A convicted sex offender has been charged with the murder of one of seven women found dead in the Indiana cities of Gary and Hammond over the weekend as police continue their investigation, including the suspect’s possible involvement in other murders stretching back decades, police said Monday.
Darren Deon Vann, 43, has been charged with murder in the strangulation of Afrika Hardy, 19, at a motel in Hammond on Friday night. Investigators discovered the bodies of six other women in Gary after Vann was arrested.
Hardy moved to Chicago in the summer to live with family and was going to “spread her wings,” her mother, Lori Townsend, said in a phone interview.
Hardy planned on going to school and was excited about starting a new life. Her devastated mother now plans to celebrate her daughter’s life with a party back in Colorado so that she can remember how Hardy lived, not her tragic death.
“She was a 19-year-old beautiful, intelligent young lady. She walked in a room and lit it up,” Lori Townsend said. “With her laugh, her smile, her beauty. She could make you cry. She could make you laugh. She made you think about things.”
Vann was charged late Monday with murder, murder in perpetration of a robbery and robbery resulting in serious injury, according to court documents.
According to an affidavit filed with the charges, Hardy was found naked in the bathtub of the motel room with the shower running. Red marks could be seen on her neck where she apparently had been strangled with “something thin,” the affidavit said.
Police found a broken fingernail, a shirt button and a torn condom wrapper on the floor of the room and the beds had been moved away from the headboards, indicating there had been a struggle, according to the affidavit.
Hardy’s friend and partner in an escort business told police Vann was using the online name “Big Boy Appetite” when he responded to Hardy’s ad posted on backpage.com, according to the affidavit. The friend said Hardy sent her a text message at 5:17 p.m. Friday indicating the man was at the motel with her, according to the document.
The friend said after Hardy “went past the normal time” for an appointment, she tried to call Hardy’s cellphone as many as eight times but there was no answer. She texted Hardy’s phone and received a response that led her to believe the man had sent the message.
The friend then called another friend and the two of them went to the motel room and discovered Hardy’s body, according to the affidavit.
Video surveillance from the motel shows Vann getting out of a dark SUV and entering Hardy’s room around the time of the slaying, the affidavit said. Cellphone records of the man who answered Hardy’s ad with the name “Big Boy Appetite” led police to an address on West 49th Avenue in Gary, where a search warrant was conducted Saturday.
After his arrest, Vann admitted to police he responded to an ad posted under the name “Octavia,” drove to the motel and killed Hardy as the two had sex.
Vann told police “at one point the sex was getting rough and she started to fight with him,” according to the document. “Vann said that he strangled the woman first with his hands and then with a cord before placing her body in the bathtub of the motel room.”
When Vann was arrested, he was wearing a shirt that was missing a button, the affidavit stated.
Hammond Police Chief John Doughty said at a news conference earlier Monday that authorities were still investigating the deaths of six other women over the weekend, as well as claims by Vann that he had killed other people “going back 20 years in the state of Indiana.”
That information, Doughty said, has “yet to be corroborated.”
Asked about a possible motive for the slayings, Doughty said that investigators had been talking at length with Vann but “I don’t have a specific reason he did this.”
When police took Vann into custody over the weekend, he not only admitted his involvement in Hardy’s death but “expressed interest” in telling more.
“He was looking for some type of deal with the prosecutors,” Doughty said.
Hammond Mayor Thomas McDermott said police “caught a break” and were able to surprise Vann with how fast they were able to track him down.
“I think he was shocked,” McDermott said after the news conference. “We caught him off guard, and he … started working with police.”
During questioning, Vann told detectives about the locations of other victims, including three women found on East 43rd Avenue, a block littered with vacant buildings and weed-choked lots. Two of those victims have been identified as Anith Jones, 35, of Merrillville, and Christine Williams, 36, of Gary.
Another victim, Teairra Batey, 28, of Gary, was found on East 19th Avenue in Gary on Saturday, police said, and an unidentified African-American woman was found in the 2200 block of Massachusetts Street in Gary.
Around 7:50 p.m. Sunday, the body of a still-unidentified woman was found in the 4300 block of Massachusetts Street in Gary, according to the Lake County coroner’s office. That woman’s cause of death was strangulation.
McDermott said that Vann has mentioned shootings in Hammond that go back to the 1990s. Police have to follow those leads to see if they can be verified, he said.
The Lake County coroner’s office continued trying to positively identify five of the women Monday afternoon, an official there said. Coroner’s office personnel were trying to use DNA to identify two of the women.
Vann was convicted in Travis County, Texas, of sexual assault and served five years in a penitentiary, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.
According to the state’s records, he was arrested in a Dec. 15, 2007, attack on a “25-year-old Hispanic female,” whom he assaulted and “struck several times and attempted to strangle,” said spokesman Jason Clark.
Vann was sentenced in September 2009 and he was ordered to register as a sex offender after his release in 2013.
Vann last registered as a sex offender in Lake County, Indiana, in August 2013, according to online records.
Tribune reporters Deanese Williams-Harris and Liam Ford contributed to this story.
Distributed by MCT Information Services