Sharon Kinne was charged with three killings before she was twenty-five, was convicted of one of them, escaped from a Mexican prison in 1969 and was not found for fifty-three years. She had been living in Canada under another name, and the case was closed only after she was dead.
She was born in 1939, married at sixteen, and was living outside Independence, Missouri in March 1960 when her husband James Kinne, twenty-five, was shot in the back of the head while asleep. She told police she had heard their two-year-old daughter ask how the gun worked, and the death was treated as an accident. She used the twenty-nine thousand dollars of insurance money to buy a car, and began a relationship with a salesman, Walter Jones. In May 1960 Jones reported his wife Patricia, twenty-three, missing; her body was found and ballistics matched a pistol connected to Kinne. She was tried and acquitted. The American press of the period called her the gunfighter.
She went to Mexico City in 1964. In September that year she shot Francisco Paredes Ordonez in a hotel room; a hotel employee who came to the sound of the shots was wounded and survived. The pistol found in her room was the weapon that had killed Patricia Jones. Because she had already been acquitted of that killing she could not be retried for it, and while she was in custody in Mexico she failed to appear in Missouri on the charge over her husband's death, which produced a warrant that stood for six decades. The longest outstanding murder warrant in Kansas City's history.
She was convicted of the Ordonez killing in October 1965 and sentenced to ten years, later increased to thirteen on review. The Mexican press called her La Pistolera. She gave interviews from prison; in one, in 1965, she said she had known the world was going on somewhere without her and that she was not going anywhere. On December 7, 1969 she escaped from the prison at Iztapalapa during a power cut, and a countrywide manhunt found nothing.
On February 2, 1970 she married James Glabus in Los Angeles. From 1973 she lived in southern Alberta as Diedra Glabus, running a motel and later a real estate agency. She died of natural causes at Taber, Alberta on January 21, 2022, aged eighty-two. An anonymous tip to a Missouri hotline in December 2023 sent investigators to Canada, and forensic genealogy together with fingerprints taken after her death confirmed the identification. Jackson County and Kansas City police announced the result in January 2025 and dropped the outstanding charges.
Her final conviction count for murder is one. The other two deaths are attributed to her and widely believed to be hers, and neither was ever proved against her in court.