Cabin 28: The Keddie MurdersChaptersKeddie, California. Easter weekend, 1981.0:21COLD OPEN1:39FILE OPEN1:55THE TOWN2:49THE FAMILY3:58THE NIGHT4:54THE MORNING5:59THE CRIME SCENE6:50TINA7:41THE SUSPECTS8:47THE COMEBACK10:10THE EVIDENCE THAT REMAINS11:12THE PLACE11:48CLOSING0:00 / 13:371×0:21NarratorKeddie, California. Easter weekend, 1981.0:27NarratorA cluster of wooden cabins tucked into the Feather River Canyon, high in the Sierra Nevada. Population: roughly sixty people. One road in. One road out. The nearest city, Quincy, is eleven miles away on a two-lane mountain highway that closes in heavy snow.0:45NarratorThis is not a town that appears on any major map. It is just a place where people ended up — people with few other options, renting cheap cabins that had once been a resort and had since quietly fallen to ruin.0:59NarratorSue Sharp had arrived four months earlier, in November 1980. She was thirty-six years old and had driven across the country from Connecticut with five children and almost nothing else. She had left an abusive marriage. She needed somewhere inexpensive and quiet, somewhere her children could run outside without her worrying. She found Cabin 28.1:23NarratorOn the night of April 11, 1981, something came through the front door of Cabin 28. By morning, three people were dead. A fourth was missing. And one of the strangest, most troubling cold cases in California history had begun.1:39NarratorYou are listening to The Cold Case Ledger. Unsolved stories, quiet towns, and the evidence that still speaks. I am your narrator. Tonight's file: the Keddie murders. A small-town strange crime.1:55NarratorTo understand what happened in Cabin 28, you need to understand what Keddie was in 1981.2:02NarratorThe Keddie Resort had been built in the early twentieth century as a railroad destination — a mountain retreat along the Western Pacific line. By the 1970s it was largely defunct. The resort company had stopped maintaining the cabins and started renting them cheaply to whoever would take them. By 1980 the community was a loose collection of low-income families and transients strung along a gravel road in one of the more remote stretches of northern California.2:29NarratorThere was no town center. No police station. No hospital. The Plumas County Sheriff's Office was the law enforcement authority for the entire region, dispatching deputies from Quincy. Response times could run long. Neighbors knew one another by proximity and necessity, not always by choice.2:49NarratorSue Sharp was making things work. Barely, but genuinely.2:54NarratorShe worked at a restaurant in town. She received a small monthly payment from the Navy, food stamps, and whatever her estranged husband sent from Connecticut. She had five children: John, fifteen; Sheila, fourteen; Tina, twelve; Rick, ten; and Greg, five. They were crowded into a two-bedroom cabin, but the children had a mountain to play on and neighbors their own age.3:20NarratorOne of those neighbors was Martin Smartt, who lived in Cabin 26 with his wife Marilyn and their son Justin. Marty Smartt was a Vietnam veteran with a history of psychiatric treatment and a volatility that other residents would later describe to investigators. He and Sue Sharp had grown close. Too close, some believed. Marilyn believed it.3:42NarratorAnother neighbor, Severin John Boubede — known as Bo — lived in Cabin 27, directly next door to the Sharps. Bo was older, quiet, with connections in New York that were never fully explained. He and Marty were friends.3:58NarratorThe evening of April 11 was unremarkable in the way that final evenings always are.4:03NarratorIn the afternoon, John Sharp and his friend Dana Wingate — seventeen, from a nearby town — left Cabin 28 for Quincy. They would return later that night. Sheila Sharp crossed the road to Cabin 27 with her younger sister Tina to watch television. Sheila decided to sleep over. Tina came back home around ten o'clock.4:25NarratorInside Cabin 28 that night: Sue, Tina, Rick, and Greg — and Justin Smartt, the ten-year-old from next door, who had been invited to sleep over with Rick and Greg. John and Dana returned sometime that evening. Seven people were in that cabin when the night fell quiet.4:44NarratorThe children slept in the back bedroom. Sue and the older kids were in the front. Outside, the Sierra Nevada was cold and dark and completely still.4:54NarratorSheila Sharp woke up early on April 12 and walked back across the road to her house.5:00NarratorThe front door opened. The smell reached her before her eyes adjusted to the light.5:06NarratorHer mother was on the floor of the living room, covered with a yellow blanket that had been pulled from the bedroom. John was beside her. Dana Wingate was near them. All three were bound with medical tape and electrical cord — their wrists and ankles tied, the boys' feet bound together. The carpet was saturated.5:25NarratorSheila ran outside screaming. Neighbors responded. Police were called.5:30NarratorIn the back bedroom, Rick, Greg, and Justin Smartt were found unharmed. They had slept through what had happened — or had not slept, and had stayed very, very quiet.5:41NarratorWhen investigators began accounting for everyone, they noticed something. Twelve-year-old Tina Sharp was gone. Her stuffed animal was still on the couch. Tina was nowhere in the cabin and nowhere in the immediate area. She was listed as a missing person.5:59NarratorThe evidence at the scene told investigators that the attack had not been random or quick.6:04NarratorThe victims had been bound deliberately with medical tape — the kind used in a professional or clinical setting. A hammer had been used. Forensic examination confirmed severe blunt-force trauma to all three victims, combined with ligature strangulation on John and Dana. Sue Sharp had also been stabbed.6:25NarratorThere was no sign of forced entry. Nothing of obvious value had been taken from the cabin. No wallet emptied, no television missing.6:34NarratorAnd then there was the note. A small piece of paper found at the scene, written in pencil. It read: "I died in anger — not for money."6:44NarratorThe note was never conclusively attributed to anyone. Its meaning has been debated for forty-four years.6:50NarratorFor three years, Tina Sharp was a missing person — a twelve-year-old girl who had vanished from the bloodiest crime scene in Plumas County history.6:59NarratorIn April 1984, a partial skull was recovered near Feather Falls, in Butte County, roughly thirty miles from Keddie. Several months later, an anonymous caller told investigators where to look for more. Additional bones were found at the same location, near a campsite known as Camp 18.7:19NarratorThe remains were identified as Tina's through dental records.7:23NarratorShe had been carried — or taken — thirty miles from the cabin where she was last seen alive. The cause of her death could not be determined from what remained. No one has ever been charged in connection with her death. No one has ever been charged in connection with any of the four murders.7:41NarratorInvestigators had suspicions within days of the murders.7:45NarratorMartin Smartt was a neighbor with means and motive. He owned medical tape. He owned a claw hammer. He had been close to Sue Sharp — close enough that his wife Marilyn had grown furious about it. And he was a man with documented psychological instability.8:01NarratorBo Boubede lived in the cabin next door — the same cabin where Sheila Sharp had slept, unharmed, through the night. Bo had a past. Old connections. People who had known him in New York were not easily described in polite terms.8:18NarratorBut the early investigation did not produce charges. The evidence was not enough — or the political will was not there. Former investigators have since alleged that the initial sheriff, Doug Thomas, was personally acquainted with Marty Smartt, that Thomas had even lived in Cabin 28 before the Sharps moved in. Whether that created a conflict of interest, or something worse, has never been established in court.8:44NarratorThe case went cold.8:47NarratorIn 2013, a new Plumas County sheriff named Greg Hagwood took office and made a decision: the Keddie case would be worked again.8:57NarratorHe brought back a retired investigator, a former deputy named Gamberg who had worked the case in its early years and had never stopped thinking about it. Together they went back to the evidence — whatever had survived decades of mishandling, deterioration, and the demolition of Cabin 28 itself in 2004.9:17NarratorIn March 2016, a claw hammer was pulled from a pond near the Keddie area. It matched the description investigators had been looking for since 1981. It went to a forensics lab.9:29NarratorIn 2018, Gamberg made a public statement. DNA recovered from a piece of the binding tape found at the original crime scene had come back with a match — to a member of Martin Smartt's family. Not Marty himself, who had died of cancer in 2006. A relative. Close enough to constitute what investigators described as strong circumstantial evidence pointing to Smartt.9:55NarratorGamberg named Smartt and Boubede as the primary suspects. Boubede had died in 1988.10:02NarratorBoth men were gone. The case was still open. No charges had ever been filed. None could be.10:10NarratorWhat investigators were left with was a picture without a frame.10:14NarratorThe note — "I died in anger — not for money." Many analysts believe it was written by Marty Smartt. The phrase fits the theory of a man acting out of jealousy, rage over an affair, not robbery. Others have disputed this.10:29NarratorMarilyn Smartt later told investigators that her husband had confessed to her. She had given contradictory accounts over the years, and the credibility of her statements has been evaluated differently by different investigators.10:43NarratorMarty Smartt had reportedly told a counselor that he had "taken care of that problem" when the subject of Sue Sharp came up. Whether that constituted an admission was never tested in a courtroom.10:56NarratorAnd then there is Justin Smartt — the boy who was in that back bedroom. He was eleven years old in 1981. He grew up. What he knows, what he remembers, what he has or has not said to investigators, is not part of the public record.11:12NarratorCabin 28 no longer exists.11:16NarratorThe resort declined further after 1981 and was never really operational again. For more than twenty years the cabin stood empty — a destination for local teenagers, a fixation for amateur investigators, a place that residents of Keddie tried not to look at directly. In 2004 it was torn down. The lot where it stood is overgrown.11:39NarratorKeddie itself has fewer than sixty residents today. The railroad that built the town still runs through the canyon. The mountains have not changed.11:48NarratorThe Keddie murders are classified as an open homicide investigation by the Plumas County Sheriff's Office.11:54NarratorSue Sharp was thirty-six years old. She had driven across an entire country to find somewhere safe. John Sharp was fifteen. Dana Wingate was seventeen, sleeping over at a friend's house. Tina Sharp was twelve, and her remains were found three years later in a forest thirty miles from her home, and no one has ever been able to say how she died or why she was taken there.12:18NarratorMartin Smartt died in 2006. John Boubede died in 1988. The note they found in the cabin — "I died in anger — not for money" — has never been explained.12:32NarratorThere are things in this case that do not add up neatly. There are things that investigators have learned and cannot prosecute. There are people still living who were children that night, who know the texture of that place, and who have had forty-four years to decide what they remember and what they say.12:51NarratorThe file stays open. The cabin is gone. The mountain is still there.12:56NarratorYou have been listening to The Cold Case Ledger. If you have information about the Keddie murders, contact the Plumas County Sheriff's Office. This case remains active.13:07NarratorUntil next time.