Plumas County Sheriff’s Office Cabin 28 at Keddie Resort, 1981. The former Sharp home was condemned and demolished in 2004.On the morning of April 12, 1981, Sheila Sharp returned to her home at Cabin 28 in the Keddie Resorts in California from the next-door neighbor’s house. What the 14-year-old girl discovered inside the modest four-room cabin instantly became one of the most macabre scenes remembered in modern American crime history and has come to be known as the gruesome Keddie murders.Inside Cabin 28 were the bodies of her mother, Glenna “Sue” Sharp, her teenage brother John, and his high school friend, Dana Wingate. The three had been bound by medical and electrical tape and had either been viciously stabbed, strangled, or bludgeoned. Sheila’s sister, 12-year-old Tina Sharp, was nowhere to be found.Stranger still, in an adjoining bedroom the two youngest Sharp boys, Rickey and Greg, as well as their friend and neighbor, 12-year-old Justin Smartt were found unharmed. They had apparently slept through the entire massacre which had unfolded mere feet from their beds.
The Keddie Cabin Murders. Plumas County Sheriff’s Department A back view of cabin 28 where the family had lived for a year.The Sharp family had just moved in to cabin 28 the year before. Sue had just divorced her husband and brought her children from Connecticut to Keddie in northern California. The 6 of them, 36-year-old Sue, her 15-year-old son John, 14-year-old daughter Sheila, 12-year-old daughter Tina, and 10-year-old Rick and five-year-old Greg, were friendly with their nearby neighbors at the Keddie resort.The night before the murders, Sheila had slept over a friend’s house down the street. John and his 17-year-old friend Dana had hitchhiked to a nearby town of Quincy for a party and returned sometime later that evening. Tina had briefly joined her sister at the neighbors before returning home to her mother, two younger brothers, and one of the neighbor boys, Justin Smartt.When Sheila returned home early the next morning to find her mother, brother, and his friend bloodied on the living room floor, she bolted back to her neighbor’s house. Her friend’s dad retrieved the three unharmed boys through their bedroom window so they would not have to see the scene.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.
Plumas County Sheriff’s Department The Keddie family, about four years before the murders.15-year-old 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.
Smartt and Bobede are dead, but Gamberg and Sheriff Hagwood say there are still persons of interest alive who either took part in the murders or helped afterward. Death In Cabin 28: The Unsolved Keddie Murders of California On the night of April 11, 1981, three victims—a mother, her adolescent son, and the son’s friend—were bludgeoned to death in a California cabin while children slept soundly in an adjacent room.
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. A Botched InvestigationWhen it was eventually discovered that Tina Sharp was missing, the FBI arrived on the scene.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,” 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.However, though the three boys initially claimed to have slept through the massacre, Rickey and Greg’s friend Justin Smartt did later say that he saw Sue with two men in the house that night. One reportedly had a mustache and long hair and the other clean-shaven with short hair but both in glasses. One of the men had a hammer. Plumas County Sheriff’s Office Composite sketch of the Keddie murder suspects.Justin reported then that John and Dana entered the home and argued with the men which resulted in a violent fight.
Tina was then allegedly taken out the cabin’s back door by one of the men.Allegedly, a lot of potential evidence was collected at the scene but because this was pre-DNA testing, very little helpful information was found at this time.Sheriff Thomas which then sent in two special agents from their organized crime unit — not homicide, which struck many as odd.Immediately, the two lead suspects were Justin Smartt’s father and the Sharp’s neighbors, Martin Smartt and his houseguest, ex-convict John “Bo” Boudebe who was known to have connections to organized crime in the area. Both men had been seen in suits and ties behaving oddly in the bar the night before.Martin Smartt later told the police that he had a hammer which matched the one discovered and also that his hammer and gone “missing” shortly before the murders. Later that year, a knife was recovered in a trashcan outside the Keddie General Store; authorities also believed this item to be linked to the crimes.It would be another three years after the Keddie murders that Tina was found.A man discovered a human skull in the adjoining Butte County, about 30 miles from Keddie, in Plumas County. Plumas County Sheriff’s Office Probable murder weapons for the Keddie slaying discovered and submitted as evidence in 2016. Between them lies the forgotten tape of the anonymous phone tip left in 1984, rediscovered in 2013.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 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.Martin was a known drug dealer and Bo was connected to Chicago crime syndicates with financial interests in drug distribution.This might explain why the Sacramento DOJ sent two allegedly corrupt organized crime special agents instead of agents from the homicide department.