To make matters worse, Elaine had been pregnant with the couples’ second child, a daughter, and the beating caused her to go into labor. The killer or killers had shown no mercy, however, and the newborn child was beaten to death as well. Elaine was bound with duct tape and gagged, and all three were tucked into bed together. The area had even been cleaned up, indicating that the killer or killers had been in no hurry to vacate the crime scene.

The initial suspicions that Keith Dardeen had brutally murdered his own family were quickly laid to rest when his body was found the following day, lying in a nearby field. He had been shot three times, and his penis was cut off. Police found Keith’s car parked outside the police station in the nearby town of Benton, some 11 miles from the Dardeen home. Blood on the interior indicated that it was the likely site of Keith Dardeen’s murder.

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Such a brutal crime would have been enough to shock a rural community, but the fact was that the Dardeens were not the first victims in the area. Over the past two years, Jefferson County had been home to 15 homicides, including one particularly grim case in which a teenager living in Mount Vernon killed his parents and three siblings.

While the spate of murders seemed unrelated, it was enough to drive locals into an intense state of fear. During the days and weeks following the discovery of the Dardeen family murders, locals took to openly carrying shotguns and the coroner in nearby Franklin County was quoted as saying that locals were so afraid to let strangers into their homes that if he ran out of gas on a country road, he wouldn’t even bother knocking on the door and would instead simply walk to the highway and hitch a ride.