Sharon Glover (6 of Spades, Louisiana)
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Early one morning, just two weeks before Thanksgiving, the body of a woman was found viciously stabbed to death on a rural back road in Louisiana. Rumors led this woman's family to believe that the killer was someone they knew.
But detectives are now releasing new information in this case for the first time.
And they believe that there has been a different prime suspect
lurking in the background of this investigation for decades.
I'm Ashley Flowers, and this is The Deck. Thank you.
On November 14, 1993, two locals were out driving about 20 miles outside of Shreveport, Louisiana, city center. When they turned off the highway onto the rural Mount Olive Church Road that dead-ended at the old Missionary Cemetery, their headlights barely cut through a dense fog drifting through the oaks.
But as the mist cleared, something caught the driver's eye in a drainage ditch. It was the body of a woman laying face down.
When they got out and saw that the woman was covered in blood and not moving, they wasted no time and quickly drove to a nearby telephone to call the sheriff's office. Deputies was dispatched to the scene.
They identified the body as a black female. At the time, she was unknown.
She still had her clothes on and everything, but she had stab wounds to her body. That's Detective Vincent Jackson from the Caddo Parish Sheriff's Office.
Though not the original investigator, Detective Jackson inherited the case in December of 2024. And he discovered that he's actually distantly related to this victim through his mother's side.
Sometimes these tragedies hit a little closer to home. Now, Detective Jackson could easily imagine the place where this woman's body was found.
I mean, not much has changed since the 90s. Per the old reports, her body was found lying near a turnoff to a gated gravel road that led to a private farm.
Now, her head was pointed toward the wood line and her feet toward the main road. She was wearing blue jogging pants, a multicolored camouflage halter top, and a slip-on shoe on her right foot.
The left shoe was on the ground next to her. Now, the back of her shirt was soaked in what appeared to be blood, but deputies noted that no blood had pooled beneath her body, and there was no blood spatter on the ground.
By about 7.30 a.m., the scene had been secured and the sheriff's lead detective and the parish coroner had arrived. Everyone gathered around to watch as the deputy coroner turned the body over so she was laying face up.
It appeared that this woman had been stabbed several times in her upper chest. There were deep grass impressions on the victim's face, chest, arms, indicating that she had been there for at least a few hours, which posed a problem for evidence collection because it had rained the night before.
If there is any good DNA that could have been found on the body at the time, the rain could have washed it away or it could have washed and mixed up other DNA. That may be blown to her from her bleeding and contaminated the scene.
The rain wasn't all bad news, though. The road was muddy and investigators quickly zeroed in on tire tracks left on the west side of the road.
CSI techs took photographs and poured a cast of the tire impressions.
But as Detective Jackson explains, they didn't yield any useful information in that moment. TV shows, a lot of stuff, you know, you run the tire track and then you pop up with 15 tires and the type of car, it don't work the same way in the real world.
So, you know, so if we have a vehicle, we could be able to take that cast and determine, hey, these tires are similar to these tracks. So this person is a person of interest.
This crime scene was so fresh, there weren't any persons of interest yet. But the soft ground did give investigators a strong idea of what happened.
There, leading out from those tire tracks, were what appeared to be drag marks, which ended where the woman's body was found. We just feel like her body was placed there from the way it was positioned.
We had tire tracks, car pulls up, open the door. You can see, like, where somebody had her and their feet were dragging along on the ground.
In other words, there was evidence to suggest that the victim was already dead when she was unceremoniously dumped in that ditch.
And they believed that she'd been killed elsewhere, which meant that somewhere out there was probably another bloody crime scene.
The woman's remains were transported from the scene by the deputy coroner for an autopsy. In the morgue, her fingerprints were taken in hopes of identifying her.
But it was 1993, and while online databases were technically a thing, Caddo Parrish was still using physical print cards for comparison, which, as you can imagine, was a painstaking and time-consuming task. Now, 1993 happened to be the year when Shreveport had a record of 86 homicides, tied only in the year of 2021.
This coroner, who served all of Caddo Parish, was literally buried in bodies. Despite being overworked, the coroner was able to conduct the woman's autopsy within a day and determine that the stab wounds on the woman's chest were her cause of death, or as he wrote it in his report, a, quote, laceration of the heart and left lung.
Now, the number of stab wounds is information that Detective Jackson asked us to hold back.
But he did note that the wounds didn't reveal much about the murder weapon, just that it was some type of cutting object, so not super helpful. In addition to the stab wounds that ultimately killed her, the woman sustained cuts to her arms in what the coroner theorized were defensive wounds.
The autopsy also revealed that someone had hit her on the left side of her face. And when the toxicology results came back, it didn't show any alcohol in her system.
But she did test positive for cocaine. And the lab results added another piece of evidence.
An unknown DNA profile was found on the woman's clothing. Incredibly, the rain hadn't washed everything away.
But at the time, there were no suspects to compare this profile to. On November 15th, the same day as the autopsy, the Caddo Sheriff's Office got some exciting news.
A match for the victim's fingerprints. She was Sharon Glover.
Sharon was only 27 years old and a mother of two young children, eight-year-old Nikita and six-year-old D'Andre. Sharon was a local to Caddo Parish, and her prints were on file likely from a previous arrest, though detectives couldn't locate any arrest record today, so they aren't sure what for, if that is the case.
Sharon's friends and family had not yet reported her missing by the time authorities identified her body.
But that doesn't mean that they weren't worried about her. Sharon's daughter, Nikita, does remember that her mom made some chilling comments alluding to her own death in the week before her murder.
I feel like she knew that something was going to happen.
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and she looks back on her mother's last days as something of a warning. My mom came down and she talked to me and she was like, you know, I want you to always look after your brother no matter what.
I always take care of him. And that's the last thing I remember her telling me.
So I feel like she knew that something was going to happen. Nikita's grandmother, Leanne Watkins, got a similar ominous message around the day of her daughter's murder, too.
And that's when she called me up and said, Mama, if I don't see you no more, you have a happy turkey day. But what Sharon's eerie comments meant remains a mystery to her mother and her daughter.
They couldn't figure out if Sharon was actually afraid of someone in particular,
or if she had gotten involved in something dangerous.
And when asked by our reporters to clarify what they believe this meant,
Nikita and Leanne said that they never asked Sharon.
So instead of gathering around the Thanksgiving table,
Sharon's family gathered around a pink casket strewn with white gardenias and pink roses. And meanwhile, Caddo's sheriff's detectives started to look at the people closest to Sharon.
The first person, I hate to say it, is always going to be either the spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend. Not saying that they're guilty or anything, but that person is the closest person to the deceased.
For Sharon, that was her soon-to-be ex-husband, Charles Glover. Police questioned Charles right after Sharon was identified.
Though the exact details have been lost over time, records indicate that Charles was with a friend at the time of the crime, and investigators were able to verify this with said friend. However, Sharon's mother, Leanne, wasn't so convinced that Charles should be in the clear.
I mean, that's partly because Sharon was in the process of divorcing Charles at the time of her death. Leanne's suspicions about Charles were also based on two rumors she heard.
For one, she heard that Charles kept a knife in his car, which was suspicious to her given Sharon's stab wounds. And two, she heard that Charles had burned his car soon after Sharon's death.
And then Leanne told us about a number of confusing calls that she received from Charles the night before Sharon's murder. Charles called me by seven o'clock and told me, said, well, would you come and help me with my car? Leanne is saying that her son-in-law, who her daughter was on the outs with, was calling her with car trouble.
A friend advised Leanne to let Charles kind of like sort it out himself. But he called Leanne back again an hour later, asking for help.
Again, Leigh-Anne said no, and she went out that evening to an event. But when she got home later that night, Charles called her a third time.
I got home, Charles called me back and said, my car been vandalized. Are you going to come help me in my car? And my friend told me, he said, no, you're not going.
This time of night, if he hadn't got it fixed from the time he told you up in the day, up until 11 o'clock at night, he said, you're not going. That was that Saturday night.
My daughter got killed Saturday night or Sunday. And I feel like all of this was playing it on her.
Leanne suspects that Charles was trying to get Leanne out of the way. Beyond that, though, she didn't have a clear theory on why he would want her out of the way or why he would even want to kill Sharon or what sequence of events led to her murder.
But Leanne did end up sharing this information with authorities. And Detective Jackson said that he has heard this story about Charles Glover before.
I've heard this theory. I heard a whole bunch of theories as well.
From what I'm thinking of,
the evidence has to be there for us to go out and arrest him.
Police never actually took Charles that seriously as a suspect after his alibi checked out. So they never searched his residence for a knife or recovered one belonging to him.
Detective Jackson also debunked Leanne's concern about Charles burning his car. It wasn't actually Charles' vehicle at all that got burned.
It was a car that belonged to one of Sharon's boyfriends, a guy named Harold Thompson. And turns out, Harold didn't even set his car on fire.
He had scrapped it after it stopped working. Detective Jackson said it was likely that the family had gotten these stories just mixed up.
And when we reached out to Charles for comment, he declined to talk with us. But investigators hadn't run out of leads.
Soon after Sharon was identified, a tip came in through an anonymous source. The informant wanted police to know that a week before her murder, Sharon had been in an argument at a party, and that argument got heated.
It's unclear what this argument was about, but apparently this woman pulled a machete on Sharon. Now, there's no actual violence that happened, but I mean, someone pulls a machete on a person who turns up a week later stabbed to death, the police have to check it out.
Detectives interviewed this woman, and while it's unclear whether her alibi was verified, they confiscated the machete and apparently a steak knife, and they had both of them tested. Yet both of these weapons came back negative for any human blood.
So police crossed this woman off their list of suspects. They next turned their sights to another man in Sharon's life, a guy named Charles McRae.
Now, this is a second Charles, not her soon-to-be ex-husband, so to avoid confusion, I'm just going to refer to him as McRae. Well, detectives heard rumors from some of Sharon's friends that McRae was a sex trafficker and could possibly have been trafficking Sharon at the time.
McRae's criminal history returned drug trafficking charges and one count of murder. He's actually serving time in Texas for that.
There were no sex trafficking charges, but Detective Jackson explained that in the early 90s, police were usually well aware of men who were trafficking women for sex. But in an area like Shreveport, where violent crime was rampant, these sex traffickers were rarely arrested or charged.
Police were more concerned with drug busts and homicides. So with this context in mind, police also were hearing rumors that Sharon was known to use drugs with her clients and then set them up to be robbed.
Other sources have confirmed that she would set guys up all the time and have sex with them out there on that private road as well. And then she would rip them off, pull a knife on them, hold a knife to their throat, take their money and all this.
We know that Sharon was using cocaine at the time of her death. So had an attempted robbery gone sideways? I mean, is it possible that that particular country road was a place that Sharon took her marks? Or potentially Sharon's client was local to this area and he chose this spot because it was off the beaten path, far outside of city limits.
As their list of suspects grew, Charles, the soon-to-be ex, Harold, the ex who scrapped his car, and McRae, detectives knew that they had one solid way to narrow things down, that DNA profile on Sharon's clothing. One by one, the men were tested, and by the end of 1993, each had been ruled out.
But there was one other person that police had yet to look into. So I don't want this out.
There's a person of interest that I think is the actual person that lived in that area. That's right.
Detective Jackson has a prime suspect. As of 2012, the suspect is deceased, and Detective Jackson was a little hesitant to talk more about him.
But he eventually agreed to release this new information to our reporters, Jennifer Amell and Emily Enfinger. Okay, so I'm not trying to be like combative or anything.
No, you're good. What is the fear you have if this person is deceased on giving us more information? The only fear that I have that this person is deceased, being able to prove that he's involved.
That's one thing that, you know, I would like to be able to say, okay, this person is determined as a person of interest for me to be able to go out and talk to him, get his side, and, you know, the ultimate goal is to get him to commit that he, you know, actually is involved with it. Though it took a little prodding, here's what Detective Jackson revealed to us.
A week or so after Sharon's murder, a witness came forward and told police that he saw a local man doing some fishy stuff around his mobile home. We're going to call this guy Bobby.
Now, we've confirmed his real identity, but Detective Jackson asked us to withhold it. He also asked us not to share exactly what it was that Bobby was seen doing.
So that happens. And then a short while after Sharon's murder,
Bobby's trailer caught on fire.
This is sometime between November 1993 and January 1994.
Now, this didn't give investigators much to work with,
but it did give them a name.
Our reporters tried to find documentation of this fire,
but the Caddo Parish Fire Marshal said
that they wouldn't have records of a fire
from that far back. Detective Jackson said that he didn't think the fire was even reported, but he knows it happened based on a supplemental report in Sharon's case file.
Now, Bobby's mobile home was out in the rural country, so it's possible that he just waited for the fire to extinguish itself and then, like, hoped it didn't catch the nearby oaks.
Now, we found out Bobby had a criminal record.
He was charged with aggravated assault with a weapon and battery 10 months before Sharon's murder,
and he served time in jail.
He was out of prison, however, by the time of Sharon's murder.
The real bombshell came in the summer of 1994,
when detectives went back to interview Sharon's boyfriend, Harold Thompson.
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Greenlight.com slash the deck. In this interview, Harold brought up Bobby and told police that he and another witness had actually seen Sharon with Bobby three days before she turned up dead.
Harold said that he and this unnamed witness had seen Sharon using drugs with Bobby in his mobile home. And guess where his mobile home was? Right on Mount Olive Church Road, approximately 200 yards from where her body was later found.
Harold even remembered what Sharon was wearing. She was dressed in the same clothing that she was later found in, jogging pants and a halter top.
The significance of Sharon being seen in the same clothing is that she likely didn't return home after November 11, 1993. It's also more likely that Sharon didn't see other clients after partying with Bobby.
Detective Jackson speculates that it's possible Sharon was working with her alleged trafficker, McRae, to set Bobby up. Or she could have acted alone.
It's unclear if Bobby was a friend of Sharon's or a paying client. If he was a client, then it might be more likely that McRae would have been involved or would have at least known that Sharon was going out to Bobby's house.
But when McRae was questioned, he said that he didn't know if Sharon was set to meet any clients in the days before her murder. So if Sharon was seen partying with Bobby by Harold Thompson and another person, did she wait for everyone to leave before trying to rob Bobby? Maybe Bobby took the knife from Sharon and high on cocaine got carried away and stabbed her to death.
I think a time of death could be very telling. Was she alive days after being seen with Bobby? Hours? Unfortunately, the coroner's report does not note Sharon's time of death.
In August of 1994, the Caddo Sheriff's Office finally brought Bobby in for questioning. He said he was with his girlfriend and couldn't possibly have killed Sharon.
However, when the police checked with his girlfriend, she said Bobby wasn't with her. And because his alibi fell apart, Bobby moved to the top of the suspect list, unbeknownst to anyone outside of law enforcement.
I mean, not even Sharon's family knew about him. Though it's unclear why, it took nearly 10 years.
But on July 23rd, 2004, detectives finally secured a warrant to collect Bobby's DNA. They compared it to the unknown profile found on Sharon's clothing, and they held their breaths, anticipating a match.
But Bobby's DNA came back inconclusive. Detective Jackson believes this is because the technology available in 2004 just wasn't advanced enough to compare these profiles.
This could be that the unknown profile was too degraded to make a positive match, or the technology just wasn't where it is today, but it certainly didn't rule Bobby out by any means. But without a solid DNA match, investigators probably didn't have enough to actually charge Bobby, which is why Bobby never got charged.
I mean, additionally, his mobile home had burned down before detectives even had him on their radar. So any evidence that might have been in there went up in smoke.
As I mentioned, Bobby passed away in 2012, September 13th of 2012, to be exact. And he lived out his whole life on that lonely stretch of road in Caddo Parish.
Bobby remains the strongest suspect in Detective Jackson's books.
And although he's been a lead suspect for police,
that information was never released publicly.
In fact, like I said,
most of Sharon's family members
continued to be convinced that Charles Glover,
Sharon's ex-husband, was to blame. Over the years, investigators continued to bring in Charles for questioning, once in 1995 and again in 2004.
Detective Jackson himself interviewed Charles for a final time in 2024. By all accounts, his story never changed.
In December 2024, Sharon's daughter, Nikita, learned that there was a new young investigator on her mom's case. So she contacted Detective Jackson and urged him to make use of modern forensic technology.
And Detective Jackson listened. The first thing he did was submit Sharon's evidence for retesting, though he did not want to elaborate on what evidence exactly.
He's hoping that he's going to get a more complete DNA profile this time off whatever this piece of evidence is, and he wants to compare it to Bobby once again. Sharon Glover's case could be solved.
Detective Jackson confirmed that he met with the family and explained that Sharon's husband, Charles, had been ruled out and that he was focusing on a different suspect. But Sharon's mother wasn't entirely convinced.
So after clearing it with Detective Jackson, our reporter Emily explained to Sharon's mother and sister all about Bobby and why detectives believe he's a good suspect. Okay, so his theory is that it's another person who lived nearby where her body was found.
Our reporters also explained that Charles Glover had been officially ruled out due to his DNA not matching the unknown profile found on Sharon's body. To at least be at peace is a relief, a mind relief.
So you can have that, you know, off of your mind. That's Sharon's sister, Latosha Watson.
She still was a loving person, and she still was my sister. I just missed the entire idea of having a mother.
Like, now that I'm a mother and I have a daughter, I have to deal with those emotions, and it's difficult. Sir?
It's going to be all right.
They're working on it, okay?
I remember this little old lady told me,
he said, before you leave this,
you'll find out who killed your daughter.
I got the pictures in there now.
Oh, wow, y'all got a whole table spread.
I hope y'all don't laugh at me, but you may not want to look at some of this. What I'm talking about, I brought her report cards.
I keep up with everything. Amongst the photos of Sharon spread out on the kitchen table, Leanne pointed out a piece of loose-leaf paper with a dozen or so names written down.
Leanne explained that these were names of people who knew Sharon in 1993. And there, at the top of the page, was Bobby's real name.
Detective Jackson is waiting on results to come back from the evidence that he sent to be retested. But closure to him is more than just lab results.
So if I'm able to call it closed with the person of interest that's deceased, at least we'll know and have peace of mind that I can give to the family saying, hey, he's the one that did it. That way they can know and move on with their lives, hopefully build a relationship with the ex-husband.
And that way it's not in the back of their mind, always thinking, well, he did it, you know, and I can tell them, no, you know, maybe y'all can get past it now and help y'all be in y'all relationship. So that's at least what I want, you know.
Today, if you follow the still rural stretch of Mount Olive Church Road all the way to the dead end. You can find Bobby's headstone
in that little missionary cemetery.
He's buried only a few hundred feet away
from where Sharon's body was found.
If you have any information
on the murder of Sharon Glover,
Detective Jackson urges you
to reach out to him directly
at 318-681-0705.
You can also submit a tip anonymously through Crime Stoppers. The Deck is an audio chuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.
To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve? Perigold is the destination for luxury home.
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