Town note
It began as a small farming community known as Turkey Flats and later became Keller.
about 0:05:38The story
In January 1980 Nedra Sharp, a licensed practical nurse at a nursing home in Ashdown, Arkansas, lived in a single-wide trailer in Crossroads, a community of eighty people near the Oklahoma state line. On Friday 11 January 1980 he finished work in the afternoon, came home, checked some animal traps he had set nearby, drove to Foreman to wash his pickup, then returned, showered and changed. His mother had been eating fish sticks. He said she was expecting to meet a man from Shreveport called Lane, and that he ate nothing himself. He took his mother's Trans Am across the Oklahoma border to Betty's Place, a local establishment that sold beer and was frequented by young people. He played pool, went on to a friend's house, and got back to the trailer at three or four in the morning.
When he walked in, the lights and television were on and there was blood over the walls. His mother was gone. He ran about a mile to a relative's house, woke him, and the two men returned and called the sheriff. A deputy reached the trailer at 4.09 a.m. and left two civilians at the scene while he went to find other officers, coming back about four hours later. The trailer held blood on the carpet, walls and doorsteps, clumps of hair and two small pieces of what appeared to be human skull. Nedra's purse had been emptied; she had been given two fifty-dollar bills the day before. Her .25-calibre pistol was missing at first but turned up in a jacket pocket in the back of Glen's pickup, and he said he must have carried it while checking his traps. Also missing were his work clothes, pyjamas and steel-toed cowboy boots.
A telephone book turned up Lane Barmore, who had a Shreveport exchange and had been seeing Nedra. He was married. Officers searched his vehicle in Shreveport. The blood in its trunk proved to be animal blood and his alibi checked out.
Two weeks after the killing the Ashdown Police Department received a letter in large capital letters. It said that Nedra was a good person but had to die because she would not marry the writer, that he had loved her but had to do it, that he had to kill the boy too, and that he had put Nedra under some tree tops about a thousand yards east of the old house place at Piney. The sheriff's office had Glen give ten handwriting samples without showing him the letter, and a handwriting expert said the letter was his. Questioned for two hours, Glen admitted writing it, but said a stranger had stopped him on the road in Louisiana, climbed into his pickup, held a pistol on him, said he had his mother, made him write the letter at gunpoint and told him to post it. He described the man only vaguely, as a white man with brown hair whose face was hard to make out because he was crying. Glen said he decided not to tell anyone.
On 31 January 1980 officers searching about a thousand yards east of the old home place, near the old Piney cemetery and roughly a mile and a half from the trailer, found a shallow grave covered with dead pine tree tops at the edge of a sagegrass field. Nedra Sharp was inside, wrapped in her bed clothes and robe and tied with a belt. The autopsy found that she had been strangled by hand by someone right-handed, had suffered numerous knife wounds and blows to the head, and had been impaled on a large knife that went through the trailer floor; the knife, an old one a former stepfather had found while working on a pipeline, lay about twelve feet from the body. The skull fragments in the trailer matched her skull. Undigested fish in her stomach showed that she died within half an hour to an hour of eating. A shovel by the trailer had a thread in a splintered part of its handle consistent with the belt of her robe, and blood specks in the cab of Glen's truck were human.
A relative, John Ogls, said he saw Glen pull out from behind the trailer between six and six twenty that evening and follow him slowly for seventy-five to a hundred yards before turning off towards the Piney cemetery. Ogls later found tyre tracks in the sagegrass field from a short-wheelbase vehicle with large mud-grip tyres; Glen drove a four-wheel-drive Chevrolet LUV with large mud-grip tyres. A friend, Don Kleghorn, saw him at the car wash between six thirty and seven thirty and noticed what looked like tufts of hair in the back of the pickup; Glen said it was from a deer he had killed.
On 1 June 1980 Glen called the police to say that someone had come in and shot him. He had bullet wounds in the webbing of his left hand and his shoulder; investigators concluded they were self-inflicted.