Deaths of Arnold Archambeau and Ruby Bruguier

Arnold Archambeau (born 1972), a member of the Yankton Sioux Tribe, was raised on its reservation in the southeastern half of Charles Mix County, South Dakota. Raised by his grandmother after his mother's death in his teens, Archambeau was living with an aunt and working at the Fort Randall Casino at the time of his disappearance. Ruby Bruguier (born January 11, 1974, in Wagner), also a Yankton Sioux, also grew up on the reservation and attended school in Lake Andes, the county seat of Charles Mix County. In 1991 she and Archambeau had a daughter; they never married. ==Accident and disappearance==

On the night of Friday December 11, 1992, Archambeau and Bruguier took a break from their parental and work responsibilities to socialize. They left their daughter with Bruguier's uncle and took his daughter, Tracy Dion, aged 17, with them as they visited friends at various locations all night. When they returned around 6:00 the next morning, the uncle noticed they seemed to have been drinking and suggested they return later in the day after they had sobered up, which they agreed to do. Shortly afterwards, closer to 7 a.m., they were at a three-way intersection with U.S. Route 281 (also U.S. Route 18 and South Dakota Highway 50 at that point) approximately one mile (1.6 km) east of Lake Andes. Archambeau, who was driving, stopped at the sign. As he turned left onto 281, the vehicle hit a patch of black ice on the road and overturned, coming to rest just off the highway in a depression between the road and a former railroad right-of-way to its north. Dion later told Unsolved Mysteries that while she did not see Archambeau leave the car after the accident, he was not in it when it came to rest upside down. Bruguier, she says, kept saying, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" and hitting the car. She says Bruguier soon managed to push one of the doors open and slide out. When Dion went to do the same, the door was shut. She remained inside the car until rescuers arrived some time later. ==Discovery of bodies==

By early March 1993, the couple's whereabouts were still unknown, and police went to the media to publicize the story in hopes of finding Archambeau and/or Bruguier. "It's a very odd case", said Captain Vincent Merrick of the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs Police (BIAP). He was especially struck by Bruguier's apparent abandonment of a child she was still breastfeeding, which had never happened in any other case he had investigated. Investigators had found no evidence of either having any serious interpersonal disputes with someone else, or any legal or financial difficulties. Merrick said he had requested the assistance of the state's Division of Criminal Investigation. The Archambeau and Bruguier families offered a thousand-dollar reward for any information that would lead to their discovery. The disparity between the extent to which the bodies had decomposed, and their apparent absence in the three months preceding their discovery, were not the only facts that confounded investigators. Youngstrom told Unsolved Mysteries that a tuft of hair found on the roadside near the bodies was determined to have been Bruguier's, but it was in far better condition than it should have been if it had been there the entire time since the accident. Her body was wearing the clothes she had on at the time of the accident, but was missing shoes and glasses, he added. ==Investigation==

The bodies were taken to Sioux Falls, where the Minnehaha County coroner performed autopsies. They seemed not to have been significantly injured in the accident; the cause of death was determined to be hypothermia, but the exact time could not be determined. At a March 19 news conference, family members of both Archambeau and Bruguier in attendance, along with reporters, accused officials of racism and incompetence. Asked if he had taken pictures of the scene on the morning of the accident, Youngstrom said that he had but through a processing error the negatives were rendered useless. "It sounds like you're trying to cover your butt," Mike Archambeau said. "It sounds like you didn't investigate in the first place." Bruguier's sister said that Native Americans were "overlooked and set aside" when things like this happened, and the aunt Archambeau had lived with agreed: "When a Native American is charged with something, it's pursued heavily. However, when a Native American is a victim, it's not pursued with the same perseverance." Those complaints aside, they agreed with Whalen that the bodies had not been there since December and had been moved from somewhere else. In the wake of the segment, police revealed some further details from their own investigation. Among the sightings reported after the accident was one by a woman who knew Archambeau and said she had seen him on New Year's Eve; she had passed her polygraph test. Conversely, a couple who had been reported to have been in the backseat of the car that night denied having done so but failed their polygraphs. Youngstrom was also checking out a call from someone in North Dakota about two men seen near a "Blazer-type vehicle" at the accident site the morning the bodies were found. FBI investigation None of the leads generated by Unsolved Mysteries ultimately proved of any value in advancing the investigation. Later in the year, a lawsuit in federal court over the reservation boundaries resulted in a temporary injunction that denied state and local law enforcement any jurisdiction over the portion of Charles Mix County within the reservation. ==See also==