Solved cold cases in South Dakota
3 documented cases.
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash
Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a 30-year-old Mi'kmaq woman from Nova Scotia and a prominent member of the American Indian Movement, was taken from a house in Denver in late 1975 by three AIM associates, her hands bound, and driven to Rapid City, then across the Rosebud and Pine Ridge reservations, because AIM figures believed she was a government informant. On a bluff beside Highway 73 between Kadoka and Wanblee she was shot in the back of the head with a .32-caliber pistol. A rancher found her body on February 24, 1976. A first autopsy listed exposure; she was buried unidentified, and only after fingerprints identified her and she was exhumed did a second autopsy, on March 10, 1976, find the bullet. For 26 years the case went nowhere. Investigators made headway only after agents began talking to Arlo Looking Cloud in the mid-1990s and former AIM members, including an AIM leader's former wife who recorded conversations, broke their silence. Looking Cloud and John Graham were indicted in 2003. Looking Cloud was convicted of first-degree murder in federal court in February 2004 and sentenced to life. Graham, extradited from Canada in 2007, saw the federal case dismissed because he is not an American Indian under U.S. law; the State of South Dakota tried him instead, and on December 10, 2010 a Rapid City jury convicted him of felony murder in the kidnapping. He was sentenced to life without parole.
Candace Rough Surface
Candace Rough Surface, an 18-year-old member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe from Kenel, South Dakota, and the mother of a two-year-old son, disappeared on August 2, 1980, during a trip across the Missouri River into the border town of Mobridge. Nine months later, in May 1981, a local ranch hand found her skeletal remains in a shallow bay of Lake Oahe, exposed by receding water; the remains carried bullet wounds. Authorities said there was little evidence, and the case went cold for fifteen years even though, the sheriff later admitted, the name of a Mobridge teenager had come up early. In 1995 that teenager's cousin, James Stroh, by then living in Wisconsin, was going through a bitter divorce. He had told his wife before they married what he had done in South Dakota, and her mother went to the authorities. Stroh confessed in October 1995 and said the killing was the idea of his cousin, Nicholas Scherr. Both were charged that month, which set off months of racial tension between Mobridge and the reservation. On May 7, 1996, the day his first-degree murder trial was to begin, Scherr pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter and was sentenced to 100 years; Stroh pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and aggravated assault and received 15 years. Stroh was released in 2004. Scherr was paroled in 2019 after 23 years.
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.