GREGORY - A former police chief was arrested Wednesday morning on one count of first-degree murder for the 2009 death of his then-fiancee because of “additional evidence.”

Russell Bertram, 63, of Sioux Falls, was indicted Tuesday by a Gregory County grand jury on suspicion that he intentionally shot Leonila Stickney, of Bridgewater, then age 26, on Oct. 24, 2009, while hunting.

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The incident was originally thought to be an accident. Officials at the time said Stickney was a passenger in a vehicle driven by Bertram northwest of Gregory. Bertram was entering the vehicle after shooting a pheasant when he fired his 12-gauge shotgun, which struck Stickney in the chest, authorities said in 2009.

Sara Rabern, spokeswoman for the South Dakota Attorney General's Office, said the case was forwarded to the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation's special agent assigned to cold cases for further review, and "additional evidence was discovered which led to this arrest."

Rabern declined to provide details about the additional evidence. Rabern said Bertram was arrested late Wednesday morning near Pierre.

The man who originally investigated the incident, then-Gregory County Sheriff Charlie Wolf, said Wednesday in an interview with The Daily Republic that "things didn't look quite right."

“I was always concerned this wasn’t what (Bertram) said it was,” said Wolf, the initial responder to the incident. “Then we became more concerned, and now there’s even more things that point to him being guilty about it.”

Wolf, who has been retired since Jan. 1, said the Gregory County Sheriff’s Office investigated the case for about one and a half years before the state Division of Criminal Investigation took over.

“We didn’t know a lot of things at the beginning, but a lot of things came out later through interviews,” Wolf said Wednesday. “They did more interviews, and more people came forward.”

Wolf declined to disclose names from the interviews, but he said there were no witnesses to the alleged murder.

From information received from a six-year investigation by the Department of Criminal Investigation and the Gregory County Sheriff’s Office, a grand jury charged Bertram on Tuesday with having a “premeditated design to effect the death of a person,” according to court documents.

Bertram served as a police officer in Colome from November 1988 to August 1991. He then became a police officer in Parker until December 1996, which is when he became chief of police in Harrisburg until May 2004.

First-degree murder is a class A felony, the penalty for which, upon conviction, is death or a mandatory life sentence in prison, plus a fine of up to $50,000. The South Dakota Attorney General's Office is prosecuting the case.

“The investigation reached a point that based upon the evidence we felt it appropriate to present it to the grand jury,” Attorney General Marty Jackley told The Associated Press. “We certainly respect that the defendant is presumed innocent and the case will be proceeding forward accordingly.”

Some crimes in South Dakota are restricted by a statute of limitations, an ordinance that says a person can only be charged with a crime within a specific amount of time after the crime was committed. Arson, burglary and second-degree manslaughter have a statute of limitations of seven years, for instance. More serious crimes, such as first-degree manslaughter or murder, have no limit.

Rabern said the Department of Criminal Investigation has several crimes that “go cold.” One instance was re-opened more than 40 years after the incident occurred.



