1817
Fort Pierre developed earlier, with a permanent settlement there since 1817; it began as a fur trading post.
about 0:05:22The story
Tamara Donell Burns, known as Tammy, was born on June 15th, 1964 in Lander, Wyoming, the oldest of Donald and Bonnie's three daughters. She graduated from high school there in 1982 and worked in women's retail before settling in Billings, Montana. In August 2004 Brad transferred with Walmart to Pierre, South Dakota, where Tammy took a job in the shoe department at Kmart. The marriage was not close: they slept in separate bedrooms, and he worked long hours.
At Kmart Tammy met Brian Clark, the assistant manager, and around December 2005 they began an affair. In the first days of February 2006 she told Brad she wanted a divorce and to see other people. He sank into depression and asked her mother Bonnie to talk his wife round. Tammy refused, but agreed to wait until Haley's school year ended.
That evening she watched Haley play basketball at Georgia Morse Middle School; afterwards they got fast food and were home by 8.30, with Tammy in bed by nine. In the middle of the night Haley woke to find her father at her door with an armful of clothes. He said nothing, lay with her and told her he loved her. The next morning the washing machine was running. Haley found her mother's bed unmade and Tammy gone, with her phone, purse and Dodge Durango still there. Brad said she had a boyfriend and was probably at his house, then told Haley on the drive to school not to tell anybody.
When Bonnie heard nothing from her daughter she phoned Haley at school, then Brian at Kmart, who said Tammy had not shown up for her ten o'clock shift. Brian went to the police and told them everything, including the affair, and suggested the husband might have done something. His alibi was solid, so he was quickly ruled out. Police found no answer at the house and saw the Durango and a reddish-brown stain in the garage. At the Walmart security office Brad said that when he got home around one in the morning Tammy was not there, that a vehicle pulled into the driveway and drove off, and that he chased it without catching it. He signed a consent to search. Detectives found a blood droplet on the garage floor, a strong cleaning solution smell from the Durango, and fresh laundry in his bed and the washer and dryer.
Haley was taken into foster care overnight.
On February 10th a National Guard helicopter pilot spotted a body near the Oahe Dam emergency spillway on Lake Oahe. It was Tammy, nude, her throat slashed and her body bearing 37 stab wounds. A T-shirt riddled with knife holes and a pair of bloody gloves lay nearby. The autopsy found wounds to the chest, back, face and arms, damage to the heart, aorta and lungs, and post-mortem wounds; there were more wounds than were needed to kill her. She had been stabbed first in the back, then repeatedly in the chest, and attacked again after being placed on a tarp. The spot where she was found was one she had visited with Brian Clark to have sex.
Agents searched those spots with a bloodhound and a cadaver dog and found three City of Pierre garbage bags in juniper hedges near the power station. Inside were bloody sheets, blankets and women's underwear, a six-by-eight-foot blue tarp with a four-by-six-foot patch of blood and 16 stab holes, a box of condoms with one missing, and cleaning bottles.
Acting on it, the medical examiner found a condom inside Tammy.
Haley testified that she had never hurt her mother and, at five foot one and 94 pounds, lacked the strength. Brad then testified, against his lawyer's advice, that he had found Haley catatonic and bloodied, and had planted the condom to make it look like a sexual assault.
Haley grew up with her grandparents, is now in her thirties, married under a different name, speaks against domestic violence and has disowned her father. Tammy is buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Lander, Wyoming. The Kmart in Pierre closed in April 2016.