Murder of Becky O'Connell

On the evening of May 8, 1990, nine-year-old Becky O'Connell disappeared after walking to a Sioux Falls neighborhood convenience store to buy candy and sugar to make lemonade. Her mother, Tina Curl, and stepfather, David M. Curl, along with neighbors, searched for her before contacting police. O'Connell's body was found the following morning in a wooded area along the banks of the Big Sioux River near Lake Alvin in Lincoln County. An autopsy determined she had been raped and that her cause of death was a severed jugular vein from a cut throat. No murder weapon was recovered at the scene, and no attempt had been made to conceal her body or clothing.

Detective Mike Larsen identified Donald Eugene Moeller, a 37-year-old man with a prior criminal history who lived near the abduction site, as a suspect. Moeller was questioned and provided a blood sample; investigators noted his truck was muddy and resembled a vehicle witnesses had seen near where the body was found. By the time police obtained a search warrant for his home, Moeller had fled. He evaded capture for more than nine months until he was apprehended in Tacoma, Washington. He was initially jailed there under an alias on an unrelated stolen property charge before an FBI fingerprint check revealed his identity and an outstanding South Dakota warrant. He was extradited to South Dakota in February 1991.

A Lincoln County grand jury indicted Moeller in July 1991 on charges of first-degree rape, felony murder, and first-degree murder. On September 1, 1992, a jury in Yankton County convicted Moeller, and he was sentenced to death days later — the first death sentence issued in South Dakota since the state revived its death penalty in 1979. In 1996, the South Dakota Supreme Court overturned the sentence, finding that testimony about Moeller's prior alleged sexual assaults should not have been presented to the jury. Moeller was retried in Rapid City in 1997, and a Pennington County jury again sentenced him to death; he was formally resentenced on June 4, 1997.

Moeller remained on South Dakota's death row for more than two decades, maintaining his innocence and pursuing appeals. In July 2012, he publicly confessed to the rape and murder and asked to stop his appeals, stating he deserved to die. Despite motions filed by others on his behalf, courts allowed the execution to proceed. Moeller was executed by lethal injection at the South Dakota State Penitentiary on October 30, 2012, and pronounced dead at 10:24 p.m. His execution followed that of another South Dakota death row inmate two weeks earlier, marking an unusual period of two executions in one month for the state. O'Connell's mother and stepfather traveled from New York to witness the execution.