The story began in the fall of 1980, when Glenna Susan "Sue" Sharp broke up with her husband and decided to leave Connecticut for Northern California.
Glenna was a mother of many children with five children of different ages: 15-year-old John, 14-year-old Sheila, 12-year-old Tina, 10-year-old Rick and 5-year-old Greg.
After some searching for relocation options, Glenna chose the tiny town of Keddi in the Sierra Nevada. By 2010, only 66 people lived there, and before that there were only slightly more. All local families knew each other well and for Glenna and her children this place was to be the beginning of their new and happy life.
But instead, three of the Sharp family found only a gruesome death here, and this massive unsolved murder, called the Keddy Murder, is still the most famous event in this settlement.
Glenna rented house number 28 and the family gradually began to settle down in a new place. Glenna got to know her neighbors and they have a good relationship.
On the evening of April 11, 1981, 14-year-old Sheila went to spend the night with a girl from a neighboring house, while the rest of her family were at the house. Justin Eason and Dana Winget, a friend of 15-year-old John, stayed overnight at Glenna's house that evening.
When Sheila returned home the next morning, she saw a terrible picture: the whole house was covered in blood, and in this blood lay the dead bodies of her mother, her brother John and his friend Dana Winget. They were all tied tightly with wire and duct tape and severely beaten, and then stabbed to death with two knives and hammered. The murder weapons were found at the crime scene.
In the next room were living Rick, Greg and Justin, but 12-year-old Tina was neither among the dead nor among the survivors.
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When the police arrived at the scene, they confessed that they had never seen such a brutal murder. Before death, the woman and the teenagers were tortured with a knife, and they were killed with such fury that even the walls and furniture were splattered with blood.
They were killed in the living room, and then, with an incomprehensible purpose, they transferred the bodies to different rooms. John's throat was cut, and his girlfriend Dana was lying next to him, tied to John by the ankle with a wire. There was a deep, depressed wound on her head from a strong blow, but she died, as it turned out later, from suffocation.
Glenna Sue was stripped almost naked, and her mouth was gagged with her own linen and covered with duct tape. It was clear from the injuries on her arms that she was trying to defend herself, but she died from severe blows with a hammer and cuts on her throat. There was literally no living space on her body.
The whole scene was so shocking that the head of the local police patrol made the following statement:
The curtains of the house were drawn tightly over the windows, the phone was ripped off the nightstand, and traces of blood were found even inside the shoes of the victims.
The missing girl Tina was never found and it was unclear what became of her, but another shock to the public was the fact that the surviving children apparently slept soundly in the next room while their mother and brother and his girlfriend were brutally tortured and killed through a thin wall from them.
Another oddity was that none of the neighboring houses standing next to each other saw or heard anything that night, no screams or other noise. Sheila didn’t hear anything either, being in her friend’s house next door. At the same time, they tortured and killed the victims for an hour, no less.
It also turned out that there are no signs of a break-in on the doors and windows of Glenna's house, so the murderers were let in by the household themselves.
When they started looking for fingerprints, they found nothing, the killers used gloves. Biological materials were found, but it was 1981 and it was still a long way from a massive DNA test by the police.
The police soon found themselves stumped. No one in the area saw or heard anything suspicious, and they did not have any clues about the identity of the killers either.
Only a little later did the first clues appear. One of the three survivors of that terrible night in the house - Justin Eason - was hypnotized and he said that in fact he did not sleep, but saw two unfamiliar men appear in the house.
One was long-haired and the other with a mustache and short hair. One of them was holding a hammer and Sue was talking to them in a raised voice, and then they attacked her. The same two men took the girl Tina with them after the murder.
It also turned out that there are no signs of a break-in on the doors and windows of Glenna's house, so the murderers were let in by the household themselves.
When they started looking for fingerprints, they found nothing, the killers used gloves. Biological materials were found, but it was 1981 and it was still a long way from a massive DNA test by the police.
The police soon found themselves stumped. No one in the area saw or heard anything suspicious, and they did not have any clues about the identity of the killers either.
Only a little later did the first clues appear. One of the three survivors of that terrible night in the house - Justin Eason - was hypnotized and he said that in fact he did not sleep, but saw two unfamiliar men appear in the house.
One was long-haired and the other with a mustache and short hair. One of them was holding a hammer and Sue was talking to them in a raised voice, and then they attacked her. The same two men took the girl Tina with them after the murder.
Then several potential suspects emerged. First of all, Justin Eason's stepfather is Martin Smart and his neighbor John B., who was a former criminal. Smart stated that it was possible that his hammer was found in the Sharps' house, but someone stole it from him shortly before the murder. There was no other evidence on Smart and he was released. The case was declared unsolved.
And three years later they found the missing Tina Sharp. More precisely, what is left of it. On April 22, 1984, a child's skull was stumbled upon in the neighboring county, in a place located a hundred miles from the town of Keddy. Together with the skull in the forest lay a blanket, children's jeans with a torn off pocket, a blue jacket and an empty adhesive tape roller.
Soon after the terrible discovery, an anonymous person called the police and said that the skull found was the remains of Tina Sharp. After that, a special study was carried out on DNA and it turned out that the words of the anonymous author were correct.
However, the discovery of the girl's skull also did not advance the investigators one step towards solving the murder in Keddi. How Tina Sharp died and what results the study of the skull showed, did not get into the press.
Until 2013, the Sharps' house was sealed and only opened when Special Investigator Mike Gamberg and County Sheriff's Deputy Greg Hagwood decided to take the case. They found a box on this old case at the police station and decided to check the facts again.
True, this new investigation also did not lead to anything new, except for new suspicions of Martin Smart, but he died in 2000 and it was no longer possible to interrogate him.