HOW A TROVE OF ELECTRONIC EVIDENCE BROUGHT DOWN A GANG OF POACHERS
ON A FRIGID BLACK NIGHT in December 2016, Officer Tyler Bahrenburg stood in the garage of a rundown home in Longview, Washington, looking for the heads of two poached deer. The faint stench of death hung in the air of the building, a hoarder’s den of tools and refuse. Small drops of blood led out the back door. Bahrenburg, a Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife game warden with an easygoing attitude, followed the narrow path they made out of the shop. The home’s occupant, 25-year-old Billy Haynes, trailed behind.
The deeper into the yard they went, inching toward a rusting GMC Jimmy wet with rain, the faster Haynes’ breathing became. “I want to go back inside,” he stammered.
Bahrenburg, one of four wardens at Haynes’ house that night, reached the GMC, and that’s when he saw it: a pile of black trash bags, each one bursting with antlers. He stooped and scanned under the vehicle with his flashlight — more bags with antlers. In the bed of the truck, still more. “What is all this?” he said.
A foul odor erupted when Bahrenburg opened the bags. Some of the heads were fresh; others crawled with maggots. There were at least a dozen. He looked up at Haynes, a paunchy man with a scruff of red beard, and saw that his chest was heaving. One of the other officers, a hot-headed rookie named Denis Budai, shouted in frustration: “You better be fucking honest and tell us what else you have here.”
It cracked Haynes wide open. These were deer from Oregon, Haynes admitted. He told the officers that he and another man, Erik Martin, had been on a long hunting trip — what amounted to a two-week killing spree of illegal, late-night spotlighting sessions. And these weren’t the only heads they had: There were 14 more at Martin’s house.
The wardens split up, two to Martin’s house, two staying with Haynes to collect evidence. It was midnight by the time the wardens met at a storage facility they kept on the outskirts of town. They formed a production line, tagging and filing the antlers and heads until 4 a.m., exhausted but ecstatic. The improbable turn — a search for two poached deer skulls that ended with 27 — marked one of the biggest cases any of them had ever worked.
But even after the evening’s staggering discoveries, the officers had no idea how much darker the case would become. Billy Haynes and Erik Martin knew something the officers didn’t: For years, the men had been illegally killing wildlife in the wooded Oregon-Washington borderlands, and they hadn’t been doing it alone. The investigation that began that cold night would be unlike any the wardens had known before, ultimately pushing the boundaries of what they imagined people were capable of — and
