Thirty-six-year-old Glenna Sharp, more commonly known as Sue, was originally from Connecticut, but in late 1980, she left her husband James, and subsequently moved with their five children—fifteen-year-old Johnny, fourteen-year-old Sheila, twelve-year-old Tina, ten-year-old Rick, and five-year-old Greg—to cabin twenty-eight at the Keddie Resort in northern California. Sue chose this location in particular because it was quite close to where her brother Don lived, and now that she was a single mother, she felt better knowing that family was only a short drive away.
The Sharps had lived in Keddie for only a few months, but all of the children had developed friendships with other kids who lived in neighboring cabins. In fact, on April 11th, Sheila was planning to stay overnight with the Seabolt family in cabin twenty-seven, while Johnny was spending the day with a school friend of his, seventeen-year-old Dana Wingate. The boys had been wandering around downtown earlier in the afternoon, and later in the evening, reportedly hitchhiked back to Quincy, California, where they were spotted at a party.
Sue was at home in cabin twenty-eight with her two youngest boys and their friend, twelve-year-old Justin Smartt, who lived two cabins over. Tina, who had been watching TV at the Seabolts’ place next door, came home at a little before ten p.m., only an hour or so after her older sister Sheila had gone there to sleep over. Johnny and Dana arrived back at the cabin shortly afterward and went to hang out in Johnny’s basement bedroom.
At some point later on that night or early the following morning, another individual or individuals with murderous intent entered the cabin through the back door.
At approximately seven forty-five a.m. on the morning of April 12th, Sheila walked back to cabin twenty-eight, opened the front door, and seconds later went racing back to the neighbors’ place, screaming that there were three dead people in her house.
The Seabolts called the police, and then they and Sheila went back to the cabin to get Rick, Greg, and Justin out of the house via a back window, so that they would not have to go through the living room and see the carnage the killer (or killers) had left behind. For whatever reason, the murderer had left the three boys unharmed, and at first, authorities believed that all three of them had slept through the entire event.
When investigators arrived and combed the scene, they found a crime as grisly as it was unexplained. All three victims had been bound with surgical tape and electrical wire, all had blunt force trauma to the back of their heads that was consistent with blows from a hammer, and both Sue and Johnny had their throats slashed. Dana Wingate, despite having the same head injuries as the other two victims, had been manually strangled.
Sue Sharp had also been gagged by a bandanna and her own underwear, which had been taped over her mouth. She further bore several additional stab wounds in her chest, as well as an imprint from the butt of a Daisy BB gun on the side of her head. Though she was found naked from the waist down, there was no evidence of sexual assault. It also appeared as though the killer had moved her body into a less exposed position and partially covered it with a sheet and a yellow blanket.
The walls and floor of the living room were copiously splattered with blood. Though detectives suspected that two different hammers were used in the commission of the homicide, only one was recovered from the scene. Additionally, a steak knife was found near the bodies, the blade of which was bent nearly in half from the force the killer had exerted while stabbing his victims. A second knife was found in a trash can behind the Keddie general store a short time later.
No sign of forced entry was apparent, though a single unidentified fingerprint was discovered on the handrail of the back steps. All the lights in the cabin were found to be off, and all the curtains were drawn; the phone had also been left off the hook. A survey of the neighbors established that no one seemed to have heard anything unusual, save for one couple who thought they heard a sound like muffled screaming at approximately one-thirty a.m., but dismissed it after they could not determine where it was coming from.
When officers spoke to the three children who had been in the cabin at the time of the murders, Justin Smartt attempted numerous times to tell them that twelve-year-old Tina Sharp was missing, but this fact apparently did not sink in until several hours had gone by. Sheila also informed the authorities that Tina’s shoes and jacket had vanished from the cabin as well. When the reality of Tina’s disappearance was finally noted, the FBI and the Department of Justice became involved in the case and organized a grid search.
Interestingly, even though Justin first claimed to have slept through the incident, he later told authorities that he dreamed details of it, and when placed under hypnosis by a child psychologist, actually admitted that he had seen the crime occur. He stated that two men had been in the house talking to Sue, and that a violent argument broke out when Johnny and Dana arrived home, after which the men had taken Tina out the back door before proceeding to kill the others. From Justin’s recollections, investigators produced sketches of the alleged perpetrators, one of whom was clean-shaven with short, dark blond hair, the other of whom had long, greasy black hair and a mustache; both the men were in their late twenties and wore gold-framed glasses.
Law enforcement wasted little time in tracking down suspects in the brutal and apparently random crime. One individual who had abruptly left Keddie shortly after the murders was picked up in Oregon and questioned, but released after passing a polygraph. Perhaps one of the most promising persons of interest, though, was someone even closer to home.
Justin’s father Marty Smartt, who lived in cabin twenty-six with his wife Marilyn and their son, drew the attention of authorities when he began providing several “helpful” clues in the case that gave detectives the distinct impression that he was seeking to allay suspicion from himself. He told them, for example, that he had lost a claw hammer very similar to the one police believed had been used in the murder.
Further, his wife Marilyn said she had found Tina’s bloody jacket in the basement of the Smartt home and had turned it into police, though investigators claim to have no record of this.
Marilyn, in fact, was quite certain that Marty and his friend, John “Bo” Boubede, had been responsible for the multiple murder at cabin twenty-eight. She stated that she had dropped the two men off at the Backdoor Bar at around eleven p.m., and that they had specifically wanted Sue Sharp to come along with them. Marilyn allegedly told them that Sue would not want to go, and called her to ask, at which point Sue reportedly declined the invitation.
Marilyn told police that when she left them at the bar and went back to the Smartt home to sleep, Marty and Bo were angry about Sue’s refusal. Other witnesses in the bar also claimed that the men had been behaving belligerently. Marilyn further alleged that she had awakened at around two a.m. on April 12th and witnessed Marty and Bo burning some unknown item in the wood stove.
Not only that, but Marilyn left Marty on the day following the murders, maintaining that he was abusive. In fact, she further declared that Sue had long been encouraging her to divorce Marty, and cited this “interference” in the Smartt marriage as a motive for Marty to kill Sue.
Not long after the murders, Marty moved to Reno, Nevada, and sent Marilyn a letter which supposedly contained the statement, “I’ve paid the price of your love and now I’ve bought it with four people’s lives.” Though Marilyn could not recall ever receiving this letter, it was eventually recovered in the case files, though it had been overlooked at the time of the active investigation.
A therapist in Reno also later came forward and stated that Marty had confessed to him that he had killed Sue and Tina, but would not admit to killing Johnny or Dana.
Despite Marilyn’s conviction that her husband was one of the killers, Sheriff Doug Thomas cleared him after he passed a polygraph; Bo Boubede was likewise polygraphed and dismissed, in spite of his purported Chicago mob ties.
The case stagnated thereafter, with neither solid suspects nor Tina’s whereabouts emerging. It would, in fact, be three long years before Tina’s ultimate fate would be discovered, and decades after that before any new leads would bubble to the surface.
On April 22nd, 1984, a man out collecting bottles at a camp near Feather Falls stumbled across part of a human skull and jawbone lying in the dirt. Before the remains were identified, the sheriff’s office of Butte County received an anonymous telephone call claiming that the bones belonged to twelve-year-old Tina Sharp, who had been missing since her mother, brother, and a family friend had been viciously slain in April of 1981.
Sure enough, later that summer, the remains were indeed confirmed as those of Tina Sharp. The spot where she had been found lay nearly one-hundred miles away from her family’s cabin in Keddie. Discovered along with the body was a pair of Levi’s jeans with one pocket missing, a child’s blanket, a blue jacket, and an empty dispenser of surgical tape.
Suspects Marty Smartt and Bo Boubede had been cleared of the murders after passing polygraph tests, but new evidence later came to light that seemed to complicate the issue. At the time of the slayings, Marty had stated that he had lost or misplaced a hammer from his own cabin; this was significant because two hammers had been used to slaughter Glenna Sue Sharp and the other victims, and only one was recovered from the scene. In 2016, though, a hammer matching the description of the one Marty claimed to have lost was dredged from a pond near the Smartt’s former cabin. Its location suggested to investigators that the weapon had been deliberately concealed there.
Bo Boubede died in 1988, and Marty Smartt in 2000; neither was ever charged in the Keddie murder case. In 2018, however, more new leads surfaced in the form of a DNA profile obtained from a piece of tape found at the crime scene. This profile, according to investigators, matches a living suspect, which would seem to rule out Marty Smartt and Bo Boubede, who are both deceased. No further announcements as to this suspect’s identity have yet been made.
The ghastly quadruple murder at cabin twenty-eight has long been a topic of fascination with the American public, and has generated several documentaries, as well as supposedly being the loose inspiration for the 2008 horror film, The Strangers.
Crime Immemorial 