By Chris Bartholomew
The Strangers is a new horror movie based on true events, the Manson murders, and also on the Keddie Resort Murders of 1981.
The Keddie Resort Murders have never been solved. This unsolved case resembles another case in Wolf Lodge Bay in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, involving serial killer Joseph Edward Duncan III.
Here is the story:
The Cabin 28 murders still haunt the sleepy little town in the northern Sierra Nevadas at the Keddie Resort and Lodge 140 miles north of Sacramento, California.
On April 11th, 1981 a murder that took the lives of three family members and a neighbor who was spending the night. In a cabin not fifteen feet away from the murder house, no one heard a thing. Three small children were asleep in another bedroom and were unharmed. Two slept through the troubles. One of the daughters was missing and the other one had spent the night at friends.
Sometime between 9 p.m. and 10 p.m. that day, 15-year-old John Sharp and his friend, 17-year-old Dana Wingate, hitchhiked from Quincy to Keddie Cabin #28. John had been living there for months with his 36-year-old mother, Glenna Sharp, and once the two boys walked through the door the horror began.
A pair of killers either went in with the boys (maybe the people they hitched a ride with?) or were waiting with Glenna Sharp, and they tied up all three with duct tape and electrical wire. Soon after, John's 13-year-old sister, Tina showed up. She was bound too.
By the time the killers left 10 hours later, steak knives and a claw hammer had been used to such effect that the victims were barely recognizable. John, his mother and his friend were stabbed so violently that one knife had bent double from the force. The knife had been stabbed and pounded the walls, the people, and the furniture.
The carnage was discovered the next morning by John's 14-year-old sister, Sheila, who had been sleeping next door. The bodies of John and Dana lie inside. Their hands and feet were tied and they had been stabbed and hammered to death. There was blood on every surface of the cabin. Her mother, Sue Sharp was murdered in the same brutal fashion, she was on the couch. Her younger sister, Tina, was missing.
Two of John's brothers slept in a nearby bedroom. A friend who'd spent the night awoke and remembered enough details so that the police could make a detailed sketch of the two killers, but the boy was young, and his evidence considered unreliable.
Tina's head was found fifty miles away by a waterfall. The case was never solved.
On May 15, 2005 the bodies of Brenda Groene, 40; son Slade, 13; and Groene's live-in companion, 37-year-old Mark McKenzie, were found in the Groenes' blood-spattered rental house at 12725 Frontage Road, in Wolf Lodge Bay in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. A neighbor called police after seeing blood smears on the front door of the white cinderblock home.
Groene's two other children, 9-year-old Dylan and 8-year-old Shasta, were probably in the home at the time of the slayings, but had vanished. Shasta was later recovered when she was reported seen at a restaurant in Boise, Idaho with Joseph Edward Duncan III. Dylan was murdered. His remains were found at a remote campsite in Montana's Lolo National Forest on July 4, seven weeks after he disappeared from his home.
Duncan, a 42-year-old registered sex offender from Fargo, N.D., was suspected of using a hammer to beat to death 13-year-old Slade Groene, the boy's 40-year-old mother, Brenda Groene, and her 37-year-old boyfriend, Mark McKenzie, the night of May 15. He was accused of first threatening them with a shotgun.
Shasta told investigators that Duncan bound her family members with zip ties and duct tape, carried her and Dylan outside the home, and drove them off to be sexually molested over a period of weeks at primitive campsites in Montana.
Bruce Bennett, his wife Debra and their daughter Melissa, 7, were brutally killed in their home. Only Vanessa Bennett, 3, survived the attack. The murders of the Bennett family happened in Aurora, Colorado. The family was bludgeoned to death with a hammer. The mother, Debra, and older daughter, Melissa, were raped as well. The three-year-old little girl was so badly beaten that her brain showed through her skull.
There is no end for inspiration for stories it seems...
Editor's note: this was written in May 2008, on the release of the film, and is reproduced as written. Two of its three cases have moved since. The Aurora killings are no longer unsolved. DNA identified Alexander Christopher Ewing in 2018, while he was serving forty years in Nevada for attacking a couple with an axe handle in 1984, and an Arapahoe County jury convicted him in August 2021 of the murders of Bruce and Debra Bennett and their seven-year-old daughter Melissa. He received three consecutive life sentences. A Jefferson County jury convicted him in April 2022 of the murder of Patricia Smith, 50, killed with a hammer in Lakewood six days before the Bennetts, the two cases having been tied to each other by the same DNA. Prosecutors alleged that Melissa Bennett was raped; the article extends that to her mother, which the trial record does not support. Vanessa Bennett survived with permanent injuries and has spoken publicly at both trials. Joseph Edward Duncan pleaded guilty in Idaho and received six life sentences, then pleaded guilty in federal court and was sentenced to death in August 2008, three months after this was written; he died of brain cancer at the federal medical centre in Terre Haute in March 2021. The Keddie killings remain unsolved and this archive has no entry for them. The article's own inconsistencies are left as written: the mother is called Glenna Sharp in one paragraph and Sue Sharp in another, which are the same woman, and the surviving sister is placed both at a friend's house and next door.