The murder of Candace Rough Surface

The case was broken by a confession, and the confession was prised loose by a divorce. Through the 1980s the investigation had almost nothing to work with: a young woman who had gone into Mobridge and not come home, and, nine months later, bullet-marked skeletal remains in a bay of Lake Oahe. Walworth County Sheriff James Spiry told the Seattle Times in 1996 that Nicholas Scherr's name had come up early, but investigators had pursued a different lead and it went nowhere. In 1995 James Stroh II, Scherr's cousin, was living in Eagle River, Wisconsin, and his marriage was ending. Before the marriage he had told his wife what had happened in South Dakota in August 1980. During the divorce, his mother-in-law alerted Wisconsin authorities, and in October 1995 Stroh confessed. According to the Associated Press, he said he was fifteen and Scherr sixteen when his vacationing family stopped in Mobridge; that after a party the three left in Scherr's pickup; that Rough Surface hit him and Scherr became angry; that Scherr dragged her from the truck and raped her, that he raped her too at his cousin's insistence, that they shot her, chained her body to the truck and left it in the river. He said the killing was Scherr's idea. The Seattle Times reported that authorities also taped a phone call in which Scherr allegedly admitted involvement. Stroh was offered reduced charges in exchange for testimony, and both men were charged in October 1995. Scherr, by then a diesel mechanic from a prominent Mobridge family, was charged with first-degree murder and freed on a $200,000 bond. The rape charge was dropped because the statute of limitations had run. On May 7, 1996, the day his trial was to start in Selby, Scherr pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of first-degree manslaughter before Circuit Judge Jack Von Wald, agreeing that his lawyer's account of the night was accurate. State's Attorney Dan Todd recommended 100 years, and that is what Scherr received. Stroh pleaded guilty to second-degree manslaughter and aggravated assault and was sentenced to 15 years.