In October 2014 police in northwest Indiana arrested Darren Vann, a 43-year-old former Marine and registered sex offender, in the death of a 19-year-old woman found in Hammond. Within a day of his arrest, police said, he had confessed and begun telling them where to find other women. Six more bodies were recovered in Gary over the following weekend. Three of the women could not be named for weeks or months, and the last two were identified only in February 2015.
Lake County prosecutors charged him with murder and sought the death penalty. After three and a half years of pretrial proceedings, Vann pleaded guilty to all seven murders on May 4, 2018, under an agreement that took execution off the table. On May 25, 2018, Lake Superior Court Judge Samuel Cappas sentenced him to seven concurrent terms of life in prison without parole.
Little is known of Vann's childhood. Scripps News reported in 2014 that he lived in Hammond, Indiana, in the 1990s before moving to Texas. His date of birth has not been made public; he was 43 in October 2014 and 47 in May 2018.
He served less than two years in the Marine Corps. According to Marine Corps Times, which obtained his record from the service's Manpower and Reserve Affairs office, he went through recruit training at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and combat training at Camp Pendleton, California, and qualified at Fort Bliss, Texas, as a Hawk missile system operator. From July 1992 to September 1993 he was assigned to the 3rd Light Antiaircraft Missile Battalion at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina, with a temporary assignment to a weapons and tactics squadron at Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona. He left the Corps in 1993 as a private with an "other than honorable" discharge. The Marine Corps said the character of his service had been "incongruent with the Marine Corps' expectations and standards." CBS Chicago found traffic citations in North Carolina from 1993 for speeding and driving without a license, and a guilty plea in Calumet City, Illinois, to aggravated fleeing from police, for which it gave no date.
His former wife, who spoke to ABC7 Chicago in October 2014 on condition that her name be withheld, said she had never known him to be violent. She described him as friendly and protective, a man who did not drink, always had a job and quickly found another if he lost one, and was "a loner more than anything." The couple grew apart and divorced in 2011, she said, and she last spoke with him shortly before he went to prison in Texas.
In April 2004, in Gary, Vann was at the center of a standoff with police. According to police and court records described by CBS Chicago and ABC7 Chicago, he forced his way into his then-girlfriend's home and threatened her. A Gary patrol officer, Joe Hamer, kept him talking until a SWAT team was in place, and officers took him to the ground before anyone was hurt. Hamer, later with the Lake County Sheriff's Department, told ABC7 in 2014 that it was hard to believe he had dealt with the same man a decade earlier. The charges were reduced in a plea bargain. Reports differ on the outcome: CBS Chicago said he was convicted of misdemeanor residential entry and served 90 days in jail, while Associated Press reports said he was sentenced to a year in prison.
In December 2007, in Austin, Texas, a 25-year-old woman told police that Vann had sexually assaulted her and threatened to kill her. ABC7 Chicago reported that he was convicted in September 2009 and sentenced to five years. The Travis County district attorney, Rosemary Lehmberg, said in 2014 that he had first been charged with a first-degree felony sexual assault carrying up to 99 years, and that she offered a plea deal on a reduced charge because there was no DNA evidence and the woman's statements had been inconsistent. Her spokesman, Rudy Magallanes, said the 2004 Indiana case had not appeared in the criminal history prosecutors reviewed in 2009, and that if they had known of it, "it could have potentially affected the prosecutor's decision."
Before his release, Texas officials rated Vann a low risk for violence. A Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman, Jason Clark, said that a risk committee's staff scored inmates before release, and that Vann would still have been rated low because he had served his whole sentence and was not under Texas supervision when he left. Texas's sex offender registry listed his risk level as "low."
Vann left the Texas prison system in July 2013 and moved back to Indiana. He registered as a sex offender in Gary that July and registered again in July 2014; ABC7 Chicago reported that his last registration was on September 11, 2014. In September 2014 the Lake County Sheriff's Department checked his Gary address, confirmed that he lived there, and saw nothing suspicious. A department spokeswoman, Patti Van Til, said he had complied with every requirement. Sheriff John Buncich said after the arrest that budget and legal limits made it hard to watch registered offenders as closely as he would like. A neighbor told ABC7 that Vann was quiet, "a pretty good neighbor," and a member of the neighborhood watch.
Anith Jones, 35, lived in Merrillville. Her friend of 25 years told the Associated Press that Jones had moved to northwest Indiana from Detroit 10 to 12 years earlier and sold men's clothing at a market in Gary, hoping to open a store of her own. She had no children of her own but was godmother to her friends' children and a favorite aunt to her nieces and nephews, and she kept a dog and a cat. "I knew what I had in a friend," the friend said; Jones "just wanted to travel and enjoy life." She was last seen on October 8, 2014, and her sister reported her missing.
Teaira Batey, 28, was born in Chicago, moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, at about age 4 and came to Gary in 2004. Relatives said she lived with disabilities, and her mother called her trusting, vulnerable and "a sweet person" who "didn't deserve to get hurt." She and her longtime partner had a 2-year-old son and were planning their wedding; he said she had wanted to marry, raise their son together "and just live a prosperous, happy life." She was reported missing in January 2014. A cousin said the family had told police where they thought she might be, and that a proper search would have found her.
Kristine Williams, 36, of Gary, was a native of Knox, Indiana. ABC57 in South Bend, which spelled her first name both Kristine and Kristene, described her as a mother of five, a daughter, a sister and a friend. Her father told CBS Chicago that she had had troubles in life and run-ins with the law, and that the pain of her death was beyond measure. Her family held a memorial in Knox on November 1, 2014. A relative called her a "kind-hearted, loving woman" who "made some mistakes but we all do," and said, "We wanted her home and now she can never come home." The same relative said she believed the death penalty should be "back on the table." Her father was less hopeful; days after the arrest he told CBS Chicago he doubted the man who confessed would ever be executed, and he questioned how someone who had done such a thing could go on receiving three meals a day.
Afrikka Hardy, 19, had wanted to be a nurse, a singer or a music engineer, her mother told the Associated Press. She grew up poor, moved from Chicago to Aurora, Colorado, and in June 2014 moved to Gary on her own, trying to find work and support herself. "She had so much potential," her mother said. Relatives in Chicago held a candlelight vigil outside her former home in the city's Lawndale area. "What was your purpose?" a cousin asked of her killer. Another cousin said he could understand what she had been going through, and wondered, "What if I was in her shoes?"
Tracy Martin, 41, of Gary, and Sonya Billingsley, 53, and Tanya Gatlin, 27, both last known to live in Gary, were among the women who could not be identified at first. Little about their lives has been made public beyond their ages and their hometown.
Afrikka Hardy was found dead in Hammond on October 17, 2014. The Lake County coroner's office said she had been strangled. A woman who knew Hardy gave police a phone number, which detectives traced to Vann in Gary. On the afternoon of Saturday, October 18, after obtaining a search warrant for a house and a vehicle in Gary, police took him into custody.
Hammond Police Chief John Doughty said Vann confessed to Hardy's killing and told investigators where other bodies could be found. That night police found Anith Jones in Gary. On Sunday, October 19, they found five more women in the city, among them Teaira Batey and Kristine Williams. Doughty said Vann had made statements suggesting victims going back as far as 20 years, "but that has yet to be corroborated." Gary Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson said his information had been accurate so far but that police were not relying on it alone, and that he had indicated he killed more than seven people. She said he appeared to have chosen people who might be "less likely to be reported missing." Gary Police Chief Larry McKinley said Vann had been "not on our radar at all."
The FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, Virginia, assisted. By early November, police searches in northwest Indiana and Chicago's southern suburbs had found no other victims. Cellphone records placed Vann's phone in several south suburban Illinois communities between the discovery of Hardy's body and his arrest. The FBI looked into his claims that he had killed in other states.
Police said he cooperated at first, then stopped. Prosecutors obtained five sealed search warrants, and a gag order kept investigators from speaking publicly about the case.
The Lake County coroner, Merrilee Frey, was left with three women who had no names. By October 22, the coroner's office said, 17 families had called about missing relatives, and DNA tests were under way. In early November DNA samples from two families went to the Indiana State Police laboratory.
On January 16, 2015, the coroner announced that DNA testing had identified Tracy Martin, 41, of Gary, the fifth of the seven women to be named. On February 13, 2015, the coroner's office said DNA had identified Sonya Billingsley, 53, and Tanya Gatlin, 27. They were the last of the seven, identified nearly four months after Vann's arrest.
Vann was charged on Monday, October 20, 2014, with murder in Hardy's death. When he was brought before Lake County Magistrate Judge Kathleen Sullivan in Crown Point on October 22, he would not state his name or answer her questions, even after three chances. She found him in contempt and told his public defender, Matthew Fech, to "tell your client that he stays in jail the rest of his life until this hearing takes place." Sheriff Buncich said Vann had been calm and quiet in jail and had asked why so many reporters were present.
The same day he was charged in the death of Anith Jones with murder, murder in the perpetration of a robbery, and robbery resulting in serious bodily injury. An autopsy showed that Jones had been strangled. Charges in the other five deaths waited on full autopsy results; as of January 2015 the coroner had not yet ruled those deaths homicides, which held up further charges.
On October 29, 2014, Vann appeared in handcuffs and shackles, answered the magistrate with "yes, ma'am" and "no, ma'am," and had not guilty pleas entered for him in the Hardy and Jones cases.
The arrest drew renewed attention to older cases. In 2010, Scripps News had identified 15 unsolved strangulations of women in Gary, nine between 1991 and 1998 and six between 2005 and 2007, and had given its list to Gary police and the Lake County coroner's office. A retired assistant coroner, Jackie DeChantal, said in 2014 that the report had raised her suspicions, but "we couldn't get anyone else to say that they were connected." She added, "I might have been on the right road, but I just didn't get far enough along it." The county's chief deputy coroner, George Deliopoulos, said one of the cases he was examining in the Vann inquiry was the 2007 strangling of an unidentified woman that had been on the Scripps list. Gary police said they were reviewing the old cases.
Police in Havelock, North Carolina, were also reported to be examining him in a 1992 unsolved killing of a 25-year-old woman, and investigators in Indiana and Texas reviewed cold cases and missing persons reports. No charge has been reported in any of these older cases.
Families also questioned how the women had gone unfound. Batey's partner said he and her mother had filed a missing person report for her, though the mayor had said the city's only such report was for Jones. Gary police commander Del Stout said several families with missing relatives had called to ask whether Vann could have killed them.
Prosecutors later sought the death penalty in the Hardy and Jones cases and charged Vann with murder in the deaths of the other five women in a separate case. Trial in the Hardy and Jones case had been set for October 2018.
On Friday, May 4, 2018, at a court hearing in Crown Point that had not been announced in advance, Vann, then 47, pleaded guilty to the murders of all seven women. Judge Cappas reviewed the agreement, which spared him the death penalty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole. Lake County Prosecutor Bernard Carter said he hoped the plea would bring the families some closure.
According to the Associated Press, when detectives had asked Vann why he started killing, he said it was "anger," and that he "shouldn't have went to prison the first time." Teaira Batey's partner said he was relieved by the plea and the life sentence. "I want him to suffer," he said.
Vann signed papers waiving his right to be present, and on May 25, 2018, he was not in court when Judge Cappas sentenced him to seven concurrent terms of life without parole, one for each woman. His lawyer apologized on his behalf; relatives said that was not enough. Batey's partner said Vann "could have come to court and say 'I'm sorry.'" That, he said, "would have been something versus nothing." He also spoke for all the families: "These ladies had faces. They had families."
Judge Cappas said he could not imagine the families' pain and hoped the case's end would bring some closure. Carter called Vann a "prolific serial killer" who had "touched the lives of many individuals," and said the plea spared the families years of hearings and motions. Investigators said they believed he might have preyed on women for more than 20 years and that there could be more victims than the seven he admitted.
Vann's statements that there were victims going back 20 years, and the mayor's account that he claimed more than seven, were never corroborated in public; no further killing is known to have been charged against him. The older Gary strangulations on the Scripps list and the 1992 North Carolina case were examined but no court record attributes them to him.
A sworn affidavit described by the Sun-Times Media Wire in February 2015 said Vann told authorities that an unnamed person had promised him drugs and $300 to make Anith Jones "disappear." No one else is reported to have been charged in her death.
Reports differ on several details. Afrikka Hardy has been described as being of Hammond, of Gary and of Chicago. Teaira Batey's first name also appears as Tearia and Tiera, and one 2018 report gave her age as 29. Kristine Williams has been described as a mother of five. The outcome of the 2004 Gary case is reported both as 90 days in jail and as a year in prison.
1992 to 1993: Serves in the Marine Corps, including at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina; discharged in 1993 as a private, other than honorable.
April 2004: Standoff with Gary police; later convicted of misdemeanor residential entry after a plea bargain.
December 2007: A woman reports a sexual assault by Vann in Austin, Texas.
September 2009: Convicted in Travis County, Texas, on a plea; sentenced to five years.
2011: Divorces, according to his former wife.
July 2013: Leaves the Texas prison system and registers as a sex offender in Gary.
January 2014: Teaira Batey is reported missing.
September 2014: Deputies confirm he lives at his registered Gary address.
October 8, 2014: Anith Jones is last seen.
October 17, 2014: Afrikka Hardy is found dead in Hammond.
October 18, 2014: Vann is arrested in Gary; Anith Jones is found that night.
October 19, 2014: Five more women are found in Gary.
October 20, 2014: Charged with murder in Hardy's death.
October 22, 2014: Refuses to speak in court and is held in contempt; charged in Jones's death.
October 29, 2014: Not guilty pleas entered for him in both cases.
January 16, 2015: Tracy Martin is identified.
February 13, 2015: Sonya Billingsley and Tanya Gatlin are identified, the last of the seven.
May 4, 2018: Pleads guilty to seven murders in Crown Point.
May 25, 2018: Sentenced to seven concurrent terms of life without parole.