THE KILLER WHO TURNED CABIN 28 INTO A SLAUGHTERHOUSE

James came out to see them once that year. He went back east and never came again. According to the investigator who would later spend years on this case, Sue and the children got no support from him at all.

So Sue got by the way single mothers always have. There was a small payment of about $250 from the navy, and food stamps. She took a part-time job at the Elks Lodge in Quincy. She also signed up for a government job-training scheme that paid a small allowance while she learned to type at Feather River College.

Sitting in that same typing class were a married couple called Marty and Marilyn Smartt.

Remember those names.

About six or seven miles up the road from Quincy sits Keddie. Even today it's barely a dot on the map, a small cluster of buildings wedged between Spanish Creek and the railway line.

The town is named after Arthur Keddie, a Scottish-born surveyor who dreamed up a railway through the Feather River Canyon back in the 1860s. It took him decades to see it built. In November 1909, the last spike of the Western Pacific Railroad was driven on a bridge high over Spanish Creek near the spot that would carry his name. Not far from there stands the Keddie Wye, a strange and famous piece of track where two railway bridges meet inside a tunnel. People still come from all over just to photograph the trains crossing it.

A holiday resort grew up around the railway, with a hotel, a restaurant and a bar, and rows of little cabins tucked among the pines along the creek. For a while it was quite the place to be.

By 1980 the shine had well and truly worn off. The resort was sliding downhill. The cabins were rented out to railway workers, college students and people passing through, folks who often didn't stay long. Keddie still had its hotel with the restaurant and the Back Door Bar, a general store, a post office and a boarding house. But it had stopped being anyone's idea of a holiday.

To Sue Sharp, it must have looked like heaven compared to that trailer.

In November 1980 a place came up for rent at the Keddie Resort. It was number 28, the place the whole world would come to know as Cabin 28. It was much bigger than the trailer. And it had only just become available because the man who'd been living there had moved out.

That man was Doug Thomas, the sheriff of Plumas County.

The family called it a cabin, but it was really a small two-bedroom house. Sue shared one bedroom with her girls, Sheila and Tina. The two little boys, Rick and Greg, had the other.

Fifteen-year-old John wanted a bit of space of his own, as fifteen-year-old boys do, so he moved into a room in the basement that could only be reached from outside the house.

The only bathroom was upstairs. So that John could come and go at night, the doors were usually left unlocked.

In a house full of children, nobody thought twice about it.

Next door, in Cabin 27, lived the Seabolt family. Sheila and Tina were friendly with them and were often in and out of each other's places.

Across a narrow little street called Spanish Oaks Lane, almost in line with the Sharps' place, stood Cabin 26. That was where the Smartts lived. Marty Smartt had come to Keddie in 1980 to work as a cook in the hotel restaurant. With him were his wife Marilyn and her two sons, Justin and Casey.

Justin was about twelve, and he and the younger Sharp boys became mates. He was forever in and out of Cabin 28.

That's what small places are like. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone knows whose kids are whose, who's working and who isn't, who's fighting with who, and who's just moved into the sheriff's old house.

Sue was described as a quiet woman who kept to herself. The investigator who knew the family put it simply: "She was into her kids." He said she wasn't a drinker and she wasn't into drugs. Years later, Sheila would describe her mother as very caring, and say that's exactly how Sue raised her children to be.

So who were those children?

John, or Johnny as most people called him, was fifteen. He was a good-looking lad who was trying to be a man before his time. The summer before, he'd worked on a painting crew alongside a local Quincy boy his own age named Greg Hagwood. He'd also taken martial arts lessons from a man called Mike Gamberg.

Hold on to those two names as well, because this story has a way of coming back around. Decades later, Greg Hagwood would become the sheriff of Plumas County, and Mike Gamberg would be the investigator he handed this case to. The two men who would fight hardest to find John's killer had both known him as a boy.

John's best mate was Dana Wingate, a seventeen-year-old from Quincy. Dana had taken martial arts from Gamberg too. He was a regular at Cabin 28, and when you saw John, you usually saw Dana not far behind.

Sheila was fourteen, and the sensible one. She was the sort of girl who helped her mum with the little ones without being asked.

Tina was twelve, a schoolgirl in Quincy whose teacher happened to be Greg Hagwood's mother. She was at that age where she was halfway between being a little girl and a teenager, and probably didn't know which one she wanted to be.

Rick was ten and mad keen on baseball. Greg, the baby of the family, was just five.

That was the Sharp family. They had no money to speak of and no father in the picture. But they had a mother who had walked away from a bad marriage to give them a better life, and a roof over their heads that was finally big enough to hold them all.

For five months, Cabin 28 was home.

Sue had got her children away from a bad marriage and a long way from trouble. Or so she thought.

On the night of Saturday, 11 April 1981, trouble walked straight through her door.

End of chapter one. 11 more chapters in the full book.