Canadian man re-indicted by U.S. jury in 1975 killing case
Last Updated: Tuesday, October 7, 2008 | 8:25 PM ET
The Associated Press
Federal grand jurors in South Dakota have indicted a Canadian man again and joined his case with another American Indian Movement member also charged with a 32-year-old homicide.
John Graham was to stand trial this week on a charge he killed fellow Canadian Annie Mae Pictou-Aquash in 1975 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
But a judge on Friday threw out the original indictment because it didn't show that either Graham or Pictou-Aquash belonged to a federally recognized American Indian tribe.
Graham is from the Southern Tutchone First Nation in the Yukon and fought his return to South Dakota from Vancouver for more than four years. He was extradited in December after the Supreme Court of Canada refused to review his case.
Pictou-Aquash, a Mi'kmaq woman from Pictou, N.S., was killed by a gunshot to the head. Her body was found in South Dakota on Feb. 24, 1976, and she was buried weeks later as Jane Doe but was disinterred when tests determined it was her body.
Pictou-Aquash was reburied at an Oglala cemetery but her family exhumed the body in 2004 and returned it to Canada. She was laid to rest a third time at the Indian Brook First Nation.
U.S. attorney Marty Jackley said Tuesday that the new indictment charges Graham and Richard Marshall with three alternative counts of first-degree murder and aiding and abetting in Pictou-Aquash's killing, and alleges that both were members of American Indian tribes.
Marshall was charged separately in August.
A third AIM member, Arlo Looking Cloud, was convicted in 2004 of killing Pictou-Aquash and sentenced to a mandatory life prison term. He is a Lakota who was living homeless in Denver.
Witnesses said Pictou-Aquash begged for her life
Witnesses at Looking Cloud's trial said he, Graham and another AIM member, Theda Clarke, drove Pictou-Aquash from Denver to South Dakota in late 1975 and that Graham shot Pictou-Aquash in the Badlands as she begged for her life.
Clarke, who lives in a nursing home in western Nebraska, has not been charged.
Graham has denied killing Pictou-Aquash but acknowledges being in the car.
Marshall's former wife, Cleo Gates, testified at Looking Cloud's trial that Graham and Clarke stopped by with Pictou-Aquash in late 1975 and Pictou-Aquash stayed with her in the kitchen while the others went into a back bedroom with her husband.
When a prosecutor asked whether Marshall kept a gun back there, Gates said he did not.
Some speculated Pictou-Aquash was killed by AIM members because she knew some of them were government spies, while others said she was executed because she herself was an informant. Federal authorities have said Pictou-Aquash was not an informant and they had nothing to do with her death.
Pictou-Aquash, 30, was among the aboriginal militants who occupied the village of Wounded Knee, S.D., in a 71-day standoff with U.S. federal authorities in 1973 that included an exchange of gunfire with agents who surrounded the village.
The judge scheduled the trial for Graham and Marshall for February in Rapid City, but that could change. Lawyers for the two likely will argue they should be tried separately.
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