Editor's note: This story was originally published in the Belleville News-Democrat.
Dale Anderson, who was serving a life sentence for killing a Belleville-area woman and her 3-year-old son in 1989, has died, the Illinois Department of Corrections said Saturday.
Anderson, who denied killing Jolaine Lanman and her son Kenneth, died Tuesday at the Pontiac Correctional Center in Pontiac, the state agency confirmed in a statement. He was 71.
Livingston County Coroner Danny Watson said he responded to a prison cell in the correctional center north of Bloomington on Tuesday and found Anderson dead.
An autopsy was conducted but Watson said a cause of death wouldn’t be available until after toxicology tests are completed in the coming weeks. Watson said the Illinois State Police always investigates deaths that occur in a state prison.
A representative of the Illinois State Police told the Belleville News-Democrat that she would check to see if additional information could be released.
Anderson was found guilty in 1990 of killing Jolaine Lanman, 34, and her son in their home in the Villa Madero subdivision in St. Clair County east of Belleville on Sept. 27, 1989. Lanman, who was pregnant, and her son were beaten and stabbed with a pair of scissors. Anderson was arrested two days later in his Belleville home.
“I am innocent. I never did anything to harm Mrs. Lanman or her child. Anybody who knows me knows I wouldn’t murder anyone or do anything to bring shame or disgrace to my family,” Anderson said in an interview with the Belleville News-Democrat after his arrest.
The prosecutor in Anderson’s double-murder trial said that Anderson killed Lanman and her son to get revenge on his three supervisors at the Belleville office of the Illinois Department of Public Aid, according to a Belleville News-Democrat account of his trial in 1990.
Anderson had been fired from his job just more than a year before the Lanmans were killed.
A note found under Jolaine Lanman’s bed stated that the three supervisors attacked her and it listed the license plate numbers of the agency-issued vehicles they drove.
“This man here had an obsession to get revenge on those three people,” said then-St. Clair County Assistant State’s Attorney Dennis Hatch during his opening arguments in Anderson’s trial, which was conducted in Randolph County because of pre-trial publicity in Belleville.
The note, which an expert said was written by Lanman, also implicated Anderson’s three supervisors in the death of Belleville News-Democrat intern reporter Audrey Cardenas, who was killed in June 1988. Her body was found in a creek by Belleville East High School.
Anderson timed the killing of the Lanmans to fall on the day before Rodney Woidtke of California was to be sentenced in the Cardenas case, Hatch said during Anderson’s trial.
Murders of young women
A former FBI analyst who once led the agency’s team that profiled serial killers, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1999 that Anderson likely killed the 24-year-old Cardenas and that Woidtke was innocent.
However, St. Clair County prosecutors said in 2001 that there was no evidence that Anderson killed Cardenas although they acknowledged Anderson was obsessed with the Cardenas case, the BND reported.
Anderson, who served as a corrections officer in the St. Clair County Jail, in the 1970s, called Cardenas’ father and told him he was a police officer investigating Cardenas’ death.
Woidtke was convicted in August 1989 of killing Cardenas and given a 45-year prison sentence. He won a new trial in 2000 after reporting by the late Post-Dispatch reporter Carolyn Tuft, who had previously worked for the BND, raised questions about his rights. He was found innocent in the retrial in 2001 and he died in 2014.
In 2018, James Rokita, who was chief of detectives for Belleville Police Department at the time of the Cardenas murder, told the BND that he believed Woidtke killed Cardenas.
“I’m absolutely sure of that. He’s the killer,” Rokita said.
The late Robert K. Ressler, who was the former FBI expert cited by the Post-Dispatch in 1999, also suspected Anderson killed four other young women in the Metro East:
- Elizabeth K. West, a 14-year-old freshman at Belleville West High School . Her body was found in 1978 in a creek between Belleville and Millstadt.
- Ruth Ann Jany, 21, whose body was found in 1979 near Hecker in Monroe County. (Gregory Bowman was convicted in 1979 of the West and Jany murders. He died in 2016.)
- Eulalia “Lolly” Chavez, 27, of Palo Alto, California, who was strangled and whose mutilated remains were found in a cornfield near Summerfield in 1986. Chavez wasn’t identified until 2008 and no one has been charged in this case.
- Kristina Povolish, 19, was strangled and her body was found in 1987 near Belleville. No one has been charged in this case.
Charges before the Lanman muders
Before Jolaine Lanman and her son were killed in 1989, Anderson had been in the news.
Anderson had filed disorderly conduct charges against his former supervisors but those were dismissed in September 1988.
He was convicted of one count of disorderly conduct for waving a gun at Tuft in June 1988 when she was working for the BND. This occurred when she was interviewing him in his home, the BND reported before Anderson’s 1990 trial.
In 1988, a clinical psychologist deemed Anderson legally insane. This ruling was made while Anderson was facing the charge involving Tuft.
Mike Koziatek is a reporter with the Belleville News-Democrat, a news partner of St. Louis Public Radio.
