Keddie sits in the Feather River Canyon a few miles north of Quincy, the county seat of Plumas County, California, a scatter of buildings beside the railroad and the highway in pine country close to the Nevada line. It began, by Crime Magazine’s account, in 1910, as a hotel and lodge for travelers on the rail line between Salt Lake City and Oakland. By the spring of 1981 the resort had aged into something plainer: its log cabins were rented, mostly to families of modest means, and a bar at the resort served the people who lived there.
On the morning of Sunday, April 12, 1981, a fourteen-year-old girl came home to learn that her mother, her brother and her brother’s friend had been killed. Her twelve-year-old sister was gone. Three years later the younger girl’s remains were found in another county. No one has been charged with any of the four killings.
Glenna Sharp, known to everyone as Sue, was thirty-six. According to Plumas News, she left her husband, a member of the military, in 1979 and moved with her five children first to Quincy and then, that November, to Keddie. Money was short. She had a small income from the Navy, food stamps and a part-time job at the Elks Lodge in Quincy, and she was taking a typing course at Feather River College through a state training program. Her investigator decades later, Mike Gamberg, told the paper that the family received no support from the children’s father.
The children were John, fifteen; a daughter of fourteen; Tina, twelve; and two younger boys, nine or ten and five. John’s friend Dana Wingate, seventeen, lived in Quincy. On the evening of Saturday, April 11, John and Dana were in town, and they got a ride back to Keddie at some point between ten o’clock and one in the morning; the driver was later identified and interviewed, according to Plumas News. The fourteen-year-old stayed the night at a friend’s home nearby. The two youngest Sharp boys had a guest of their own, a twelve-year-old boy from the cabin next door, who slept over with them in a back bedroom.
Greg Hagwood, who would one day run the investigation as sheriff, was a fifteen-year-old freshman at Quincy High School that spring. He knew John Sharp and Dana Wingate, KOLO News in Reno reported.
The fourteen-year-old came home that Sunday morning to change for church, ABC10 in Sacramento reported. She went to the cabin next door for help. At 8:05 a.m. the sheriff’s dispatcher took a call from a co-owner of the Keddie Resort, and a deputy was the first officer on the scene, according to the 2018 reconstruction published by Plumas News.
All three had been killed; Sue Sharp had been beaten and stabbed, KOLO and CBS13 in Sacramento reported. It was some time before anyone grasped that Tina was missing. She was not in the home, and investigators came to believe she had been taken from it. Because she was thought to have been abducted, the FBI became involved, Plumas News reported.
Hagwood and Gamberg later spoke bluntly about what happened next. There was no roadblock and no search of vehicles leaving the area, according to Gamberg’s records as reported by the Lassen County paper in 2018, and some of the cars visible in aerial photographs that day did not appear on the logs of license plates. The original case history log has since gone missing. Some evidence was disorganized, and some was spoiled when a freezer was switched off. "You could take someone just coming out of the academy and they’d have done a better job," Gamberg told Plumas News. Both men said that the sheriff’s office of 1981 and the state agents who joined it had, in their words, blown it.
The sheriff in 1981 called the California Department of Justice in Sacramento at once. The department sent two special agents, a fingerprint expert and an evidence specialist. According to Plumas News, the two agents came from the department’s organized crime unit rather than from homicide, a point Gamberg would later return to when he questioned how the case had been run. Crime Magazine, in a 2013 account, wrote that the scene was poorly secured and that officers at first did not believe the report that Tina had been taken, so that hours were lost.
The sheriff of the day had a link to the place himself. He had lived in the same cabin before the Sharps moved in, the Lassen County paper reported, and he was on friendly terms with one of the men who would later be named as a suspect. He resigned in July 1981, Crime Magazine reported, and moved to a job with the state’s police training commission, which the Lassen County paper put at about six weeks after the murders.
The two men who came to dominate the case both lived, that spring, in the cabin next to the Sharps. One was a neighbor who had come to Keddie in 1980 to cook at the resort’s restaurant, and who lived there with his wife and her two sons; the boy who slept over with the Sharp children was one of those sons. The other was the neighbor’s friend, an older man who slept on the couch. The neighbor told investigators he had met him at the Veterans Administration hospital in Reno.
On the night of April 11, the two men and the neighbor’s wife went to the bar at the resort, according to the Lassen County paper; the neighbor said they left after a few hours, came back for a last drink and went home shortly before two in the morning. The neighbor’s wife left him on April 12, the day the bodies were found, Plumas News reported. Both men were interviewed by state agents within days and then left Plumas County for Klamath Falls, Oregon. KOLO reported that both had criminal records; the Lassen County paper reported that the friend had served prison time for armed robbery in Illinois and California and had claimed credentials he did not have.
Early in the investigation the neighbor told detectives that a hammer of his had gone missing shortly before the killings. He took a polygraph examination from the state on April 17, which Crime Magazine reported he passed. Crime Magazine also wrote that detectives did not press him on that remark or on others, and that state agents allowed him to move away.
The twelve-year-old who had spent the night in the Sharps' back bedroom was, by any measure, the nearest thing the case had to a witness, and his accounts did not hold still. He said he had seen what happened; he said he had dreamed it; at times he said he had seen nothing, ABC10 and Crime Magazine reported. He was questioned under hypnosis. The first session, according to the Lassen County paper, was conducted by the sheriff himself, who had recently attended training in the technique. A second session took place on May 19, 1981, with a psychologist from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. In 1981 the sheriff’s office released drawings of two men, based on what one of the boys had described under hypnosis three days after the killings, Plumas News reported.
For three years there was no word of Tina. On April 22, 1984, human remains were found in rural Butte County, and they proved to be hers, ABC10 reported. Reports put the distance from Keddie at anywhere from about sixty to about a hundred miles.
Shortly after the discovery, an anonymous caller telephoned the dispatcher in Butte County and asked whether investigators had considered the unsolved Keddie case and the missing twelve-year-old girl. The call was recorded. The recording was not followed up. It sat in an unopened envelope in the evidence room of the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office for more than thirty years, until Gamberg found it, according to KOLO and Plumas News. CBS13 reported that it had never been entered into evidence and had turned up at the bottom of a box.
Investigators have long treated Tina as the key to the case. A detective told CBS13 in 2011 that she was "an integral part of this," and ABC10 quoted investigators as saying that Tina "is central to this case."
The investigation stalled and, for most of the next three decades, lay dormant, KOLO reported. The friend who had shared the neighbors' cabin died in 1988; Crime Magazine reported that he died of natural causes after returning to the veterans' hospital in Reno. The neighbor died in 2006, according to Plumas News and ABC10. The cabins at the center of the case were demolished in the early 2000s, Plumas News reported, though the one where the two men had stayed was still standing in 2018.
The case did not go away in Plumas County. A local filmmaker, Josh Hancock, made a documentary, Cabin 28: The Keddie Murders, critical of the way the sheriff’s office had handled it, and online researchers kept a running public record of the case on a website, keddie28.com, which Gamberg later credited with keeping tips coming in. In November 2011, CBS13 described the killings as the only unsolved murder case in Plumas County. Hagwood, by then sheriff, was the seventh to have it on his desk. He told the station that many people likely knew more than they had said.
Sue Sharp’s surviving daughter, by then an adult, returned to Keddie for the thirtieth anniversary to ask for help. She told CBS13 that she thought of her younger sister as her angel, and that she wanted to know why it had happened.
The most dramatic claim in the case came from a counselor at the Veterans Administration in Reno. According to the 2018 Lassen County series, he said that the neighbor, during a seventh appointment in May 1981, a few weeks after the killings, admitted killing Sue Sharp and Tina and said he had nothing to do with the two boys. The counselor said he urged the man to turn himself in, and that he reported what he had heard to the state agents, who dismissed it as hearsay. The same man, the counselor said, claimed he had beaten the polygraph.
The account surfaced publicly decades later, after the neighbor’s death. A therapist described the confession in Hancock’s documentary, and CBS13 aired it in 2011. Hagwood confirmed to the station that a confession had been made, but said the therapist had later changed his account and that the confession had fallen apart. It is a claim, reported and then qualified, about a man who could no longer answer it.
In August 2013 Hagwood brought Mike Gamberg out of retirement to take the case. Gamberg had worked Plumas County homicides from 1974 until he retired in 1994, but never this one. He had been dismissed in an unrelated dispute weeks before the killings and, though later reinstated, was kept away from the Keddie investigation, KOLO reported. Like Hagwood, he had known the victims. He described what he inherited as fragmented and said he had essentially had to rebuild the file. "It’s not about what was done, but what was not done," he told Plumas News.
Hagwood explained his decision in plain terms. "There is not an expiration date on homicides," he said in 2016, as Plumas News reported. When some residents questioned whether a thirty-five-year-old case deserved the money, he warned of a slippery slope.
The reopened file produced a run of discoveries in 2016. In the spring of that year a man with a metal detector, searching a dried-out pond near the entrance to Keddie for a ring lost at a wedding, came upon a hammer, and Gamberg recovered it with him, Plumas News reported. It resembled the hammer the neighbor had reported missing in 1981. CBS13 reported that a relative of the neighbor’s friend had led investigators to it. After KOLO’s coverage that April, a man came forward with a knife he had found in an ash pile near the scene. The knife, the hammer and the 1984 recording were sent for analysis at an FBI laboratory, KOLO reported in June 2016.
Gamberg also found, in the files, a handwritten letter the neighbor had sent his wife within weeks of the killings, which she had handed to the sheriff’s office. ABC10 reported that in it he wrote that he had bought her love with four lives; KOLO, which quoted part of the line, said it read almost like a confession, and Gamberg described it to Plumas News as close to one. His wife, Plumas News reported, did not remember the letter but recognized the handwriting.
That spring Hagwood told CBS13 that he believed more than two people were involved, including people who disposed of evidence and who took the girl, and that some of them were still alive. He said he was confident investigators had identified some of those involved and that arrests could come "next month" or "next year." In late 2016 the case drew national attention when People magazine and a television program revisited it; Hagwood said his office took no payment for its part and hoped the coverage might stir a memory or a conversation.
In April 2018 Plumas News and its sister paper in Lassen County published a three-part reexamination of the case. Its central disclosure was a piece of tape collected as evidence in 1981 that carried identifiable DNA. Gamberg said the profile matched a known living suspect. He had had that person’s DNA for years and had recently obtained the samples needed to make the comparison. Neither he nor Hagwood would name the living suspects.
Investigators told the paper that as many as six people may have been involved in the killings or in covering them up. Another person of interest, the paper reported, lived in Butte County. Gamberg’s theory, and that of the online researchers he worked alongside, ran wider still, to a cover-up and to allegations about the state agents of 1981 themselves; the Lassen County paper reported that Gamberg believed the Department of Justice had an interest in the neighbor’s friend and may have protected him. None of those allegations has been tested in court.
Hagwood’s position in 2018 was a patient one. "If it’s a death bed confession, I’ll take it," he said.
No one has been charged in the deaths of Sue Sharp, John Sharp, Dana Wingate and Tina Sharp. In 2018 the DNA match was said to point to a living person, yet ABC10, writing forty years after the killings, still described the case as cold. Both of the men questioned next door in 1981 are dead, and the case against them rests on a letter, a missing hammer, a counselor’s account that the sheriff himself said had come apart, and the impressions of investigators who believe the 1981 inquiry let them leave town. The relatives of the victims, CBS13 reported, came to believe the two men had been told to leave, and saw that as a cover-up.
The Plumas County Sheriff’s Office continues to ask anyone with information to call its Keddie murders hotline, (530) 283-6360. Secret Witness in Reno has offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and prosecution.
• November 1979: Sue Sharp, having left her marriage that year, moves with her five children to Keddie, in Plumas County, California.
• 1980: A man who will later be named as a suspect comes to Keddie to cook at the resort and moves into the cabin next to the Sharps.
• April 11 to 12, 1981: Sue Sharp, 36, John Sharp, 15, and Dana Wingate, 17, are killed in the family’s home in Keddie; Tina Sharp, 12, is missing.
• April 12, 1981: The killings are discovered that morning; the sheriff’s office calls in the California Department of Justice.
• April 14, 1981: The neighbor’s friend leaves Plumas County after a state interview.
• April 17, 1981: The neighbor takes a state polygraph examination.
• May 1981: According to a Veterans Administration counselor in Reno, speaking years later, the neighbor tells him in a session that month that he killed two of the victims.
• May 19, 1981: The boy from next door is questioned under hypnosis by a psychologist from Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
• July 1981: The sheriff resigns.
• April 22, 1984: Tina Sharp’s remains are found in Butte County; an anonymous caller soon tells a dispatcher to look at the Keddie case. The recording is filed and forgotten.
• 1988: The neighbor’s friend dies.
• Early 2000s: The cabins at the center of the case are demolished.
• 2006: The neighbor dies.
• November 2011: The thirtieth anniversary passes with the case unsolved; Sheriff Greg Hagwood says a reported confession has fallen apart.
• August 2013: Hagwood brings Mike Gamberg out of retirement to reinvestigate.
• Spring 2016: A hammer is recovered from a dried pond near Keddie; a knife and the 1984 recording follow and are sent for FBI analysis.
• November 2016: National magazine and television coverage revisits the case.
• April 2018: Plumas News reports that DNA on tape from the 1981 scene matches a living suspect.