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To get this episode of Forensic Tales ad-free, please visit patreon.com slash forensic tales. Forensic Tales discusses topics that some listeners may find disturbing. The contents of this episode may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised. In 2004, 22-year-old Neela left poverty behind in the Philippines. She dreamed of her slice of the American dream.
Shortly after arriving in the U.S., she met a much older man who promised to take care of her and her family. But only five years later, her American dream ended when she was tragically shot and killed during a hunting accident. Although her death was ruled an accident, not everyone agreed. This is Forensic Tales, episode number 160, The Leonela Stickney Story.
Welcome to Forensic Tales. I'm your host, Courtney Fretwell-Ariola.
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A little after 1:30 p.m. on October 24th, 2009, a 911 call came in to the Gregory County Sheriff's Department in rural South Dakota. Gregory is a small farm country with less than 5,000 people. It's a place where everyone knows everyone. The only other people to visit Gregory are hunters. According to its website, Gregory County, South Dakota is a hunter's paradise.
Each year, their hunting season attracts experienced hunters from across the country. It's a spot especially popular among deer hunters. But because the hunting culture is so prominent in this part of South Dakota, they also have a saying, if you want to murder someone, you take them hunting.
On October 24, 2009, a caller told 911 that there had been an accident. His friend had accidentally been shot in a hunting accident, and they were on their way to the nearest trauma center. By 1.40 p.m., a man driving a pickup truck with a female passenger pulled up to the emergency room in Gregory. When the hospital staff pulled the female passenger out of the pickup, they saw she had a single gunshot wound to the left side of her chest.
Just as doctors and nurses started to work on her, the Gregory County Sheriff's Department arrived at the hospital. Anytime there is a report of a gunshot victim, the police are automatically called to the scene. The police thought this was a hunting accident, as the caller said. Pheasant hunting season begins in early October in South Dakota and runs until late January. South Dakota is also known for its pheasant hunting.
The state is home to over 4.5 million acres of public land. Even many private landowners will allow hunting on their property during pheasant hunting season. So it wasn't uncommon for the police to hear about hunting accidents around this time of the year. Maybe this was simply another accident by an inexperienced hunter.
When police arrived, they needed to speak to the driver immediately. They needed to determine what happened and figure out if this was just a tragic hunting accident. Right away, the officers recognized him as one of their own. It was 52-year-old Russell Bertram, the former Sioux Falls, South Dakota police chief.
Russell Bertram told the deputies that the shooting victim was his 26-year-old fiancée, Leonela Stickney. According to Russell, he and Leonela went on a hunting trip together that afternoon. As an experienced hunter himself, he wanted to take his fiancée with him that day so that they could go hunting together. Although Leonela had never been hunting before, he said she asked him if she could go and he said yes.
During the hunting trip, he said they drove to a section line road about seven miles north of Gregory. He shot two pheasants and put them in the back of his pickup truck. He then said they drove a little farther down the road where he got out again and saw another pheasant. He took his 12-gauge shotgun out of the pickup truck where he shot the third pheasant and put it in the back with the others. This is when he said the accident happened.
According to Russell, after he collected the third pheasant, he opened the front driver's side door while holding his shotgun. As he was getting inside, he said Leonila grabbed the front barrel of the shotgun and said, kiss me. Just as she pulled the barrel, Russell said the gun accidentally went off and Leonila was shot on the left side of her chest.
After that, he immediately called 911 and drove her straight to the hospital. While Leonela went in for emergency surgery, Russell went with Gregory County Sheriff Deputy Tim Dre to where the shooting happened. Everything about Russell's story pointed towards a tragic accident, but they needed to make sure everything added up.
By all accounts, Russell was a well-experienced hunter, so it seemed strange someone like him would be involved in a hunting accident. When they arrived, Russell showed Deputy Dre where it happened, a small dirt road that was hard to see from the main road or surrounding area. The two of them got out of the patrol car and started searching the area for Russell's shotgun shell casings.
After several moments searching through the dense weeds, they found a spent shotgun casing. This lines up with Russell's story because he said right before the accident, he shot a pheasant. So the single spent shell casing made sense. Deputy Dre could also see tire tracks in the dirt road, which also lined up with the story. But something about what happened didn't sit right with the deputy.
Russell was a former police chief and experienced hunter, so he knew that he was exceptionally experienced with guns. It seemed odd that he would have brought the shotgun into the front cabin of the pickup truck without making sure his gun was safe and wouldn't go off. Any experienced hunter or former police chief would secure their gun before entering the truck.
especially if he knew his fiancée wasn't a skilled hunter and, in fact, she had never fired a gun before. Although it seemed a little out of character, everything about Russell's story seemed to check out. The single-spent shotgun casing from shooting the pheasant and the tire tracks in the dirt suggested that this is where the shooting happened.
When Russell and Deputy Dre returned to the hospital, they learned that Leonila didn't survive. She died on the operating table. Leonila Stickney was only 26 years old. At the hospital, the police got another clue that supported Russell's story.
Inside the back of the pickup truck were three dead pheasants. Two of them were cold, suggesting that they had been shot much earlier, but the third was still warm, indicating that it had been freshly shot. This discovery lined up perfectly with his story that he had recently shot one before getting into the truck.
They also found Russell's 12-gauge shotgun. The barrel of the gun was lying on the center console, and there was blood on the passenger side seat where his fiancée was sitting. Everything you'd expect to see if this was an accident, like Russell said. Although the police had their suspicions early on, the evidence pointed towards a tragic accident.
Around 2 o'clock a.m. after the shooting, Russell called his fiancé's family living in the Philippines to break the news, which was devastating for them. Leonila, who went by Nila, was raised in a poor jungle community in the Philippines. She was raised by her mother and father and had seven siblings, three brothers and four sisters. She wanted to improve her life, so she moved to the United States as an adult.
Living in the U.S. would give Neela many more opportunities she didn't have in the Philippines. Neela was described as always being an overachiever. If she set her mind to something, she did it, and nothing was going to stop her. She also had a passion for dancing.
To escape poverty, Neela came to the U.S. from the Philippines in 2004 as a 22-year-old mail-order bride of 73-year-old David Stickney. The arrangement was for Neela to move to the U.S. and get her citizenship in exchange for marrying 73-year-old David Stickney. Now, despite their 51-year age difference, Neela did it to have a better life in the States.
In October of the same year, 2004, Neela gave birth to a son who was fathered by David Stickney. The three lived together in Bridgewater, South Dakota, where Neela worked at a local nursing home. Throughout her time in the U.S., Neela financially supported her family back in the Philippines. Each month, she sent $300 of her earnings from the nursing home job to help support her family.
In 2008, the marriage fell apart. Four years after she left the Philippines to become a mail-order bride to David Stickney, she left. After the separation, their four-year-old son stayed with David in Bridgewater and Neela left. Although they were separated, Neela regularly spoke with her son and made regular trips to visit him at his father's house. Shortly after separating from David, Neela met Russell Bertram.
Russell was 56 years old and Neela was 26. Although she was still legally married to David, she and Russell began dating. And shortly after that, they were engaged. Two days after the shooting, the Gregory County medical examiner performed Neela's autopsy. He determined that she died from a single gunshot wound to the left side of her chest. The examiner also determined that she had been shot from close range.
Because she had been hit so close, shotgun pellets had entered her body, causing a lot of internal damage to several different organs. But the medical examiner couldn't determine if the shooting was an accident or something else. According to the medical examiner, the survivability from this type of injury was practically zero.
Neela had no defensive wounds on her hands or arms, indicating she was shot quickly and likely didn't have time to react. But the most troubling part of the autopsy didn't come from the gunshot wound itself. During the autopsy, the medical examiner discovered Neela was a few weeks pregnant when she died.
Russell told the police he didn't know his fiancée was pregnant, and this was a complete shock because he had a vasectomy decades earlier in the late 1970s. Three days after the shooting, he allowed investigators to take his shotgun to dust it for fingerprints. If Neela's fingerprints were on the barrel, that would support Russell's story about what happened. But they didn't find any when the shotgun was tested for fingerprints. None belonged to Russell or Neela.
Now, that doesn't mean she didn't grab the barrel like he said. It just means they couldn't find any evidence to prove this part of his story. Five weeks after the shooting on November 30th, Neela's manner of death was officially reported as an accident. But this ruling didn't stop the Gregory County Sheriff's Office from investigating.
Something about how Neela was shot didn't make sense. Sure, all the evidence seemed to support Russell's story about what happened, but there was just something off about a former police chief and experienced hunter accidentally discharging his shotgun that didn't sit well with investigators. In January 2010, detectives brought David Stickney, Neela's first husband, in to be interviewed.
During the interview, they questioned him about Neela's relationship with Russell and the pregnancy. Detectives told him that during their interview with Russell right after the shooting, he claimed he didn't know she was pregnant and said that he had undergone a vasectomy years earlier, so he didn't know how she could become pregnant. So investigators wondered if this could be a possible motive for murder.
During this interview with Neela's ex-husband, the detectives learned that Neela had another boyfriend besides Russell, a guy named Nathan Meter. So on January 16, 2010, the police interviewed Nathan. He said he met Neela about three months before her death and that he didn't even know that she was dead.
He told detectives that he met Neela when she was going through her divorce from David and that he had no idea she was engaged to Russell. Nathan told the police that on October 22nd, two days before the shooting, Neela told him she was pregnant and that she believed he was the father.
When detectives questioned him about why he didn't know that Neela was dead if she had just told him that she was pregnant with his child, he had an explanation. According to him, the two had been exchanging text messages, and the last text messages happened two weeks after the day she was shot. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash tails to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash tails. On November 5th, 2009, two weeks after Neela died, Nathan texted her asking if they could get together. Someone using her cell phone responded saying that she couldn't see him anymore.
But the message couldn't have been sent from Neela because she was dead. So who sent the messages? The police brought Russell in for another round of interviews in January 2011. On January 21, 2011, police questioned him about someone using Neela's cell phone after she died. He eventually admitted sending those texts to Nathan because he wanted to know for sure that she was seeing another man.
He said in the weeks leading up to the shooting, he was suspicious she was cheating on him. So the text messages served as a confirmation of his suspicions. As soon as investigators learned he used Neela's cell phone after she died, they dug deeper into his background. And the deeper they dug, the more they uncovered. When Neela and Russell met in early 2009, Russell was in debt for over $100,000.
They also learned that he had been married and divorced three times. And when the police interviewed these ex-wives, they all told investigators that Russell was obsessively jealous. He would also regularly go through their cell phones because he constantly suspected them of cheating. After their divorces, each woman had taken out restraining orders against him.
So the police wondered, if Russell was known to go through his ex-wife's cell phones to see if they were cheating, did he also do the same with Neela? If he had gone through her cell phone, he would have certainly found out that she was seeing Nathan. And if he did, this could be a strong motive for murder.
About a month after the coroner's ruling of an accident, Neela's estranged husband, David Stickney, contacted the Gregory County Sheriff's Department. He said he had recently discovered that Neela had taken out several life insurance policies, but when he tried to collect on them, he found out that neither he nor their son was listed as the beneficiaries. The insurance company claimed Russell Bertram was the sole beneficiary.
That's when David decided to go to the police. Although he and Neela were separated, he didn't think she would do that. He wondered why she would take out life insurance policies and make the man she met only a few months earlier the sole beneficiary, and not her four-year-old son. And why would a seemingly healthy 26-year-old think they needed life insurance?
When the police started looking into David's claims, they discovered that in early 2009, a few months after their relationship began, Russell and Neela went together to visit an insurance agent. They purchased a $750,000 life insurance policy on Neela for a term of five years. Russell also purchased another $170,000 policy on her by mail after the visit.
Both of the policies listed Russell as the sole beneficiary, not Neela's estranged husband or her young son. Immediately, Gregory County officers knew this was strange. Not only was it unusual for a 26-year-old woman to obtain a five-year, $750,000 life insurance policy, but Russell was 30 years older than her, and he became the sole beneficiary of both policies.
If they wanted to protect themselves in case of tragedy, it seemed far more likely that Russell would open the insurance policy under his name, not his fiancé, who was only in her mid-20s and 30 years younger than him. Nila also financially supported her family in the Philippines. Since she arrived in the U.S., she has sent money to her family every month, so it seemed odd she wouldn't have the insurance money sent to her family either.
Even just a fraction of the $750,000 would have been life-changing money for her family. So the police also questioned the length of the policy. Five years is a very short amount of time. Again, for someone so young and appeared to be perfectly healthy. But Russell had an explanation.
He said they both agreed to the policies because Neela was a bad driver and she wanted to protect her family in the Philippines in case something happened to her in an auto accident. He said he was made the beneficiary so that he could give the money to her family. In June 2010, eight months after the shooting, David Stickney retained attorney Doug Daly to represent Neela's estate.
The estate argued Russell didn't have rights to the life insurance money, arguing Lena's death was intentional. Although the coroner ruled her death an accident and no criminal charges had been filed against Russell, David Stickney believed his ex-wife wasn't involved in a shooting accident. Instead, he believed she was murdered. And she was murdered so that Russell could collect on the recently opened life insurance money.
And if that's true, he wasn't entitled to it. But the lawsuit didn't make it to trial. Instead, it settled in October 2011. Russell's attorney argued that he had passed two independently administered polygraph tests about his involvement in the shooting, and there was no evidence it was intentional. Everything the police did throughout their investigation suggested it was an accident, as he said. So without a good enough counter-argument, the case was settled.
Russell and Nila's estate agreed that Russell would get $320,000 of the insurance proceeds plus $82,000 in interest, and the estate would get the remaining $600,000. But Russell and his attorney were quite specific about where the rest of the money would go. The settlement agreement specifically said the $600,000 retained for the estate would go directly to Nila's family in the Philippines.
Over the next two years, the police watched to see if Russell would turn the money over to Neela's family. If he did, it might decrease their suspicions. And if he didn't, that would raise additional alarm bells. By September 2013, an investigator from the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation went to speak with Russell at his home in Sioux Falls.
When he arrived, he was stunned to find out that Russell had married Nila's older sister, Melissa Del Valle. After Nila's death, Russell began regularly communicating with her family in the Philippines. Russell said the conversations were initially about Nila and getting them the life insurance money. But over time, the relationship between him and Nila's sister Melissa grew.
and by July 2013, she moved to South Dakota with her daughter, and the two got married. Russell was now married to his ex-fiance's sister. Another year passed, and by January 2014, investigators were at Russell's door again. This time, his story seemed to change.
By 2014, he finally admitted he knew Neela was pregnant when he had looked through her phone three or four days before she died. At this point, investigators theorized that Russell may have feared that Neela would change the life insurance beneficiary if she was pregnant with someone else's baby. But first, they needed to confirm he finally gave her family the money.
In August of 2014, the police sat down and spoke with Nila's sister, Melissa, who was now married to Russell. According to her, the family received only $200 a month from Russell, which at that point totaled less than $10,000. The family hadn't received anywhere near the entire $600,000 insurance payout.
Investigators also learned from Melissa that Russell told her and the family a different story about what happened to Neela. Apparently, Russell told them she was handling the gun wrong and accidentally shot herself. He never told them that he was the one that shot her.
After learning from the police that Russell had lied to her and her family, Melissa agreed to work with investigators to build a stronger case against Russell. She and the police had become convinced this was no accident. On September 8, 2015, Russell was formally indicted for first-degree murder for killing Neela.
It may have taken the police six years, but they finally felt like they had enough to convince a jury that this wasn't a tragic hunting accident. Instead, it was first-degree murder. Twelve months after the arrest, the case went to trial in September 2016. By that point, Russell was 64 years old.
The prosecution argued that he convinced Nila to take out over $900,000 in life insurance so he could get the money after she was dead. He might have told the police he did it because he thought Nila was a bad driver and wanted to make sure her family in the Philippines was taken care of. But prosecutors said that was a lie. It was all a ruse to take the money for himself.
Prosecutors also argued he knew Neela was cheating on him and he knew about the pregnancy. Although he initially denied knowing that she was pregnant at the time of her death, evidence suggested that he had been snooping through her cell phone in the weeks and days before the shooting, which meant he would have seen the text messages between her and Nathan Meader and he would have known about the affair and pregnancy. According to the state, the motive was simple, money.
He knew if Neela was killed and he made it look like a tragic hunting accident, he could collect on the life insurance. Even after the lawsuit involving her estate settled, he only sent around $200 a month to her family, a tiny fraction of the total amount of money they were owed. Besides telling the jury about the insurance money, prosecutors had another trick up their sleeves.
They presented evidence that Russell used Neela's cell phone two weeks after she was killed to text Nathan Meter saying she couldn't see him anymore. This proved that he knew about the affair and the pregnancy. On top of the money, this was motive enough to kill Neela. Russell's defense presented a much different story.
Although they admitted he used Neela's cell phone after she died and he knew about the pregnancy, they argued this wasn't motive enough for murder. Neither was the money. At trial, Russell maintained Neela's death was a total and complete accident. He didn't take her on the hunting trip to kill her, and he never meant for the shotgun to go off. It was an accident, but convincing the jury was impossible.
On September 26, 2016, Russell was found guilty of first-degree murder. Although the forensic evidence at the scene all seemed to support his story about what happened, they just didn't buy that this was an accident. Immediately after his conviction, he was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. But he wasn't going to go away without a fight. As soon as his sentence was handed down, he appealed.
In his appeal, he argued the court violated his constitutional rights to a fair trial based on two issues. The first issue was that the trial court didn't allow Russell's polygraph results to be presented as evidence. According to his defense attorneys, Russell took and passed two separate polygraphs about his involvement in the shooting, but they weren't allowed to tell the jury about them at trial.
In most criminal cases, polygraph test results are inadmissible in court. In many cases, the polygraph results are unreliable or inaccurate, and the tests don't reach the standard required for evidence. Normally, this works in the opposite direction. Most of the time, police and prosecutors want polygraph results to be admitted into evidence because usually the suspect fails, and they want the jury to hear about it.
But this case is a little bit different because this time you've got the defense arguing the polygraph should have been admitted because he passed them. His lawyers argued that under the Sixth Amendment's Confrontation Clause, he was entitled to present the results of his polygraph tests as part of an effective cross-examination. The second issue up for debate on appeal was evidence the prosecution presented against Russell.
During the trial, prosecutors told the jury about several affairs he had outside his relationship with Neela. He had multiple sexual encounters with an exotic dancer in September and October 2009. He also had affairs with two other women on October 19th and 20th, 2009. But on appeal, Russell's attorneys argued that these affairs were irrelevant and this evidence should have been thrown out.
When it came to the first issue about the polygraph, the appellate court disagreed with Russell's defense. The court argued it wasn't a Sixth Amendment constitutional issue because the Sixth Amendment doesn't require a court to admit polygraph test results into evidence.
The court also considered whether this issue simply involved evidentiary rules. In other words, was the polygraph test admissible under South Dakota's rules of evidence? Again, the court said no. According to the appellate court, polygraphs shouldn't be admissible because of, quote,
This essentially means the evidence has, quote, no general scientific acceptance as a reliable and accurate means of ascertaining truth or deception.
It is not reliable, it had no probative value, and it is likely to be given significant, if not conclusive, weight by the jury so that the juror's traditional responsibility to collectively ascertain the facts and adjudge guilt or innocence is thereby preemptive. Unlike cold, hard forensic evidence, polygraphs aren't good enough.
When it came to the second issue about the affairs, the court once again disagreed. They believed that these relationships right before Neela's murder were relevant to the case. They were relevant because they established motive. In the end, the court denied Russell's appeal for a new trial and affirmed his original conviction and sentence of life in prison.
Jealousy and greed was the motive behind the murder of 26-year-old Neela Stickney, a young woman who left the Philippines and traveled to the U.S. to start a new life. Instead, that new life was shot down by a former police chief. For years, her killer made it seem like an accident, even staging the forensic evidence.
He would have gotten away with the murder if it weren't for the relentless investigation by Gregory County police officers. Russell Bertram will spend the rest of his life in prison. To share your thoughts on this story, be sure to follow the show on Instagram and Facebook. To find out what I think about the case, sign up to become a patron at patreon.com slash forensic tales.
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