This is going to be a two-part piece on Sharon Kinne, known as La Pistolera which translates to The Gunfighter. She was born Sharon Elizabeth Hall on November 30, 1939 in Independence, Missouri. It was certainly not a rural community, but was small with a population of around 16,000. Today Independence, which sits on the outskirts of Kansas City, has a population of around 121,000.
Sharon moved with her family Washington State for a short time when she was around fifteen, then they returned to Independence. Sharon thought it was too small and boring. Her plan? Find a husband to get her the heck out of there.
She found what she thought she was looking for one summer evening in 1956 at a church function. Though Sharon was only 16, she caught the attention of a 22 year old college student who was home for the summer. James Kinne had never met anyone like Sharon and they hit it off immediately. She said she was 18 and they began a summer romance.
When James left in the fall to return to Brigham Young Univesity, Sharon was upset. She wrote to him that she was pregnant and he was the father. She wanted him to return right away and do the right thing. James and his family were deeply religious and he did as was expected. His hopes of finishing his college career were dashed and he returned to Missouri and married Sharon in October, 1956.
I will just get it out there right now and say it – Sharon was a perpetual liar. She told James on their wedding day that she had already been married during her short stay in Washington to a man she called “Big Jim” who was killed in a car accident. She went so far as to mark the City Hall wedding license application as ‘widowed’. This was a lie.
Second, she wasn’t pregnant. She wanted to be married so she lied about being pregnant because she knew that James would marry her. After the marriage, she turned sour toward James almost immediately. She was unhappy about where they lived, how much time they spent with his family and thought they should be spending more money on a house and other belongings.
She soon tired of pretending to be pregnant and faked a miscarriage. She was bored of James and thought nothing of having sex with other men when James was at work or sleeping. However, she did end up pregnant for real and Danna E. Kinne was born in the fall of 1957. As is almost always the case, adding a baby to a bad marriage does not fix anything.
James became aware of her affairs and was contemplating divorce. He talked to his parents, Haggard and Kattie Kinne, who encouraged him to stick to his vows. James was very close to his parents and did as they told him.
In the meantime, Sharon had taken up with an old high school boyfriend, John Boldizs. She and James had another child they named James Jr. but who they called Troy. James tried to make things work but finally told Sharon he wanted a divorce. Sharon said she would give him a divorce if he gave her the house, $1,000 and Danna. She did not want to keep her infant son.
This should tell us something about this heartless woman. Why would you keep only one of the children and separate siblings like that? Sharon was very vocal about her hatred for James’ parents and their religion but she was willing to let her son stay with him and be raised in that religion? It’s very confusing to me, but I know there are lots of women out there who do not connect to their children and Sharon was definitely one of them.
A short time later, Sharon told James she would not give him the divorce. She had second thoughts about the deal she had made and realized she could get a lot more money than the $1,000 she had agreed to. In the spring of 1960, she asked her boyfriend (John) if he would kill James for her. She was thinking she would gain life insurance money if he was killed. John turned her down, later claiming he thought she was joking.
On the March 20, 1960 issue of the Kansas City Star newspaper, an article appeared saying the previous evening James Kinne (age 25) had been found shot in the head and died in the ambulance on his way to the hospital. Sharon is listed as his wife who was “too upset for a detailed interrogation” by authorities. Oddly though, she had told the 911 operator that her husband had suffered a heart attack. She did manage to say to officers, despite her upset, enough to lead them to believe their 2.5 year old daughter accidentally shot the gun killing James. Again, Sharon is a liar – remember?
James had laid down to take an afternoon nap because he worked until midnight the previous night. He wanted to get a little rest because they had plans for the evening – a church gathering.
Sharon told police that Danna, their daughter, loved playing with toy guns and that James was careless about leaving his real one laying around after cleaning it. She must have pulled the trigger, hitting James in the back of the head as he slept. Sharon claimed to have been in the bathroom getting ready to go out with her husband when she heard the gun go off.
The next day, the Star had another article, stating Sharon still had not been interviewed because she was under a doctor’s care. But the article also revealed that the authorities believed the gun was laying on the pillow next to James when it was fired based on the angle of the shot, where the gun was found and there was indication on the pillowcase that showed where the bullet traveled. Does it seem possible that a small child, only two and a half years old, could squeeze the trigger as the gun was laying on it’s side on the pillowcase?
By March 24, police had tested the pressure needed to shoot the .22 calibur pistol and it showed that Danna could have done it. They allowed her to play with the pistol, unloaded, and she proved she could turn off the safety and pull the trigger successfully. But at that time, did they lay the gun down and have her try and shoot it from where it was actually fired? Could she even reach the pillow where they say it was when it went off?
Unfortunately, even James’ own parents told police that James had a fascination with guns but was careless about leaving them lying around, which bolstered Sharon’s story that Danna pulled the trigger. Though detectives were still skeptical, they closed their case as there was no hard evidence to link the death to Sharon.
And just as she had hoped, Sharon collected the life insurance money following James’ death. She was set to receive a total of $29,000 (about $230,000 today). She wasted no time in running off to a car dealership and purchasing a brand new Ford Thunderbird on April 18, one month after James was killed. The grieving widow began to flirt with the car salesman, who returned her attention. His name was Walter T. Jones, Jr. and they began an affair very soon after meeting.
Walter was married to Patricia Jones and they had 2 small children. Though not unhappily married, Walter had a habit of stepping out on Patricia. They were high school sweethearts and grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri. They married shortly after graduating in the mid-1950’s. Patricia worked at the Internal Revenue Service office in Kansas City.
Just over a month after starting the affair with Walter, Sharon told him she was pregnant with his child. She demanded he leave his wife and marry her. She was used to getting what (and who) she wanted, so she wasn’t sure what to do when Walter’s reaction to this news didn’t go as she planned. His response was anger and he broke things off with Sharon on May 25. Sharon was not happy.
The next day, Sharon called Patricia at her work and asked her to meet. She had ‘information’ that her husband was being unfaithful to her with Sharon’s sister. Did I mention Sharon was a liar? Sharon doesn’t have a sister. Patricia agreed and had co-workers drop her to meet Sharon. Patricia had carpooled to work. Those co-workers watched her get into a car with a woman wearing a head scarf and sunglasses. Sharon wasn’t driving her own Thunderbird but had borrowed a car for this meeting.
Later that night, Walter began to panic when Patricia didn’t come home. He phoned her co-workers who told him where they had dropped her off and Walter was immediately suspicious that the woman in the head scarf was Sharon. He called Sharon who confirmed she had met with Patricia and told her about their affair.
Walter was furious but was also worried that he couldn’t find Patricia. He could only hope that she was with friends or in a hotel somewhere stewing over the news that he had been having an affair.
The next morning when there was still no word from Patricia, Walter knew something was wrong. She might ignore him for this long, but not their two small children. He filed a missing persons report on May 27.
He called Sharon later that day and demanded she meet with him. He threatened to hurt her if she didn’t tell him where Patricia was, but Sharon played innocent. Pretending to feel bad for him, she offered to help search for Patricia. Not wanting to go alone, she called John Boldizs to take her around various places to search.
John quickly got bored with this and wanted to go parking at one of their usual spots instead. Sharon agreed. Not long after they pulled into their spot on a known ‘lovers lane’, Sharon let out a yell and pointed to a grassy area near the car. She made John get out to take a look and sure enough, just before midnight on May 27, 1960, they had found Patricia’s body. What are the odds of that?
Patricia was born in St. Joseph, Missouri to parents Elmer and Mary Margaret Clements on May 14, 1937. She graduated from Benton High School and shortly after, married her high school sweetheart, Walter Jones. After a short stint on the west coast, they settled in Independence. Together, they had two children, Jerry and Cindi, who were only ages 3 and 2 at the time of Patricia’s death.
Oddly, the newspaper described her as being 5’5″, 112 pounds with red hair. It’s difficult to tell from the photos that she had red hair, as most of the photos are in black and white. Of course today they would never refer to the weight of someone, unless it was pertinent to the story or the death in some way. She was also described as attractive and vivacious in the news articles.
When she was found, Patricia was wearing a black sweater, yellow skirt, nylons and white shoes. She had been shot four times with a .22 caliber pistol – once in the abdomen, twice in her shoulders and once in the head which was the fatal wound.
The next day on May 28, both Sharon and John Boldizs were questioned. Authorities also questioned Walter Jones. Both men agreed to give written statements and take polygraphs to prove they had nothing to do with Patricia’s murder. Sharon, on the other hand, refused both but did agree to an oral statement.
Thankfully, the police were on the ball in this case. They recalled Sharon Kinne from just a few weeks prior as the wife of James Kinne. They hadn’t been comfortable with the outcome of that case, which was ruled an accident. They quickly learned that she and Walter were having an affair. The odds of the dead woman’s mistress being the last person to see her alive and the person to stumble upon the body were just too great.
Patricia was laid to rest in St. Joseph, her hometown, on May 31. Later that same evening, Sharon was arrested for her murder. The next day, polygraphs were given to Walter and John and both were found to be truthful in their statements.
One thing stumping the police was the murder weapon. The gun that killed Patricia was the same kind of gun that killed James Kinne. However, following James’ shooting, police had confiscated that weapon. It couldn’t be the same exact gun, but it was the same type they believed.
Also, police were frustrated that a proper autopsy was not done on Patricia. The coroner, among other things, had not retrieved all four bullets and had not done any chemical tests on the contents of Patricia’s stomach. He didn’t see that it was necessary to get all four bullets when only the one to her head was fatal. Further, he stated that doing the chemical tests would have been ‘too messy’. I’m sorry – what? You do autopsies for a living. What on earth could be ‘too messy’ for you?
Not only that, before he did his cursory autopsy the funeral home had already begun ‘preparing the body’ for burial – meaning she had already been embalmed. What an evidentiary nightmare. They needed those remaining bullets to do ballistics tests. The one retrieved from Patricia’s head was not able to be used due to the amount of damage it had sustained.
Just to be clear – these are the types of decisions that should be made by police and prosecutors – not the coroner. Certainly not without police input. What types of tests need to be done are based on the evidence needed – and only those investigating the case know what they need. I cannot imagine the level of frustration they felt when they realized how botched the body evidence was and how problematic it could be to proving their case against Sharon.
Police were faced with having to request that Patricia’s body be exhumed in order to do proper testing. Walter agreed and a judge ordered it on June 17. This wasn’t easy. Patricia had been buried in her hometown of St. Joseph some 70 miles away at Mount Auburn Cemetery. They had to go there, exhume her, bring her back to Independence, perform the autopsy, then return her back to St. Joseph.
These are the kinds of things that can get a little brushed over in telling stories of murder and other strange behavior. But exhuming a body has to be so difficult for a family to endure. Patricia’s parents had likely visited their daughter’s grave many times following the funeral. It would be difficult to stand by and watch her be removed from her final resting place as you are trying to adjust to having lost your daughter. And even though it’s harder to muster up sympathy for Walter, he had to make that difficult decision to allow her to be exhumed in those weeks following the funeral when he was dealing with grief, guilt and watching his small children wonder where their mommy is. Just as families are starting to adjust to their loved one being gone, they are traumatically pulled back into their earlier stages of grief.
But, the authorities made the trip and a proper autopsy was done by a medical examiner (not a coroner). They were able to determine that the contents of her stomach were the remains of her lunch, as attested to by her co-workers. Now they could fill in some gaps in the timeline they had created and have a better idea of time of death.
Unfortunately, the bullet that went through Patricia’s stomach wasn’t retrieved. They speculated that it must have passed through her body and into the ground. It was not found in her body, leading police and experts to believe Patricia was shot in the stomach at fairly close range. She would have already been on the ground with the shooter standing over her when she took that bullet, which could mean it was the final shot – over kill. They needed to go back to the area to find that missing bullet.
This is where I will end for Part 1 of this story. There is so much left to tell – even more ‘murder and other strange behavior’ before we reach the bizaar and unsatisfying end of this tale. You can read Part 2 here.
Works sited section
“I’m Just An Ordinary Girl – The Sharon Kinne Story” by James Hays
KC Star via Newspapers.com