'She was just a good mother'

Suspect linked to long-unsolved death of Agatha White Buffalo, Rosebud Sioux
By Kevin Abourezk Agatha White Buffalo was a diminutive woman, barely 5 feet tall, and pretty.She was a housewife, who ironed her husband’s police blues and washed her eight children’s clothes by hand, hanging them out to dry on a clothes line with the help of her daughters.Living on South Dakota’s Rosebud Indian Reservation, the Lakota woman guided her children in the Catholic faith, ensuring they properly practiced communion and the sacraments.But when her husband, Patrick Henry White Buffalo, was incarcerated, she struggled to care for her children on her own. The state of South Dakota eventually took her children from her and placed them with foster parents.Then, White Buffalo got sick. The Indian Health Service hospital in Rosebud, South Dakota, found a spot on her lung, and sent her to Omaha, Nebraska, to have a biopsy done.So in November 1973, the 34-year-old hopped a bus headed south.She never came home.“She wandered off and got killed,” said her daughter, Joyce Bresette. “She was there for a reason, but she got involved with the wrong people.”A November 17, 1973, article in The Omaha World-Herald reported the murder of Agatha White Buffalo at the age of 34. Courtesy photoLast November – 45 years after White Buffalo’s body was found upside-down in a 55-gallon barrel in Omaha – authorities announced they finally had a suspect in her murder.And just last week, Omaha police said they have officially linked a Texas inmate who has claimed responsibility for 90 killings over 35 years to White Buffalo’s murder. Sam Little, 78, has confessed to killing women from 1970 to 2005, and is serving three consecutive life sentences after being convicted in 2014 of murdering three women in Los Angeles from 1987 to 1989.The former boxer has admitted to killing women from California to Florida, saying he would beat them and then strangle them before dumping their bodies in alleys, dumpsters and garages, according to the FBI. Federal authorities have been able to corroborate 34 killings so far.“Little chose to kill marginalized and vulnerable women who were often involved in prostitution and addicted to drugs,” the FBI said in a news release last November. “Their bodies sometimes went unidentified and their deaths uninvestigated.”His method of killing often left few signs that the death was a homicide. The former competitive boxer usually stunned or knocked out his victims by punching them and then strangled them. His victims’ causes of death were often attributed to drug overdoses, accidents or natural causes.As for White Buffalo, her body was found November 16, 1973, inside a barrel at the Sturges Hide Company in south Omaha, according to an article published the next day in the Omaha World-Herald. A 27-year-old man, Martin Hernandez, was moving barrels behind the plant when he found her body. Police later found some of her clothing nearby.A county coroner ruled she had been strangled but hadn’t been sexually assaulted.Bresette, who at 62 is the oldest of White Buffalo’s six surviving children, said she learned about the Little’s confession in November.She said she contacted Omaha police after learning they were trying to reach her family. A detective told her about Little and said Omaha prosecutors planned to extradite him to Nebraska to face trial in her mother’s death.The detective also offered her a few details about her mother’s death that she hadn’t heard before, including information about another Native woman who had been drinking at a bar with Agatha White Buffalo the night she was killed.The Native woman told police at that time that the two women had been drinking with a man who she believed had killed White Buffalo. The other woman left White Buffalo and the man at the bar later that night.The news of Little’s confession didn’t shock Bresette, she said. The pain of her mother’s death had long since faded, but she said she’s glad her family may now find some closure.She said her mother’s death nearly shattered her family.“It was mayhem for us,” she said.
Her father, Patrick Henry White Buffalo, began drinking constantly and was unable to care for his children. His four youngest children were placed in foster care, until they were old enough to attend boarding school and were returned to Bresette’s grandmother and aunt.Another person close to the family said White Buffalo — a Korean War veteran who died in 2003 – loved his wife and grieved for her until the day he died.“He was lonely for the rest of his life,” this person said. “Some people can't be replaced.”Bresette, who today still lives in St. Francis, South Dakota, not far from her childhood home, said her family has never fully healed from her mother’s death.“She was just a good mother,” she said. “She was real kind. She was gentle-hearted. She was just a nice person.”