Dead Man's Camp

"I think she found something," Meek called to the detectives.

As Meek walked closer, she saw the midsection and rib cage of a badly decomposing body covered with maggots and bugs. The nearby grass was trampled.

Owen was lying on his back, his arms and legs outstretched like Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. His short-sleeved, checked shirt was ripped and pulled up over his chest. The pockets of his dirty blue jeans were turned inside out. His shoes and socks were missing. So were his glasses.

Part of the body's skeleton was exposed; skin and tissue were missing from the back of the head and neck. The front of the head was black and leathery.

The coroner, Dr. Donald Pojman, wouldn't arrive until that afternoon. Pojman would need dental records to identify Owen. He would later rule Owen's death a homicide, listing the cause of death as asphyxiation.

After finding the body, detectives searched a nearby homeless camp and found the charred remains of what appeared to be spiral notebooks, cell phones and keys. They also found an ax.

Detectives would later interview several people, including Ron Greene, who gave descriptions of Sharp, Hollingsworth, Baker and Cornell.

On July 13, Barron spotted a black man and a white woman in the 900 block of North Kansas Avenue, near the Topeka Rescue Mission Thrift Store. Hollingsworth and Sharp had left the camp for lunch.

The couple matched descriptions of the people they were looking for. Barron radioed detective Bryan Wheeles — a thick, 12-year cop who wore his hair buzzed. Wheeles rolled up on the couple, then Barron arrived, and the detectives separated Sharp and Hollingsworth.

Barron asked Hollingsworth for his name. Hollingsworth lied, telling the detective that his name was Terry L. Bennett. When Barron didn't believe him, Hollingsworth came clean.

Wheeles, meanwhile, went with Sharp. He could tell that Sharp was afraid of Hollingsworth. The detective considered her a witness.

Before uniformed officers led Hollingsworth away in handcuffs, Sharp yelled that she loved him.

In July 19, the Shawnee County District Attorney charged Sharp, Baker, Hollingsworth and Cornell with first-degree felony murder and kidnapping.

In the months that followed, leading to Baker's January 12 conviction, the four would turn on one another.

Kansas' aiding-and-abetting laws hang responsibility on anyone who assists in committing a crime, regardless of how much he or she participates. Sharp and Cornell might not have helped string up Owen, but because they didn't do anything to stop the crime — and burned Owen's belongings — the state held them liable for his murder. A conviction for felony murder could have cost Cornell life in prison with the possibility of parole after a mandatory 20 years. Cornell cut a deal with the state on the afternoon of October 6 — pleading guilty to reckless involuntary manslaughter and kidnapping — and agreed to testify against Sharp, Baker and Hollingsworth. The burly man wore a forest-green Shawnee County Jail jumpsuit and shackles to the courtroom where he signed the deal. His sentencing was scheduled for February 9.

Two months later, Sharp and Baker were convicted in separate trials. Owen's family — his father, Darrell; his mother, Ann; and his brothers, Paul and Andy — watched as Baker, Cornell and Sharp fingered Hollingsworth.

On December 13, Darrell Owen took the stand as the first witness in Sharp's trial. The patriarch of the Owen family was stoic.

He recalled David's arrest in Sedgwick County for downloading child pornography. He revealed that a psychologist's evaluation of his son after the arrest led to a diagnosis of possible paranoid schizophrenia (though he backed off that statement while testifying at Baker's later trial).

But Owen sounded proud as he told the court that Homeless Come Home was his son's idea.

Sharp testified that she had been afraid of Hollingsworth "the whole time" the two had been together. She said she feared for Owen's life when Hollingsworth grabbed an ax and led Owen out of the camp. After she saw how Hollingsworth treated Owen in the camp, she was afraid of her lover.

But in two videotaped interviews, Sharp contradicted herself. After she was taken into police custody, she told detective Wheeles that Hollingsworth had told her to "burn everything" at the camp; later, in a video re-enactment at the crime scene, Sharp admitted that it was her idea to burn Owen's stuff. She said she wanted to destroy any evidence that he was ever at the camp.

Andy Owen cracked a sad smile when the prosecutor showed the jury a photo of his older brother's charred glasses. Later, during the part of the video re-enactment when Sharp told a detective that Baker and Hollingsworth returned to the camp with Owen's broken glasses, shoes and socks, Paul Owen cried.

When Deputy District Attorney David Debenham showed jurors photos of Owen's body at the scene of the crime, Darrell stayed while the rest of the family left the courtroom.

Sharp's attorney, Stacey Donovan, argued that her client burned Owen's belongings out of anger, not to destroy evidence. Sharp saw the photos of destroyed homeless camps and couldn't understand how Owen could have done that to the people he supposedly was trying to help. Donovan told the jury that her client made mistakes that night, but she wasn't guilty of Owen's murder.