March 12, 2019
'She was just a good mother'
Suspect linked to long-unsolved death of Agatha White Buffalo, Rosebud SiouxBy 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.”
A family portrait of Agatha White Buffalo.
A family photo of Patrick Henry White Buffalo. A smaller photo of Agatha White Buffalo can be seen in the lower right.
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.”
The only reporter who has spoken to Samuel Little explains how the criminal was finally caught, and why he almost got away with his crimes https://thecut.io/2EEcv0j
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