The murder of Patricia Jones

The 1960 investigation pointed quickly toward Sharon Kinne. She had been carrying on an affair with Patricia Jones's husband, Walter, and on the evening of May 26, 1960, she telephoned Patricia, then met with her; Patricia was last seen alive with Kinne. Patricia's body, shot four times with a .22, was found the next day in a secluded wooded area near Independence. But the prosecution at Kinne's 1961 trial could not produce the murder weapon, and without the gun the case rested on motive and opportunity. After about an hour and a half of deliberation, an all-male jury acquitted her. Under the double jeopardy clause she could never be tried for the Jones murder again, no matter what evidence later emerged. The evidence emerged anyway, by an entirely separate route. While free on bond awaiting yet another trial in the shooting death of her own husband, Kinne traveled to Mexico, and on September 18, 1964, she shot and killed a man named Francisco Paredes Ordonez in a Mexico City hotel room, also wounding a hotel employee. When Mexican authorities arrested her, they recovered a High Standard .22-caliber pistol from her room. That recovered gun became the key to the cold Missouri case. Kansas City police ballistics experts test-fired the pistol and compared it against the bullets recovered from Patricia Jones's body in 1960, and concluded the same weapon had fired both sets of rounds. Investigators further found that the pistol's serial number matched the serial number on an empty gun box that had been recovered from Kinne's home before her Jones trial, tying the weapon directly to her possession. It was the firearm and ballistics evidence, not any new witness or confession, that finally established who had killed Patricia Jones. The legal aftermath was peculiar: the ballistics match could convict Kinne of nothing in Missouri, because of her acquittal, but it left no doubt in the eyes of investigators. Kinne was convicted of the Mexico City homicide and sentenced to thirteen years, escaped from the Ixtapalapa women's prison during a power outage on December 7, 1969, and then disappeared from the historical record for more than half a century. The final chapter came in 2023 and 2024, when an anonymous tip and a fingerprint comparison revealed that a woman who had lived quietly in Alberta, Canada, under the name Diedra Glabus was in fact Sharon Kinne, and that she had died of natural causes on January 21, 2022. On January 31, 2025, the Kansas City Police Department and the Jackson County Sheriff's Office publicly announced that the long-fugitive Kinne was dead and reaffirmed that ballistics had identified her, decades earlier, as the person who killed Patricia Jones.