Fifty-five years after Missouri murderer Sharon Kinne escaped from a Mexican prison, American authorities confirm the fugitive hid for decades in a small Alberta town.
On Thursday, Jackson County Sheriffs confirmed that Kinne, who was linked to three murders in two countries, had been hiding out three hours south of Calgary, in the town of Taber, for 49 years until her death in 2022 at the age of 81.
Kinne had been living under the name Diedra (Dee) Glabus in the sleepy prairie town of about 9,000 residents, best known for its corn crop.
It’s unclear if anyone in the town knew she was a fugitive, on the run from both Mexican and Missouri police. Or if they just knew Glabus as a bridge-playing local realtor and volunteer.
Tip came from Albertan
Capt. Ronda Montgomery with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office told reporters at a Kansas City news conference on Thursday that police received an anonymous tip in December 2023 from someone in Alberta.
The “courageous” tipster told police that Kinne had been living in Alberta under the name Diedra Glabus, said Montgomery.
Police then subpoenaed the funeral home in Taber. In Canada, in certain circumstances, people can be fingerprinted after they die.
Investigators finally had the answers that had evaded them for decades.
‘La Pistolera’
The recently deceased 81-year-old was, indeed, the fugitive who had disappeared in 1969 in the middle of serving a sentence for a murder in Mexico and while wanted in the 1960 slaying of her husband, who was fatally shot in his bed.
While Kinne’s final conviction count for murder stands at just one, it is widely believed she killed two others.
The fatal shootings took place between 1960 and 1964 and stretched from Independence, a satellite city of Kansas City, to Mexico City, where the press gave her a nickname — “La Pistolera,” the female gunslinger.
In 1964, Kinne was a month away from a retrial for the 1960 murder of her husband when she skipped town, heading south to Mexico, where, within a matter of days, she killed a man in the course of a robbery.
And although three years earlier she had been acquitted by a Missouri jury in the death of Patricia Jones, the wife of her lover, police discovered the murder weapon used to kill Jones in Kinne’s Mexico City hotel room.
Back in Jackson County, investigators had their own nickname for Kinne.
Col. William Morton called her the Pistol Packin’ Mama.
Morton died in 2011, but in the 1990s he and two other officers who were involved in the Kinne investigation did an interview on a Kansas City talk radio station, KCMO, with host Mike Murphy.
Morton was first on the scene when Kinne called for police after her husband was shot in the head.
“She said she was in the bathroom getting ready for dinner and she heard her daughter say ‘Daddy, how’s this thing work?’ Then she heard a shot and she said she ran in the bedroom and discovered her husband,” Morton told Murphy.
“She said that the little daughter had shot him, two and a half years.… We bought it at that time.”
Taber Motel owner
Col. Morton’s grandson, Ryan St. Louis, said his grandfather “would be flabbergasted” to learn Kinne had managed to evade authorities in a small Canadian town.
“For somebody to be able to escape basically prison here, then escape prison in Mexico and be able to live a full life, I don’t know if that’s ever happened anywhere,” said St. Louis from his Kansas City home.
“To be wanted for murder in two different countries and be able to hide in a third country — crazy.”
For the last half of her life, Kinne lived as Dee Glabus, a realtor and volunteer in town.
According to the obituary for her husband Jim Glabus, the couple moved to town in 1973 and owned the Taber Motel before working together as realtors.
Glabus was quoted in the Lethbridge Herald in her role as the chair of Taber’s daycare centre steering committee.
While living in Alberta, she had two husbands, who both died.
Archival newspaper clippings show that in 1979, husband Jim Glabus died in Taber at the age of 38.
Jim had a history of alcoholism and diabetes, according to the findings of a fatality inquiry, and was drinking the night he died.
Husband dead at 38
According to evidence presented to a judge, Dee tried to get her husband admitted to hospital but was unable due to a shortage of beds.
The judge found Jim died of “asphyxiation from inhalation of gastric juices as a result of being in a diabetic coma.”
In 1982, Glabus married Willie Ell.
Ell died in 2011 at the age of 79.
Kinne had children in at least two of her marriages, although details are sparse.
Much more is known about the first half of Kinne’s life than the latter part as so many of her early activities wound up on the front pages of newspapers, the subject of books and even on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries.
Her early life and crimes are extensively detailed online, in Kansas City Public Library archives, in newspaper clippings, and from the accounts of Morton and two other detectives who were interviewed on KCMO.
Kinne first appeared on the police radar in 1960, at the age of 20, when her husband James Kinne was fatally shot while lying in bed.
When police arrived, Sharon Kinne blamed her two-year-old daughter. Initially, detectives believed her.
Shortly after the death, Kinne used some of her husband’s life insurance money to buy a new Ford Thunderbird convertible, according to the detectives, and then promptly began an affair with the car salesman, Walter Jones.
But Walter refused to leave his wife, Patricia Jones, for Kinne.
Three months after James Kinne’s death, the body of Patricia Jones was discovered — by Sharon Kinne — just outside Independence, Mo.
That’s when police charged Kinne with both murders.
Mexico murder
She went on trial for the Jones murder first and was acquitted by jurors.
Next was her trial in her husband’s death. She was found guilty, but the conviction was overturned because of problems with the jury.
Two more trials took place with both resulting in mistrials.
A fourth was scheduled for October 1964. At the time, Kinne was out on bail.
One month before that trial was set to begin, Kinne and her new beau travelled to Mexico City.
There, she shot Francisco Paredes Ordoñez while attempting to rob him. When a hotel employee came running after the sound of gunshots, Kinne shot him, too. The employee survived.
Double jeopardy
When police searched Kinne’s hotel room, investigators found another gun. Mexican police allowed the Kansas City cops to run ballistics tests on the weapon.
Investigators concluded it was the same gun used to murder Patricia Jones, said Sgt. Dustin Love, with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office, on Thursday.
Double jeopardy laws meant Kinne could not be charged again, despite the new, damning evidence.
Kinne was convicted of Paredes Ordoñez’s murder one month after the shooting.
In 1969, five years into her 13-year sentence, Kinne escaped from prison.
‘Someone had that tip’
Mexican authorities conducted a countrywide manhunt, but Kinne continued to evade police until the anonymous tip led Missouri police to southern Alberta.
Sgt. Love said it’s “unfortunate” the case was solved only after Kinne’s death.
“She was really good at what she did. She hid really well,” said Love.
“Someone had that tip and was not willing to release it until after her death.”
Police say that, while the case is officially closed, they’re still interested in hearing from anyone who can fill in the details of Kinne’s life after 1969.
In a brief statement read aloud at the news conference, the Kinne family referred to their “traumatic legacy” and expressed gratitude that “this chapter in our family history can be closed.”
“Sharon never faced consequences for her actions.”
