Background
On the morning of April 12, 1981, 14-year-old Sheila Sharp walked into her family's cabin in the northern California resort town of Keddie and found her mother, her older brother, and her brother's friend murdered in the living room. Her 12-year-old sister, Tina, was missing.
More than forty-five years later, the crime remains unsolved.1 It is a case plagued by fear, rumors, missing evidence, and the belief that the investigation may have gone wrong from the start.
A Family Starting Over
Glenna Susan Sharp — “Sue” to those who knew her — had come to Plumas County in 1979 at age 34 with her five children after leaving her husband. Sue first rented a small mobile home in Quincy before moving the family to Keddie later that year.
By 1980, the family was living in Cabin 28 at the Keddie Resort, a fading cluster of cabins in the Sierra Nevada. By the time the Sharp family arrived, the resort was in decline and had an increasingly transient population.
The cabin was larger, but still crowded. 15-year-old John slept in a basement room accessible only from outside, while Sue shared the upstairs with her daughters Sheila, 14, and Tina, 12, and her younger sons, Rick, 10, and Greg, 5.2
April 11, 1981
On Saturday, April 11, 1981, Sheila Sharp planned to stay over at the home of the Seabolt family in neighboring cabin 27. Tina, who had also been at the Seabolt home that evening, returned home around 9:30 p.m.
Meanwhile, the rest of the Sharp family, along with John’s 17-year-old friend, Dana Wingate, and Justin Smartt, a young friend of Rick and Greg, were at the family’s home in Cabin 28.
Neighbors would later recall a green van parked outside around nine o'clock, and Tina coming home not long after. Just after 1 a.m., a neighbor two cabins away heard what sounded like muffled screaming.
Discovery
At around 10:00 a.m. the following morning, Sheila returned to Cabin 28. Inside the living room, she found the bodies of her mother, her brother John, and Dana Wingate. She ran screaming for help.3 A member of the neighboring Seabolt family helped remove the three younger boys — Rick, Greg, and Justin — through a bedroom window.
The neighbor later admitted that he entered the cabin to see whether anyone was still alive. That early movement through the scene has long raised concerns about contamination of crucial evidence.
The scene inside the cabin was horrific. Sue, John, and Dana had been bound with medical tape and electrical cords and killed in the living room. Sue had been stabbed repeatedly, and her throat cut. John's throat was slashed, and his skull struck with a hammer; Dana had been beaten and strangled with bare hands. Two bloodied knives and a claw hammer lay near the kitchen, and the butt of a pellet rifle had been used to strike Sue's head.
In addition to the brutal murders, 12-year-old Tina Sharp was missing. Investigators quickly began trying to piece together what had happened.
Investigation
The investigation determined that all the attacks had taken place in the living room. The three younger boys had been left alone sleeping in an adjacent bedroom. Physical evidence, including the presence of two knives and a hammer, suggested the possibility of more than one killer.
Investigators began to focus on Sue's neighbor and Justin’s stepfather, Marty Smartt, and his friend, John "Bo" Boubede, both of whom were questioned. Smartt told police that one of his claw hammers had gone missing just prior to the murders.
Days after the killings, Smartt left for Reno, Nevada. In a letter to his wife, he wrote a line investigators would turn over for decades: “I've paid the price of your love & now I've bought it with four people's lives.” A counselor Smartt saw in Reno later said he had admitted to killing Sue and Tina — saying Tina died because she had witnessed the attack — while denying any role in the boys' deaths.
John “Bo” Boubede was an ex-convict who was staying with Smartt at the time of the murders. Despite this incriminating circumstantial evidence, no charges were ever filed. Both Smartt and Boubede are now deceased. 4
Justin Smartt was interviewed by investigators and told them that he had had dreams about the murders. He was later put under hypnosis, during which he claimed to have seen Sue with two men. Based on Justin’s description, composite sketches of the two men were rendered. However, in another controversial aspect of the case, the sketches were drawn by an individual with no forensic sketching background rather than by local or federal artists with experience.
The suspects were described as being in their late 20s to early 30s, with one being between 5’11in and 6’2in with dark blonde hair, and the other between 5’6 in and 5’10 in with black greased hair. Both men wore glasses.
The investigation into the killings has been heavily criticized by those outside of and within law enforcement. One investigator who later worked the case stated: “Someone fresh out of the academy would have done better.”
Discovery of Tina Sharp
In addition to investigating the triple homicide, authorities were also searching for 12-year-old Tina Sharp, who had gone missing the night of the killings. The disappearance was initially treated by the FBI as a possible abduction; however, by the end of April 1981, the case was primarily being handled by the California State Department of Justice.
For three years, there was no progress; then, on April 11, 1984 — three years to the day of the murders — a man hunting for old bottles found a partial human skull at Camp 18, near Feather Falls in Butte County. That June, the remains were confirmed to be Tina Sharp.
Like the other murders, the death of Tina Sharp remains unsolved. In 2004, Cabin 28 was condemned and torn down.
Current Status
Though the case is now long cold, the investigation has never closed. In 2016, investigators pulled a claw hammer from a drained pond near Keddie that matched the one Smartt said had vanished. Two years later, they revealed that DNA from a piece of tape at the scene matched a living suspect — someone other than Smartt or Boubede — and said as many as six people may have been involved in the killings or their cover-up.
A recording tied to the discovery of Tina's remains, missing for decades, turned up at the bottom of an evidence box in 2013.5 As of 2026, the Keddie murders remain officially unsolved. No one has been charged in the deaths of Sue, John, Tina, and Dana Wingate.
“Keddie murders.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keddie_murders.
“The Keddie Cabin Murders: Inside the Grisly Quadruple Homicide That Still Haunts California.” All That's Interesting. https://allthatsinteresting.com/keddie-cabin-murders.
People. “5 Things to Know about the Keddie Cabin Murders and the Hunt for the Killers.” https://people.com/crime/keddie-cabin-28-murders-5-things-know/.
Plumas News. “Keddie murders revisited, part 1: New evidence discovered links living suspect to grisly scene.” https://www.plumasnews.com/keddie-murders-revisited/.
“35 Years Later, New Clues May Solve Keddie Murder Mystery.” CBS News Sacramento. https://cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/35-years-later-new-clues-may-solve-keddie-murder-mystery.