Solved cold cases in South Dakota
1 documented case.
Unnamed 23-month-old girl (name not publicly released)
In the early morning hours of September 4, 1992, a 23-month-old girl, the daughter of Jay Adams Jr.'s girlfriend, was killed at a home on the Lake Traverse Indian Reservation in Roberts County, South Dakota. The toddler had been living in the home of Adams's parents. According to court records summarized by federal prosecutors, after Adams returned from a night shift he discovered the child had soiled her diaper and bedding, and he reacted violently, slamming her body to the ground and striking her head against a hard concrete floor; an autopsy also found evidence of forceful blows to her abdomen. The death was treated for decades as an unexplained child death, and the case went cold. The break did not come from DNA or forensic science but from a person: in early 2023, a witness to the crime came forward and identified Adams as responsible for the girl's death. The Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Police Department and the FBI reopened the investigation, working through the U.S. Department of Justice's Missing or Murdered Indigenous Persons Regional Outreach Program. A federal grand jury indicted Adams on a charge of first-degree murder in April 2023. Adams, an enrolled member of the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate who had himself worked as a dispatcher for the tribal police, pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter on November 20, 2023. On June 24, 2024, in Aberdeen, U.S. District Judge Charles B. Kornmann sentenced him to 10 years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release and a special assessment to the Federal Crime Victims Fund, roughly 32 years after the child's death. The victim's name has not been publicly disclosed.