The Union County bridge where a fisherman found the vehicle believed to be driven by two teens missing for decades had been inspected every two years for at least two decades.
The most recent inspection report from Aug. 2012 includes photos of the area underneath the bridge where the passerby found the overturned 1960 Studebaker driven by Pam Jackson on May 29, 1971, the night she disappeared along with her friend Sherri Miller.
Record flooding followed by a drought brought the vehicle into view, according to Attorney General Marty Jackley. Crews with the South Dakota Department of Transportation, the Division of Criminal Investigation and others are working to pull evidence from the car in hopes of learning more about the girls’ disappearance.
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Brule Creek bridge inspection
Jackley said in a news release Tuesday that skeletal remains were found in the vehicle that was pulled from Brule Creek. Jackley said an autopsy will be performed on the remains and no further announcement will be made until families are notified of the results.
“Things are being preserved as well as possible, but the vehicle has been under water for about 42 years,” Jackley said Monday.
Authorities brought murder and kidnapping charges against a state prison inmate named David Lykken in 2007, but the case fell apart once it was learned that his taped confession had been falsified by two other inmates.
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The teens told friends they’d been going to a party at a gravel pit on the night they disappeared. The Studebaker Lark, which belonged to Jackson’s grandfather, was found by a fisherman Monday on the downstream side of the bridge. The bridge is less than a half-mile from the pit.
Kevin Goeden, Chief Bridge Engineer for the state DOT, says the federal guidelines require “arm’s length” inspection on each of the state’s 6,000 bridges. The state inspects around 1,800, and the remaining 4,000 are the responsibility of counties, townships or cities.
“They have to look at everything,” Goeden said. “I would call it comprehensive.”
Most bridges, including the one over Brule Creek on 310th Street, are inspected every two years, with the records logged and kept by cities, counties and townships.
Union County contracts the biannual, federally-required inspections to Johnson Engineering of Yankton. Dave Johnson, co-owner of the firm, declined to comment Tuesday on the most recent inspection, which took place on Aug. 9, 2012.
The report noted that the channel had degraded since 1998, and that it had a “huge amount of debris hung up” on the columns. The file includes notes on the bridge back to 1984.
The inspections happen every other year, but the creek would otherwise see little traffic at that location according to Union County Public Works Superintendent Ray Roggow.
People fish Brule Creek, which runs through Union County and empties into the Big Sioux River, but do so miles downstream from the bridge, which is surrounded by private land.
“I’ve never heard of anybody fishing in it,” Roggow said.
The county did “extensive channel work” upstream from the bridge after major spring flooding, Roggow said, but the work didn’t come near the spot where the vehicle was found.
The flooding was severe.
“Some of the old-timers told me it was the worst flooding they’d ever seen on Brule Creek,” he said.
The bridge is north of the Lykken family farm, which was searched extensively in 2004 after his sister told investigators that she had reclaimed repressed memories of the Jackson vehicle on the farm.
Defense lawyer Mike Butler, who represented Lykken in the murder case, said the discovery of the vehicle squares with the most solid evidence that anyone found: That the teens were on the way to a party.
“It could be as simple as a tragic accident,” Butler said. “It’s maybe not any more complicated than that.”
Butler had argued in 2008 that the sister’s repressed memories were dreams and that investigators worked backward, filling gaps with falsified testimony against Lykken.
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