A recent investigation by the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has confirmed that the now-infamous 49-point buck that appeared at a hunting expo this spring was indeed a high-fence deer. The 306-inch nontypical had been under suspicion even before it was submitted as a fair-chase state-record muzzleloader buck by Richard Waters, a 62-year-old from Markesan, Wisconsin.
While high-fence deer operations aren’t illegal or even unusual in Wisconsin, it is against the law to attempt to pass off a high-fence animal as a potential free-range record. The hunting community and the Wisconsin Buck and Bear Club scorers who saw the rack — and photos of it — had doubts about its authenticity but had to wait on the DNR investigation to verify those concerns.
The first give away was the sheer size of the rack, which scored roughly 50 inches higher than the current 253-inch record Waters sought to unseat. The tines were unnaturally white and sharp, considering Waters claimed to have taken the buck during the late muzzleloader season, which occurs after the rut in Wisconsin. In the wild, mature bucks usually have well-worn racks and a few busted tines by December.
Doubts prompted tips to the DNR and subsequent investigation, which was first made public by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Tuesday. After initially lying to game wardens, Waters ultimately admitted to buying the antlers from a friend, who had in turn purchased them from a local high-fence deer farm in 2021.
DNR conservation warden Ben Mott, one of the lead investigators on the case, says that Waters’ plans to enter the buck as a state-record didn’t seem particularly pre-meditated, nor was it especially buttoned up.
“I don’t know how much pre-thought there was,” Mott tells Outdoor Life. “It seemed like it was an off-the-cuff decision and it snowballed from there. One of the things he told me was he didn’t think the antlers were as big as they were. In his mind — trying to put myself there — maybe he expected it to be closer, maybe a higher record buck, but not beating the next-closest by 50 inches.”
Although Waters initially pled “not guilty” when charged in Wisconsin Circuit Court last month, he signed a “no contest” plea on June 12. He was found guilty of failing to keep records as required, failing to keep accurate records, or otherwise providing incorrect info (none of which is a criminal offense). Instead, he was paid a $544.50 fine, forfeited the antlers to the Wisconsin DNR, and lost his hunting and fishing privileges for a year. He could not immediately be reached for comment Wednesday.
Deer Farms and Fair Chase
The Wisconsin Bear and Buck Club, a state-wide scoring organization, was caught in the middle of the Waters scandal and has received plenty of flak for it. As a record-keeping organization, WBBC says it complied with its own bylaws and proceeded on good faith with Waters.
Critics contend, however, that the buck should have never been displayed at the expo since it was obviously a high-fence buck.
“The Buck and Bear Club isn’t going to escape this without getting a big black eye on social media,” outdoor writer Dan Cole told Outdoor Life in April. Cole had attended the expo to write a story about the Waters buck and says that there was some disruption in the measuring room at one point during the show. He says he heard multiple comments about how some of the WBBC measurers were not on board with scoring the deer and didn’t even want it at the Expo. As is common in other record-keeping organizations, official measurers can refuse to score a buck if they don’t think it was taken legitimately, or for any other reason.
Before the antlers appeared at the expo, WBBC scorers went to speak to Waters and examine the deer, which they’d heard about but had not seen photos of yet.
“We made a trip down to see this guy and to take a look before we measured it. We wanted to verify,” says Marlin Laidlaw, the chairman of WBBC and an experienced deer hunter and scorer. “The first words that I said when I knelt down by the deer … were, ‘This deer’s color is white. This is not normal for a wild deer.’ And a little later as I examined it, I said, ‘This deer doesn’t have any broken points.’ Immediately the red flags go up.”
Although Waters didn’t have many of the usual photos from the hunt, he was also a 62-year-old hunter who often left his phone at home, according to what his wife later told game wardens. Waters seemed trustworthy, was perfectly willing to sign a WBBC fair-chase affidavit, and had corroboration from a landowner.
The WBBC does not and cannot investigate the trophy animals submitted to its organization. In the case of the Waters buck, however, scorers felt they owed it to all Wisconsin hunters and to the principles of fair chase to check that the buck had been registered properly with the DNR. They also have a duty to record-seeking hunters who are often accused on social media of shooting high-fence deer, but that turn out to be wild, fair-chase deer.
“The first call [of the investigation] had come in to [a now retired warden] from the scorers, like ‘Hey something may or may not be right with this, could you just verify that he registered it,’” Mott says. “It wasn’t until Mr. Waters had that buck scored at Deer Fest that more calls and photos came in. It was like, ‘Okay, he did actually submit this for scoring for the record books, and it needs to be verified.’”
Mott and his co-investigating warden, Brad Latza, started making phone calls.
“We took an every-which-way approach. We made some phone calls to some local folks who said, ‘Hey, I think this was shot at a ranch, possibly from Waushura County, which is how I got looped in because that’s where I’m stationed. So we reached out to some of these high fence farms. Some of them recognized potential genetics, which sent us in a couple ways.”
Latza visited a small Amish deer farm, Yoder Whitetails, not far from where Waters lived, according to Mott, sometime around April 2. When he showed the family photos of the buck, they didn’t immediately recognize it.
“They’re like, ‘yeah it looks like it might’ve been one of ours.’ The Amish community and this farm in general is owned by an actual high-fence ranch now because they’re not real good at their paperwork, and that’s self-admitted. The Amish community, it’s not like they take photos of all their deer and have electronic devices all over the place.”
Still, owner Jonathan Yoder dug up a photo and showed Latza.
“They pull out a photo with like six giant bucks in it, and this buck is sitting there in the middle, in velvet. It’s unmistakable,” says Mott. “Every little point coming off this way or that way, you’re like ‘Yes, this is one hundred percent the deer.’”
While the Yoders normally raise and ship their bucks to Hunt’s End Ranch, a high-fence hunting outfit, this particular buck was gored by another deer and died there. Mott says the farm is open pasture, with no trees for deer to rub their antlers on and regular sun exposure.
“I think it was shedding velvet when it died. There was definitely a few pieces of dried velvet, dried blood still on the antler. Everything else was polished white, but there were still a couple of nooks and crannies with little bits of dried stuff.”
Buying a Big Rack and Selling a Story
According to Mott, a local named Richard Klemm, whose wife is a taxidermist, bought the antlers from Yoder Whitetail, in the fall 2021, by his best recollection. Then he sold the skull and antlers to Waters for $600.
“Then he stuck them up above his shop for a couple years, never told his wife that he had them,” says Mott. “And he just kind of woke up and had this idea that weekend to bring these antlers out and make all this stuff up.”
Unlike other high-profile record buck scandals such as the CJ Alexander case (which involved trespassing and poaching a wild buck, among other violations), Waters didn’t initially break any game laws.
“At face value, this is a privately-owned animal all the way around. It was never wild. The only time that it entered into our [jurisdiction] is when he registered it as a wild buck,” says Mott. “When he registers that, it’s providing false information to our department. So that’s what brings our violation in. And it ups the ante when we go to talk to him, and he lies to us the entire time.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Once Mott and Latza collected enough information, they went to visit Waters at his home.
“We wanted to show up and let him tell us what he wanted to tell us,” says Mott. “And he almost seemed happy that we showed up. [It seems like he] felt like by telling us his story, maybe he wouldn’t receive so much flak now that we’d been there and talked to him and could verify it.”
According to a copy of the DNR investigation obtained by Outdoor Life, Waters claimed he shot the deer on Dec. 6.
“He said he just felt it in his bones that something was going to happen that night hunting,” reads the report. “He got to the stand at 4:00PM (Closing was 4:42PM). He said at 4:30PM he saw him. Then said he saw him before that. He said he yelled at him on Thanksgiving Day, but the deer wouldn’t stop. He isn’t completely sure it was the same deer, but he thought it was. Then he went back to talking about the hunt on December 6, 2024. When he saw the buck, he said he yelled so loud he figured the neighbors 500 yards away would hear him. He said he yelled that loud to get the buck to stop. Then when the buck stopped, he ‘hammered him.’”
Waters continued with an elaborate story about how he couldn’t locate the buck for two days, and he eventually found it because “he could smell a dead deer … and the taxidermist needed to use a cape from a different deer because the coyotes ruined that one.”
When Waters told this story to the wardens, Mott says he didn’t come off as nervous.
“I think that he’d probably just bought into the story so much already because he had to tell it so many times that this was his truth at this point in time.”
While Waters also provided the wardens with some photos, he did not have any images from the hunt.
“The freshest pictures we had of those antlers were skull capped,” says Mott, who also recalls one low-quality trail camera image printed on a piece of paper that he claimed was from a few years ago. Waters said he didn’t have his phone with him during the hunt or when he recovered the deer.
“A number of things didn’t line up,” Mott says. “But we’re just giving Mr. Waters a chance to tell us what he’s wanting to tell us, then we’ll go check these [investigative] boxes, and we’ll come back and see him again.”
When the two wardens returned to the Waters home on April 8, he stuck to the same story. Then, as Latza began to lay out the evidence, even comparing the rack’s sharp, fresh tines to a pedestal-mounted deer in the Waters’ kitchen — Waters began to nod along.
“[His wife] looks at him, and goes, ‘Are you agreeing with them?’ That was the breaking point question, almost, and she asked it,” says Mott. “Then he eventually admitted he didn’t shoot [the buck]. And she was just beside herself.”
According to the investigation report, Waters couldn’t explain his motives for the elaborate lie, and just “said he bought [the antlers] because he liked them. His wife said, ‘God, I thought you were smarter than this.’ Richard said, ‘I’m stupid, yes.’”
While Waters initially received an obstruction charge for lying to the wardens, it was later dropped as part of his plea deal. In the end, Waters didn’t actually break many laws, but he’s become infamous among Wisconsin deer hunters.
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“Part of our job is to make sure everybody has a level playing field,” says Mott. “There’s a lot of tradition with deer hunting, especially in Wisconsin, so there’s that. But when you enter into this record-book world, it’s not right for somebody to misrepresent all these efforts that other folks have put into [their] hunts and to fair chase, to then go and have your name at the top of the list for a deer you actually didn’t even harvest.”
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