It was an
elaborate scheme to cover up an illegal deer kill, but a quick-thinking and
sharp-witted New Hampshire Fish & Game conservation officer who wasn’t
afraid to get his hands a little dirty got to the bottom of the case.
In the
final analysis, all it really took was some guts.
Well, a gut-pile, actually. And a mysteriously disappearing
and reappearing one, to be precise.
The case began Nov. 8
when officer William Boudreau was called by a landowner who reported hearing
shots and finding deer entrails in an area closed to hunting.
The
Portsmouth (NH) Herald reports that
Boudreau quickly determined that the remains came from a female whitetail,
while the marks on the ground indicated the deer had been dragged to a nearby
gravel pit owned by the University of New Hampshire, where it was placed into a
vehicle.
Boudreau’s investigation
then took him to local deer check stations, where he discovered that no doe
deer had been registered that day.
The CO’s detective work
next led to UNH public works supervisor David Howard, one of the few persons
who had access to the locked gravel facility. Howard told the officer he had
killed a doe on Nov. 8, but in a different township than the area near the
gravel pit.
That’s when CO Boudreau
morphed into a conservation super sleuth and began to lay his trap.
He returned to the site
of the illegal kill, located the gutpile, and placed his Game and Fish
Department business card (with the time and date
hand-written on the back) inside the deer’s stomach. Boudreau then phoned
Howard and requested that he (Howard) take him to the location of his Nov. 8
kill the following morning. Howard agreed.
On the next
day, when the two drove to the site where Howard claimed to have shot and field-dressed
his doe, sure enough, there was a gutpile. And the deer stomach containing Boudreau’s business card? It
was there, too.
In the end, Boudreau’s
hunch that Howard would move the doe’s remains played out like something from a
crime novel or a television script.
Kind of a CSI: Gutpile.
According
to the newspaper, court records indicate that Howard has presented the fish and
game department with a written confession and has admitted to hunting on posted
property. He is scheduled to be
arraigned next week in Portsmouth District Court.