SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — For the first time, federal prosecutors handling a 1975 slaying on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation have directly accused one of the defendants of supplying the gun that killed Annie Mae Aquash.
Richard Marshall and John Graham pleaded not guilty Friday in Rapid City to a new indictment charging them with committing or aiding and abetting the first-degree murder of Aquash when all three were active with the American Indian Movement.
Marshall was indicted in August, five years after Graham and another AIM member, Arlo Looking Cloud, were initially charged.
Looking Cloud was convicted in 2004 for his role in Aquash’s murder and sentenced to a mandatory life prison term.
Witnesses at his trial said that he, Graham and another AIM member, Theda Clarke, drove Aquash from Denver in late 1975 and that Graham shot 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 Aquash but acknowledges being in the car from Denver.
Some speculated AIM members killed Aquash because she knew some of them were government spies, while others said she was executed because she herself was suspected of being an informant. Federal authorities have said Aquash was not an informant.
In a new filing, U.S. Attorney Marty Jackley and Assistant U.S. Attorney Bob Mandel gave each man 10 days to provide notice of an alibi defense, including where they were and whom they were with when Aquash was believed to have been killed — Dec. 12, 1975.
Marshall was at his house in Allen when he gave Graham, Looking Cloud and Clarke the revolver and shells used to kill Aquash, they wrote. The prosecutors also wrote that the meeting included an exchange of the “baggage note” — correspondence supposedly to Marshall from other AIM members that referred to Aquash.
