Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.
In the 1980’s 4 people were tortured and murdered in the small town of Keddie. Police investigated but 40 years later there is still no suspect…
APRIL 12th , 1981
On the morning of april 12, 1981, 14 years old sheila sharp woke up after sleeping at a local neighbor’s house for the night. she ate her breakfast, chatted with her neighbors and then around 7 am decided to go back home and join her family in cabin 28.
she walked across the short path to her home turned the handle and pushed open the door..
expecting by her mother ,sister ,brothers and a local friend who stayed the night instead…..
she was met with a gruseome violent and frenzied murder scene.
she discovered the brutal tortured corps of her mother ,brother and his friend scattered around the blodstained living room.
and no sign of her younger sister
in july of 1979 susan sharp packed up the family’s possessions and left the home they shared with her husband in connecticut and moved acrosss the country to california .this was to be a new stop for the family and for sue who was trying to escape her abusive husband james .
brother don lived in northen california at that time and it seemed like a good to be close to family when trying to leave an abusive pather behind as then at least if james tracked her down she would have some support.
when she arrived in california she had little to no money no job valuables and five kids to feed
so she took the trailer in which her brother used to live in quincy.
and despite the fact it was a tight fit for a family of six, they felt relieved and happy to move to somewhere new and start fresh.not to long after arriving in california an opportunity arose
to move into a place called the kedi resort whitch had fallen on hard times
and so the owner had converted many of the holiday cabins into lovw – income housing instead
one such cabin head recently been vacated by sylvester thomas the county sheriff and so, susan packed their things up again and moved into cabin 28 of the kedi resort.
mother Glenna “Sue” and her kids john, sheila, tina , rick and greg , all looked forward to hopefully starting a new life together.
April 11th – 11:30 a.m .
on the morning of april 11 th Glenna “Sue” took a trip with sheila and greg and drove to pick up rick who was trying out for the baseball team at gansner field in quincy. on their way they spotted her son john and his friend dana trying to hitchhike their way back into kedi and pick them up.
a couple of hours later after arriving back in keddie , john and dana hitchhiked their way back to quincy again as they had planned to meet friends there at around 3:30 p.m.
at around that time the pair was spotted by eyewitnesses in the downtown area of quincy.later that evening Glenna “Sue” ‘s daughter sheila arranged to stay over at the seabolt’s house who were a family who lived in the adjacent home Glenna “Sue” would stay home with her sons rick and greg and their friend justin smart whos family also had a cabin nearby.
tina had been watchin TV at the seabolt’s residence since they came back .at 7 pm sheila entered the seabolt’s cabin to stay the night.
and 10 pm tina sayd goodbye and went back to her own cabin at number 28 to join her mother and brothers.
April 12 th – 7:00 am.
when sheila opened the door to her cabin she was immediately confronted with the horrific and brutal deaths of her mother ,john and his friend dana.
the floor and walls were covered in blood stains
and there were random knife marks in the walls. all three victims had been bound with electrical tape and electrical cords.
Glenna “Sue” was led on her side near the sofa in the livingroom ,she was nude from the waist down and had been gagged with a blue bandana and her own underwear which had been fixed in place with electrical tape.
despite being naked from the waist down the autopsy report states that there were no signs of forced sexual trauma,she’d been stabbed in the chest and then stabbed horizontally in the neck going through her larynx and also slightly catching her cervical spine
she also had bruises and imprints from where she’d been stuck with the butt of an air rifle.
john was found close by ,his throat had been curtained ,had suffered blunt -force trauma blows from a hammer.
Dana had been repeatedly struck in the head with a hammer and then manually strangled to death until he asphyxiated.
lying on the floor was a bloddied hammer
and a stake knife
which had been jammed into the victim so hard that it had bent at a 30 degree angle.
after the immediate horror subsided sheila ran back over to the seabolt’s resident to get help. jaime the eldest seabolt son went back to thecabin with sheila where he looked in the bedroom windows and amazingly so a that all three of the young boys were still in bed sleeping.
he knocked loudly on the window and woke them up and motioned for them to exit through the window so that they wouldn’t see the grusesome crime scene in the living room. police were then contacted and began their investigation .
THE INVESTIGATION
after interviewing sheila and the seabolt family both stated that they heard nothing unusual from cabin 28 throughout the night.
however the couple living in number 16 stated that they were woken at 1 :15 am by what sounded like muffled screaming.
rick sharp was interviewed by the police and statedhe fell asleep at 10 pm and did not wake again until the following when jamie seabolt knocked on the on the window, this was echoed by justin smart,but the police did not initially interview five year old greg smart.
police also interviewed neighbors at number 14 and someone else living in a mobil home not far away, neither neighbor heard any commotion in the night.
upon walking the scene police noticed that there were no signs of forced entry and tina’s jackt and a box containing various tools had gone missing from the sharp cabin. the telephone had also been disconnected and the curtains closed
when local neighbor martin smart (marty) father to justin smart had been interviewed he had claimed that a claw hammer had gone missing from his possession and he had no idea how or when.
sheriff thomas commented that smart had seemed to provide endless clues which all seemed to point away from himself.
despite almost nobody hearing anything unusual in the night several neighbors did report seeing an unfamiliar green van parked outside the sharp’s house at 9 pm.
upon further interview justin smart, marty smart’s stepson changed his story and his details later stating that he had dreamed details of the murders and then later claiming to have actually witnessed them.
when questioned under hypnosis he described being awoken by sounds coming from the living room when he was still sleeping in the bedroom.
when he went to see what was happening ,he claimed to see sue with two men.
one with a mustache and short hair, the other clean-shaven with long hair both wearing glasses justin stated that john and dana entered the home and began arguing with the men, a fight broke out after which tina entered the room and was then dragged out of the cabin’s back door, never to be seen.
April 29 th , 1981
based on justin’s description a composite sketch was created by a police volunteer and local amateur artist.despite the FBI allowing the sheriff’s office to access tothe most decorated forensics artists,no reason was given for this .
sheriff thomas who presided over the case stated that the case was very frustrating as despitethe gruesome scene little to no clues ever led to solid leads or suspects.
the FBI begn an investigation into the the abduction of tina sharp as a remains and still to be recovered and there were no signs of her death at the crime scene.
however, after weeks with no sign of either Tina ,kidnapper or ransom demands the FBI backed off their investigation.
this was a little controversial since it hadn’t been determined a homicide at this point so fell wtihin FBI jurisdiction as kidnapping is a federal offence.
some people at the time argued that it should have remained an active FBI kidnapping case until proven otherwise which would have afforded a much greater amount of manpower and funding to the investigation .
sheriff thomas had described the FBI presence at the time as unnecessary …
December , 1983
local police suspected known and recently captured interstate serial killers henry lee lucas and autist tool to be the killers inthe keddie case. befan to investigate them eventually concluding that the two kilers were in a different state at the time of the murde and their killings were also not consistent with the ammo inthe kaddie case either.
henry lee lucas cases himselves were not without controversy as he confessed to over 600 murders which upon further scrutiny couldn’t have been possible but local rangers in those cases defended their work claiming it to be high quality ,despite the fact none of the confession were recorded
making it impossible to know how much information lucas had beforehand
and how much was fed to him during questioning.this led to many questions about the validity of lucas’s claims.
April 22nd , 1984 . feather falls
a man collecting bottle caps in the nearby town of feather falls in butte county approximately 100 miles away from keddie discovered a piece of human skull and also a piece of a mandible bone he immediately reported the find.
and the butte county sheriff’s office began to investigate the area and found a blue nylon jacket , a pair of levi jeans with the back poclet missing and an empty medical tape dispenser. the remains were later identfied by the forensic pathologist to belonging to tina sharp confirming what many had feared previously. Tina sharp had also been murdered.
Suspects & theories
the roimary initial susopect was marty smart , marilyn’s husband and justin’stepfather who cast suspicion upon himself by offering up the information that a clawhammer was missing from his possession
even though details of murder weapons wasn’t publicly available at that time.
hw qould also offer information which sheriff thomas felt was designed to intentionally throw suspicion away from marty.
marilyn smart said that she felt the composite sketch matched marty and also gave details of marty and his friend Bo burning something in the wooden stove at 2 am on the night of the murder.
later in the case , mike gamberg found a letter from marty to marilyn after he moved away to nevada following the breakdown of their marriage.
in a letter , marty seems to confirm that he had killed four people when he states
” i paid the price of your love and now i’ve bought it with four peoples lives.”
the letter had been overlooked and never logged into the chain of custody as evidence by the sheriff’s departement.marilyn confirmed the handwriting as belonging to marty.
a claw hammer matching the one marty reported missing and potential being used in the murder aws also recovered from a nearby lake years later though no physical evidence remained on the item so it would not be possible to definitively tie the item to the murder.
a veterans councillor from reno nevada would come forward offering information that marty had confessed to murdering sue and tina during therapy sessions , the counselor claims that he informed the FBI and the DOJ about this ,but it was dissmissed as hearsay.
the counselor didn’t have any recordings of the session and did not have notations from the session either . it was also claimed that the counselor asked marty if he was given a polygrapg test and according to the therapist marty boasted that he lied and beat the test.
marty would supposedly be motivated to murder sue because she was interfering with marty’s marriage .
it was said that marty was physically abusive to marilyn and she often she often confided in sue who as a domestic abuse victim herself would encourage marilyn to leave marty.
sheriff thomas stated that marty was interviewed under a polygraph test and showed no signs of deception he also mentions in a documentary that marilyn and marty often come to him for marital advice.
neither the sheriff’s initial investigation nor any since has been abl to find any physical evidence linking marty to the crime.
John “Bo” Boudebe
his friend Bo was thought by many to have conducted the murders with marty, it’s unlikely one person would have been able to control a room with four people inside and so both the sheriff and the FBI worked under the assumption that there must have been at least two assailants.
during an interview for a documentary marilyn stated that marty had tried to persuade sue to come to the bar with him as bo had taken a liking to her but that marilyn told marty that sue didn’t drin and was not interested.
this could potentially give Bo a motivation for the crime also.
there are also some people who say that sheriff thomas was a good friend of marty and so shielded him during the investigation and gave him advice on how to get away with the crime.
this is mostly based ona recorded conversation between thomas and marty whish has his ifi did it moment and describes how he would manage a group of people he intended to harm.
thomas himself denies being any friend of marty’s in a documentary interview.
Bo the informant
Bo was alleged to have ties to gangs in chicago and possibly a former member of the chicago maffia which if true may demonstrate his willingness to engage in violent acts.
there was also a theory that Bo was an FBI informant on the chicago maffia and he was protected by the DOJ in order to maintain that information pipeline on maffia .
Drug connection
another coomon theory was that someone in the sharp family or dana had become mixed up in drugs ,that perhaps they ‘d ripped someone off and the murders was punishment for this.
a local resident named carla mcmullen told detectives later that dana had stolen an unknown quantity of LSD from drug dealers though she was not able to provide any evidence of corroborating witness for this statement.
Grooming theory
some people have posited the idea that the attack and subsequent kidnapping of murder of tina is part of a plot for a predator to groom her.
with one report stating that the FBI .john dougas had believed that tina may have been involved in the murders and that the groomer then her later to protect himself.
there are some rumorse of a teacher who was also convicted sex offender whom people say groomed tina and then and then convinced tina to assist murdering her family so that they could run away together.
there are however no solid details on this and it seems a stretch that a 12 year old girl would orchestrate the murder of four people to please her groomer who would then murder her later anyway.
Sheila the killer
on website keddie28.com admin dmacc has long held the theory that sheila herself was either the murderer or one of the murderes.
in long posts onthe site he describes how sheila detests her mother because of her poor parenting skills and supproted promiscuity the theory talks about how because of these things sheil sharp wanted her mother susan dead.
the theory stems form perceived small discrepancies or inaccuracies in police reports regarding a light bulb and hearsay accounts regarding sharp family.
the theory then concludes that the murderes and the plumas county sheriff’s office conspired together to cover up the murder.
Later developments
in a documentary filmed years later a bformer deputy mike gunberg stated in a interview that he felt that politics played a big hand in why the investigation was kept in house so vehemently.
and then in 2018 DNA was matched to a living suspect from a piece of tape at the crime scene.
as of yet, nobody has been arrested …….
more details
The hammer was a significant find for homicide investigator Mike Gamberg. It is believed to be one of two hammers used in the brutal murders of at least three individuals. The tape was discovered in an unopened envelope inside the Keddie murders evidence room. The hunting knife is one discovered near the old Keddie store.
Photo courtesy of Plumas County Sheriff’s Office
The Sharp family’s home shortly after the infamous murders took place in 1981. Note the sign on the front tree proclaims this was a home where a mom and her five children lived. Also note how close the cabin is to its neighbor. The Seabolt family lived just 15 feet away. Members of that family, along with Sheila Sharp, 14, claimed they didn’t hear a sound from the Sharps’ house that night. A psychic online claims she visited the house and could hear the screams of the victims. Cabin 28 was condemned and torn down in 2004.
Photo courtesy of Plumas County Sheriff’s Office