Strangers

Content below is from #180 of the Who’d a Thunk It? Podcast

RECOMMENDATION SEGMENT

• This week I recommend you watch The Strangers!
  • It ties directly into today’s main event so let’s get right into it.

NOW FOR THE MAIN EVENT

• In 2008 a movie was released that looked pretty darn creepy based on the trailer. It was called The Strangers.
  • Google’s description:
    • Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman) are expecting a relaxing weekend at a family vacation home, but their stay turns out to be anything but peaceful. First, a mysterious and dangerous woman arrives at the door while James is out on an errand. When he returns, he accidentally kills his friend Mike (Glenn Howerton), mistaking him for an intruder. And then real danger does show up — in the form of three masked torturers, leaving Kristen and James struggling for survival.

The Strangers – 2008

• It was directed by Bryan Bertino. It made about $82 million at the box office. It is currently sitting at around 50% on rotten tomatoes (so not universally loved).
  • Now, over a decade later most people probably forgot about the movie. It was … OK. Nothing amazing.
  • The coolest/scariest part was in the trailer when one of the victims asks the cliche question “Why are you doing this to us?!” and the intruder answers with a disturbingly calm voice: “because you were home.”
  • That’s the best part, that and their masks are super plain in a freaky way. The trailer and movie poster were probably the best parts about this film… so why make an episode about it?
  • Same reason I did one on the Blob from last week’s episode… it’s based on real events!

HeadStuff.org summarizes:

Director Bryan Bertino’s main inspirations for the story are the Manson murders and the unsolved quadruple homicide case known as the Keddie Cabin Murders. In 1981 at a resort town in the Sierra Nevada foothills, an entire family were stabbed, strangled, and bludgeoned to death in the middle of the night with no witnesses or any suspects. Nobody has ever been arrested for the murders. 

• Skipping over the Manson murders because that stuff has been covered ad nauseam by books, articles, movies, etc. … I thought it would be cool to look into the Keddie Cabin Murders.
  • It was April 11th and 12th of 1981 when 4 people were tortured and killed in a resort town Keddie California. The crime was never solved.

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeCabin 28 at Keddie Resort, 1981. The former Sharp home was condemned and demolished in 2004

• Fourteen-year-old Sheila Sharp was coming back to Cabin 28 in Keddie Resorts California on April 12th, 1981. She had spent the night at a neighbor’s house.
  • When she stepped into the little 4-room cabin she walked into a horror scene that would come to be known as the Keddie Murders.
  • Bodies lay everywhere. Her mom Glenna “Sue” Sharp, brother John, and John’s high school girlfriend Dana Wingate.
  • The three had been tied up with tape, stabbed, beaten, and strangled.
  • There was someone missing though… Sheila’s 12-year-old sister Tina Sharp wasn’t at the cabin. She was missing.
  • Weirdest part, one of the bedrooms had little Rickey and Greg sharp, as well as their friend and neighbor, 12-year-old Justin Smartt inside. The three boys had slept through the night and were unharmed. They supposedly woke up on April 12th with no knowledge of the carnage that occurred just a few feet away on the other side of the cabin wall.

The Keddie Cabin Murders

Plumas County Sheriff’s Department – back view of cabin 28 where the family had lived for a year.

• This family, the Sharp family had just recently moved to cabin #28 a year prior.
  • Sue, the mom, had just had a divorce and brought her kids from Connecticut to Keddie in north Calfornia.
  • There were 6 of them
    • 36-year-old Sue,
    • her 15-year-old son John,
    • 14-year-old daughter Sheila,
    • 12-year-old daughter Tina,
    • and 10-year-old Rick
    • and 5-year-old Greg
  • April 11th, Sheila stayed over at a friend’s/neighbor’s house.
  • John and his 17-year old girlfriend hitchhiked (yes, hitchhiking was still a thing) to a party, but came back later in the night.
  • Tina went with Sheila to the neighbor’s house, but returned home to cabin #28
  • Rick, Greg, and their buddy Justin Smartt slept in Cabin #28 that night. They were the ones unharmed.

• When sheila saw most of her family butchered she went back to the neighbors in a panic. The Neighbor’s dad got the three young boys out of the bedroom window so they wouldn’t see the carnage.
• The cops were called. Deputy Hank Klement (very small-town cop kinda name) was the first to arrive. His report said he saw “blood everywhere.” it was on the walls, the bottoms of the victim’s shoes, Sue’s bare feet, the bedding in Tina’s room, the furniture, the ceiling, the doors, and on the back steps
  • This amount of blood lead the cops to think the bodies had been moved multiple times

Plumas County Sheriff’s Department – The Keddie family about four years before the murders.

AllThatsInteresting.com describes:

Young John was closest to the front door, face-up, his hands blood-covered and bound with medical tape. His throat had been slit. His friend Dana was on the floor beside him on his stomach. His head was badly damaged as though bashed in with a blunt object and lay partially on a pillow. He had been manually strangled. His ankles were tied with electrical wire which was wound also around John’s ankles so that the two were connected.

Sheila’s mother had been covered partially with a blanket though that had done little to hide her gruesome injuries. On her side, the mother of five was naked from the waist down, tightly gagged with a bandana and her own underwear secured with medical tape. She had injuries consistent with a struggle and had an imprint of the butt of an .880 pellet gun on the side of her head. Like her son, her throat had been cut.

All victims had suffered blunt-force trauma by hammer or hammers. They also all sustained multiple stab wounds. A bent steak knife was on the floor. A butcher knife and claw hammer, both also bloodied, were side-by-side on a small wooden table near the entry into the kitchen.

• It would be hours until they realized a potential 4th victim was missing, Tina. When they did realize, the FBI was called in.
  • Lt. Don Stoy said “The strangest thing is that there is no apparent motive. Any case without an apparent motive is the toughest to solve,” Stoy recalled to the Sacramento Bee in 1987.
  • There was no sign of forced entry. Only one unknown fingerprint was found on the back stairs. the phone was left off the hook. The lights were off and the drapes closed.
  • The weirdest detail to me is that the 3 boys (3 survivors) didn’t hear anything at all. Even though a neighbor reported muffled screams woke them up at 130AM.
  • It later came out that although Rickey and Greg always maintained they saw and heard nothing… their buddy Justin Smartt saw Sue with two adult men… and one of them had a hammer.
    • One reportedly had a mustache and long hair and the other was clean-shaven with short hair but both in glasses.

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeComposite sketch of the Keddie murder suspects.

• Justin started to become a wealth of knowledge… the only person who saw anything. he said that John and Dana entered the home and argued with the men which resulted in a violent fight. Tina was then was taken out the cabin’s back door by one of the men.
• This was pre-DNA testing so most evidence taken was virtually useless.
• The cops did have two suspects before too long. It was Justin Smartt’s dad/the neighbor Martin Smatt and his friend who was staying at Smartt’s house that night John Bo Boudebe.
  • That would explain why the boys were left unharmed…
  • And Martin’s house guest Bo was an ex-con. He was known to have connections to organized crime in the area. Both men had been seen in suits and ties behaving oddly in the bar the night before.
• A LOT of evidence points to Martin and Bo as the killers…
  • For a long time it was believed that was the end of it. Cops did a bad job and two guys got away who committed horrible murders… but in the past decade a lot of other theories… conspiracy theories have arisen from this case.
  • Turns out Martin Smartt admitted to the cops that he had a hammer that matched the one discovered and also his hammer was now coincidentally missing just before the murders…
  • Later in the year, a knife was found in a trash can near the Keddie convenience store and it was believed to be part of the murders.
  • So much evidence was found in this case and two VERY likely suspects… why was this never closed?
• The 4th and final victim Tina was found 3 years later about 30 miles away from Cabin #28. Her skull was found by a guy in neighboring Butte County.
  • The cops found a child’s blanket, a pair of jeans (missing a back pocket), a blue jacket, and an empty surgical tape container… the same kind of tape found on the scene at Cabin #28.
  • Tina’s body being found made the Keddie Murders a quadruple homicide case.
  • Not to mention, the local head honcho overseeing the Keddie Murders Sheriff Thomas resigned just 3 short months into the case. Looking back, Law enforcement saw a LOT of holes in Sheriff Thomas’s investigation almost like he intentionally threw the case.
  • “I was told the suspects were told to get out of town, so to me, that means it was covered up,” Sheila Sharp told CBS Sacramento in 2016.
• The rest of the episode will mainly be read from AllThatsInteresting.com‘s take on these murders… written in Fall of 2021:

Remarkably, the tape of the anonymous tip regarding Tina was found sealed in case files, untouched by Plumas County Sheriff’s Dept. until 2013 when the case was reopened with new investigators Plumas Sheriff Greg Hagwood and Special Investigator Mike Gamberg.

In 2016, Gamberg located a hammer believed to be one of the murder weapons in a dried-up pond in Keddie.

Further, it came to light that Marilyn Smartt, Marty’s wife and mother of Justin, had left her husband on the day of the murder discovery. Afterward, she provided Plumas Country Sheriff’s Dept. with a handwritten letter sent to her and signed by her estranged husband. It read: “I’ve paid the price of your love & now that I’ve bought it with four people’s lives, you tell me we are through. Great! What else do you want?”

This letter was not treated as a confession nor was it followed up on at the time. Even though Marilyn admitted in a 2008 documentary that she thought her husband his friend Bo was responsible, Sheriff Doug Thomas contradicted this and stated that Martin had successfully passed a polygraph test. It was later confirmed that Martin was close with this Sheriff.

In 2016, Gamberg met with a counselor at the Reno Veteran’s Administration. The anonymous counselor told him that in May 1981, Martin Smartt had confessed to killing Sue and Tina Sharp. “I killed the woman and her daughter, but I didn’t have anything to do with the [boys],” he purportedly told the counselor. When the DOJ was alerted to this confession in 1981, they dismissed it as “hearsay.”

The Keddie Murders Revisited

Plumas County Sheriff’s OfficeProbable murder weapons for the Keddie slaying discovered and submitted as evidence in 2016. Between them lies the forgotten tape of the anonymous phone tip left in 1984, rediscovered in 2013.

The most widely accepted theory involves a love triangle between Martin, Marilyn, and Sue.

It was believed that Martin and Sue were having an affair and that Sue was supposedly counseling Marilyn to leave her husband, who she had said was abusive to her. When Martin discovered this, he enlisted Bo, his friend, and known mob enforcer who had lived with the Smartt’s a mere 10 days before the Keddie murders, to take Sue out of the picture.

This would account for Marilyn leaving her husband the day of the murder discovery. It would also explain why the Smartt boy and the other Sharp boys in the adjoining room were spared. Additionally, it gives context to Martin’s handwritten note that Marilyn gave to the Plumas Sheriff’s Dept.

Some investigators who picked up the case when it reopened in 2013 tie the slayings into an even larger plot. To Gamberg, it is clear that the DOJ and Thomas-run Sherriff’s Dept. “covered it up, is the way it sounds.” He alleges that Bo and Martin fit into a larger drug-smuggling scheme that involved the federal government.

Martin was a known drug dealer and Bo was connected to Chicago crime syndicates with financial interests in drug distribution.

This might explain why the Sacramento DOJ sent two allegedly corrupt organized crime special agents instead of agents from the homicide department. It also provides an explanation as to why the two lead suspects were seemingly given a free pass and told to leave town by Sheriff Thomas.

Furthermore, it suggests an answer as to why this case was handled so sloppily, remains unsolved, and is seemingly not a priority to the Sacramento DOJ.

What is known is that this 37-year-old crime is far from a cold case, as new evidence sheds light on what may have occurred at Cabin 28 in Keddie, California.

Although both Martin Smartt and Bo Boudebe are now deceased, new DNA evidence has pointed investigators to other suspects who may have had a hand in these murders, and who are still alive.

“It’s my belief that there were more than two people who were involved in the totality of the crime–the disposal of the evidence and the abduction of the little girl,” Hagwood said. “We’re convinced that there are a handful of people that fit those roles who are still alive.”

• Cabin #28, the home where at least 3 members of the Sharp family were murdered (possibly Tina as well) was demolished in 2004.

CREDIT:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keddie_murders
• https://headstuff.org/entertainment/film/7-horror-movies-you-didnt-know-were-based-on-true-stories/#:~:text=The%20Hills%20Have%20Eyes%20%E2%80%93%201977&text=This%20is%20a%20modern%20take,people%20in%20the%20Scottish%20Highlands.
• https://allthatsinteresting.com/keddie-cabin-murders