Where is she? Mom accused of killing husband and lover’s wife is a Kansas City mystery

If you’re familiar with the sordid saga of Sharon Kinne, you almost certainly wonder whether she is still alive and, if so, where she is.

If not, here’s a quick recap:

Before turning 25, she was accused of shooting her husband to death, then of shooting and killing her lover’s pregnant wife; gave birth to a child by that lover; stood trial for murder four times in those two homicide cases, resulting in an acquittal, an overturned conviction, a mistrial and a hung jury; hightailed it to Mexico before a fifth trial could start; and then shot and killed a man in Mexico. After finally being convicted of murder, she escaped from a Mexican prison, never to be heard from again.

Not exactly your typical 1960s Kansas City area housewife and mother.

Charles Ballew of Kansas City remembers reading about Kinne’s crimes six decades ago and submitted a question to “What’s Your KCQ?,” The Star’s ongoing series with the Kansas City Public Library that answers readers’ queries about our region:

“How about reviewing the Sharon Kinne crime stories? … It’s a very interesting story, about which many younger Kansas Citians probably know nothing.”

Ballew procured a bit of inside knowledge through a friendship with one of her lawyers, Henry Fox. He suspected Fox, who went on to serve as a Jackson Country prosecutor and judge, knew what became of Kinne after her Mexican jail break, but Ballew never pressed him for details. Fox died in 1982.

Most of the other key figures in the Sharon Kinne drama also are dead, but there remains an expert on one of the most notorious killers in the annals of Kansas City crime.

James C. Hays, whose interest in this sordid tale dates to when he was in grammar school, wrote “‘I’m Just an Ordinary Girl’: The Sharon Kinne Story” in 1997, drawing his book’s title from how Kinne once described herself. At that time, there had been no new developments in Kinne’s story in more than 25 years. Same for the 25 years since the book published.

“And if I do get something that I think is new,” the Oak Grove resident said, “I always go to the Independence police department and pass it along, although I think it’s more of, ‘Oh, here comes that crazy writer again.’”

Hays said a woman who had read the book, originally published by Leathers Publishing and now available only as an e-book, contacted him a few years ago. She claimed she had run into Kinne 10 or 15 years earlier at a 7-Eleven in Independence.

Rumors also run rampant on the internet, where the recent explosion of true crime podcasts (True Crime Squad, Our True Crime Podcast), blogs (Alyssa Lee Clear) and YouTube channels (How Strange) has resurrected the Sharon Kinne story.

After being largely forgotten for decades, Kinne has become something of the Tony Bennett of the serial-killer set, getting discovered by a whole new generation.

The podcasts and blogs all tell pretty much the same story, regurgitating information from previous accounts — including Hays’ book, which also was largely the basis for TV stories about Kinne on “Unsolved Mysteries,” Discovery I.D.’s “Deadly Women” and elsewhere.

“I had to go to Bellingham, Washington; I went to Atlanta, Georgia; I went to Texas, because that’s where the story took me,” Hays said. “And everything was done by shoe leather.

“And now you can’t sling a cyber cat without hitting a story on Sharon Kinne on the internet.”

The tale

Perhaps a more detailed summary is in order at this point.

Sharon Kinne (born Sharon Elizabeth Hall on Nov. 30, 1939) attended William Chrisman High School in Independence before marrying James Kinne in 1956 and giving birth to two children by the age of 20. On March 19, 1960, James was killed in their Independence home and Sharon told police their 2½-year-old daughter probably shot him accidentally.

Police believed her and filed no charges, until …

A few months later, Patricia Jones was found shot to death. She happened to be the pregnant wife of the new widow’s new boyfriend, used car salesman Walter Jones. Kinne promptly was charged with both murders.

Kinne gave birth to Walter Jones’ daughter, Marla Christine, on Jan. 16, 1961, before going on trial for the murder of Jones’ wife. The new widower and two other men testified that they had engaged in affairs with Kinne. Still, an all-male jury acquitted her on June 22, 1961, and the courtroom erupted into applause.

In 1962, Kinne was convicted of killing James Kinne and sentenced to life in prison, but the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the verdict because of improper jury selection.

While awaiting the appeal, she had spent 18 months in the Jackson County Jail and the state women’s prison in Tipton, where she became known for having female lovers. One of them, Margaret Hopkins, her cellmate at the Jackson County Jail, claimed Kinne had confessed to both murders and provided the prosecution with damning letters she said Kinne had written to her.

None of it was enough for a conviction. Kinne’s first retrial in March 1964 ended in a mistrial, and another retrial a few months later ended with a hung jury.

Free on $25,000 bail, Kinne took off for Mexico in September 1964 with a new friend, Samuel Francis Puglise. A few days after arriving in Mexico City, she shot and killed Francisco Paredes Ordonez in a motel and wounded a night clerk. Captured with the murder weapon in her hand, she claimed self-defense. Among her belongings, Mexican police found the .22-caliber pistol that had been used to kill Patricia Jones.

A Mexican court convicted Kinne of murder in 1965, but she escaped from the women’s prison at Ixtacalapan in 1969. Her whereabouts have been a mystery since.

The woman who was known as “La Pistolera” in Mexico became a popular interview subject while in prison there.

In a Sept. 25, 1965, story in the Saturday Evening Post, she explained her frustration with her life before the murders. “I knew that out there, out in Kansas City and Independence, the world was going on its way someplace,” she said. “And I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Longtime Star columnist C.W. Gusewelle was among the journalists who trekked south to write about Kinne. “Her main concern seems to be how her hair will look for the camera,” Gusewelle wrote.

Kevin Kelleghan, a reporter for The Star, was the last person to interview Kinne. He met with her on March 20, 1969, after she had spent nearly five years in the Mexican prison. She had learned Spanish — as well as the secret to dealing with Mexican prison guards.

“You know, one of the reasons why I can do just about anything I please is they’re a little bit afraid of me,” she said. “They’re afraid of all the women convicted of murder.”

The mystery

The conjecture began as soon as news broke that Kinne was on the lam.

Did she bribe or seduce one or more prison guards to help her escape? Had she killed again? Did she find refuge at the Honduran mountain ranch of Alex Peebles, her primary lawyer?

Peebles spoke with The Star in 2002, when he was 91, and gave a concise appraisal of his client: “You might say Sharon didn’t take anything off anybody.”

Peebles, who revealed that Kinne had told him she was going to Mexico in 1964, indicated Mexican sources believed the family of Kinne’s victim helped her escape, then killed her by burying her up to her neck near an anthill.

The lawyer floated the same theory in 1996 to Hays, who suspected Peebles knew more than he was letting on.

“He said he wasn’t going to say whether she was alive or dead because she was still his client,” the author said. “But he said that his thought would be that somebody spirited her out of jail, probably the family of Señor Ordonez, took her to the desert, stabbed her with a screwdriver and buried her in an anthill. … The two things that stand out in that are the words ‘screwdriver’ and ‘anthill.’ Why not ‘shot her’? Why not ‘strangled her’?”

The most popular theory at the time was that Kinne had fled to Guatemala or another Latin American country. If so, at least one expert suggested Kinne wasn’t done killing.

Harold L. Fridkin, a former counselor for Jackson County, told The Star in 1974, “Apparently her solution to a problem was to kill somebody. It’s hard to believe she’s run out of problems.”

Speculation also focused on Alaska, where Kinne’s mother and brother had moved in 1965.

More recent online claims are significantly less grounded in reality. They include that Mexican prison guards murdered her, that she hanged herself not long after escaping and that she had gender-confirmation surgery and now goes by the name Sherman.

In any case, she isn’t off the hook in Jackson County. Her name is on the longest outstanding arrest warrant for murder in the area’s history and one of the longest outstanding felony warrants in American history.

Hays, for one, isn’t convinced the Kinne story has ended.

“She would be 83 years old this year,” he said, “so there’s the possibility that she’s still alive.

“I’d still like to meet her.”

Of course, it’s also possible that Sharon Kinne has been dead for more than 50 years. It’s a mystery that might never be resolved, just as the mystery of what drove a Midwest housewife to become a serial killer continues to baffle.

Herman B. Davis, director of the Kansas City Police Department’s crime lab for 30 years, was at the James Kinne murder scene. He found the 25-year-old victim with a bullet in the back of the head and encountered Sharon Kinne for the first time.

“She was very pretty and quite pleasant,” he said nearly 40 years later, “unless she had a gun in her hand.”