Post by Admin Horan on May 25, 2017 8:18:26 GMT -6
For those who either have, or haven’t, heard of the “Keddie Cabin 28” murders, this website will present, as far as possible, the known and available evidence, and will invite discussion on the missing/unknown evidence. But first, it is terribly important to begin by separating what is “known” from what is not known—and that includes rumor, speculation, theorizing, and other attempts to “solve” the case. The first mistake made by amateur sleuths is jumping to conclusions about “what happened,” and then trying to find explanations for “what happened.” Invariably, these assumptions about “what happened” turn out to lead down dead ends. In my experience, the best way to examine a “cold case” is to recreate the path of the investigation from law enforcement’s point of view. The biggest handicap for us in this case as that only some of the case documents are available for review.
This is what we KNOW happened:
At around 8:15 am on the morning of April 12, 1981, the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office in Quincy, California, received a call from the current owner/operators of the Keddie Resort, a sort of village of low-income families and individuals living in a cluster of “cabins” which had been built as a luxury resort after WWII, but which had never prospered as such. Over the years, the Hotel and Restaurant had been frequented almost entirely by Plumas County residents, and low-income tenants had rented nearly all the cabins on a more or less permanent basis. One of these tenants, Zonita Seabolt, had come to the Cabin of her landlords, the Albins, to ask the Albins to call the police. Zonita said that the teenaged daughter of her neighbor, Sheila Sharp, who had spent Saturday night with the Seabolt family, had gone to her home next door and returned screaming that several people were lying dead on the living room floor amid quite a bit of blood. Mr Seabolt worked for the Albins as the Keddie handyman. The Seabolts could not afford a telephone of their own, and that’s why Zonita had gone to the Albin cabin to have them call the police.
The first deputies arrived at Cabin 28 at about 8:30. Inside, they found the bodies of 15-year-old Johnny Sharp, 17-year old Dana Wingate, and 36-year-old Glenna Sue Sharp, lying more or less next to each other parallel to the couch. Sue’s body had been covered by two blankets. All three victims appeared to have had their wrists bound together with white cloth tape, their ankles also bound together with white cloth tape, and Sue’s wrists had been bound to her ankles with a length of electrical appliance cord. Johnny’s ankles had been tied to Dana’s ankles by another length of cord. Sue had also been gagged. Dana was lying face-down, his head resting on a square cushion taken from the couch, in a puddle of blood. Johnny was lying next to him, face up, between two smaller puddles of blood. Sue was on her back, her knees drawn up due to the electrical cord binding her ankles to her wrists, in another puddle of blood, next to the couch. All three victims had been bludgeoned about the head and face. There were splashes of blood on the walls of the rather cramped living room. A butcher knife and claw hammer belonging to the Sharps were found on a small table near the bodies, covered in blood. Police found no one else in the cabin. Blood was found on the bathroom cabinet door, the doors to both upstairs bedrooms (Johnny usually slept in a utility room downstairs that had its own door leading outside) and on the bedclothes of the two beds in the west bedroom, where Sue and her two daughters slept.
Police were told the following information: That Johnny’s younger sister Sheila had (as was usual on Saturday nights) stayed all night with the Seabolts and their kids. When she returned home Sunday morning to get a change of clothing for church, she had entered the front door, seen two bloody bodies and what looked like a third body under a blanket, a small knife on the floor at her feet that she thought looked like a pocket knife, and a lot of blood.
Sheila told police that she had immediately run back to the Seabolts. Zonita Seabolt had then gone to the Albins’ cabin to call for help. Sheila said that in the mean time, she, along with Jamie Seabolt Jr, and Alysa Seabolt, had gone back to Cabin 28 to check on four younger kids who had been in the Cabin the previous night. They first went to the windows of the east bedroom, where 5-year-old Greg Sharp, and 10-year-old Ricky Sharp, slept in bunk beds. A neighbor boy, 12-year-old Justin Eason (Smartt), had been invited to sleep over Saturday night. Sheila and the Seabolt teens were able to see through the bedroom window that the three boys appeared to be asleep. They knocked on the window. The boys woke up, and the teens outside the window got the three boys inside to climb out the window to safety.
Jamie Seabolt told police that he then went around to the back door (the kitchen door) of the cabin, which had been left open. Jamie told police that he went through the cabin quickly to see if there was anyone else in the house. No one was in the kitchen, the bathroom, or the east bedroom where Sue, Sheila, and 12-year-old Tina slept. Jamie said that he then exited through the kitchen door, closing it behind him. By the time he had exited Cabin 28, deputies were arriving. Deputies Klement and Shanks took control of the crime scene, and Deputy Shaver began interviewing the kids and neighbors. When Sheriff Doug Thomas arrived, he immediately called the California Department of Justice for assistance. Two crime scene/evidence specialists and two experienced investigators arrived later that day and more or less took the lead in the investigation. Sue’s brother Don Davis arrived about 9:30, having been called by the Albins, and he identified the body under the blankets as Sue Sharp. That meant that Tina was unaccounted for, and Sheriff Thomas immediately organized a search.
All three of the boys, who had presumably spent the entire night in Sharp cabin, told police that they had slept soundly all night and had only awakened when Sheila and the Seabolt teens had knocked on the window. One neighbor told police that she had heard some “muffled screams” coming from the general direction of the Sharp cabin at 1:15 am. No one else in Keddie had heard or seen anything directly related to the violence that had taken place.
Physical evidence, including autopsies and forensics inside Cabin 28, suggested that at least two assailants had been responsible. There was no sign of forced entry. The extent of blood splashes, along with several marks on the walls that looked as though they had been made with the “pocket knife” (that turned out to be one of the Sharp family steak knives which had been bent) indicated that the attack had taken some considerable time all together. The ME and other experts determined that the violence mush have taken place over some considerable time between approximately 11:00 pm and 2:00 am.
Over the next few days and weeks, investigation was slowed by a lack of useful information, as well as conflicting information, from Sheila Sharp, Justin Eason, Justin’s mother and stepfather Marilyn and Martin Ray Smartt, and neighbors and acquaintances of the Sharp family and other residents of Plumas County. No one knew of any specific “suspects,” no one could agree on a probable motive, and police could find no trace of Tina Sharp. Marilyn Smartt made suggestions to police that her emotionally unstable husband and his recent acquaintance, a disreputable salesman and shabby con artist from Reno named Severin John Boubede, had supposedly acted very suspiciously. DOJ agents Crim and Bradley questioned Smartt and Boubede at length, but apart from some minor inconsistencies in their stories, could not shake their alibi nor find one shred of physical evidence actually linking them to the crime. Beyond vague suggestions of the possibility of some kind of trouble over illegal narcotics, no other solid suspects, and no motives, were uncovered. Those closest to the Sharps were the least illuminating, and those who seemed to have useful information were universally unreliable witnesses who did not know the Sharp family very well.
In April 1984, the skeletal remains of a young teenager were accidentally found in a remote, abandoned logging camp many miles from Keddie. Dental records seemed to confirm that remains were those of Tina Sharp. There was no evidence Tina had been murdered, and certainly not in the manner of the other three victims. She could have been murdered in some other way; she could have taken her own life; or she could have died of exposure. There is no way to be sure. No effort had been made to conceal the body.
Over the past 35 years, rumors, hearsay, false leads, seances, sensationalized news stories, websites, amateur documentaries, purported confessions, and a whole raft of speculation have produced not one iota of useful evidence that might be instrumental in solving the mystery. Justin Eason, Sheila Sharp, and Glenna Meeks, Sue’s best friend in Plumas County (and her own children,) and many, many others, have all told investigators and journalists more and more stories that align less and less accurately with each other, and less and less accurately with the known evidence. Some of the original case files and other materials from the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office have been leaked and exploited, all to no avail.
And that is ALL that we “know” at this time. Do the police authorities know more than we do? Maybe. Maybe not. Is there any possibility that we can come to know more? Maybe.
Here is just a small, small sampling of the kind of tangled fog awaiting anyone who tries to plumb the depths of this “case:”
Ask two people from Keddie who the Sharp family were, and you’ll get three different answers. The Meeks family knew them best. Sheila had given birth to a baby girl two months before the murders. One of the Meeks boys, Richard, is the putative father. Sue made Sheila give up the baby for adoption in Oregon, over the objections of the Meeks family. People in Keddie who were not close to the Sharps have said that Tina was in a relationship/was pregnant by—Walter Meeks, Dale “Wade” Meeks, Martin Smartt, and/or John Boubede. Some of Johnny Sharps’ friends have said that he was a punk and a bully who intimidated his own family, including his mother, and stole drugs from his friends and sold them in Quincy. Others have said that he was a “good kid.” Dana was certainly on probation for a series of petty crimes and was living in a foster group home for troubled teens. He was either Johnny’s best friend, or was informing on Johnny to the police. Sheila and Tina either resented their mother, or were devoted to their mother. Sue Sharp was either a lazy, inattentive mother with loose morals, or a quiet, retiring single mother struggling to get by as best she could.
A half dozen thoroughly discreditable “witnesses” have told police and others that they gave Johnny and Dana a ride home to Keddie that night. They can’t all be right. None of their stories can be confirmed in the slightest degree. The people who knew the victims best claim to know little or nothing about their whereabouts, movements, or activities after about 5:00 pm Saturday. Others have reported seeing the boys at several parties which may or may not have ever taken place, and in every instance, people who admit being at these parties swear they did not see the boys at any of them.
Tina’s Special Ed teacher, Joel Lipsey, told Crim and Bradley that he thought the Meeks family were a bad influence on Tina. His own statement makes himself look at least as suspicious as anyone, and he was later convicted of molesting children. Deputy (later Sheriff) Shanks resigned over credible allegations of child molesting. Sue had reported a neighbor of the Meeks and Sharp families, Daniel French, for molesting Tina and another girl and of offering to take nude photographs of them for money. Neither Lipsey nor French can be ruled out as suspects in the disappearance of Tina Sharp, all of which does absolutely nothing to explain the murders. Several people may have had a motive to murder Johnny and/or Dana, none of which does anything at all to explain the disappearance of Tina.
Has one, single, solitary person in Plumas County ever told what they really know? Probably not. Justin Eason told police three different stories, none of which can possibly be true, and then refused to say anything else. Martin Smartt’s “therapist” reported to police that Smartt supposedly “confessed” to him, but nothing about the reported confession aligns with the known evidence. There is no evidence that Martin Smartt ever actually injured anyone his whole life. John Boubede has been accused of being a “mob hitman,” which is 100 percent false. Doug Thomas, and DOJ agents Crim, Bradley, and Lister have been accused of a ridiculous conspiracy to “cover up” for Smartt and Boubede, based on the entirely unsubstantiated theory that Smart and Thomas were “best friends” and the ludicrous fantasy that Boubede was a mobster with so much juice that half the California DOJ were practically his employees.
In other words, the “Keddie Cabin 28” case makes Twin Peaks look like the dullest episode of Dragnet.
This is what we KNOW happened:
At around 8:15 am on the morning of April 12, 1981, the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office in Quincy, California, received a call from the current owner/operators of the Keddie Resort, a sort of village of low-income families and individuals living in a cluster of “cabins” which had been built as a luxury resort after WWII, but which had never prospered as such. Over the years, the Hotel and Restaurant had been frequented almost entirely by Plumas County residents, and low-income tenants had rented nearly all the cabins on a more or less permanent basis. One of these tenants, Zonita Seabolt, had come to the Cabin of her landlords, the Albins, to ask the Albins to call the police. Zonita said that the teenaged daughter of her neighbor, Sheila Sharp, who had spent Saturday night with the Seabolt family, had gone to her home next door and returned screaming that several people were lying dead on the living room floor amid quite a bit of blood. Mr Seabolt worked for the Albins as the Keddie handyman. The Seabolts could not afford a telephone of their own, and that’s why Zonita had gone to the Albin cabin to have them call the police.
The first deputies arrived at Cabin 28 at about 8:30. Inside, they found the bodies of 15-year-old Johnny Sharp, 17-year old Dana Wingate, and 36-year-old Glenna Sue Sharp, lying more or less next to each other parallel to the couch. Sue’s body had been covered by two blankets. All three victims appeared to have had their wrists bound together with white cloth tape, their ankles also bound together with white cloth tape, and Sue’s wrists had been bound to her ankles with a length of electrical appliance cord. Johnny’s ankles had been tied to Dana’s ankles by another length of cord. Sue had also been gagged. Dana was lying face-down, his head resting on a square cushion taken from the couch, in a puddle of blood. Johnny was lying next to him, face up, between two smaller puddles of blood. Sue was on her back, her knees drawn up due to the electrical cord binding her ankles to her wrists, in another puddle of blood, next to the couch. All three victims had been bludgeoned about the head and face. There were splashes of blood on the walls of the rather cramped living room. A butcher knife and claw hammer belonging to the Sharps were found on a small table near the bodies, covered in blood. Police found no one else in the cabin. Blood was found on the bathroom cabinet door, the doors to both upstairs bedrooms (Johnny usually slept in a utility room downstairs that had its own door leading outside) and on the bedclothes of the two beds in the west bedroom, where Sue and her two daughters slept.
Police were told the following information: That Johnny’s younger sister Sheila had (as was usual on Saturday nights) stayed all night with the Seabolts and their kids. When she returned home Sunday morning to get a change of clothing for church, she had entered the front door, seen two bloody bodies and what looked like a third body under a blanket, a small knife on the floor at her feet that she thought looked like a pocket knife, and a lot of blood.
Sheila told police that she had immediately run back to the Seabolts. Zonita Seabolt had then gone to the Albins’ cabin to call for help. Sheila said that in the mean time, she, along with Jamie Seabolt Jr, and Alysa Seabolt, had gone back to Cabin 28 to check on four younger kids who had been in the Cabin the previous night. They first went to the windows of the east bedroom, where 5-year-old Greg Sharp, and 10-year-old Ricky Sharp, slept in bunk beds. A neighbor boy, 12-year-old Justin Eason (Smartt), had been invited to sleep over Saturday night. Sheila and the Seabolt teens were able to see through the bedroom window that the three boys appeared to be asleep. They knocked on the window. The boys woke up, and the teens outside the window got the three boys inside to climb out the window to safety.
Jamie Seabolt told police that he then went around to the back door (the kitchen door) of the cabin, which had been left open. Jamie told police that he went through the cabin quickly to see if there was anyone else in the house. No one was in the kitchen, the bathroom, or the east bedroom where Sue, Sheila, and 12-year-old Tina slept. Jamie said that he then exited through the kitchen door, closing it behind him. By the time he had exited Cabin 28, deputies were arriving. Deputies Klement and Shanks took control of the crime scene, and Deputy Shaver began interviewing the kids and neighbors. When Sheriff Doug Thomas arrived, he immediately called the California Department of Justice for assistance. Two crime scene/evidence specialists and two experienced investigators arrived later that day and more or less took the lead in the investigation. Sue’s brother Don Davis arrived about 9:30, having been called by the Albins, and he identified the body under the blankets as Sue Sharp. That meant that Tina was unaccounted for, and Sheriff Thomas immediately organized a search.
All three of the boys, who had presumably spent the entire night in Sharp cabin, told police that they had slept soundly all night and had only awakened when Sheila and the Seabolt teens had knocked on the window. One neighbor told police that she had heard some “muffled screams” coming from the general direction of the Sharp cabin at 1:15 am. No one else in Keddie had heard or seen anything directly related to the violence that had taken place.
Physical evidence, including autopsies and forensics inside Cabin 28, suggested that at least two assailants had been responsible. There was no sign of forced entry. The extent of blood splashes, along with several marks on the walls that looked as though they had been made with the “pocket knife” (that turned out to be one of the Sharp family steak knives which had been bent) indicated that the attack had taken some considerable time all together. The ME and other experts determined that the violence mush have taken place over some considerable time between approximately 11:00 pm and 2:00 am.
Over the next few days and weeks, investigation was slowed by a lack of useful information, as well as conflicting information, from Sheila Sharp, Justin Eason, Justin’s mother and stepfather Marilyn and Martin Ray Smartt, and neighbors and acquaintances of the Sharp family and other residents of Plumas County. No one knew of any specific “suspects,” no one could agree on a probable motive, and police could find no trace of Tina Sharp. Marilyn Smartt made suggestions to police that her emotionally unstable husband and his recent acquaintance, a disreputable salesman and shabby con artist from Reno named Severin John Boubede, had supposedly acted very suspiciously. DOJ agents Crim and Bradley questioned Smartt and Boubede at length, but apart from some minor inconsistencies in their stories, could not shake their alibi nor find one shred of physical evidence actually linking them to the crime. Beyond vague suggestions of the possibility of some kind of trouble over illegal narcotics, no other solid suspects, and no motives, were uncovered. Those closest to the Sharps were the least illuminating, and those who seemed to have useful information were universally unreliable witnesses who did not know the Sharp family very well.
In April 1984, the skeletal remains of a young teenager were accidentally found in a remote, abandoned logging camp many miles from Keddie. Dental records seemed to confirm that remains were those of Tina Sharp. There was no evidence Tina had been murdered, and certainly not in the manner of the other three victims. She could have been murdered in some other way; she could have taken her own life; or she could have died of exposure. There is no way to be sure. No effort had been made to conceal the body.
Over the past 35 years, rumors, hearsay, false leads, seances, sensationalized news stories, websites, amateur documentaries, purported confessions, and a whole raft of speculation have produced not one iota of useful evidence that might be instrumental in solving the mystery. Justin Eason, Sheila Sharp, and Glenna Meeks, Sue’s best friend in Plumas County (and her own children,) and many, many others, have all told investigators and journalists more and more stories that align less and less accurately with each other, and less and less accurately with the known evidence. Some of the original case files and other materials from the Plumas County Sheriff’s Office have been leaked and exploited, all to no avail.
And that is ALL that we “know” at this time. Do the police authorities know more than we do? Maybe. Maybe not. Is there any possibility that we can come to know more? Maybe.
Here is just a small, small sampling of the kind of tangled fog awaiting anyone who tries to plumb the depths of this “case:”
Ask two people from Keddie who the Sharp family were, and you’ll get three different answers. The Meeks family knew them best. Sheila had given birth to a baby girl two months before the murders. One of the Meeks boys, Richard, is the putative father. Sue made Sheila give up the baby for adoption in Oregon, over the objections of the Meeks family. People in Keddie who were not close to the Sharps have said that Tina was in a relationship/was pregnant by—Walter Meeks, Dale “Wade” Meeks, Martin Smartt, and/or John Boubede. Some of Johnny Sharps’ friends have said that he was a punk and a bully who intimidated his own family, including his mother, and stole drugs from his friends and sold them in Quincy. Others have said that he was a “good kid.” Dana was certainly on probation for a series of petty crimes and was living in a foster group home for troubled teens. He was either Johnny’s best friend, or was informing on Johnny to the police. Sheila and Tina either resented their mother, or were devoted to their mother. Sue Sharp was either a lazy, inattentive mother with loose morals, or a quiet, retiring single mother struggling to get by as best she could.
A half dozen thoroughly discreditable “witnesses” have told police and others that they gave Johnny and Dana a ride home to Keddie that night. They can’t all be right. None of their stories can be confirmed in the slightest degree. The people who knew the victims best claim to know little or nothing about their whereabouts, movements, or activities after about 5:00 pm Saturday. Others have reported seeing the boys at several parties which may or may not have ever taken place, and in every instance, people who admit being at these parties swear they did not see the boys at any of them.
Tina’s Special Ed teacher, Joel Lipsey, told Crim and Bradley that he thought the Meeks family were a bad influence on Tina. His own statement makes himself look at least as suspicious as anyone, and he was later convicted of molesting children. Deputy (later Sheriff) Shanks resigned over credible allegations of child molesting. Sue had reported a neighbor of the Meeks and Sharp families, Daniel French, for molesting Tina and another girl and of offering to take nude photographs of them for money. Neither Lipsey nor French can be ruled out as suspects in the disappearance of Tina Sharp, all of which does absolutely nothing to explain the murders. Several people may have had a motive to murder Johnny and/or Dana, none of which does anything at all to explain the disappearance of Tina.
Has one, single, solitary person in Plumas County ever told what they really know? Probably not. Justin Eason told police three different stories, none of which can possibly be true, and then refused to say anything else. Martin Smartt’s “therapist” reported to police that Smartt supposedly “confessed” to him, but nothing about the reported confession aligns with the known evidence. There is no evidence that Martin Smartt ever actually injured anyone his whole life. John Boubede has been accused of being a “mob hitman,” which is 100 percent false. Doug Thomas, and DOJ agents Crim, Bradley, and Lister have been accused of a ridiculous conspiracy to “cover up” for Smartt and Boubede, based on the entirely unsubstantiated theory that Smart and Thomas were “best friends” and the ludicrous fantasy that Boubede was a mobster with so much juice that half the California DOJ were practically his employees.
In other words, the “Keddie Cabin 28” case makes Twin Peaks look like the dullest episode of Dragnet.
