James Kinne

Case background and investigation

On the evening of March 19, 1960, James Kinne, a 25-year-old engineer at Bendix Aviation, was found shot in the back of the head at the home he shared with his wife Sharon and their children in Independence, Missouri. He died on the way to the hospital. Sharon Kinne told police that the couple's two-and-a-half-year-old daughter had accidentally fired James's .22-caliber High Standard pistol while playing with it. Investigators found no fingerprints on the weapon and performed no gunshot residue testing; after officers confirmed that the child was capable of operating similar firearms, the death was initially ruled accidental.

The case was reopened only weeks later. On May 27, 1960, the body of Patricia Jones, a 23-year-old file clerk, was found in a secluded area outside Kansas City — discovered by Sharon Kinne herself, accompanied by a boyfriend. Patricia Jones was the wife of Walter Jones, a car salesman with whom Sharon had begun a relationship after James's death. When Sharon admitted she had been the last person known to have spoken with Patricia, she was charged with Jones's murder, and prosecutors also charged her with killing her husband. In June 1961, a jury acquitted Sharon Kinne of the Jones murder.

Tried separately for James Kinne's death, Sharon was convicted on January 11, 1962 and sentenced to life in prison. In March 1963 the Missouri Supreme Court reversed the conviction, citing improper jury selection, and she was released on a $25,000 bond. A 1964 retrial ended in a mistrial over juror bias, and a third trial that summer ended with a hung jury reported as leaning 7–5 toward acquittal. Before a fourth trial could begin, Sharon Kinne fled to Mexico in September 1964. There she was arrested after Francisco Paredes Ordoñez was shot dead in a Mexico City hotel room; Mexican authorities said ballistics tests linked the pistol she was carrying to the Patricia Jones killing in Missouri, though her earlier acquittal barred a new prosecution in that case. She was convicted of the Paredes murder in October 1965 and sentenced to 13 years.

On December 7, 1969, Sharon Kinne escaped from a prison in the Iztapalapa area of Mexico City and vanished. According to investigators, she married James Glabus in Los Angeles about two months later and, from 1973, lived quietly in Taber, Alberta, Canada under the name Diedra "Dee" Glabus, running a motel and later working in real estate. She died of natural causes on January 21, 2022. Following an anonymous tip in December 2023, Jackson County investigators obtained fingerprints preserved by a funeral home service and the FBI matched them to Sharon Kinne's 1960s arrest prints; the Kansas City Police Department and Jackson County Sheriff's Office announced the identification in January 2025.

Because Sharon Kinne's 1962 conviction was overturned and her retrials ended without a verdict, no one was ever finally convicted of James Kinne's murder, and she died without the Missouri charge being resolved. The identification of her remains closed the decades-long fugitive investigation, but James Kinne's homicide officially ended without a conviction.