A woman who escaped from a Mexican prison in 1969 and was wanted by American law enforcement was found decades later, laid to rest in Taber.
On Thursday, the Jackson County Sherriff’s office announced that after receiving a tip in December 2023 they started an investigation that led to confirming the woman who for years was known as Deidra Glabus in Taber real name was Sharon Kinne, a Missouri woman who was wanted for three murders, including that of her first husband James Kinne in 1960.
According to a statement from the Taber Police Service, early last year the department was contacted by an investigator from the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office in Lee’s Summit, Missouri. The investigator told Taber officials they had received a confidential tip that Glabus, who had recently passed away of natural causes in Taber, was a woman who was wanted for murder. Taber officers got to work getting background information from those who had known Glabus and shared that information with the Jackson County department.
The statement from Taber police reads, “During this process, it was discovered that a fingerprint had been obtained by a funeral home for their own records. However, under Canadian law, there was no legal avenue for the Taber Police Service to obtain that fingerprint through judicial authorization.”
Police say her fingerprint was electronically stored by a private company based out of Jackson County, Missouri.
“In an unexpected turn, investigators realized that the evidence required to confirm the fugitive’s identity originally collected in Taber, Alberta was being held in the same jurisdiction that had issued the arrest warrants decades earlier.”
Jackson County law enforcement got ahold of the fingerprint and sent it to the FBI for confirmation, which did come back as a match. During the Thursday press conference, prosecutors announced all pending charges against Kinne have been dropped.
During the press conference, Sergeant Dustin Love broke down the timeline of Kinne’s crimes. Love says in March of 1960, sheriffs were called to Kinne’s home after she was said to have found her husband James Kinne shot in the back of the head in the couple’s bedroom.
“She claimed that their two-and-a-half-year-old daughter had been playing with a firearm and accidentally shot her father in the back of her back of his head uh he later died en route to a local hospital,” Love says.
In May of the same year, a woman named Patricia Jones was reported missing by her husband Walter Jones. Love says police later found out Jones and Kinne were in a relationship, that Jones ended after Kinne asked him to end things with his wife because she claimed she was pregnant.
“Sharon then duped Patricia Jones into meeting with her and that was the last time Patricia Jones was seen alive.”
Love says Kinne took part in a large-scale search for the missing woman and ended up being the one who found her with one other person, who reported Kinne acting surprised to have found the body. Jones was shot four times with a .22 pistol. Later that year Kinne was arrested for the murder of both Jones and her husband, even though no weapons was found for the Jones murder.
Kinne was found not guilty of Jones’s murder in June of 1961, but in January of 1962 was convicted for the murder of her husband and sentenced to life in prison. The following year the conviction was appealed at the Missouri Supreme Court. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction and called for a new trial. Kinne was released on bond pending the new trial when Love says she fled to Mexico, where in 1964 she shot and killed a man in a Mexico City hotel room.
“Mexico City [police] took Sharon back to her hotel room, they searched the hotel room and found a high standard .22 pistol, that pistol was later compared by [the Kansas City Police Department] ballistics experts and it was found to be the murder weapon for the Patricia Jones murder,” Love says. “She was sentenced to 13 years in a Mexico prison.”
Love says after she escaped the prison in Mexico she was never to be seen again. Annalysts in the US say information they found on Kinne was minimal between 1969 and 1979 outside of her marriage to her second husband in Los Angeles, California.
According to her second husband’s obituary, the two moved to Taber in 1973 where they started a Century 21 real estate agency and owned a motel. Her second husband passed away in 1979 while in his late 30s and three years later Kinne married her third husband who passed away in 2011.
Members of Kinne’s family issued a statement which reads, “We would like to state how happy we are that this chapter in our family history can be closed. Hopefully, this closure will allow the family a chance to heal from her traumatic legacy.”
Family members have requested to remain anonymous and asked for privacy.
