At about 5:30 on the afternoon of March 19, 1960, in the ranch house they had built on East 26th Terrace in Independence, Missouri, Sharon Kinne heard a shot from the bedroom where her husband James was asleep. That was her account. She said she found their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter on the bed beside him, holding his High Standard .22 pistol, and James bleeding from a wound in the back of his head. He was dead by the time the ambulance reached the hospital. Family and neighbors said he often let the child play with his guns, and in a police test she proved able to pull the trigger of a pistol like his. No fingerprints could be lifted from the oiled grip and no gunshot-residue test was done on mother or daughter. The death was ruled accidental, and Sharon collected about $29,000 in life insurance.
She was born Sharon Elizabeth Hall in Independence on November 30, 1939, to devout members of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. At sixteen she met James Kinne, a Brigham Young University student, at a church function, wrote to him that she was pregnant, and married him on October 18, 1956, on a license that gave her age as eighteen and called her a widow. He worked nights as an electrical engineer at Bendix Aviation; she spent heavily and had affairs. By early 1960 he was talking to his parents about divorce. A high school boyfriend later said she had once offered him $1,000 to kill her husband or find someone who would, though he also said she might have been joking.
On April 18, 1960, she bought a Ford Thunderbird with the insurance money from a car salesman named Walter Jones, and they began an affair. When she told him she was pregnant with his child, he ended it. On May 26 she telephoned his wife Patricia, a twenty-three-year-old file clerk at the Internal Revenue Service and the mother of two, and arranged to meet her. That evening, confronted by Walter, she said she had met Patricia to tell her Walter was having an affair with Sharon's sister, and had left her near the Jones house talking to a man in a green 1957 Ford. Before midnight Sharon and the old boyfriend found a woman's body in a lovers' lane about a mile outside Independence. Patricia Jones had been shot four times with a .22. Sharon had asked a co-worker to buy her a new .22 pistol that May and register it in someone else's name. She said she had lost it.
She was arrested for Patricia Jones's murder on May 31, the night of the funeral, and charged with her husband's as well. Tried for Patricia's death in June 1961, after giving birth to a third child that January, she was acquitted by an all-male jury in about an hour and a half, the jurors citing "just too many loopholes," and one of them asked for her autograph. In January 1962 a jury convicted her of murdering James, and in April she was sentenced to life. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed the conviction in March 1963 because her lawyers had been denied enough peremptory challenges. A second trial in March 1964 ended in a mistrial within days, when it emerged that a juror had once retained a law partner of the prosecutor. A third, that summer, ended with the jury deadlocked seven to five for acquittal. A fourth was set for October 1964.
In September 1964, free on a $25,000 bond, she left her children with James's father and went to Mexico City with a man named Francis Samuel Pugliese, traveling as his wife under the name Jeanette Pugliese. Saying she felt unsafe, she bought a pistol there. On the night of September 18 she met Francisco Paredes Ordoñez, a Mexican-born American citizen, in a bar and went back to his room at the Hotel La Vada. She said he made advances and she fired to frighten him. He was shot in the back. A hotel employee, Enrique Martinez Rueda, came in at the sound, and she shot him in the shoulder; he locked her in the room and called the police. They found a gun and fifty cartridges in her purse and two more guns in the couple's room at the Hotel Gin, and ballistics later showed that the gun in their room was the one that had killed Patricia Jones. She had already been acquitted of that killing and could not be tried for it again.
Pugliese was cleared and deported. On October 18, 1965, she was convicted of killing Ordoñez and sentenced to ten years; on appeal a three-judge court threw out an attempted-robbery finding but raised the sentence to thirteen, calling ten too lenient. In the women's prison at Iztapalapa she became known as La Pistolera. Her Missouri bond was forfeited when she failed to appear on October 26, 1964, and the warrant issued then stood until her death, the oldest outstanding murder warrant in the Kansas City area. On December 7, 1969, she was missing at the five o'clock roll call. There had been a blackout at the prison at about that hour, a door that should have been locked was open, and the prison was understaffed. The rumors ran from bribed guards to a disguise as a man. By the end of December the Mexican authorities had run out of leads.
In February 1970, two months after the escape, she married James Thomas Glabus in Los Angeles. From 1973 they lived in Taber, Alberta, about 120 miles southeast of Calgary, where they ran a motel and later a real estate agency whose advertisements carried her photograph. As Diedra Glabus, known as Dee, she did volunteer work, chaired a daycare steering committee, and was known for needlepoint, banana bread and bridge. Glabus died in 1979. In 1982 she married William Ell, who died in 2011. She died of coronary artery disease on January 21, 2022, at eighty-two; her death certificate and headstone give her birth year as 1940. How she got her papers into Canada is still unknown.
In December 2023 the Jackson County Sheriff's Office and the Kansas City police both received an anonymous tip that she was living, or had lived, in Taber. Canadian police could not take fingerprints from a deceased person with no criminal record, but the funeral home had preserved hers as a keepsake for the family through a company that, by chance, was based in Independence. Jackson County investigators got a warrant, the FBI matched the prints, and on January 17, 2025, American authorities announced that Diedra Glabus had been Sharon Kinne. She left four children. Investigators are still seeking information about her life after 1969.