KY teacher convicted of sex charges, acquitted of conspiracy to murder husband
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- A Kentucky jury convicted Elena Bardin on sex charges involving a 17-year-old inmate.
- Jurors acquitted Bardin of plotting her husband’s murder.
- Bardin’s conviction spotlights mounting scrutiny of Kentucky juvenile facilities in 2025.
A jury late Thursday convicted former teacher Elena Bardin on felony sex charges related to her behind-bars relationship with a 17-year-old student held at the state-run juvenile detention center in Adair County.
Jurors in Adair Circuit Court found Bardin, 27, guilty of one count each of first-degree sexual abuse, unlawful transaction with a minor and distribution of obscene material to a minor.
They recommended consecutive sentences that would total 14 years in prison. Circuit Judge Samuel Spalding scheduled Bardin’s sentencing for Nov. 13. In the meantime, she was returned to jail on Thursday night.
The jury acquitted Bardin of another serious charge, solicitation to commit murder.
Commonwealth’s Attorney Brian Wright said Bardin didn’t just have a sexual relationship with a teen boy at the Adair Youth Development Center, she also discussed with the boy her desire to have her husband murdered by him or one of his friends back home in Louisville.
Bardin wanted out of her marriage, but she didn’t want to split the marital assets or share custody of the couple’s 5-year-old daughter, Wright said.
But defense attorney Steve Romines told the jury that any comments made about killing Michael Bardin, Elena Bardin’s husband, were only jokes made around the detention center or in letters between the two. They were not taken seriously by the boy, who faces an unrelated murder charge in Jefferson County, Romines said.
“I know you say you’ll take care of him, but shouldn’t someone else do it to take the suspicion away from you?” Bardin wrote to the boy in one letter obtained by police.
Separately, in a diary also seized by police, Bardin wrote that the boy “would make comments verbally and in writing about ‘getting rid’ of my husband. I would ask him what he meant. (He) was always very adamant that if he ever did anything criminal again, he would do it alone.”
Elena Bardin did not testify during the two-day trial.
The boy, who did testify Thursday, said he came to believe Bardin was serious about wanting her husband eliminated, but he never planned to take any action on her requests. The relationship with his teacher was mostly just an amusing way to kill time while he was locked up, he testified.
Romines attacked the boy’s credibility as a victim, saying he pursued Bardin for his own pleasure.
“In regard to her grooming him, he was grooming her just as much,” Romines told the jury.
Kentucky State Police arrested Bardin on April 2 following a search of the teen boy’s cell that turned up a large collection of sexually explicit letters and photographs of herself that Bardin had provided to the boy over recent months as their relationship deepened.
Bardin was the boy’s English teacher at the facility, which she joined last year.
Her husband filed for divorce from her and for sole custody of their daughter on May 7.
On Thursday, a visibly embarrassed state police Detective Mike Dubree read the jury excerpts from many of the 138 pages of Bardin’s handwritten letters. Using colorful, profanity-laced language, Bardin told the boy of her sexually explicit fantasies about him and recounted their real-life experiences, including kissing and sexual touching. The boy confirmed those experiences in his testimony on Thursday.
Security footage played for the jury showed several times when — in violation of facility rules — Bardin went into the boy’s cell with him for extended periods while nobody appeared to pay attention to them. There are no security cameras in most individual cells at the facility, so the couple had privacy at those times.
Bardin repeatedly urged the boy to hide her letters and her nude and scantily clad photos, which she had developed at the local Walmart, so they wouldn’t be discovered in routine security searches of his cell.
“I can’t be classified as an effing pedophile,” she wrote in one letter.
By March, some of Bardin’s colleagues testified during the trial that they became suspicious of how much time and attention she devoted to the boy. They transferred him to a different housing unit at the facility where she wasn’t a teacher in order to separate the pair.
A building-wide security sweep turned up the letters and pictures in his new cell in late March.
The felony conviction of a teacher on sex charges is the latest black eye for the Kentucky Department of Juvenile Justice, which operates the Adair Youth Development Center and other juvenile detention centers around the state.
State officials recently confirmed that the U.S. Department of Justice is continuing its civil rights investigation into possible mistreatment of youths at the juvenile detention centers following years of reports about abuse and neglect.
Youths at the Adair County facility have refused to leave their cells this year, saying they fear they will be attacked. The detention center flunked an annual inspection in May, as state officials cited its filthy conditions, broken equipment and youths languishing in cells for extended periods.
