Pennsylvania Game News - April 2011 - 14

Mr. Snyder said that it was the boy who’d had his deer stolen. I hadn’t met Steve’s son yet and I had never seen a picture of the deer. The deer in the picture looked to us to be the same as the one we’d examined at Sticky’s. I asked the butcher what day Sticky brought his roadkill in. The butcher thought a minute, then looked in his log and said, “The same day Steve’s son’s deer went missing.” I asked to take the picture and then headed back to Sticky’s house. The deer head was still lying next to the garage. We knocked on the door and asked Sticky if we could look at his son’s deer head again. He said I could do what I wanted. The picture and the deer head had the same antlers. Above the brow point on the main beam the antler had a hole in it. It could be seen very distinctly in the picture and by looking at the antler. The antlers had the same curves, proportions, coloration and shape. Deer antlers are like fingerprints as no two are the same. I read Sticky his Miranda Rights and asked him to explain why he was in possession of a deer that belonged to someone else. Sticky immediately clammed up and wouldn’t talk about the deer, asking to speak to a lawyer instead. I seized the deer head and left. We took the deer head to Steve’s
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house and I asked him to come to my vehicle to look at something. I handed him the deer head and he absolutely lit up, exclaiming, “Where did you find it?” I explained how I found the deer head and told him that I hoped he could help wrap up the case. I asked Steve for all the pictures he had of the deer and if he had anything that might have any DNA from the deer on it; bloody clothes, meat… anything. Steve said that his wife had just washed his hunting suit the day before, but thought that he hadn’t cleaned his knife yet. The knife turned out to have a pretty sizeable piece of tissue along with blood and hair on it. Steve also gave us the digital camera containing all the photos he’d taken. Armed with this evidence I was confident that we had everything we needed to solve the case. I told Steve that once we had the results from the DNA lab, we could confirm that this was, indeed, his son’s deer and return it to him. I told him that we couldn’t make his son’s Christmas wish, but that I was confident he’d get it back in time. Steve shook my hand vigorously, chuckled, and said he would give his son the good news. I took the knife and samples from the deer head to the DNA lab at Stroudsburg to have them analyzed. A few weeks later the results indicated that the DNA was a perfect match, with all “markers” lining up. I then asked if they could do a statistical probability representing how common it would be for another deer to have the same DNA as the one we’d submitted. The lab was in the process of building a database
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Pennsylvania Game News - April 2011

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