On the night of April 11, 1981, in a quiet resort cabin in the Sierra Nevada town of Keddie, California, a mother, her teenage son, and his friend were bound, beaten, and stabbed to death in Cabin 28. In other rooms of the same small house, three younger children slept through it and survived. A twelve-year-old girl who lived there vanished that same night; her remains were not found for three years. Decades of suspects, an alleged confession, and a recovered hammer have never closed the case.

A Night in Cabin 28

Keddie was a tiny railroad and resort village tucked into the pines of Plumas County, the kind of place where everyone knew everyone. Glenna “Sue” Sharp had moved there with her children to start over. On that April night, Sue, her 15-year-old son John, and John’s 17-year-old friend Dana Wingate were in Cabin 28, along with several of Sue’s younger children and a friend of theirs sleeping in a back bedroom.

The Discovery

On the morning of April 12, Sue’s 14-year-old daughter Sheila, who had spent the night at a friend’s cabin nearby, came home and opened the door onto a nightmare. Sue, John, and Dana had been savagely killed — bound with tape and wire, struck repeatedly with hammers, and stabbed. The violence was extreme, and yet, almost incomprehensibly, the younger children asleep in the next room were physically unharmed and had apparently slept through the attack.

The Missing Girl

One person was missing from the scene: Sue’s 12-year-old daughter, Tina. For three years she was listed as a missing child while her family and the public prayed she was somehow still alive. Then, in 1984, some of her remains were discovered far from Keddie, dozens of miles away, confirming the worst. How and why she was taken from the cabin that night remains one of the case’s darkest questions.

The Investigation That Stalled

Almost from the start, the investigation was troubled. The crime scene was difficult, leads were mishandled, and pieces of evidence were lost or set aside for years. A case that should have generated an intense, coordinated manhunt instead went cold, and Cabin 28 became a local horror story — the cabin was eventually demolished — and, later, an obsession for online sleuths who refused to let it fade.

The Suspects

Over the years, suspicion settled most heavily on a man who lived just steps away — Martin “Marty” Smartt, whose own son had been in the cabin that night — and on a friend of his. Investigators and journalists have reported that Smartt allegedly confessed to a therapist that he had killed Sue Sharp, and a hammer matching one he said he had lost was later recovered near the scene. More recently, a piece of tape from the crime scene was said to carry DNA tied to a living suspect. Yet no one has ever been charged. Both of the men most often named have since died, taking whatever they knew with them.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Keddie murders endure because they combine maximum horror with maximum frustration. The crime was brutal, the town was tiny, the suspects were close at hand — and still, justice never came. For the surviving Sharp children, who lost their mother, brother, and sister in a single night, the decades without answers have been their own kind of wound.

The case also stands as an indictment of how it was handled. Many who have studied it believe it was solvable, perhaps even early on, and that the failure lies less in the killer’s cunning than in the investigation’s mistakes.

Three children slept a few feet from the slaughter and lived; one was taken and did not. So how does a crime this savage, in a town this small, with suspects this close, stay unanswered for more than forty years?