On the morning of April 12, 1981, Sheila Sharp came home to change for church. She was fourteen and had spent the night at a sleepover in the cabin next door. When she opened the door of Cabin 28 at the Keddie Resort in Plumas County, California, she found three people dead on the floor: her mother, Glenna Sue Sharp, thirty-six; her brother John, fifteen; and John's friend Dana Wingate, seventeen. They had been tied, beaten with a claw hammer and stabbed. Her two youngest brothers were asleep in another room, unharmed, and with them was a boy from a neighbouring cabin. Her twelve-year-old sister Tina was gone.
No one has ever been charged. The Plumas County Sheriff’s Office still carries it as an open case, and where this account names anyone it names them as a suspect, which is all that forty-five years of investigation has produced.
Keddie had been a resort of the older kind, a hotel and bar with cabins in the woods off the Feather River canyon. By 1981 it had fallen out of repair and the cabins were let as low-cost housing. Sue Sharp had moved in with five children after leaving a marriage. Cabin 28 was bigger than the trailer she had been in; it had become available when its previous tenant, the county sheriff at the time, moved out.
Tina's remains were not found for three years. On April 22, 1984, three years and eleven days after the murders, a bottle collector came across part of a skull and a jawbone at Camp Eighteen, near Feather Falls in Butte County, some distance away. They were identified as hers in June 1984. An anonymous caller had already told police whose they were; the call was not documented at the time and the recording of it turned up years later in an evidence box. A blue nylon jacket, a blanket, a pair of jeans and an empty medical tape dispenser were found near the remains. Investigators have long thought that what happened to Tina is the centre of the case rather than a detail of it: three bodies were left where they would be found within hours, and she was not.
The handling of the investigation is the reason this case is written about at all, and it went wrong on the first day.
Because Tina was believed to have been abducted, the FBI came in, and withdrew again at the end of April 1981 on the understanding that the state was running an adequate investigation. The sheriff had contacted the California Department of Justice, which sent two special agents. They came from the organised crime division rather than from homicide.
That choice makes sense only in the light of who was in the frame. Investigators eventually settled on two men: Martin Smartt, a neighbour of the Sharps, and his friend Severin John Boubede, who was known as Bo. Boubede had connections to organised crime in Chicago and used at least two other names. Whether the Department of Justice sent an organised crime unit because of him, or whether the unit was simply the one available, is not something the record settles.
The boy who had been asleep in the room with Sue Sharp's two youngest sons was Justin, Martin Smartt's stepson, from Cabin 26 next door. He gave an account of the night and then gave a different one. He said he had dreamed the details; he said he had seen two men tie up John and Dana and kill them, and that Tina had interrupted them and been taken out of the back door. His later account was given under hypnosis. Composite sketches of the two men were produced from what he described, by Harlan Embry, a man with no artistic ability and no training in forensic sketching.
Smartt was interviewed the day after the bodies were found and, according to the sheriff of the time, kept returning to the investigation with information, in a way that officers later read as an attempt to point suspicion elsewhere. He was allowed to go, and one account of the decision is that he had passed a polygraph.
Neither man was ever charged. Boubede died in 1988 and Smartt in 2006, though some accounts give 2000 for Smartt.
What Smartt left behind is the strongest single item in the case. After he left Keddie he wrote to his wife Marilyn, and the letter contains the sentence: “I’ve paid the price of your love and now I’ve bought it with four people’s lives.” Four people had died. The letter was in the files from shortly after the murders. It was never admitted in evidence, and the special investigator who reopened the case has described it as overlooked, which is a precise and damning word: not lost, not missed, looked at and passed over.
There was a hammer, too. Smartt told investigators early on that a claw hammer of his had gone missing from his house in the weeks before the murders.
After Smartt's death a counsellor from the Veterans Administration in Reno came forward. He said that Smartt had confessed to him in a session a few weeks after the murders, during a seventh appointment, and had said that he killed Sue Sharp and her daughter Tina but had nothing to do with the two boys. The counsellor's account is second hand, was given long after the fact, and concerns a man who was by then dead and could not be asked about it. That is the difficulty with every confession of this kind that this archive holds.
Two things have moved since. In 2016 investigators recovered a hammer from a pond close to the scene, near the cabin they believe the killers were staying in, and said they thought it was one of the weapons. In 2018 the Plumas County Sheriff's Office disclosed that a strip of white medical tape, of the kind used to bind the victims, had been recovered from the floor beside Sue Sharp's body in 1981 and carried identifiable DNA. A special investigator said the profile matched a known living suspect.
That is where it rests. Forty-five years, two dead suspects, one living person whose DNA is said to match material from the floor of the cabin, and no charge.
The case is usually told as a mystery, and it is not really one. The pattern of it is the same as several others in this archive: a small department out of its depth, a state agency that took the case and did not work it, a prime suspect released on a polygraph, a signed letter referencing four lives that was never entered in evidence, composite sketches drawn by a man who could not draw, and tape recovered in 1981 that was not reported as yielding a DNA profile until 2018. What changed was not the evidence but whether anyone looked at it.
Sheila Sharp was fourteen when she opened that door. Greg Hagwood, who reopened the case after he became sheriff in 2010, had been a boy in Quincy seven miles away; Tina Sharp had been a pupil of his mother's, and he had stayed in that cabin himself before the Sharps lived in it. Small places carry their unsolved cases differently. Everyone involved in reopening this one had been close enough to it to have a reason.