Photo courtesy of Upshur County Sheriff’s Dept.
The Dark Tale of Sharon Maxwell, Ore City’s Most Dangerous Wife
If you’ve ever lived in a small town, you know everybody knows everybody’s business. In Ore City, Texas — a tight-knit community of just about 1,100 people — there was one woman who gave the locals plenty to talk about. Her name was Sharon Maxwell, and by the time she was 44 years old, she had managed to marry ten men in a town where most people can’t even name ten people they’d want to have coffee with.
Ten husbands. In a town of eleven hundred people. Let that sink in for a second.
But Sharon’s story isn’t just about a woman with a serious marriage habit. It’s about what happened when husband number ten finally pushed back — and paid for it with his life.
The Tenth Husband
Gordon Lynn Maxwell wasn’t just any guy. He was a former Baptist preacher turned steelworker, a hard-working man in his mid-40s who had reconnected with Sharon online after ending a long marriage. He seemed like a decent, honest type — the kind of guy who wore his heart on his sleeve. Friends say he was genuinely trying to make his marriage to Sharon work, even as things between them got rocky.
And rocky they definitely were. Gordon had started to figure out what everyone else in Ore City apparently already knew: Sharon was cheating on him. Openly. She had been carrying on with an ex-lover named Joey Stroman since 2009, and the affair was still going just weeks before Gordon’s death. Gordon confided in coworkers that he was thinking about divorce. He was unhappy. He wanted out.
That, prosecutors would later argue, was the last mistake Gordon Maxwell ever made.
The Night Everything Went Up in Flames — Literally
On August 30, 2011, emergency services got a call from Sharon. She said she couldn’t find her husband and his pickup truck was on fire in the backyard. She told them she’d heard loud bangs — thought they were bullets popping in the heat — and had no idea where Gordon was.
Firefighters showed up, put out the blaze, and made a horrifying discovery. There was a body on the floorboard of the truck. It was burned so badly they couldn’t even identify it by looking at it — dental records had to be used to confirm it was Gordon. The truck reeked of gasoline, and tests confirmed an accelerant had been used to start the fire.
The autopsy told the real story. Gordon hadn’t been caught in some freak accident. He had been shot four times in the head with a .22 caliber weapon before the fire even started. The proof? No soot in his lungs. He was already dead when someone lit that truck.
This was no accident. This was a murder scene.
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Three Stories, All Lies
When investigators started pressing Sharon, things got interesting fast. And by interesting, we mean deeply suspicious.
Story One: She knew nothing. Gordon was working on the truck, it caught fire, she had no idea what happened. When police found blood stains in the master bedroom, that story fell apart pretty quickly.
Story Two: Self-defense. She claimed Gordon had attacked her, they struggled over a gun, and it went off accidentally. She then admitted to dragging his body to the truck using a blanket and setting it on fire — but hey, it was an accident! Investigators weren’t buying it. Gordon’s ex-wife of 16 years testified he had never once been violent. The self-defense story had no legs.
Story Three: This is where things took a truly dark turn. Sharon pointed the finger at her own son.
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Blaming the Kid
James Potter was Sharon’s 19-year-old son. At the time of Gordon’s murder, the poor kid had just had kidney surgery. He was recovering, on medication, and could barely move around.
Sharon told investigators that James had shot Gordon — supposedly over a fight about household rules — and that she had helped cover it up to protect him. She claimed she’d been lying this whole time to save her son from going to prison.
James took the stand and flatly denied every word of it. He said he was asleep when everything happened, that he hadn’t shot anyone, and that he was “very scared” when he saw the truck on fire and didn’t even know where his mother was. Given that the kid was post-surgery and on painkillers, the idea of him committing a calculated murder was a stretch to say the least.
The prosecution pointed out to the jury that all the evidence placed James sound asleep — the only person who said otherwise was, in the DA’s words, a “habitual felon” whose testimony the defense had drummed up. Investigators ruled James out as a suspect entirely.
Sharon had shot her husband four times in the head, burned his body in his own beloved truck, tried to cover her tracks with a web of shifting stories, and then — when her back was against the wall — tried to send her own recovering teenager to prison for life.
The Motive: Money and Fear of Being Left
So why did she do it? Prosecutors pointed to two things working together.
First, money. Gordon had taken out a $175,000 life insurance policy with Sharon as the beneficiary, and it had conveniently become active right around the time of his death. That’s a serious chunk of change.
Second — and maybe even more telling — was Sharon’s personality. People who knew her described a woman with a deep, almost desperate fear of being abandoned. She had ended every single one of her previous nine marriages herself. She was always the one who walked away. The idea of someone leaving her was apparently unbearable.
One of her exes told the court she had ended their marriage without warning, over the phone, while he was working out of town. Another man she had been involved with recalled how she chased his car down the street and grabbed at his arms through the window when he tried to pull away from her. Coworkers said Gordon had told them his wife was “good with a .357” — almost like a warning he didn’t take seriously enough.
When Gordon started talking about divorce, Sharon apparently decided that if she couldn’t control the ending, she’d make sure there was no ending to be had at all.
Justice, Eventually
The trial wrapped up in August 2012 after four days of testimony. The jury took just one hour to come back with a guilty verdict. One hour. That’s how airtight the case against her was.
Sharon Maxwell was sentenced to life in prison and hit with a $10,000 fine. She sat there stone-faced as Gordon’s family finally got to exhale after more than a year of grief and legal proceedings.
She appealed the conviction in 2014, arguing there wasn’t enough evidence. The court disagreed and upheld the verdict. She is not eligible for parole until 2042 — when she’ll be in her mid-70s.
Her son James, the young man she tried to sacrifice to save her own skin, walked out of that courtroom a free man. He deserved so much better than the hand his mother tried to deal him.
A Town That Knew Too Much
Looking back, the people of Ore City weren’t exactly shocked that things ended this way. The warning signs had been there for years. Friends had literally warned Gordon that being with Sharon could “cut his life short.” He laughed it off…or maybe he just didn’t want to believe it.
Sharon Maxwell spent decades being the woman who always got away with it. She ended marriages on her terms, controlled the men around her, and kept the small town gossip mill spinning. She thought murder would be no different, that she could spin enough stories, shift enough blame, and walk away clean one more time.
She was wrong.
Husband number ten was the last one.
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Lisa Crow contributed to this article. She is a true crime junkie and lifestyle blogger based in Waco, Texas. Lisa is the Head of Content at Gigi’s Ramblings and Southern Bred True Crime Junkie. She spends her free time traveling when she can and making memories with her large family which consists of six children and sixteen grandchildren.
