanted to move back to Mount Carmel, even as a man quitting his job and figuring things out later. I said, "Why are you coming back?" We said there's just too many things happening down here. There's people being murdered and robbed and just all kinds of meaness, and he said, "I don't like it." It showed up in small moments, for example, one night a young woman knocked on their door asking to use the phone. Keith refused to let her inside. Not because he thought she was dangerous, but because he didn't feel safe opening the door to anyone at all. That was how tightly wound things had become, and for a churchgoer, that was no way to live. By late 1987, the Dardines had put their mobile home up for sale, and they were actively planning to leave, eena, to start over somewhere that felt quieter and safer, but they never got the chance. On the morning of November 18th, Keith didn't show up for his shift at the Water Treatment Plan. Not alone raised concern, and Keith didn't miss work, he didn't know called no show. This supervisor tried reaching him throughout the day, calling the trailer again and again, but nobody answered. As the hours passed, the concern turned into something heavier. Eventually the supervisor contacted Keith's parents. Though divorced, both still lived around Mount Carmel, which was about 80 miles away. They hadn't heard from their son, didn't know what the problem was, but if he wasn't at work and wasn't at home, something might be wrong. And Keith's father, Dawn, had a spare key, so he drove down to eena to meet deputies from the sheriff's office there and let them go into the trailer. And inside they found the family. Elaine, Peter, and a newborn baby girl were all in the same bed, but they weren't sleeping. Investigators said the Dardene family was brutally murdered. Elaine and their son Peter were bound and beaten to death. Elaine, seven months pregnant at the time, prematurely gave birth during the beating to a little girl who was also killed. Honestly, I don't even know how to wrap my mind around that level of cruelty, and that's about as bad as it gets. And the bodies had been deliberately arranged in the bed and pulled in close together, covered as if someone had taken the time to make them look peaceful. The trailer itself was clean, so had no signs of a struggle. There were no broken locks, no forced entry, the back door was standing open, but nothing appeared to be missing. A VCR sat untouched in the living room, a portable camera was still there, and cash and jewelry remained where they'd been left. This wasn't a burglary, whatever had happened here, death wasn't the point. And on top of it all, Keith, he was gone. His car, a red 1981 Plymouth, was missing too. And given what deputies knew at the time, the first theory was the most obvious one. A Keith had lost it for some reason, murdered his entire family, and then fled. A man hump began almost immediately. Armed officers went to his mother's house, expecting to find him there, and Joanne was adamant that it couldn't be true, as she told them her son loved his family, and he would never hurt them. But most mothers don't think their sons could be killers, and the facts here were hard to ignore. Keith was missing, his family was dead, talked away nicely as a final goodbye, and there were no other clear motives as to why anyone would do this, other than it was a personal attack. While that theory collapsed the next day, Hunter's found Keith's body in a field about a mile away from his trailer, and he had been shot three times in total, once in the skull, once on the right side of his face, and once through his left cheek, and his body and also been mutilated just below the waist. back to the story. Just a second, but first, a quick thanks to today's sponsor, Fast Growing Trees. 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The plimuth was parked at the police station in Benton, about 11 miles south of the Dardine home. Just left there in plain sight, and inside the vehicle was covered in blood. Whoever committed this crime drove a blood-soaked car to the most visible place imaginable, parked it directly outside a police department and then walked away. Naina might have been going through a spell of violence at the time, but this was something different. It didn't feel like some local teens or thugs or whoever looking to kill someone, I guess. And to do what they did, and leave a bloodied car with the police was a message. Whoever did this wasn't really improvising, looked like they were working from a plan. The question was, why, and who planned something like this at all? With those kinds of questions in mind, the news started to absolutely terrorize Jefferson County. People who were already scared became completely paranoid. Gun sales went through the roof, and people started installing security systems and homes that had never needed them. The fear was everywhere. Meanwhile, 30 detectives were put on the case working full-time. They interviewed more than 100 people and collected almost 150 pieces of evidence, but none of it led anywhere. Obviously, finding out who did this was the mission, but the biggest problem the investigators were facing was figuring out why this happened. What was the motive? I mean, even if the Dardine somehow slighted a neighbor in some sort of way, this kind of revenge would be pretty extreme. Robbery, as mentioned, was ruled out immediately because nothing was taken. And the longer they sat and stared at this picture, the more it all started to feel like perhaps the killing itself was the point of it all. The ultraviolence was what they wanted, and that's all they wanted. Police looked hard at Keith's life for clues, affairs, gambling, drugs, financial trouble, none of it surfaced. Psychology reports later showed no drugs or alcohol and any of the victims. Like I said at the start, regular church-going folks. In a community already on edge, speculation filled the gaps. And this was the late 1980s in the height of the Satanic Panic in America, and some people became convinced the murders had to be ritualistic. The mutilation of Keith's body and the circumstances surrounding Elaine's labor. To some, it felt like it fit a narrative they were already primed to believe. But specialists were brought in and they pushed back hard. Ritual killings they explained follow patterns. Symbols, markings, objects left behind. Repeated acts meant to communicate something. None of that was present here. There were no symbols, no staging, beyond what was immediately apparent. No evidence of organized ritual behavior. Whatever happened to the Dardine family, it was in part of some larger cult mythology. It was something else. At that point, no one could say what. The Franklin County corner, Robert Lewis, didn't think the family had been chosen randomly. It told reporters it seemed really personal and deliberate. But, if it was personal, who could have hated this quiet church-going family that much? No one knew them, not a bad word to say about Keith or Elaine. So one theory was mistaken identity, and maybe someone thought the Dardines were somebody else. Another theory, which Keith mother, Joanne, suggested years later, was that someone tried to press your Keith into selling drugs and he refused, or maybe someone was interested in Elaine romantically and she turned them down, which led to this explosion of rage. All these are just guesses, there's really no evidence for any of it. There's also the fact that Keith's body was found in a different location. Why? Did someone force him to drive to that wheat field at gunpoint? Was he killed first, or did he have to watch his family die in front of him? I think they made Keith witness what happened, because the duct tape was removed and Keith was taken about a mile away, shot execution style. The timeline says all four victims died within an hour of one another, but the logistics of moving between two crime scenes that fast raises so many questions. Whoever killed them took their time at the trailer, made beat three people to death and cleaned up the scene and arranged the bodies in the bed. This isn't someone panicking or acting in a frenzy, so maybe there were more than one person involved. While the trailer was being worked on, maybe someone else had Keith in that field. Again, that doesn't exactly make a whole lot of sense either, because what's the motive of it all? Having more people to the equation just complicates things further. The FBI sent profilers to look at the case, and even they admitted, it didn't fit their normal patterns. Every piece of evidence seemed to point in a different direction, and every theory fell apart when you looked at it too closely. For years, this case went cold, but Joanne Dardine wouldn't let people forget. She called the detectives working the case all the time, offering tips she'd heard or asking for updates. She got signatures on a petition trying to get the Oprah Winfrey show to tell the story, but the producers said no, but the crime was just far too brutal for daytime TV. America's most wanted eventually covered the story in 1998, but it didn't generate any new leads. Then, the next year in 1999, Lee's briefly looked into a serial killer named Angel Materino Resendez. He traveled around the country. mainly hitching rides on freight trains and would pick victims near railroad tracks, often beating them to death. The Dardine trailer was near railroad tracks, and the method seemed to fit, but they could never connect them to the crime. And just when everything seemed lost and solving this case, then came a killer named Tommylin Sel's. Sel's first came on to law enforcement's radar at the very end of 1999. On December 31 in Texas, he was arrested after attacking two young girls near Del Rio. 13-year-old Kaelin Harris was killed and 10-year-old Crystal Surles survived, and it was her account that helped police identify the man responsible. Sel's was eventually convicted and sentenced to death, and once he was locked in, with nothing left to lose, he started talking a lot. Now, that was a disturbing interview. I mean, how Cavalier he was about killing people. I mean, he described the thrill he got in killing people. From death row, Sel's claim responsibility for dozens of murders committed while he drifted across the country. And he put the number as high as 70. Investigators were able to confirm his involvement in at least 22 of them, enough to establish a clear pattern that Sel's was a transient killer, comfortable with extreme violence, moving from place to place without roots, without witnesses, and knew his name. So, when his confessions reached Illinois, detectives listened. Among the crime Sel's said he was responsible for were the murders of Keith, Elaine, Peter, and baby Casey Dardine. Corden to him, he had been moving around the Midwest throughout the 1980s, sometimes working at carnivals, sometimes picking up odd jobs, and sometimes stealing what he needed. He traveled by hitchhiking or hopping freight trains, and he claimed that was how he'd come to know the Ena area. What followed, though, was where his story began to fracture. In one version, Sel said he met Keith in November of 1987, either at a truck stop near Mount Vernon or at a local pool hall. The location changed depending on when he told it. In both tellings, Sel's claim Keith invited him back to the trailer for dinner. Afterward, Sel said Keith made a proposition involving Elaine, something Sel's described as triggering an uncontrollable rage. He said he forced Keith into the car at gunpoint, drove him to the wheat field, killed him, mutilated him, and returned to the trailer to kill Elaine and Peter because they were witnesses. He claimed the same anger explained why he killed the newborn as well. Later, though, he told a completely different story. In that version, Sel said he jumped off a freight train near Ena, and noticed the Dardine trailer because it had a four-sale sign out front. He described drinking beer, waiting, and then knocking on the door under the pretense of being interested in buying the place. From there, he said he overpowered Keith, forced him to bind his wife in some with duct tape, and made him drive out to that field. He claimed he mutilated Keith and threatened to return part of him to Elaine and then shot him. Afterward, Sel said he went back to the trailer, killed the rest of the family, cleaned the scene, and drove Keith's car to Benton. Same outcome, completely different paths, and that was the problem. Besides the different accounts, well, there are also other problems with all of these stories. And first off, Keith's friends and family found it impossible to believe he would invite a stranger home for dinner. I mean, this was a guy who was so paranoid about his family's safety that he wouldn't let a young woman use his phone. Why would he invite a 22-year-old drifter he just met into his home? And second, the idea that Keith made in advance just doesn't fit with anything anyone knew about him. No one knew Keith, never thought he had any interest in men. And police found no evidence of that during their investigation. And detectives thought Sel's invented that detail to make the crime seem justified, which is something he did when confessing to other murders, too. He'd add these provocative elements to make himself look less monstrous. And third, when investigators press Sel's on details that had never been made public, he struggled. He said Keith was shot in a specific seat of the plimuth, but the evidence proved that was wrong. When they asked him how Elaine's body was positioned, he answered wrong at first and guessed right, which would have just been a lucky guess. But Sel's did get some things right. He correctly described watermelon-themed ceramics that were in the trailer. For some investigators, this was the smoking gun. I mean, how could he know that, unless he'd been inside? Others pointed out that most of what Sel's described had been reported in the media at some point. The stuff he got right could have come from news articles, and the stuff he got wrong showed he was guessing. Sel said he'd take police back to Ena and show them where he hid the evidence, but it was a problem. Texas law doesn't allow prisoners on death row to leave the state. Police in Illinois wanted to take him up on the offer, but Texas officials refused to make an exception. The state's attorney in Jefferson County, Douglas Hoffman, decided not to file murder charges against Sel's. He said there were just too many inconsistencies in the story and not enough physical evidence. Hoffman said Sel's was still the number one suspect, but he couldn't prosecute based on a questionable confession and nothing else. Sel's maintained until his death in 2014, and he did, in fact, kill the Dardine family. But to this day, no one has been charged with the murders of Keith Elaine, Peter, and Baby Casey. The case files take up more than 20 thick binders at the Jefferson County Sheriff's office. DNA samples from the victims are still preserved, but there's no suspect DNA to compare them to. The evidence has been tested and retested, but nothing yet is produced a real lead. This case was a brutal one no doubt, and worse, it still remains unsolved this day, which is tragic. Friends and family of the Dardines never got closure, and the town of Ena never got answers. Years have passed by, and with that, people in Ena have moved away or passed on, replaced by other individuals who have never heard of the Dardines or know their story at all. The case stopped being something people talked about, but no matter how much time has passed, it will never truly be gone, not something this violent. This family wasn't living on the edge of anything. They weren't tangled in crime or hiding secrets. They were a young family making careful plans and saving money, getting ready to move somewhere that felt safer. They did everything people tell you to do, and it still wasn't enough, and that perhaps is the hardest part to reconcile in all this. So that's going to do it for today's episode of Every Town. Thanks for tuning in. If you want more dark true crime content, we'll go check out our exclusive vaults collection, where we have over 200 episodes you can pick and choose from, over at patreon.com/scarymysteries. I remember to come on back here next week for another episode of Every Town, filled with strange and mysterious stories. Because you never know, Every Year Town will be next.