On March 13th, 2000, four young men met up at a house in Spearfish, South Dakota, to play video games together. The home belonged to Chester Allan Poage and his family and it had been a long and winding road for them to end up in this quaint and rural city.
Chester himself had been born on July fourth, 1980, on a farm in Norton County, Kansas. The farm had been in the Poage family for generations, over a hundred years, and it looked like it was primed and ready to pass on to the next generation. First Chester and then his younger sister grew up living and working with their parents on the farm. The work was tough and physically demanding, but despite his small stature, Chester was a tough nut. When he was done with the hard work on the farm for the day, Chester could be found playing baseball and basketball with the other children of rural Norton County.
But Chester was small and short for his age and children can be cruel. The other members of the basketball and baseball teams bullied him and he was almost always picked last.
And by 1994, things had started to fall apart at home too. The marriage between his parents was feeling the strain and to try to smooth things over, the family moved to Rapid City, South Dakota, looking for a fresh start.
It wasn’t meant to be however and in 1996, Chester’s parents filed for divorce. Only four days later his father took his own life.
Reeling from the sudden loss, his mother moved Chester and his sister back to Norton to be closer to their grandparents. Chester grew up. Now over six foot, he became good with his hands and interested in technology, which is partially the reason why he chose to study communications technology at Northwest Kansas Technical School.
While Chester was away at college, his mother and sister moved to Spearfish, South Dakota, and that’s where they finally settled. By 2000, Chester was nineteen years old, had just finished an internship and was six months away from graduating when he decided to take a short break of a few months. He moved out to Spearfish to be closer to his mother and sister, who were delighted to see him and happy that he was doing so well.
But by March of that year, they also needed a little break, not from Chester but from the harsh South Dakotan winter, so they booked a long trip to Florida to try and warm up. Chester decided to stay, both to look after the house and because he’d made some new friends.
Elijah Page was eighteen years old and originally from Titusville, Florida. His journey to Spearfish, South Dakota, had been marked with tragedy and abuse and, unfortunately, the side-effects of that were starting to show. Growing up, Elijah had been moved from abandoned building to abandoned building by his mother and his stepfather. These derelict homes often had no heating or even plumbing and every cent his mother and stepfather came by went into fuelling their drug addictions. When the money ran out, Elijah’s mother found a cruel way to get what she wanted.
When Elijah was only two years old, his mother began selling him to her dealers in exchange for drugs and money. Both she and these men allegedly physically and sexually abused him and that was only the start. When an angry and irate dealer showed up at their front doorstep demanding to be paid, Elijah’s stepfather used the child as a human shield to try to fend the dealer off.
Finally Elijah was placed into foster care, which was how the then eighteen-year-old ended up in Spearfish, but by then the damage had been done. In his teens, Elijah began showing signs of sociopathy. He had rage issues that threatened to turn violent and he showed no remorse or empathy to those around him.
With Chester and Elijah in Chester’s home that day was the twenty-one-year-old Darrell Hoadley, another young man plagued with a troubled upbringing. His childhood had been shadowed by emotional, physical and sexual abuse from his mother and the men that were in and out of her life. And by the time Darrell walked into Chester’s house that day, he was already the father to an infant daughter.
Wrapping things up, the supposed leader of this gang of misfits was the nineteen-year-old Alaskan born Briley Wayne Piper. At just nine years old, he’d set his parent’s bedroom on fire. At thirteen, he’d been arrested for molesting a woman and then later arrested again for robbing a classmate at knifepoint. He was later described as someone apt at manipulating others, but it was actually Elijah who set wheels into motion that day that would lead to a devastatingly bitter and cruel end.
With Chester’s mother and sister away in Florida and the four young men over at Chester’s family home to play video games, the scene was set. While the others were hanging out, Elijah began stalking through the home, searching for valuables.
At some point during the evening, he approached Darrell and the pair of them agreed that Chester and his family had things that were worth taking.
Around 20:00, the three others convinced Chester to head over to the house that they were currently living in. Chester agreed and even drove them in his Chevrolet Blazer, unaware of what his supposed friends had planned for him.
When Chester walked into their house later that evening, Elijah pulled out a gun and aimed it at Chester. The gun was Chester’s mother’s and Elijah had stolen it during his stake-out earlier.
Elijah ordered Chester to the floor where Briley began repeatedly kicking him. He kicked Chester so hard that he ended up cracking one of Chester’s teeth and Chester went unconscious. Completely caught off guard and vulnerable, Chester was then tied to a chair with a tire iron placed across his feet to keep him from moving.
When he came to, Briley was standing on top of that tire iron, crushing Chester’s feet. They then forced the remains of an old beer, tainted with various pills and hydrochloric acid, down Chester’s throat and finally explained what was going on.
Elijah, Briley and Darrell were going to rob Chester’s house and they were simply getting rid of the only witness.
But the beating and the poisoned beer didn’t kill Chester and left the three criminals in an unexpected predicament. In front of their friend-turned-victim, they began discussing potential ways to kill him, ignoring Chester’s pleas and the damage they’d already inflicted on him.
They then stole his ATM card and ordered that he give them the pin. Chester complied, all the while begging to be let go.
Instead of listening, Elijah, Briley and Darrell forced Chester back into his car and drove him out to the remote Higgins Gulch, where they reckoned they could kill Chester and no one would ever find out. Out in about twelve inches of snow, they then ordered Chester to strip naked and marched him out towards an icy creek, beating him more along the way and jeering at him.
Then they forced Chester down into the frigid water where they beat him again, thinking that either the blows or hypothermia would eventually kill him. When that seemed to be taking too long, they then pulled Chester out of the water and started kicking him. Between them, they kicked him so hard and so often that they ended up ripping both of his ears off and partially scalping him.
But still Chester clung to life.
He survived being thrown back into the icy creek, stabbed in the neck, stabbed through the skull and into the brain and then through the ear. When he cried out after the last stabbing, he was beaten again as punishment.
By then, Chester had accepted that he was going to die, but he made one final plea. If he was going to die, he wanted to die in the warmth of his car, not out in the cold and the snow. His attackers agreed to his request and told him he could only get back into his car if washed the blood from his body.
Chester dragged himself back to the water’s edge and cleaned himself. While he was stumbling back towards his car, his attackers pounced again. Between blows and kicks, they confessed that it had all been a trick and they weren’t ever going to let Chester back into his car.
Instead they pulled him back to the water. This time Chester didn’t fight and he didn’t complain as the three men tried to drown him. Instead whenever he caught his breath, Chester either just stayed quiet or begged for it to be over.
Between them, Briley and Darrell began lifting heavy rocks and bashing Chester over the head with them. Elijah had supposedly returned to the car by the time the finishing blow had been dealt.
Somewhere over the span of one evening, Chester had gone from being surrounded by friends to lying, dead, half-submerged in an icy creek in the middle of the Dakotan wilderness.
His killers then returned to his home where they ransacked the place and took anything of value that they could fit into Chester’s car. Splitting town, they then drove down to Missouri, pawning off items and collecting money from Chester’s ATM card along the way. They arrived at Elijah’s sister’s home, thinking that she would let them stay for a while, but she refused. The three killers then went their separate ways.
When Chester’s mother and sister returned from their trip to Florida, they found their home in disarray and Chester gone. Knowing that something was wrong, they filed a missing person’s report, but nothing came of it until six weeks later, when a woman found the remains of a young man in a creek near her property.
Authorities advised Chester’s mother not to identify her son’s body herself because the damage inflicted on him in his final hours had been so brutal.
Five days after Chester had been found, police brought in Darrell Hoadley, the only one of the three killers to return to Spearfish since the murder. Darrell quickly confessed and coughed up the names of his two accomplices. Elijah was arrested down in Texas, Briley was arrested up in Alaska.
Both Elijah and Briley pled guilty and were found guilty of first degree murder. Both were sentenced to death for their crimes. Darrell was sentenced to life in prison and he remains behind bars in South Dakota State Penitentiary.
Elijah first waived his right to have a jury determine his sentence and in 2006, he ordered his lawyers to stop any appeals. He was executed by lethal injection in 2007 at twenty-five years of age.
Briley, however, continues to appeal his sentence. He was resentenced by a jury in 2011, a sentence that was then upheld in 2019. He is currently the only prisoner left on death row in South Dakota, where he still awaits his execution.
