Anna Mae Aquash

Case background and investigation

Anna Mae Pictou Aquash was born in 1945 in Nova Scotia and was a member of the Mi'kmaq nation. In the early 1970s she became a prominent member of the American Indian Movement, which had been founded to protest the treatment of Native Americans and which occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, for 71 days in 1973.

On February 24, 1976, a body was found at the bottom of a ravine along Highway 73 near Wanblee, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. According to Wikipedia's summary of the record, the first autopsy attributed the death to exposure and the woman was buried without being identified. Her hands had been removed and sent to the FBI for fingerprinting, which led to her identification. A second autopsy, performed after exhumation, found that she had been shot in the back of the head.

Nearly three decades passed before anyone was charged. In 2003 a federal grand jury indicted Arlo Looking Cloud and John Graham. Looking Cloud was arrested in Denver that March. At his trial in Rapid City in February 2004, witnesses testified that Aquash had been taken from a house in Denver in December 1975 by Looking Cloud, Graham and Theda Clark, driven to Rapid City and then to the reservation, because some in the movement suspected she was a government informant. AIM leaders have denied involvement. The jury convicted Looking Cloud of first-degree murder and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Graham, a Southern Tutchone man from the Yukon, was arrested in Vancouver in December 2003 and fought extradition until December 2007. A federal murder charge against him was dismissed in 2009, and he was then tried in state court in Rapid City. Looking Cloud testified that he saw Graham shoot Aquash. On December 10, 2010, the jury found Graham guilty of felony murder in the course of a kidnapping and not guilty of premeditated murder, Native Sun News reported. He was sentenced on January 24, 2011, to life without parole, and the South Dakota Supreme Court upheld the conviction in 2012.

Two other people were charged. Vine Richard Marshall was indicted in 2008 on a federal charge of aiding and abetting the murder, accused of supplying the handgun; he pleaded not guilty and was acquitted. Thelma Rios pleaded guilty in state court in November 2010 to being an accessory to kidnapping and died in 2011. Clark, by then 87 and living in a nursing home, was called at Graham's trial but declined to testify.

In 2011 a federal judge reduced Looking Cloud's sentence to 20 years in recognition of his testimony, and he was released in November 2020, according to Wikipedia. Aquash was reburied in Nova Scotia in June 2004. CBS News reported at Graham's sentencing that officials still considered the investigation open.