Darren Vann Charged in Hammond Motel Killing as Police Recover Six More Bodies in Gary
Vann, 43, was arrested a day after Afrikka Hardy, 19, was found strangled. Police said he then led them to six more women in abandoned houses.
Published
Afrikka Hardy was supposed to come home for Thanksgiving. Her mother, Lori Townsend, lived in Colorado and had been counting on it. Instead, at 9:30 on the night of Friday, October 17, 2014, Hardy, 19, was found dead in a room at the Motel 6 in the 3800 block of 179th Street in Hammond, Indiana. An autopsy found she had been strangled.
She had arranged to meet a man there for sex, Hammond Police Chief John Doughty said, and the woman who had set up the meeting led investigators to him after Hardy's body was found. On Saturday afternoon officers arrested Darren Deon Vann, 43, near his home in Gary without a struggle. He began to talk almost at once. According to Doughty, Vann told them he "had messed up by committing the crime in Hammond, and was surprised by how quickly he was located."
Then, police said, he took them to the others. At 11:20 that Saturday night the body of Anith Jones, 35, of Merrillville, was found in the 400 block of East 43rd Avenue in Gary; she had been reported missing on October 8. Early Sunday they found Teaira Batey, 28, of Gary, in an abandoned home on East 19th Avenue. Her boyfriend, Marvin Clinton, said she had been missing since late January. "She would give you anything she had. And she would go without," he said. They had a 2-year-old son. Another woman, not yet identified, was found on Massachusetts Street. That evening a woman identified at the time as Christine Williams was found farther along the same street, and hours later two more bodies were recovered in the 400 block of East 43rd Avenue. Officials said every one of the women had been strangled.
On Monday afternoon Vann, a registered sex offender in Texas, was charged with Hardy's murder. Doughty warned that the count might not stop at seven. "It could go back as far as 20 years based on some statements we have. That has yet to be corroborated," he said. "He's claimed crimes he committed in Indiana go back that far." Vann had lived in Austin, Chicago and northwest Indiana, and police were checking his movements against their cold cases.
In Gary the finds forced a reckoning with the city's empty houses. "It indicates that he preyed on individuals who might have been less likely to be reported missing," Mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson said. The city had some 10,000 abandoned buildings, she said, and the money to demolish only a fraction of them. Townsend wanted the women remembered as people. "They're not nobodies. They're somebody," she said. "My daughter, she was somebody. She was somebody important."
In May 2018 Vann pleaded guilty to murdering seven women in Gary and Hammond, in an agreement that took the death penalty off the table.
What this story covers. The discovery of Afrikka Hardy, the arrest, Chief Doughty's statements, the recovery of the six other bodies, the charge and the quotations from Lori Townsend, Marvin Clinton and Mayor Freeman-Wilson come from the ABC7 Chicago report of October 21, 2014. Vann had been charged only with Hardy's murder when it was published, and his other admissions were police accounts. The early reports differ on the spelling and age of the woman named here as Christine Williams; later records give her name as Kristine Williams. The May 2018 guilty plea comes from the Associated Press report of the plea. The image is a jail booking photograph of Vann.
Sources
- Alleged serial killer Darren Deon Vann charged in Hammond murder, ABC7 Chicago (WLS-TV)
- Indiana man pleads guilty to serial killing of 7 women, The Associated Press (via KUTV)