A Look Back On The Keddie Murders
In July of 1979, Glenna Susan Sharp, better known to her friends and family as Sue, along with her five children, left her home in Connecticut after separating from her abusive husband, James Sharp.
She decided to relocate to northern California, where her brother Don was residing at the time. Upon arriving in California, she began renting a small trailer formerly occupied by her brother at the Claremont Trailer Village in Quincy. The following fall, she moved to cabin #28 in the rural Sierra Nevada resort community of Keddie.
In its hay day Keddie was an idyllic resort. A rustic hotel, bar and restaurant surrounded by cabins, nestled in the woods promised their guests a peaceful vacation. But by the 1980’s, the cabins had gone into a state of disrepair that no longer brought the affluent crowd it once did. Facing financial problems the resort converted their cabins into low-income housing.
Cabin #28 was much larger than the trailer Sue once occupied. It became available when Plumas County’s then-sheriff, Sylvester Douglas Thomas, moved out. There, she resided with her 15-year-old son, John, 14-year-old daughter Sheila; 12-year-old daughter Tina, and two younger sons, Rick (age 10) and Greg (age 5).
While the cabin wasn’t in the best of conditions it was space for the kids, plus there were lost of other families living on the grounds. The home had 3 bedrooms. The younger boys Rick and Greg took a room while Sue and Tina shared the second room. Shelia took the 3rd room while the oldest child Johnny took the unfinished basement.
Things seemed to be looking up for the family. For a long time Sue and her kids were accustomed to moving a lot as her ex-husband had been in the Navy. They now looked forward to being in one place for a while. Sue even enrolled in a federal education program that gave her money to attend classes at the local community college. Her classmates said she was a good student who worked hard and obtained excellent grades. They also said she was a loner who didn’t join in on coffee breaks and preferred to study alone rather than in groups.
Meanwhile, the children were enrolled in local schools down in Quincy, just a few miles south of Keddie. There, they had made friends of their own, and had become well-known among the teachers and school staff. All-in-all, the move to Keddie had turned into a positive experience for the entire Sharp family, and they were pleasantly surprised at the community they had around them.
On April 11th, 1981 — a Saturday at the onset of Spring — things seemed to be well in the Sharp household.
The morning was relatively benign and quiet, and at around 1:30 PM, Sue and her 14-year-old daughter, Sheila, drove out from Keddie to the neighboring town of Quincy. While most people in the area ran through Quincy, the two women were there that afternoon to pick up John, who had been hanging out in Quincy with a friend of his: 17-year-old Dana Wingate, a Quincy High School junior, who was known for being a bit of a troublemaker in the area.
At around 3:30 PM, John and Dana left again; presumably headed out to Quincy to visit some friends for the afternoon. They were planning to come home later that evening (as Dana would be staying the night), but were directed not to hitchhike by Sue, who didn’t want them accepting rides from strangers. They were planning to openly ignore that wish, but agreed with Sue’s demands for the time-being and went on their merry way.
John and Dana would be seen in downtown Quincy throughout that afternoon, as it was a much larger town than Keddie, but was still relatively small by most standards.
The two would later seen heading to a party, but the details of this party have only been hinted at in the years since. The two teenage boys would later be spotted at a street corner in Quincy, attempting to hitchhike home sometime between 9:30 and 10:00 PM, but it is not known who gave them a lift that evening.
Meanwhile, back at cabin #28, things were unfolding pretty normally for a Saturday night. Sue hung out at home that evening while her two daughters would spend a few hours with their neighbors the Sharps to watch TV. The Sharps and Seabolts had become incredibly close over the past few months, and the Seabolts’ two daughters had become fast friends with both Sheila and Tina. Tina would return home to go to bed at around 9:30 PM but Sheila would stay the night at the Sharps.
Sue’s two younger sons Rick and Greg were having a sleepover of their own with their neighborhood friend Justin Smartt Eason in the back bedroom of the cabin. John and Dana also planned to return that evening, but when they returned remains unclear.
Sheila woke up between 7:00–8:00 AM on the morning of April 12th, 1981. I say this because there were several conflicting sources and with a case like this the time line is important so I want to get it right.
Sheila began heading home from the Seabolts’ to her cabin, which was quite literally just steps away from each other. She began opening the front door (which was regularly kept unlocked) and was greeted by an incredibly gruesome scene just inside.
She recognized her brother John lying face up, covered in blood. Terrified, Shelia ran out of the cabin, screaming, back to the Seabolt’s who called the police.
Meanwhile, Jamie — the Seabolt’s teenaged son — was sent next door to check and see if anyone was still alive. He briefly entered the cabin to see if there was possibly anyone still breathing, and — to his surprise — discovered that the three young boys in the back bedroom were not just alive, but completely and totally unharmed. To spare the young boys of the gruesome scene Jamie help them exit the cabin through the bedroom window.
The murders had been notably violent. Investigators had been called about an hour after Sheila had discovered her slain family. Deputy Hank Klement was the first to arrive on the scene and he reported blood everywhere, on the walls, the bottoms of the victim’s shoes, Sue’s bare feet, the bedding in Tina’s room, the furniture, the ceiling, the doors, and on the back steps. The prevalence of blood suggested to investigators that the victims had been moved and rearranged from the positions in which they were murdered.
John was closest to the front door, face-up, his hands blood-covered and bound with medical tape. His throat had been slit. His friend Dana was on the floor beside him on his stomach. His head was badly damaged as though bashed in with a blunt object and lay partially on a pillow. He had been manually strangled. His ankles were tied with electrical wire which was wound also around John’s ankles so that the two were connected.
Sheila’s mother had been covered partially with a blanket though that had done little to hide her gruesome injuries. On her side, the mother of five was naked from the waist down, tightly gagged with a bandana and her own underwear secured with medical tape. She had injuries consistent with a struggle and had an imprint of the butt of an 880 pellet gun on the side of her head. Like her son, her throat had been cut.
All victims had suffered blunt-force trauma by hammer or hammers. They also all sustained multiple stab wounds. A bent steak knife was on the floor. A butcher knife and claw hammer, both also bloodied, were side-by-side on a small wooden table near the entry into the kitchen.
It would take the police hours to realize that a fourth victim, Tina, was missing. This along with other errors would lead to a botched investigation.
The sheriff at the time of the murders, Doug Thomas, and his deputy Lt. Don Stoy were not initially able to discern an apparent motive which made the murders at Keddie Cabin 28 seemingly random. “The strangest thing is that there is no apparent motive. Any case without an apparent motive is the toughest to solve,” Stoy recalled to the Sacramento Bee in 1987.
Further, the home did not indicate forced entry, though detectives did recover an unidentified fingerprint from a handrail on the back stairs. The cabin’s telephone had been left off the hook and all of the lights had been shut off as well as the drapes closed.
More confounding is that the three youngest boys were not only untouched but allegedly unaware of the event, even though a woman and her boyfriend in the cabin next door woke around 1:30 a.m. to what they described were muffled screams. Unable to discern from where they were coming, they went back to bed.
Justin gave conflicting stories of the evening, including that he had dreamt details of the murders, though he later claimed to have actually witnessed them. In his latter account of events, told under hypnosis, he claimed to have awoken to sounds coming from the living room while asleep in the bedroom with Rick and Greg. Investigating these sounds, he saw Sue with two men: one with a mustache and short hair, the other clean-shaven with long hair; both wore glasses. According to Justin, John and Dana then entered the home and began heatedly arguing with the men. A fight ensued, after which Tina entered the room, and was taken out of the cabin’s back door by one of the men.
Based on Justin’s descriptions, composite sketches of the two unknown men were produced by Harlan Embry, a man with no artistic ability and no training in forensic sketching. It was never explained why, with access to the DOJ’s and FBI’s top forensic artists, law enforcement chose to use an amateur who sometimes volunteered to help Reno PD.
In press releases accompanying the sketches, the suspects were described as being in their late 20s to early 30s; one stood between 5 feet 11 inches (1.80 m) to 6 feet 2 inches (1.88 m) tall with dark blonde-hair, and the other between 5 feet 6 inches (1.68 m) and 5 feet 10 inches (1.78 m) with black, greased hair. Both wore gold-framed sunglasses.
Immediately, two lead suspects emerged. Justin Smartt’s father and the Sharp’s neighbors, Martin “Marty” Smartt and his houseguest, ex-convict John “Bo” Boudebe who was known to have connections to organized crime in the area.
Marty was a Vietnam veteran with PTSD, who was known to have some deep-seated anger issues. In particular, he had a hatred for John Sharp, the 15-year-old murder victim that had a reputation in the area for being a bit of a troublemaker and smart aleck.
John Boubede was a convicted felon that had been in and out of prison for multiple crimes (including burglary and a number of drug-related crimes). However, he was also believed to have had ties to organized crime in Chicago, and was alleged to have been an enforced for mobsters in Las Vegas prior to meeting Marty at a nearby VA hospital (who had been admitted for a mental health evaluation following a violent outburst of his own). In the weeks prior to the murders, Bo had been sleeping on the Smartt family’s couch, and had become inseparable from Marty.
On the day after the bodies were found in Cabin 28 — April 13th, 1981 — Marty was brought in for an interview with law enforcement, and from that moment, he would begin to express behavior now deemed troubling by law enforcement. You see, Marty would become overly involved in the investigation, and Plumas County Sheriff Doug Thomas would later that Marty offered up information on multiple occasions, which would — as Sheriff Thomas put it: “… throw the suspicion away from him.”
In his first (and only) interview with law enforcement, Marty claimed that he had been at the local bar, named Keddie’s Back Door, with his wife (Marilyn Smartt) and his friend (John Boubede). There, he had seen two suspicious-looking men… who, ironically, bore a striking resemblance to him and his friend, John.
But Marty’s estranged wife, Marilyn, would tell police that the three returned home at around 11:00 PM that night (and she subsequently went to bed), but Marty and Bo decided to return to the bar a short time later. The two men would stay out drinking till 1:30 AM.
In that same interview (which, again, took place the day after the murders) Marty told police that he had heard about the victims being killed with a hammer. Well, coincidentally, he had lost a hammer a short time prior, having been unable to find it in the days and weeks before the murders.
Despite also admitting in the same interview that he was prone to stress and anger outbursts — and was undergoing a separation from his wife, which would have been a major stressor — Marty was allowed to leave and was not believed to have been involved.
However, Marilyn told police that she believed her estranged husband had something to do with it; based not only on his bizarre actions that night and his prior hatred of teenager John Sharp, but his aggressive and violent nature, which really expressed itself when he started drinking. Additionally, Marilyn revealed to police that Bo — Marty’s friend and temporary houseguest — had developed a crush on Sue, and had allegedly made advanced on her the night of the murders (which she had flat-out rejected). This led to the belief that Marty and Bo might have committed the crime in a drunken rage, and that’s why the Sharp family (in particular, Sue and John) had received the majority of the abuse.
On April 22, 1984, 3 years and 11 days after the murders and Tina’s disappearance, a bottle collector discovered a cranium portion of a human skull and part of a mandible at Camp Eighteen near Feather Falls in neighboring Butte County, a distance of roughly 100 miles (160 km) from Keddie.
Shortly after announcing the discovery, Butte County Sheriff’s Office received an anonymous call that identified the remains as belonging to Tina, but the call was not documented in the case. A recording of this call was found at the bottom of an evidence box at some point after 2013 by a deputy who was assigned the case. The remains were confirmed by a forensic pathologist to be those of Tina Sharp in June 1984. Near the remains, detectives also discovered a blue nylon jacket, a blanket, a pair of Levi Strauss jeans with a missing back pocket, and an empty surgical tape dispenser.
As I’ve already briefly touched on, the police handling of this case was shaky at best. There were several things investigators overlooked in the early days of the investigation, such as the early bungling of the search for Tina Sharp; with Plumas County Sheriff’s Officials not even knowing that the 12-year-old was missing for the first several hours possibly allowing her abductors to get away scot-free. To allowing spectators to wonder around the cabin and contaminate the crime scene.
But that wasn’t all.
When police brought Marty in for questioning they also brought along John which makes sense. However, for some strange reason, police decided to question both men at the same time, which — if you’re familiar with police interrogation tactics — is the exact opposite of what investigators SHOULD do. It would also come to light that the then-Sheriff Doug Thomas was a close personal friend of Marty Smartt. Their friendship might have afforded Marty some leeway with law enforcement, thus allowing him and Bo to walk free after just one interview with DOJ investigators.
When Tinia’s remains was discovered the find was documented, but the remains were not originally tied to the missing girl (or the Keddie murders in general). In fact, experts actually thought that the skull might belong to an indigenous person from decades prior, and if weren’t the anonymous phone call eluding it belonging to Tina, they still might believe that today.
The mystery of the anonymous caller, who was able to positively identify the remains as Tina’s, after supposedly only learning about the piece of skull that had been discovered seems like an incredible coincidence to many. Especially since almost no details about the skull had been released to the press, and the odds of it turning out to be Tina — among so many other missing men, women, and children in northern California — remains microscopic (at best).
Who was this person? We’ll never know, because investigators at that time either didn’t fully investigate this lead, or simply forgot to write about it in their notes. Either remain likely possibilities, and do nothing but lead to more speculation about the original investigation being either inept or corrupt.
Following the death of her mother, brother, and sister Shelia, Rick, and Greg were sent back to the east coast to live with their father. They would then have to grow up in a world without half of their family, but they were all able to adapt to this new reality, and came out on the other side of this trauma even stronger than before.
Cabin 28 would become a dark tourist attraction for years afterwards — with true crime addicts and thrill-seeking teenagers making pilgrimages to the location where the four victims had spent their final moments. Eventually, the cabin was condemned along with dozens of others in the mid-1990’s, after years of disrepair… they had all simply become too dangerous to be lived in by anyone.
Finally, in 2004, Cabin 28 was torn down by the Keddie Resort owners, who wanted to bury this infamous piece of town lore in the past. Yet, it was already too little and too late.
Today, Keddie is a shell of what it once was. The small community that the Sharp family once lived in is no more, with many of the residents having moved on to other areas in the years since. Some still remain, but not many live in Keddie today… only ghosts.
On March 24th, 2016, a rusty old hammer was discovered in a pond near Keddie; a hammer that matched the description of the one described by Marty Smartt, which he alleged had gone missing just days before the murders. However, in 2000 Marty died due to complications arising from cancer, so he was unable to answer any additional questions.
At the time that the mysterious hammer was discovered in 2016, Sheriff Greg Hagwood revealed that police were still exploring at least six potential suspects. It was unknown if they were suspects that had been previously named by media reports or not, but all six were alive, according to Special Investigator Mike Gamberg, who also revealed in an interview with the Sacramento Bee: “… and we know exactly where they are.”
In April of 2018, Sheriff Hagwood revealed that DNA had been recovered from a piece of tape at the crime scene, which — according to local publication the Plumas News — had been found next to the body of Sue Sharp. This DNA was allegedly matched up to a suspect that was still alive (as of a year-and-a-half ago), and it is believed that this lead is still being worked on… which gives credence to the notion that this case is far from finished.
There are a few theories that surround this case that allude to the motive behind the gruesome murders.
The most widely accepted theory involves a love triangle between Martin, Marilyn, and Sue. It was believed that Martin and Sue were having an affair and that Sue was supposedly counseling Marilyn to leave her husband, who she had said was abusive to her. When Martin discovered this, he enlisted Bo, his friend, and known mob enforcer who had lived with the Smartt’s a mere 10 days before the Keddie murders, to take Sue out of the picture.
This would account for Marilyn leaving her husband the day of the murder discovery. It would also explain why the Smartt boy and the other Sharp boys in the adjoining room were spared. Additionally, it gives context to Martin’s handwritten note that Marilyn gave to the Plumas Sheriff’s Dept.
Some investigators who picked up the case when it reopened in 2013 tie the slayings into an even larger plot. To Detective Gamberg, it is clear that the DOJ and Thomas-run Sherriff’s Dept. “covered it up, is the way it sounds.” He alleges that Bo and Martin fit into a larger drug smuggling scheme which involved the federal government.
This might explain why the Sacramento DOJ sent two allegedly corrupt organized crime special agents instead of agents from the homicide department. It also provides an explanation as to why the two lead suspects were seemingly given a free pass and told to leave town by Sheriff Thomas.
Furthermore, it suggests an answer as to why this case was handled so sloppily, remains unsolved and is seemingly not a priority to the Sacramento DOJ. A $5,000 reward exists for information leading to the arrest of the killers, and — if you have any information — you are encouraged to call in your tips to 530–283–6360 (where your identity can remain anonymous).
It seems that all reporting on developments within the case has stopped in 2016. No new information has come to light since then but it is believed that officials are still working on it, and hope to bring some kind of resolution to this case in the near-future.
Despite us approaching the 40-year mark since this tragedy first unfolded, it remains one of the most high-profile cases in the region, and the infamous cabin murders continues to loom large over Keddie. For that reason, the stories of Sue, John, and Tina Sharp — as well as Dana Wingate — remain unresolved.
