1861
In 1861 the territorial government was established and Yankton was designated the first capital of Dakota Territory.
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Tamara LaFramboise was born on 7 December 1972 in Mobridge, South Dakota, the only child of Mary. Her mother moved her to Albuquerque as a baby while she studied, then the family returned to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation while Tamara was a preschooler, and later settled in Aberdeen, South Dakota. She went to a Catholic school there, then Aberdeen public schools, and finished at Washburn High in Washburn, Wisconsin. She was outgoing and made friends easily. She spent a freshman year at the University of Minnesota, moved to California, later enrolled at American River College in Sacramento and transferred to the University of California at Davis, graduating in 2001 with a Bachelor of Science in environmental biology. Both her children, Ron Jr. and Sydney, were born while she was at college. She ran seven marathons and qualified for the Boston marathon, taught boot camp at a local athletic club, volunteered at the Humane Society and served as vice president of her son's football league. She worked for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in Sacramento, then moved back to Albuquerque with her children and worked as a waitress, an apprentice electrician, a phone representative and a labourer. By 2015 she had come to Yankton, South Dakota, on what her mother described as a bid for a fresh start. She made friends, bought the Harley Davidson she had always wanted, and in late 2015 began work as a machine operator at Wilson Trailer Company. She lived in an apartment on Deer Boulevard.
In 1993, aged 19, he suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in a car accident and recovered, though the injury was visible in his face. He became a construction contractor, six feet tall and powerfully built, and was famous locally for driving nails with his hands instead of a hammer. He had two children, Sebastian and Marissa, and an ex-wife, Jennifer Becker. People who knew him described him as non-confrontational, calm and gentle. He and Tamara began a relationship, though he also had a fiancee at the time. A needle in her possession tested positive for methamphetamine.
On 1 March 2019 Tamara worked her shift at Wilson Trailer. Just before midnight she gave her debit card to a co-worker, Javier Gonzales, and asked him to buy beer at Walmart before liquor sales ended; he left the beer, the receipt and the card in another co-worker's truck. At about 1.30 a.m. she borrowed a friend's phone and called her mother in New Mexico, as she did most days. They drove to Walmart, where surveillance showed her at 2.17 a.m. buying an alarm clock and two bags of chips and getting into his pickup. She failed to turn up for her shift at the Humane Society later that day. He said he had no idea where she was, but that they had argued at her apartment on the morning of 1 March after he came to tell her she did not need to take a drug test that day. On 4 March he told Mary he had fallen and broken two fingers, and when she asked whether her daughter was alive he replied that she was when he left. Her son Ron, who had a key, checked the apartment twice a day and found nothing, though the bag she always carried was still there. Mary reported her missing at 2.53 p.m. on 5 March.
The deputy noticed a soft cast on his right hand and several dusty baseball bats in the corner of his shop. A convenience store clerk, Cindy Roberts, reported that on 1 March he had filled his truck with the bed covered, which she had never seen, and his right hand was swollen; he told her he had punched an icicle. He had left Yankton and driven towards Michigan, stopping the night of 1 March at a hotel in Tomah, Wisconsin, where he signed with his left hand, sat in the hot tub and had food delivered. On 2 March he saw a doctor in Michigan and gave the icicle story; on 4 March a second provider recorded that he had braced for a fall on ice with a clenched fist. The same day he turned up nervous at an automotive business in Menominee and asked to use the dumpster.
On 16 March two boys walking a dog along Number Five Road in Menominee township saw a body on the ice of the Little River. Gregory Thorston Westby went to look and found the nude, tattooed torso of a small woman. The body had been decapitated and its hands and feet removed with power tools, leaving tool marks and striations on the bone. Tattoos identified her: playing cards on the right forearm, a cross on the left shoulder, a puma on the left forearm, an eagle on a branch on the upper left back, three hearts with wings on the upper right back, a spider web on the left ankle and a banner on the right calf. Her head, hands and feet were never found. The chief medical examiner for Fond du Lac County, Wisconsin, found that she had been frozen and then dismembered, because blood remained in the vessels and oozed from the stumps when the body thawed. There was no evidence of trauma to the remains and her organs were in excellent health. Her blood contained 350 nanograms per millilitre of methamphetamine. The cause of death was recorded as homicide by unspecified means.
He admitted dismembering her to hide her identity, said the tools were gone and that he wore gloves. On 18 March a search warrant with luminol found her blood and blood spatter on the west wall of the entryway of her apartment. A cadaver dog indicated human remains near the driver's door of his truck, and a two-day search of the Menominee landfill recovered her Columbia coat, a black sequin hat, white pants and a Harley Davidson shirt, identified by a friend and her daughter. Michigan prosecutors said the murder was believed to have happened in South Dakota and left prosecution there.
A psychiatrist testified that the 1993 injury impaired his ability to consider alternatives and anticipate consequences. The judge allowed the autopsy photographs.