On the evening of March 19, 1960, police in Independence, Missouri, received a frantic call from twenty-year-old Sharon Kinne. She said her husband had been shot while sleeping in their bedroom. When officers arrived at the house on East 26th Terrace, Sharon explained that she had been in the bathroom applying makeup when she heard a gunshot. She rushed into the bedroom and found her two-year-old daughter, Dana, on the bed beside her father, James, holding a .

22 caliber pistol that belonged to him. James Kinne had been shot in the back of the head, yet he was still showing signs of life. An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead on arrival. Police examined the weapon for fingerprints and found none, neither the child’s nor the mother’s.

Friends and relatives told investigators that James had been careless with his firearms and that Dana often played with them. Officers asked the toddler to pull the trigger of a toy gun to test her strength, and she could. Sharon appeared genuinely distraught, and her account seemed reasonable enough that police saw no need to test either mother or child for gunpowder residue. The case was closed as an accidental shooting.

Sharon Kinne loved guns as much as her late husband had. Police kept the murder weapon, but Sharon was eager to get it back. When she could not, she had a friend purchase another . 22 for her, insisting it be registered in someone else’s name.

James Kinne was buried on March 22, and the investigation was closed. Sharon collected $29,000 from her husband’s life insurance policies, roughly $320,000 in modern terms. Less than a month after the tragedy, on April 18, she bought a Ford Thunderbird convertible with cash. Sharon was also impressed by the car salesman, a former Marine named Walter T.

Jones Jr. Walter was married with two small children, but Sharon saw no obstacle. Walter was fascinated by the attractive young widow, and the two began a relationship almost immediately. Sharon decided Walter would be her next husband.

He complained that his marriage to Patricia, his wife since high school, had gone stale, but he had no intention of leaving her. Sharon was resentful, but she saw it as a temporary setback. When Walter refused her suggestion of a trip together, she decided to force his hand. Within days, she told him she was pregnant with his child.

She expected him to divorce Patricia and marry her. Instead, Walter was furious and ended the relationship on the spot. The next day, May 26, 1960, Patricia Jones did not come home from work. Walter called police to report her missing.

A co-worker told him Patricia had received a phone call from a woman asking to meet her in downtown Independence, and she had been dropped off at a street corner there. The description of the woman matched Sharon Kinne. Walter called Sharon and demanded to know if she had seen his wife. Sharon admitted she had spoken to Patricia on the phone at her office and told her that Walter was having an affair with her sister.

The two women agreed to meet that evening, and Sharon said she later dropped Patricia off near her home, adding that she saw Patricia talking to a man in a green 1957 Ford. Walter went to Sharon’s house later that night to demand more information. He threatened her, but she gave him nothing new. The next day, Sharon called an old friend and former lover, John Boldizs, and suggested they go to a place they used to visit for such occasions.

He agreed. While parked, Sharon noticed something on the ground and suggested John investigate. Hesitantly, he found the body of a woman in a black jacket and yellow skirt. Horrified, he told Sharon, who instructed him to call police without mentioning she was with him.

He did as told, and officers identified the corpse as Patricia Jones. An autopsy performed by Dr. Hugh Owens found Patricia had been shot four times with a . 22 caliber gun: once in the abdomen, twice in the shoulders, and a fatal shot through the mouth into the head.

Gunpowder residue indicated she was shot at close range. The estimated time of death was around 9:00 p. m. on May 26, the day she disappeared.

Dr. Owens complained that the body had been embalmed before he could examine it, which made many tests impossible, and he failed to check the stomach contents or recover all the bullets. Patricia was buried on May 31, and her body was exhumed in mid-June to correct these oversights. Investigators combed the area where the body was found and asked John Boldizs what he was doing in such a remote location.

He told them he was with Sharon Kinne. The woman who had discovered Patricia’s body was also the last person seen with her. It did not take long to learn that Sharon had also been involved with the dead woman’s husband. And investigators remembered that Sharon had reported her own husband’s death two months earlier, shot in the back of the head by their two-year-old daughter while he slept.

Alarm bells rang. Sharon, Walter, and John all gave statements. Walter and John submitted to polygraph tests that indicated they were truthful. Both admitted to sexual relationships with Sharon.

Sharon refused a lie detector test and seemed evasive. Her brother Eugene, who was close to her, also refused to cooperate. A search for the murder weapon, known to be a . 22, turned up nothing except a spent bullet casing in the dirt.

Investigators learned Sharon had secretly purchased a . 22 in early May. When questioned, she said she lost it on a trip to Washington with Eugene days before the murder. At 11:00 p.

m. on May 31, officers arrested Sharon Kinne for the murder of Patricia Jones. That same day, the Jackson County sheriff formally requested prosecutors consider a second murder charge against Sharon for the death of her husband. Sharon Kinne was born Sharon Elizabeth Hall on November 30, 1939, in Independence.

Her parents were devout members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. At sixteen, she met James Kinne, a twenty-two-year-old student at Brigham Young University. In the fall of 1956, she wrote to him claiming she was pregnant. James married her on October 18, 1956.

Sharon claimed she was eighteen and a widow whose husband died in a car crash; neither was true. James had to leave school and took a job as an engineer at Bendix Aviation. Sharon miscarried, then gave birth to Dana in 1957 and a son, Troy, in 1959. The marriage was unstable, and Sharon began affairs, including one with John Boldizs.

James discovered her activities and told his parents he intended to divorce her, the day before his death. Sharon’s trial was delayed because she was pregnant. She gave birth to a daughter in January 1961, and her trial began in June. She was tried separately for the two murders, starting with Patricia Jones’s case.

The prosecution argued Sharon’s motive was Walter’s refusal to leave his wife despite Sharon’s pregnancy. The main weakness was that the murder weapon was never found. Sharon claimed the gun she had purchased was lost. The defense argued the bullets test-fired by the seller did not match those that killed Patricia and that Sharon had voluntarily admitted to meeting Patricia.

Sharon did not testify. The all-male jury deliberated for only ninety minutes and returned a verdict of not guilty. One juror, Ogden Stevens, asked for her autograph, and she obliged. Sharon still faced trial for killing her husband.

That trial began in January 1962, and the state announced it would seek the death penalty. The prosecution argued the marriage had collapsed due to Sharon’s infidelity, James was about to file for divorce, and his life insurance would only pay Sharon if she remained his wife at his death. John Boldizs testified Sharon once offered him $1,000 to kill James. Under cross-examination, he admitted it might have been a joke.

The defense pointed to the original police finding of accidental death. After five and a half hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Sharon of first-degree murder and sentenced her to life in prison. An appeal was rejected in April 1962, but the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the conviction and ordered a new trial. Sharon was released on bail in July 1963.

A second trial in March 1964 ended in a mistrial when a connection was discovered between a prosecutor’s office employee and a juror. A third trial in June 1964 ended with a hung jury. A fourth trial was scheduled for October 1964 but never happened. On September 18, 1964, Sharon crossed the border into Mexico with a new boyfriend, Francis Samuel Pugliese, posing as his wife.

They brought guns with them and checked into a hotel in Mexico City. That night, Sharon went out alone, armed. She met a man named Francisco Paredes Ordoñez in a bar and accompanied him to his room at a nearby hotel. Around 3:00 a.

m. , according to her account, he sexually assaulted her, forcing her to draw her gun and shoot him in self-defense. The gunfire drew a hotel employee, Enrique Martinez Rueda, who rushed into the room. Sharon shot him in the shoulder.

He fled and managed to trap her inside before calling police. Officers found 50 bullets in her bag and two more guns in her hotel room. Sharon claimed she went out to buy medicine and was carrying the gun for protection. She said Ordoñez seemed respectable and offered to show her photographs, then attacked her.

Mexican police believed she had lured him to his room to rob him. Sharon was convicted of murder and sentenced to ten years. Her appeal failed, and the sentence was increased to thirteen years for being too lenient. A stunning discovery emerged from the Mexican arrest.

One of the guns found in her hotel room was identified as the . 22 she had purchased in May 1960, the one she claimed she had lost in Washington. It was the murder weapon that killed Patricia Jones, the crucial piece of evidence missing at trial. But because Sharon had been acquitted, double jeopardy prevented her from being tried again, no matter how damning the evidence.

She had gotten away with Patricia’s murder. Sharon gained the nickname La Pistolera, the Armed Woman. She was sent to a women’s prison in Mexico City. On December 7, 1969, she failed to appear for an evening roll call.

A second absence was reported, and authorities discovered Sharon had escaped. She was never found. It was suspected she had inside help, possibly bribery, and likely assistance from her brother Eugene. The case went cold.

The escape coincided with a power outage, and no one ever learned how she got out. The case faded into memory for more than fifty years. In December 2023, an anonymous caller told the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office that Sharon Kinne, wanted for over half a century, had lived in Taber, Alberta, Canada, under the name Deidre Gillabert and had died. Canadian authorities confirmed the woman had died and was buried in January 2022.

She had no criminal record and no fingerprints on file. But the funeral home that handled her burial had a practice of taking fingerprints of the deceased for family members. Those prints were compared to Sharon Kinne’s on file with the FBI. On January 26, 2025, the results were announced: the fingerprints belonged to Sharon Kinne without question.

DNA testing confirmed it. Within weeks of her escape, Sharon had married James Thomas Claybass, a Canadian citizen, in Los Angeles, using forged documents. They moved to Taber in 1973 and ran a lodge and later a real estate agency. Sharon was not particularly careful about keeping a low profile.

She appeared in local newspapers, chaired committees, played bridge, and volunteered in the community. James Claybass died in 1979 at age thirty-eight. Sharon remarried in 1982 to a man named William. He died in 2011 at age seventy-nine.

Her son from her second marriage knew nothing of his mother’s past. Sharon suffered from coronary artery disease and Alzheimer’s disease as she aged. She died on January 21, 2022, at age eighty-two, under the assumed name Deidre Grace Claybass. She was buried in Taber Memorial Gardens under that name.

Sharon Kinne killed three people. Her husband James was murdered for his life insurance. Patricia Jones was killed because she stood between Sharon and Walter, the man Sharon had chosen to be her next husband. Francisco Ordoñez was killed when her plan to rob him went wrong.

She showed no remorse at any point, describing guards as afraid of her and expressing no regret. She was intelligent, manipulative, and utterly lacking in empathy, driven by her own needs regardless of the cost to others. She also possessed an extraordinary run of luck. Law enforcement failures and legal missteps allowed her to escape justice time and again.

Her surviving children released a statement after her identity was revealed, welcoming the end of the story and condemning the harm she caused and her lack of remorse. The person who called authorities with the tip that exposed her identity remains unknown, though it seems likely to have been a family member. After sixty years, Sharon Kinne, who had escaped three murder convictions and vanished from the world, was finally identified, dead and buried under a false name in a small Canadian town.