Charges are revived in case

SANDPOINT — Prosecution of a Bonner County man for lewd conduct is resuming.

The felony charge against Elijah Zachariah Nuss was dismissed without prejudice following a preliminary hearing in Bonner County Magistrate Court on Wednesday. The nature of the dismissal preserved the state’s ability to refile the charge.

Bonner County Prosecutor Louis Marshall exercised that option following Wednesday’s hearing, court records show.

Nuss made another initial appearance in magistrate court via videoconferencing with the jail. Judge Debra Heise released Nuss on his own recognizance.

Nuss, 34, is accused of having sex with the girl at a residence on the east side of the county in the summer of 2015, when she was 14 years old. The incident, however, did not come to light until early 2016, when an Idaho Department of Health & Welfare caseworker turned over a handwritten note to sheriff’s investigators.

The note, penned by the alleged victim, stated that Nuss had been having sex with her and that she was to keep quiet about it. The note was written to a friend of the alleged victim’s, but turned up in the possession of the teen’s relative, who apparently held onto it for several months.

Investigators sought to confront Nuss with the allegations, but he declined to be interviewed or submit to a polygraph examination, according to court documents.

Sheriff’s investigators also intercepted text messages in which the teen’s mother instructed her to lie and dodge authorities’ inquiries, court records indicate.

The teen later provided a caseworker with a written statement of Nuss’s alleged misconduct and verbally reported the abuse when she was seen by a doctor in June, a probable cause affidavit said.

The teen, now 15, took the stand during a preliminary hearing to recount the incident on Lower Pack River Road. She told the court that it was not the first time Nuss has had sex with her against her will.

But under cross examination, the teen admitted that she lied under oath at her mother’s behest when Nuss was accused of strangling the woman in 2014, according to court documents. She also testified that a vehicle crash had affected her memory.

Judge Justin Julian ruled that the state had fallen short of its burden of demonstrating that it was more likely than not that Nuss committed the offense. Julian, court records show, said the witness diminished her credibility on the stand and absent corroborating statements from the recipient of her note, for instance, Julian said the evidence of Nuss’s culpability was about “50/50.”

Nuss was charged with rape in 2004, although the charge was amended to felony injury to a child via plea agreement, according to the Idaho Supreme Court Data Repository. Nuss was given a one- to seven year prison term and was released from custody in 2006. Because of the nature of the amended charge, Nuss did not have to register as a sex offender or adhere to a restrictions around being the presence of minors.