Sue Sharp came to California seeking escape. In July 1979, she left Connecticut with her five children after separating from her husband James. Born Glenna Susan Davis in Springfield, Massachusetts, she had hoped the West would offer a new beginning. After a brief stay in a small trailer at the Claremont Trailer Village in Quincy, she moved her family to house number 28 at the Keddie Resort the following fall. The larger cabin had just been vacated by Plumas County's sheriff, Sylvester Douglas Thomas. Sue settled in with her fifteen-year-old son John and her two younger boys, Rick and Greg. Her daughters Sheila and Tina completed the household. The rural Sierra Nevada community seemed far removed from whatever troubles had driven them west. That sense of safety proved illusory.

April 11, 1981 unfolded like any ordinary Saturday. Sue, Sheila, and Greg visited friends, the Meeks family, before picking up Rick from baseball tryouts at Gansner Field in Quincy. John and his friend Dana Wingate, seventeen years old, were at the cabin. Sheila spent that night at the neighboring Seabolt home while Rick, Greg, and their friend Justin Smartt slept in a back bedroom of cabin 28. Sometime during the night, a couple in nearby house 16 awoke at 1:15 a.m. to what sounded like muffled screaming. By morning, Sue, John, and Dana lay dead in the living room, bound with medical tape and electrical cords. Blood spatter evidence showed all three had been killed there. Tina, just twelve years old, had vanished without a trace. The three boys in the back bedroom were unharmed, apparently having slept through the violence.

The FBI investigated Tina's disappearance as a possible abduction. For three years, her fate remained unknown. Then, on April 11, 1984, the exact third anniversary of the murders, a bottle collector made a grim discovery at Camp 18, a remote location near Feather Falls in Butte County, roughly 62 miles from Keddie. Among the detritus of the forest floor lay the cranium portion of a human skull and part of a mandible. Forensic analysis confirmed the remains as Tina's in June 1984. Plumas County Sheriff Greg Hagwood, who was sixteen years old at the time of the murders and knew the Sharp family personally, later stated that the location where Tina's remains were found was no accident. The remote spot, intentionally chosen, suggested her killer knew the area well.

Martin Smartt, Justin's stepfather and a neighbor, emerged as the primary suspect. He reported that a claw hammer had inexplicably gone missing from his home around the time of the murders. Investigators released composite sketches of two men seen in the area: one in his late twenties to early thirties, standing between five-foot-ten and six feet tall with dark-blonde hair; the other shorter, with black, greased hair. Both wore gold-framed sunglasses. Despite having access to the Justice Department's and FBI's top forensic artists, law enforcement used an amateur volunteer to create the sketches, a decision that puzzled observers. The investigation stalled, hampered by jurisdictional issues and the passage of time. Smartt died in 2000, taking whatever he knew to his grave.

The case refused to die. In 2016, investigators announced the discovery of a hammer in a pond, along with new DNA evidence that offered fresh hope for resolution. Sheriff Hagwood revealed that six potential suspects were being examined. The new evidence linked at least one living suspect to the grisly scene. Sheila Sharp, now in her fifties, continued her decades-long fight for justice, speaking to media and keeping pressure on investigators. The cabin itself is gone, demolished years ago, but its memory lingers in the Sierra Nevada pines. House number 28 at the Keddie Resort stands as shorthand for unsolved violence, a reminder that some mysteries endure across generations. Somewhere in those mountains, the truth of what happened on the night of April 11, 1981, waits to be uncovered.