Crime Junkie - WANTED: The Keddie Cabin Killer

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

A family’s brutal murder rocks a tiny California town and leaves behind too many unanswered questions.If you have any information about the murders of Sue Sharp, John Sharp, Dana Wingate, and Tina Sharp, please call the Plumas County Sheriff’s office at [phone]. For current Fan Club membership options and policies, please visit https://crimejunkieapp.com/library/. Source materials for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/wanted-keddie-cabin-killer/ 

Hi Crime Junkies, I'm your host, Ashley Flowers. And I'm Britt. And today I want to tell you about a place that sort of tucked away from the rest of the world, nestled in the Sierra Nevada mountains of Northern California. A town where for a long time everybody knew everybody else, nobody was afraid to keep their doors unlocked, and the yards were literally surrounded with white picket fences. It used to be the kind of town where bad things weren't supposed to happen, until one fateful spring night over 40 years ago, when something very bad did happen.

This is the story of the Keddy Cabin Murders. On April 11, 1981, in Keddy, California, 14 year old Sheila Sharp is looking forward to something that I know you and I used to look forward to growing up, a Saturday night sleep over with one of her best friends. Sheila is going over to her friend, Alyssa's house, and thank God because it's about to get hectic in the small cabin that she shares with her mom and four siblings. Her older brother, John, her little brothers, Ricky and Greg, and her little sister, Tina. And on this night, her brothers are actually having friends over, so it's going to be

like packed over there. So when you say they live in a cabin, my mind instantly goes to, you know, like out in the middle of the woods, nearest neighbor is pretty far away. So you're half right. They're definitely out in the woods and Keddy's this like minuscule small town right near several of Northern California's national forests, but the Sharp family's cabin is not as isolated as you might think because you see it's part of a resort area. The way the Keddy resort is laid out, there's around 25 or 30 cabins out here and they're

all built pretty close to each other. Like for example, the Sharp's house is literally only like 15 feet away from the cabin next door. Oh, okay. So yeah, so Sheila's not going on like some big adventure. She's literally able to walk right over to Alyssa's house where they'll do pretty typical sleepover stuff like they watch some TV, they talk for a while. They burn grass-scented candles, paint nails with glow-in-the-dark polish, and I don't

know, maybe rewrite some country songs about boys that they loved and hated. I mean, if she's anything like us, yes. But after a pretty normal night, they head to bed. If the next morning, April 12th is a Sunday, Sheila wakes up pretty early so she can say goodbye to Alyssa and walk home to get ready for church. According to an article in the Sacramento Bee, she gets back to her family's cabin at about eight o'clock and when Sheila opens the door, she stumbles onto a scene that changes her life forever.

Right there in the front room is mayhem. Blood is spattered from the carpet to the ceiling and everywhere in between. Through the confusion clouding her mind when she comes upon this scene, Sheila sees three bodies and she can tell that one of them is covered by a blanket and the other two are tied up. She doesn't know who's who, but in that moment, Sheila's mind kicks into survival mode. She drops her overnight bag and runs full speed back to Alyssa's house to tell them that something terrible has happened.

Since Alyssa's family doesn't have a phone, her parents run to the Kettie Resort office to call police while they send their oldest son Jamie back to the sharp cabin with Sheila. I mean, is it just the mom and me coming out or is it maybe not like the greatest idea to send two kids back to the house where, I don't know, the killer could still be? Maybe but Sheila and Jamie aren't taking any chances. I mean, they don't go anywhere near the front door. Instead, when they go back, they peek through a bedroom window and it's actually a good thing they went back because inside they see something incredible.

According to Stephen Capp's piece for the San Francisco Examiner, Sheila's two younger brothers, Ricky, who's nine and Greg, who's five, are in the bedroom sleeping with their friend and next door neighbor, Justin Easton. Wait, they're alive? Yes. By the time the police arrive, Sheila and Jamie have managed to wake them up and get all three boys out of the house, taking them through the window to spare them having to see the carnage in the front room.

Law enforcement, though, has to see it and as soon as they get inside the sharps cabin, it becomes all too obvious that if anything, what they're seeing is worse than what they were expecting. They see the huge amounts of blood all over the room and they also notice that the walls have been gouged. One of the police is actually quoted in a local newspaper saying it looks like somebody basically stabbed the wall. And everywhere they look, there are signs of a struggle, signs someone tried to flee

knowing that their life was on the line. Near the front of the room, almost as soon as you walk in the door, is where they found the first two victims, Sheila's 15-year-old brother, John, and his friend, Dana Wingate. They're tied together at their ankles. And officers notice one of the boys is lying face up and the other is face down and whoever killed them used electrical cords and medical tape to tie them up. Deeper in the room, they can see the third body, which appears to be an adult female covered in a yellow blanket.

It's easy to tell that the woman is Sheila and John's mom, Glenna Susan Sharp, who most people call Sue. According to Victoria Metcalfe's reporting in the Plumas News, Sue's lying on her side right near the couch naked from the waist down and gagged with what looks like a blue bandana covered in more medical tape. I mean the fact that she's naked from the waist down makes me feel like this is way more sexually motivated than the other two. Yeah, I kind of think that too, but just like with a definitive cause of death, police won't

know if Sue was sexually assaulted until after the autopsy. There's not a lot of information out there about what exactly police are doing at the house beyond collecting what they can and documenting the scene with the resources their tiny office has available. I can tell you, though, that as police try to make sense of just what happened here, they come across what could be the murder weapons, right there just sort of out in the open. Jeff Truesdale reported for People Magazine that police find a bloody claw hammer and a butcher knife lying on the little table near the Sharp's kitchen.

There's a bent steak knife on the floor, also covered in blood. All of the stuff is bagged up and sent off for analysis while Sue, Johnny, and Dana's bodies are being transported to Sacramento for autopsy. Like I said, Kettie's basically a blip on the map and Sacramento being the state capital of California has way more resources for law enforcement. But remember how I told you Sheila lived with her mom and four siblings? Yeah. So if you're counting, that's one brother who's deceased, two brothers who were pulled

alive from the room, and a sister that's not there. Yes. And so not only are they wondering who killed these three people, but also where is Tina Sharp? Okay, but we know that Sheila was at our friend's house that night. So is anyone considering that maybe Tina was too? You said it was a pretty full house. Well, if they ever do, that thought's discarded almost immediately because all of my source

material going right back to the days just after the murders in April of 81 lists Tina as missing. Now, since they just don't have the resources to tackle a multiple homicide and an abduction, police don't waste any time calling in the FBI and the State Department of Justice for help. While they're waiting for the FBI to arrive, police scour the area going door to door at every cabin in the Keddie Resort to interview the neighbors and track down witnesses. Remarkably though, according to the San Francisco Examiner, all of the Sharp's neighbors tell

police they didn't hear a single thing that night. Okay, but there were three little kids still in the cabin, like surely they had to have heard something. Well, according to that same article, they slept through all of it. Okay, but that feels so extreme to me. Like, I have kids. I get it. I get that you'd be surprised that they can sleep through.

But this was a violent attack, a violent triple homicide. I'm having trouble imagining anyone being able to sleep through it. I mean, is there any chance that the kids were drugged? I mean, I wondered that too, but I didn't see anything in my source material about Greg or Ricki or Justin ever even being tested for drugs. So I don't know. And maybe that wasn't even on their minds then. But I agree.

It feels, I don't want to say unbelievable, but at the very least unlikely, yeah. And yet that's what the evidence is telling police. So with the mystery of the survivors still swirling in their minds, investigators kick into high gear Sunday afternoon. Local search and rescue teams go out scouring the woods and all around the resort looking for anything to point them to a killer or to Tina's whereabouts or, you know, hopefully both. Because police believe Tina could hold the key to solving this case.

They're thinking, you know, she might have been a witness and that maybe that's why she vanished. The killer or killers took her to tie up loose ends. So on Monday, police and the FBI put out an APB for Tina Sharp. The bulletin describes her as having long blonde hair and a slight build and wearing blue jeans and a light blue shirt. The bulletin goes out to three surrounding counties and also across the state border to Reno, Nevada, about two hours drive east of Kedde, requesting not only that people

be on the lookout for Tina, but also asking local hospitals in those areas to check if anyone had come in over the past 48 hours with cuts or knife wounds. If Tina was a witness, though, like why would the perp not just kill her? Like he's already killed three other people. Yeah, it doesn't make sense, right? So even though at the time all of the source material says that they thought maybe she was a witness, honestly, internally, they were also considering the fact that perhaps she was really the target all along.

Yeah, see, that makes so much more sense to me. Like I can see an entire family doing anything to protect their little girl. So you'd literally have to kill them to get to her. Right. So that might be a motive, but you know, the question becomes who would want to take a little girl? Well, as police start looking into Sue Sharp's background, police start looking squarely at one person, a person with a grudge.

And that's Sue's ex-husband, Jim. Jeff Truesdell reported for People Magazine that law enforcement learns that Sue had fled across the country from the East Coast to California in the late 1970s in a bid to escape her abusive marriage. And when she left, she took all five of her and Jim's kids with her. And as Sheila Sharp told the show People Investigates for their episode on this case, Jim's abuse wasn't just limited to Sue. In fact, Sheila recalls that Jim sexually abused her and Tina for years until the family escaped

and that Tina was his favorite target. And was Jim still on the East Coast at the time of the murders? Well, that's exactly what police are trying to find out. You see, Jim was in California by this time during the investigation. He had come out as soon as he found out about the murders. And police want to be sure that he wasn't there before. So pretty much from the second he sets foot in the state, Jim is put under surveillance by police.

They're not just looking for anything to suggest he's the killer, but they're also looking for anything to indicate he might know where Tina is. But when they interrogate him, Jim says he's got an alibi. He's in the Navy and he tells police, look, I was back at my base in Connecticut. And much to their frustration, he can prove it. He might have been a scumbag with no business being a husband or father. But he was almost 3000 miles away at the time of the murders. While Jim turns out to be a dead end, the investigation is far from stalled.

Because police have a ton of other tips to follow. They check out one of Tina's teachers, this guy who's known for being a little too interested in her. Like, apparently he kept framed portraits of her on his desk. No, I do not like that at all. No, like, should be a red flag for any parent. But this guy has an alibi, too. Walt Wiley reported for the Sacramento Bee that police get hundreds of tips just over

the first weekend after the murders. But even with the help from the FBI and the State Department of Justice, police are overwhelmed. Literally the county sheriff is quoted in the same article describing the investigation as, quote, going in circles. By late Monday, though, lab tests confirmed to law enforcement that the hammer and the two knives found at the cabin are, in fact, the murder weapons. Preliminary autopsy reports confirm that Sue, John, and Dana died from stab wounds and multiple blows to the head.

But as I saw in the People Investigates episode, police believe a second hammer was used, too, even though they've only found one. They also believe that the murders and Tina's abduction happened sometime between 11 p.m. on Saturday night and 2 a.m. on Sunday morning. And did the autopsy give any clarity about whether or not Sue had been sexually assaulted? Well, according to multiple articles I read, there is no evidence of sexual assault. According to Marv Snow and Dave Muller's Feather River bulletin piece, by Wednesday, police have ruled out burglary and drugs as possible motives.

What I find super interesting, though, is in that same article, the sheriff mentions that the killings could be a copycat type situation. All great questions. All he says in that article was that there were similar crimes somewhere else in Northern California, but that's it. And of course, I tried looking it up, but nothing in my research points to which crimes he's referring to, either. It literally drives me bananas.

It's like a one-off mention in this case, because I would love to be able to tell you more, tell you if they are connected. So if anyone is from Northern California from the time, please reach out to us and let us know. But that's it. That one blurb, nothing else. Now meanwhile, the searches for Tina keep going hand in hand with the murder investigation as the clock ticks, and police ramp up their efforts.

They're doing grid searches, Jeep caravans, helicopters, they bring in sniffer dogs, countless hours logged on foot in the forest, and none of this, none of these things turn up any trace of Tina sharp. On April 20th, law enforcement formally suspends their search, and it takes almost exactly a month after the murders before police decide to try something a little unorthodox to finally catch a break. They put Justin Easton, one of the boys who survived the cabin massacre, under hypnosis. And while he's under hypnosis, he tells police about a strange dream he had on the night

of the murders. According to more of Victoria Metcalf's reporting, Justin says that in his dream, he was on the love vote with Sue, the sharp boys, and their friends who were at the cabin that night. In Justin's dream, two men got into a fight with John and Dana and threw them overboard. One of the men had a pocket knife in one hand and a hammer in the other. And he used the knife to cut Sue right across the chest. Both men then escaped from the bloody ship on life rafts. Now this is strange enough on its own, but it gets even more bizarre when police arrange

for Justin to be hypnotized a second time. This time, instead of talking about a dream, he talks about Tina sharp, who's still missing without a trace. Justin says Tina woke up during the attack and came into the front room to see what was going on. She was holding a blanket, and one of the men grabbed her and took her outside. He came right back, alone, pulled his hunting knife out of the wall, and then went back outside.

Okay, so you know I'm side-eyeing the whole hypnosis thing a little bit. A little bit, yeah. But this doesn't sound like a dream. We know these exact weapons were found at the house and used in the murders. We know there was a fight, a struggle. It sounds like Justin might have seen what happened, and his brain is setting up this dream scenario to cope with it. I mean that makes sense for a little kid, right?

Like you probably can't even process that something like that would really be happening, and the only way it could is if you make it into a dream. Whatever really happened, if this really was a dream, or if like you're saying it's a coping mechanism. Just take it seriously. So seriously, in fact, that since Justin's able to describe what these two men in his quote-unquote dream looked like, they have composite sketches made. And here, I'm gonna send these to you Brett.

So the sketches are pretty rough in my opinion. There are these two white guys, they're wearing glasses, but you can't really see the eyes in the sketches. One has a mustache and kind of slicked back parted hair, and the other one has hair almost to his shoulder, so it's longer and kind of parted down the middle, straight hair. Yeah, I feel like the hair is like the most distinctive part. Yeah, they almost look like, and obviously this happened in the 80s, but one kind of looks like John Lennon, the other one looks like he could be like a bartender from the

1930s. Super helpful. Well, super helpful or not, police released these sketches to the public towards the end of May, so about six weeks after the murders, though obviously they don't tell the public where they got them from. They just say that these sketches depict two men who were quote, seen around Keddie. They describe the guy on the left, the one with longer hair as being a white man between 28 and 30 years old, between 5'11 and 6'2 with dark blonde hair and gold-framed sunglasses.

The guy on the right, so the shorter hair guy with the mustache, is also a white man described by police as being between 30 and 32 years old with a black mustache and greasy black hair combed back off his face. Police say he's also wearing gold-framed sunglasses as well. So the sunglasses could be why we don't really see the eyes and the sketches. Right. But there's something else about these sketches that police aren't saying publicly at the time.

And that's that one of the sketches. The guy with the mustache bears a noticeable resemblance to this guy named Marty Smart, who just so happens to be Justin's stepfather. Oh. Okay. Now that puts a whole different look at this whole dream scenario. Right away that makes me wonder if this whole dream thing isn't Justin just trying to cover for Marty.

Well here, here's a picture of Marty. So you tell me what you think. I mean, I don't see a super clear resemblance, but there's the mustache, there's the hair combed back off his face. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine a boy like Justin being able to tell the police that he saw his own stepfather commit murder. I also find it hard to believe that like, you wouldn't recognize him. So you know what I mean?

Like he's like making up a sketch unless, unless what you're saying is he'd be like covering for him as a kid. Yeah, but then again, like would he even have like the consciousness to do that? You know? Yeah. I mean, it's hard enough for adults to cope with the emotional fallout of an event like this, let alone, you know, a 12 year old kid. So I don't know, maybe he's covering for him.

Maybe it's completely subconscious. Maybe it's nothing. I don't know. And it might be nothing, but here's what we know about Marty and why maybe police would have been considering him. He's a Vietnam veteran with a criminal past who's done inpatient treatment at the VA for PTSD. And according to multiple accounts, he is not a good dude.

To give you some examples, the Plumas News reported that he allegedly threatened his wife Marilyn with a knife during an incident in 1980. People Investigates alleges that Marty had a violent temper and abused both his wife and stepson. And on this same episode, Sheila Sharp claims that Marty once tried to run Marilyn and Justin over with his car. Now, none of these allegations against Marty have ever been proven in a court of law. But as you can imagine between the small town rumor mill and now his somewhat resemblance

to the sketch, police want to have a word with him. And not just with Marty, but with an old VA pal who's living with Marty's family, this guy named John Boba Day, who's much better known as Beau. And according to Jane Braxton Little's reporting for the Sacramento Bee, both of these guys are considered suspects. They're questioned together by police and during questioning, Marty says some things that stand out to police as odd. He tells law enforcement that he heard a hammer was used in the murders and that, by the way,

he is missing a hammer himself. It's this expensive brand name claw hammer with a blue plastic handle. His description doesn't match the murder weapon found at the scene, but it's like a weird thing to mention and so police just kind of like take note of it. But this isn't even all Marty says. Here, I am going to read you this direct quote from People Investigates. It says Marty says that Justin could have been at the crime scene without Marty detecting him.

End quote. Okay, so is Marty saying that he was there but didn't know Justin was there? Like is he putting himself at the crime scene? The documentary goes out to like spell exactly what the implication is and that being that Marty was there. Here's the thing though, apparently both Marty and Beau have alibis for the night of the murder. As the Plumas News reported, they tell police that they were both at the Keddie's backdoor

bar with Marty's wife, Marilyn. And when officers follow up, they find numerous witnesses who can put them all at the bar around 10pm and Marilyn confirms she was there with them and all the witnesses describe Marty and Beau as wearing these like flashy three piece suits and sunglasses inside, honestly almost as if they wanted to be noticed. But according to this same article, Marty and Beau weren't at the bar all night. At some point, they made a stink about like the music or something and they left with Marilyn but Marty wasn't about to like let it go so apparently he called the bar once

he got home to complain even more and then he and Beau went back to the bar until closing time. Okay, hang on. Let me make sure I've got all this. Marty and Beau go to the bar, dress to the nines, then- In sunglasses, mind you, that's one part that really sticks out to me, sunglasses. Oh, for sure. And then they get mad at the music and leave.

So mad that Marty is like, I have to give them even more pieces of my mind, makes this phone call and then everything's fine and dandy and they go back to the bar. It's a little strange, right? Yeah. Almost like they're trying to make an alibi? Yeah, almost like dropping specific breadcrumbs, putting pins and things, lining things up. So police's intuition should be tingling. I mean, all of this, the hammer, the weird remark about Justin, some missing time on

Saturday night, it's all there for law enforcement to dig deeper into and yet they seem to let it drop. According to People Investigates, police don't interview either Marty or Beau again. Me and Beau both move out of Caddy shortly after the murders and by September of 1981, with no new suspects, no new leads and no clues still about Tina's fate, the investigation has hit a wall. For almost three long years, that's pretty much how it stays. There are some blips that pop up on police's radar from time to time, people connected

to other murders in Northern California who get ruled out as possible suspects, but neither local police, the FBI or the California Department of Justice make any breakthroughs. The horror at the cabin stays frozen in time. That is, until April of 1984, when police get the phone call they've been waiting for. According to the Oroville Mercury Register, the caller tells Dispatch that they were out collecting bottles near Feather Falls in Butte County, about 50 miles due west of Caddy, when they stumbled across a part of a human skull. Police go out to the area that the bottle hunter indicates where they find more bones

and, more importantly, enough of the skull that they're hoping they can ID it with dental records. Conforcement transfers all of the remains to a local lab for examination, but before they get a positive ID, they get another phone call. Here, listen to this call that's posted on kettie28.com. I was watching the news and they were talking about the skull that was at Feather Falls, just before they Murder up in the county, up in Flemish County a couple years ago, where a 12-year-old girl was never found.

Now this is pretty sure it's a male girl. Okay. Rockbox. So it's just a 12-year-old girl, might be mistaken for a 10-year-old boy. Okay. And it was ready to enter the house? Uh-huh. Okay. Okay.

Flemish County. Okay. Okay. Flemish County. Okay. So there's a lot of interference on the call. Like, it's pretty hard to make out. But this guy's calling in saying, hey, heard you found her skull. Could it be this girl? And the dispatcher says something about a 10-year-old boy and, like, the skull is his?

Yeah. So according to Madison Wade's report, the dispatcher says something about a 10-year-old boy and, like, the skull is his? Yeah. So according to Madison Wade's reporting for ABC 10 News, the caller says, quote, I was watching the news and they were talking about the girl found at Feather Falls. I was just wondering if you thought of the murder up in Ketti in Flemish County a couple years ago where a 12-year-old girl was never found, end quote. And I guess it just feels strange to me that this dispatcher would just volunteer that

the police think that the skull belongs to a 10-year-old boy. I thought so too. So I kind of did some digging around and I found an article in the Chico Enterprise Record that mentions investigators had a theory that the remains could belong to a missing 10-year-old from San Francisco, this kid named Kevin Collins. So if that was already in the press, then maybe it's less strange for the dispatcher to say, like, yeah, this is the talk going around. This is what we kind of believe.

I don't know. I just love that the caller was also like, oh, well, I just thought, you know, maybe this 12-year-old girl could have been mistaken for a 10-year-old boy, but you guys know best. Yeah, it's strange. And it's not necessarily right because, like, for months, no one could tie the remains definitively to that boy. And in June of 1984, that's when the identification comes back.

The bones near Feather Falls don't belong to Kevin Collins. Dental records confirm that they actually belong to Tina Sharp. While the discovery answers the huge question about whether or not Tina had somehow survived, it raises a ton more questions at the same time. Even the experts seem to disagree about when Tina died. On June 22, Ken Payton quotes the Plumas County Sheriff in the Sacramento Bee saying experts believe Tina died sometime in November of 1981. So that would have been about six months after her family was killed.

But then, five days later, the sheriff goes on record with another paper and broadens the time frame, saying, quote, sometime prior to last fall. So that would have been any time between April of 81 and the fall of 83. I feel like none of these are answers. There's just more questions. Right. I mean, assuming Tina survived for honestly any length of time after the murders, they still don't know where she was, what she was doing,

or why the abductor wanted to keep her alive in the first place. Yeah, I mean, I feel like this development is like this whole case in a nutshell. Like every time someone thinks they know something, it just explodes into a mushroom cloud of more unanswered questions. Yeah. So can law enforcement tell how Tina died? They can't determine a cause of death, but they're pretty sure she was murdered. Now, the discovery of Tina's remains kick up a ton of local publicity for a while.

But once the news cycle moves on, the case just goes cold again. Like finding her remains didn't actually bring them any closer to finding out who abducted her, why, or who killed the family. The surviving sharp kids, Sheila, Greg, and Ricky spend their childhoods in foster care as anniversary after anniversary goes by, versus five years and 10 years. And with each passing year, the sharps and others who still remember the Keddie murders do their best to keep their hopes for justice alive.

In 1996, 15 years after the murders, a man named Robert Joseph Silvera Jr. confesses to the Keddie killings after he's arrested on suspicion of 17 other murders. But according to David Keller's piece in the Westwood Pine Press, police check their records and find out Robert was behind bars in April of 1981. So while he pleads guilty to two murders up in Oregon and definitely is, you know, a killer, he's not this killer. 14 more years go by, and during that time, Marty Smart and Bo Boba Day die.

The sharps cabin is condemned and demolished, and the Keddie murders get some local attention every April when the anniversary rolls around, and every once in a while, maybe police get the occasional tip, but the case doesn't move in any kind of significant way. So in 2013, now 32 years after the murders, a special investigator named Mike takes over the case. As it turns out, this isn't Mike's first go around with the killings, because back in 81, Mike was a deputy with the Plumas County Sheriff's Department.

He was fired a couple of weeks before the murders only to get rehired right after, but he was banned from working on the Keddie case. What? Yeah. That seems really strange. Like, this was the biggest investigation in the area. Like, I guess I'd imagine that the department would need the help. I agree.

I think it's weird, but I think it's weird just like everything else about this case. So Mike spends the next three years going over the case files with a fine tooth comb, turning the original investigation basically upside down, and along the way, Mike makes some shocking discoveries. He finds some pretty serious mistakes, like how the cabin apparently wasn't secured right away, and how police didn't set up any roadblocks on the one road leading in and out of Keddie, procedural errors that could have made the difference between a solved case and an unsolved case.

Along with procedural stuff, Mike also finds evidence that seems to have been forgotten about. So you remember that 911 call I played you, right? Or the person who said like, yo, that might be Tina Sharp's skull. Has anyone like checked that out? Yeah. So according to Marcella Crona's piece in the Reno Gazette Journal, he finds a cassette tape of this call just like sitting at the bottom of an unopened evidence box. Somehow this tape hasn't been examined for over 30 years.

Like since it came in, no one in the department ever followed up on it. I'm never trusting an evidence box again. I am. This is like, right? I literally thought of the one with the investigation, like all the evidence was missing. The unsolved mysteries tape just sitting in the box by itself. This is that. Was this just overlooked?

This is that all over again. But it's not the only piece of evidence that seems to have been overlooked back in 81. So I already told you that Marty Smart and his buddy, Beau, were never really followed up with his suspects and they left town after the murders. But as Mike learns, Marty left his wife, Marilyn behind. But he wrote her a letter a couple of weeks later. And I don't have the whole letter, but I do have a very important quote from the letter. And I want you to read it for everyone.

It says, quote, I've paid the price of your love and now I've bought it with four people's lives. End quote. Uh, I'm sorry, that sounds like a confession. Doesn't it? According to the Reno Gazette Journal, this letter was also overlooked during the original investigation and never entered into any of police's evidence logs. So they didn't even know it was there. There was no record of it even existing.

No, no. And as Mike keeps digging, he discovers that this letter isn't the only time Marty appears to have confessed. As Victoria Metcalfe reported, Marty's old VA counselor reaches out to Mike at some point and tells him something shocking. According to the counselor, Marty confessed at a VA facility in Reno, Nevada just a couple of weeks after the murders. Then why didn't this counselor report it back in 81? The counselor did report it back in 81. Oh my God. Not to police in Kedde, but to the Department of Justice, who you'll remember were working with local authorities via the FBI.

Now, here's where things start to get a little messy, because as this same Plumas Newspiece reported, the FBI agents on the case in 81 weren't homicide investigators. They specialized in organized crime. What? Now, I'm not going to speculate about things that have never been proven, but I will tell you that there are rumors floating all over the internet. Not about Marty Smart having mob connections, but about his old buddy, Beau. The Plumas News, People magazine, the Sacramento Bee, and other source material in my research mentioned Beau's alleged links to mafia activity back in Chicago. And over the years, these possible links have given birth to a theory that Mike has to consider at that point. What if Beau was an informant for the FBI?

What if they let this little fish go for a murder case in hopes of catching a bigger fish in the Chicago mob? Okay, but let him go for not a murder case, the murder of four people and most of them kids. Again, it is just a theory and Mike's never been able to prove or disprove it, but it's wild to think about. As Mike starts to go public with some of his findings in 2016, the case takes yet another twist. A local junk collector finds a hammer out in the woods and at first he just tosses it into a lake just down the road from where the sharp cabin used to be, figuring it's just crap. But then he finds a website all about the catty murders that details Marty Smart's weird statements about his missing hammer. And this guy realizes he might have found that missing hammer specifically. So police retrieve the hammer from the lake and it does match Marty's description.

And while it's too rusted to pull prints or DNA from, it's a huge coincidence, right? For sure. Now ultimately, the hammer doesn't have any DNA, but in 2018 Special Agent Mike announces that something else does. Police have been able to pull DNA off of a piece of tape that was found at the crime scene near Sue Sharpe's head. And get this, they get DNA off of it and they say that it matches a living suspect. Wait, so not Beau or Marty? Well, they're dead, so I guess not. The suspects aren't named, but like you said, since Beau and Marty are, you know, dead by 2018. Right.

Who? Right, if not them, who? So our crime junkies are probably like sweating because you can see we're dangerously close to the end of the episode and dangerously close to answers, but we just don't have them yet. Including a possible answer to one of our biggest questions, Britt, about why the killers would bother to take Tina Sharpe. Investigator Mike wonders if maybe Tina had been sexually assaulted before the murders, if maybe she was pregnant. But there was no way to tell that from her remains, right? No, there just wasn't enough of her recovered to check for it and her remains were too decomposed. She was skeletal by that time. The last real update that came was in April of this year from Mike and other members of local law enforcement when they told ABC 10 News that they feel like they're closer than ever to solving this case.

And they believe that at least two accessories after the fact are still alive. They're hoping that time, conscience and justice will win out in the end, giving Sheila and her siblings the closure that's been brutally denied to them for over four decades. I mean, it sounds like they have so much evidence there, but they still need some people to come forward. They still need people to talk. Maybe after all these years, allegiances have changed. Maybe it is weighing heavily on someone's conscience, but they need someone to talk. If you have any information about the murders of Sue Sharp, John Sharp, Dana Wingate and Tina Sharp, please call the Plumas County Sheriff's Office at 530-283-6360. You can find that phone number in the show notes.

You can also find all of our source material for this episode on our website crimejunkiepodcast.com. And be sure to follow us on Instagram at CrimeJunkie Podcast. We'll be back next week with a brand new episode. CrimeJunkie is an audio chuck production. So, what do you think Chuck? Do you approve?