CORSICANA — Glenn Ray Boelter, who is being held in the Navarro County Jail accused of murdering Sammie Hawkins last week is now believed to be Gary Thomas Sharron, 59, a convicted murderer from Alabama who escaped from prison in 1977.
Navarro County Sheriff’s deputies discovered Boelter’s former identity when they ran his fingerprints through the national databank. He remains in the Navarro County Jail in lieu of a $750,000 bond.
Hawkins, a former Corsicana businessman, was slain Sept. 5 in his home near Kerens.
Sharron/Boelter ran a barbecue restaurant in Seven Points and Mabank for several years under the Boelter identity, and was a regular in several bars on the lake.
“It’s kind of freaking everybody out,” said Diane Diemer, a bartender at Chap’s, where Boelter was a customer for years. “He’s not who we thought he was. We knew him as Glenn.”
Sharron, or Boelter as he was known locally, was fairly popular and got along with everyone unless he’d been drinking heavily, Diemer said.
“Occasionally, he would pick fights and stuff. He liked to play pool, and he’d get into it over that,” she said, adding: “Most of the time Glenn was a fun-loving guy.”
It was a bar fight that got Sharron into trouble back in 1973 in Russell County, Alabama.
“Yeah, I remember Gary Sharron. I went to high school with him,” said Russell County Sheriff Tommy Boswell. “He killed a guy in a bar fight a long time ago.”
Boswell remembered Sharron as a big guy, nice enough, but with a hot temper.
“He was in and out of trouble with us for a long time,” Boswell said.
Boswell, who has been an officer in Phenix City for the last 32 years, said he didn’t investigate that particular case, but he remembered it because he’d gone to school with Sharron.
“It was at the Log Cabin Bar, the guy he killed was a soldier,” Boswell said.
Phenix City is just across the river from Fort Benning, Ga., one of the largest Army posts in the United States.
Former District Attorney Bill Benton recalled the trial, and was surprised to hear of Sharron’s recapture in Texas, 29 years after he escaped from prison.
“He’s a bad number,” Benton said. “He (the victim) was a young soldier.
There was an altercation and Sharron was the aggressor. I prosecuted him for killing that kid. He had a reputation about that time, too.”
The news that Sharron has been accused of a recent murder in Texas didn’t seem to surprise Benton.
“It looks like he hasn’t gotten rid of that reputation he had,” Benton said. “So long as he’s in jail somewhere.”
Sharron was convicted in February 1973 and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
He served slightly more than four years when he was made a trustee and allowed into a work-release program. In April 1977, he walked away from the work detail and never came back, said Brian Corbett, public information manager with the Alabama Department of Corrections.
Earlier Thursday, Corbett had updated the system’s list of wanted felons and had highlighted Sharron as a most wanted.
“This is really too coincidental,” Corbett said. “Absolutely unbelievable.”
Work release in Alabama currently allows non-violent prisoners to work in the free world during the day and return to prison at night, Corbett explained.
“Today, he wouldn’t be eligible for work release,” Cobett said of Sharron. “Anyone convicted of murder, trafficking, and heinous sexual crimes is barred from work release.”
Here in Texas, none of the people who dealt with him could recount what Sharron has been doing with the last three decades of freedom.
He owned Chattahoochie Barbecue, first in Mabank then in Seven Points, before selling it to Gene Brown, who renamed it Brown’s Barbecue.
“We bought this place from him,” said Connie Rasberry, who works at Brown’s.
“It’s been a terror. He went around telling everybody he still owned part of it, and all sorts of stuff.
“They say he was a real jerk,” she added.
Over the last few years, Sharron’s luck has been going steadily downhill, said bartender Diemer.
“After he lost his barbecue place, he kind of went down, down,” Diemer said. “He was kind of a scummer, you know, he’d do stuff here and there.”
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