Fugitive US Killer Lived Quietly in Canada for 49 Years

A resident of a small Canadian town known for her banana bread and needlepoint skills had been hiding from American and Mexican law enforcement for more than 50 years, authorities say. The Jackson County Sheriff's Office in Missouri confirmed last week that Dee Glabus, who died in 2022, was really Sharon Kinne, who is believed to have killed three people, the CBC reports.

• Kinne allegedly killed her first husband, James Kinne, in 1960, when she was 20 years old, the AP reports. She claimed his 2-year-old daughter shot him by mistake, but just months later, she was charged with killing Patricia Jones, the wife of her new boyfriend. She was soon charged with killing James Kinne as well.

• Kinne was acquitted of killing Jones in 1961. She was convicted of killing James Kinne in 1962 but was released on bond after the Missouri Supreme Court overturned the verdict and a jury in a second trial couldn't reach agreement. She fled to Mexico, where she was charged in 1964 with killing Francisco Ordonez, a man she picked up in a bar. Ballistic tests showed that Jones was killed with the same gun.
• Kinne was sentenced to 13 years but escaped from a Mexican prison in 1969. Investigators say she married a man named James Glabus in Los Angeles a couple of months later and they moved to Taber, Alberta, in 1973. They ran a motel together and worked as real estate agents, Lethbridge News Now reports. Glabus died in 1979. A few years later, she married a man named Willie Ell, and they remained together until his death in 2011.

• At a seniors center in Taber, friends and neighbors who played bridge with Glabus tell the CBC they are in shock. "How can you fool the whole world year after year?" wonders Phyllis Katrusik, who had known Kinne since the 1970s.
• Police in Missouri say they received a tip in 2023 that Dee Glabus was Sharon Kinne. "It just so happens that someone had that tip and was not willing to release it until after her death," Sgt. Dustin Love at the Jackson County Sheriff's Office said last week.
• Her family said the discovery brought them closure, the AP reports. "Sharon was a woman that never faced the consequences of her actions, leaving them for her children to deal with," they said in a statement. "She caused great harm without thought or remorse."

(More fugitive stories.)