(suspenseful music)
- [Narrator] What is up, EWU Crew.
Today we're covering the unbelievable case
of the Keddie cabin murders.
It almost sounds cliche.
There is now a whole subgenre of horror
that specifically calls out the formula
and makes fun of it.
It's the basis for just about
every popular campfire story,
the bloody murder scene inside a cabin,
nestled in the woods.
But this is no campfire story.
This is no spooky tale
you tell your friends
before tucking into the
safety of your sleeping bags.
This is a true story of one
of the most gruesome murders
in the history of the United States,
made all the more terrifying by the fact
that whoever committed these murders
has eluded police detection
for nearly 40 years.
Let's talk about the Keddie cabin murders.
Before.
The Sharp family was having a bad year.
In late 1980, the family's matriarch, Sue,
asked her husband for a divorce.
When the divorce was finalized in 1981,
she gathered up her five children
and moved across country from
Connecticut to California.
Northern California was a natural choice
as it was near Sue's brother, Don.
At 36, freshly single for the
first time in over 15 years,
Sue was ready to start a new life.
Until they could get
their feet under them,
they decided to rent a cabin
at the Keddie Resort in Plumas County.
Their cabin was number 28.
The adjustment was grueling.
Sue didn't have a job,
instead, the six of them lived
on a small stipend Sue earned
from a federal education program.
They relied on food stamps
and a tiny alimony check
from her ex-husband.
They were barely staying afloat
but kids were resilient
and the distance between
their old life in Connecticut
and their new life in Keddie
afforded them a fresh start.
The Sharp children were John, age 15,
Sheila, age 14, Tina, age 12,
Rick, age 10, and Greg, age five.
To them, cabin 28 was the perfect retreat.
It was remote, offering
them plenty of room
to run and play.
They had few neighbors but
those neighbors had children
around the same ages as the Sharp children
so they quickly made friends.
There was also a river
that ran near the resort
and Sue would often find
her children splashing
in the cool water.
The setting was almost idyllic
which makes what happened
next all the more terrifying.
The murders.
On April 11th, 1981,
Sue and Sheila left Keddie
and drove to Gansner
Park in nearby Quincy.
There, they picked up
John and his friend, Dana,
and brought them back to cabin 28.
They only stayed in Keddie a few hours,
opting to hitchhike back to Quincy
in the mid afternoon
to visit some friends.
Eyewitnesses confirm that John and Dana
were in Quincy that afternoon.
One woman even claimed
that she picked them up
in Quincy and dropped them
off at a friend's house.
They finished their night off
at a party in Oakland Camp.
Sometime in the evening of the 11th,
Sheila and Tina left their home
to sleep over with one of their friends
who lived in one of
the neighboring cabins.
However, Tina decided she
wanted to sleep at home
and returned to cabin 28 in
between 9:00 p.m. and 10:00 p.m.
John and Dana returned
home sometime later.
The Sharps who were left at home,
Sue, John, Tina, Rick, Greg,
and a young boy named Justin Smart
who was a friend of the young boys.
When Sheila returned home
early the next morning,
she discovered the unthinkable.
In the main room of the cabin
were her mother, her older brother
and John's friend, Dana.
They had been tied with
wire and bound with tape.
They had been beaten,
strangled and stabbed
to varying degrees.
The room was splattered in their blood.
She stumbled backwards out of the cabin,
unsure what to do for a few seconds.
Then, she turned and ran back
to the neighboring cabin,
the home of the Seabolts.
James Seabolt followed
her back to the cabin.
When he stepped inside, it was clear
that the three bodies were beyond help
but there were three young boys sleeping
in the cabin's bedroom.
Instead of trying to pick his way
through the gruesome scene,
he hurried around the side
of the cabin and helped the
boys out through the window.
Police were called.
This was the 80s.
The police in California
were familiar with murder
by this time.
Stories of the Zodiac who
continued to elude justice
raised the hackles of
every officer in the state.
They'd seen pictures
of the vicious murders
of Sharon Tate and her house guests
but to the officers who arrived
on the Keddie cabin scene,
this was something else.
This was something much more
intimate and much darker.
The crime scene investigators noted
that the blood splattered
on the walls, ceiling
and floor of the cabin was extreme.
Even the most rookie cops could tell,
just from look at the bodies,
that this was personal.
Sue was found on the ground
beside the family's sofa.
Her underwear and a blue
bandana had been stuffed
into her mouth and a piece
of tape placed over them
to act as a gag.
Her chest was stabbed multiple times.
Her throat had been slashed.
Someone had hit her over the
head with the butt of a gun.
The medical examiner later
identified this weapon
as a Daisy 880 BB gun.
Dana had also been beaten severely.
Investigators guessed he had
been struck several times
with a hammer and their
suspicions were confirmed
when a bloody hammer
was found in the cabin.
Ultimately, however, what
killed him was strangulation.
John's mouth had also been taped over
and his throat had been cut open.
The floor was soaked with their blood.
The sheer amount of it suggested
that, while the bodies
were killed in this room,
whoever killed them
had also taken the time
to move the bodies around.
But why?
Was he looking for something?
It was clear from the
extent of her injuries
that whoever the killer was,
they had taken particular care
when they murdered Sue.
Two bloody knives were
found inside the cabin.
One of them was actually bent in half
due to the force with
which it had been used.
It was a haunting scene.
As the hours dragged on,
dread began to settle
over the police officers
as they took stock of the bodies
and of the children rescued
from the house by James Seabolt.
Someone was missing, Tina
was nowhere to be found.
At only 12, no one suspected
that she could've committed
these heinous crimes.
But if she wants in the
house, lying in a pool
of her own blood like
her brother and mother,
and she wasn't huddled in the bedroom
with the younger boys, where was she?
The investigation.
The overwhelming brutality
of the murder scene
and the fact that they
were currently missing one
of the Sharp children
meant the Plumas Police had
their hands full.
The FBI initially intervened
but by the end of April,
they had reportedly backed
off the investigation,
having found no useful evidence
and having no leads on Tina.
Left alone, the local cops had a problem.
There was a glut of evidence
but nothing and no one to tie it to.
While Sheila and the Seabolts claimed
to hear nothing unusual that night,
another couple living at the
resort heard a muffled scream
around 1:30 in the morning.
They could not, however, be sure
where the scream was coming from
or if it even really had been a scream.
Surrounded by forest, the
scream could've easily been
a far-off animal call.
With almost nothing
missing from the cabin,
police determined quickly
that the murders had not been the result
of a robbery gone wrong.
There was a lot of evidence.
However, pointing to
a deliberate homicide,
first, someone had taken the
cabin's landline off its hook.
They had turned off all the lights
and carefully closed the drapes.
As far as investigators could tell,
there were no signs of forced entry.
Whoever killed Sue, John,
Dana, and taken Tina,
had not broken into the cabin.
Whether they were invited in
or whether they had gotten lucky
and simply found the door
unlocked was unclear.
The one piece of forensic
evidence that was collected
was a single fingerprint.
It was lifted from the handrail
of the cabin's back stairs.
The few things that were missing
from the cabin made sense.
Tina's jacket and shoes.
The strangest aspect
of this crime, however,
was the fact that however had
viciously murdered Sue, John
and Dana in the cabin's living room
had left Greg, Rick,
and Justin Smart alive
in the bedroom.
Why hadn't the scream that
the neighbor reportedly heard
also woke the three boys?
Had they really slept through the act
of murdering three
people on the other side
of their closed door.
That is exactly what the
boys initially told police.
They were sound asleep at the time.
Information continued to trickle
in over the next few days.
Justin's father, Martin Smart, told police
that a claw hammer was
missing from their home.
His wife, Marilyn, found
a jacket covered in blood
in their basement.
Identifying it as Tina's,
she turned it over to the police.
At least, that's what she claims happened.
The police have no official record
of either the jacket being reported
or it being delivered to them.
Neighbors told the cops about a green van
they'd seen at cabin 28
the night of the murders.
Others claim to have seen a brown Datsun.
No one could provide
a license plate number
or either vehicle.
The conflicting stories
and dearth of any actual useful
information left the cops
with few real theories
to pursue, except one.
Early suspects.
Martin Smart just kept calling
the Plumas Police Department.
According to the Encyclopedia
of Unsolved Crimes,
he provided the cops with endless clues.
By this time, California police officers
were familiar with the
idea that some murderers
just couldn't help but insert themselves
into the investigation of their own crimes
they basked in the attention.
Each time Martin called in
or flagged down an officer
to give them another detail
about the murders in cabin 28,
he was painting a target on his back.
Then, Justin changed his story
about sleeping through the murders.
First, he told investigators
that he thought he was dreaming
when he witnessed the murders.
He'd been sleepy and
didn't know what he saw.
Then, he changed his story again
and said that he actually witnessed
Sue, John, and Dana being murdered.
A third story emerged when
he underwent hypnosis.
He, Greg, and Rick had heard the murders
but they had been watching television
in their room.
When they went to see
what the strange noises
in the living room were,
Justin claimed they had
seen two men arguing
with Sue, John, and Dana.
One man, he said, had a
mustache and long hair.
The other, short hair.
Both wore glasses.
One carried a hammer.
As the argument heated up,
one of the men grabbed Tina
and dragged her out of the cabin.
With these descriptions in hand,
the police focused on Martin Smart
and John "Bo" Boubede.
Martin, who had PTSD,
met Bo at a VA hospital
not long before the Keddie cabin murders
and had invited him to
stay at their house.
The man with the mustache
could've been Martin.
The clean shaven man could've been Bo.
But police struggle to find a motive.
It was Martin who eventually provided it.
Martin told police
that Sue thought he was
abusive towards Marilyn.
Remember Martin's wife?
Sue, nearly single, and looking forward
to starting her new
life as a single mother,
had encouraged Marilyn
to ask for a divorce.
The cops filled in the rest.
He was furious that this women had moved
into their little resort in Keddie,
made friends with his
wife, and was telling her
to get a divorce.
There were reports of
him being short tempered,
including one very specific story
from the night of the murders.
Visitors of Keddie's
Back Door, the local bar,
told police that Martin
got into a yelling match
with the manager because
he didn't like the music
they were playing.
Others reported to police officers
that Martin had a deep-seated
hate for John Sharp.
Marilyn herself told officers
that she saw Martin burning something
in the weeks following the murders.
Ultimately, confusingly, neither
Martin nor Bo was arrested.
Rumors continued to swirl.
Some locals believed
that Dana had stolen LSD
from a drug dealer and
the murders were revenge.
Others thought the murderer had a satanic
or ritualistic undertone.
No one had any real
idea what had happened.
Finding Tina Sharp.
Three years later, almost to the day,
a man collecting bottles in Bute County
found parts of a human skull.
In 2013, when a new deputy was assigned
to the case, he found a
recording of a call made
to the Plumas Sheriff's Department
on the day the discovery
of the bones was announced
to the public.
The call claimed that they
knew the bones were Tina's.
It took two months but, in June of 1984,
the bones discovered nearly 100 miles
from the crime scene were confirmed
to be that of Tina Sharp.
The Keddie cabin murders were upgraded
to a quadruple homicide.
The coverup question.
What makes the Keddie cabin
murders so frightening
isn't just the setting.
It isn't just the fact that danger lurks
in even the most idyllic settings,
that horror is waiting around the corner,
even in the places where
we feel the safest.
It's that and the fact
that those with murder
in their blood can walk free
and not because they're
particularly clever
but because the police don't care
or are simply not smart
enough to catch them.
Even more frightening is the possibility
that they might actually be
working with the criminals,
helping them to evade detection.
The accusations of a coverup started
to crop up early in this case.
The police never arrested
Martin, for example,
because he passed a polygraph test.
Martin could be heard routinely bragging
about how easy it was to
beat a polygraph test.
Police on the scene
of the murder ignored
Justin's repeated attempts
to tell them that Tina was
missing from the cabin.
They wasted hours before finally realizing
that he was right and starting the search.
They failed to properly secure the cabin,
leaving them open to the possibility
that evidence was contaminated.
A leak in the ceiling of
the Sheriff's office ruined
a large portion of evidence
that was collected.
While there was no concept
of DNA testing at the time,
the evidence was collected.
The fact that so much of it
was either improperly secured
or flat-out ruined means that
there will never be a chance
to test that evidence.
When the case, now over 30 years cold,
was passed to a new set
of investigators in 2013,
they found not just one
box but a dozen boxes
of evidence that had never been reviewed,
much less properly investigated.
It was in one of these boxes
that the recording of the mysterious call
about Tina's body was found.
Did the police simply
not have the manpower
to follow those leads?
Did they not care to
or did they purposely
botch the investigation
to let the killer or killers go free?
Like so many cold cases,
the longer it sits in a box,
the harder it is to solve.
Evidence degrades, suspects
die, witnesses die,
important context is lost to time.
The prevailing theory is that Martin Smart
and Bo Boubede killed
Sue, John, Dana, and Tina.
Sue was the primary target.
The three kids were
simply collateral damage.
It would fit many of the facts we know,
that there was no forced entry,
that Martin's son was left alive
and that the murderer
clearly hated Sue Sharp.
The fact of the matter, however,
is that we just don't know for sure
and because Martin and Bo are dead,
we may never know.
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