Buckular Dystrophy
Page 36
This book’s title is a term coined by a good friend of mine, a detective, and I think it fits the cases herein because this sort of obsession takes on an infinite number of forms and cuts across all so-called socioeconomic classes. DNR officers often make the distinction between real hunters and mere shooters.
The thing about major cases is that they can take a long while (sometimes years) to be fully adjudicated, so here I thought I’d finish by letting you know how the cases in this story turned out, to the extent that the public records will allow.
Case 8-1: Shooter Peter “Froggy” Basquell and Driver Belko Vaunt both got ninety days in jail. One year later, in 2010, they were arrested again for jacking deer at night. Parmenter Cair remains in federal prison on racketeering charges growing out of cigarette sales. His girlfriend got one year as an accomplice but was released after nine months. She now resides somewhere in northwestern Missouri. The federal government took Cair’s scenic home on the bluff and sold it.
Knezevich, the Croatian, paid the agreed-to fine, had his hunting privileges revoked, did no time in jail, and has not been seen in the U.P. since. But every Christmas he sends to Service a Christmas card with a cartoon of Santa Claus standing beside a red pickup truck.
Noble Chern (alias Chernobyl to Wisconsin wardens) also got some jail time in Michigan and remains a hopeless mess. His fines and restitution remain unpaid. He still doesn’t have a current driver’s license. He traded his TV for a deer mount, nothing comparable to what once hung on his wall. The two Henny Hills were investigated for animal cruelty (feeding kittens to coyotes), but no case was ever made because there was not enough solid evidence. Senior died in 2010. Junior still insists he has two kinds of diabetes and remains in the family trailer.
Arletta Ingalls and Penfold Pymn were both indicted by the Feds after Michigan nailed them for major poaching. The local court inexplicably returned the fancy kill rifle to the woman. Both had a larger role in the cigarette trade than Service recognized in the course of pursuing his case. Pymn eventually confessed to setting the two garage fires and got extra time in jail for those. Ingalls spent six months in jail and is now the subject of a deep IRS investigation, and more charges are pending with regard to Coppish and the hunt-for-pay scheme. Ingalls hires the best lawyers, who resist every legal move, drawing the cases out toward eternity or infinity. The pies-for-dogs business is no longer in operation.
Convicted firebug Teddy Coppish was charged as an accomplice in the garage fires and went back to jail for another year. It turned out that Teddy mentored Pymn on setting the garage fires. The night of the Slippery Creek blaze, Coppish set four other fires to pull fire coverage away from Service’s camp. Other pending charges include the hunt-for-profit scam he and Arletta Ingalls ran on Coppish’s land.
Jerzy Urbanik, who shot the gigantic sixteen-point buck while Limpy Allerdyce nearly had to deliver the couple’s fourth child in the truck, was caught jacklighting in far eastern Marquette County by CO Angie Paul the very next summer. He was ticketed for shining with a loaded firearm in possession.
The Peaveyhouse clan all got felony time for stolen ATVs and the fishand-game charges. Junco Peaveyhouse, the son who worked at a stop-androb and sold off-the-books state hunting and fishing licenses for a profit, went to jail for one year, same as his father.
Harry Pattinson and his crowd of landowners are currently vocal public boosters of the DNR. Privately they still think wolves were a large part of their deer de-population, but since Service’s arrest of Jesper Buckshow, they at least pause before going into their old spiels.
The Tavolacci family crew was charged with eleven illegal deer, paid restitution and fines, and lost hunting privileges for three years. Since they never bothered to purchase licenses in the past, it seems unlikely that license revocations have curtailed hunting in subsequent seasons.
Sandy Tavolacci filed suit against Grady Service, alleging unprofessional activity and interference with his client. The judge dismissed the case as frivolous.
The big crew of ATV drivers all paid their fines. The three illegal handguns taken that night were condemned by the court and later sold at state auction.
Gray Eyes was charged with seven illegal deer, paid restitution and fines of more than $11,000, and lost his hunting privileges for three years. All the others in camp turned on him and fingered him as the shooter. Those with illegal fish were fined and paid up.
Jesper Buckshow was convicted of a number of drug charges and went to prison for three years. The Feds retain a lien on the house, which stands empty. Restitution for 174 deer, wolves, and turkeys came to $115,000, which was pled down from $130,000. It’s still not been paid. Sally Palovar was not charged for anything and willingly helped the prosecution against her husband. She did not have to testify and, after the trial, moved to North Dakota.
Eight ball Lawrence “Lefty” Hugelyn was charged with multiple illegal deer but disappeared by the time Service filed his complaint and got the arrest warrant from the prosecutor. His kooky girlfriend, Star, moved on. Nobody knows where she went, or what happened to all of Lefty’s near-feral cats.
No clue what happened to the daffy professor and his filmmaking cinema verité crew. No charges were ever brought by Service. It just wasn’t important enough, given all the real and serious cases he was dealing with at the time.
All the deer, bear, turkeys, and wolves shot by the people in this story remain dead, and that’s the brutal fact of poaching. Restitution doesn’t bring back the dead. Illegally killing such animals amounts to nothing less than stealing something precious that belongs to all of us.
Limpy Allerdyce pretty much hangs with Grady Service and Friday all the time now and is adored by both Shigun and Maridly, not to mention Newf and Cat.
Tuesday Friday was speechless for two days after learning about Grady’s money. There is an unspoken agreement that they will get married. When is an entirely different question.
When I was a young man, deer season was a happy, even festive occasion in Rudyard, the Upper Peninsula community where I went to high school. This was because the firearm opener was an official school holiday. My dad didn’t hunt, but we got the day off, and that alone gave me positive vibes about hunting. Back then, in the late ’50s and early ’60s, the entire state deer herd was smaller than the annual harvest of deer is in the state today. Back then only bucks could be shot, and of course a big buck tended to give a hunter bragging rights for the year. Hunters had their local cedar swamp deer camps and repaired to the camps to stalk their prey. There were no store-bought tower blinds, no baits, no food plots, just lone hunters on two feet with a bow, rifle, or shotgun, hoping for enough snow to track moving and wounded animals.
The story of Grady’s hearing in the spring of 2010 is for a future telling.
Be safe in the woods and streams, and as a pal of mine says, “Shot and a beer!” But not if you’re gonna be driving.
—Joseph Heywood
Alberta and Portage, Michigan
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joseph Heywood is the author of The Snowfly, Covered Waters, The Berkut, Taxi Dancer, The Domino Conspiracy, the nine previous Grady Service Mysteries, two short story collections, Hard Ground: Woods Cop Stories, and Harder Ground. And the Lute Bapcat Mysteries Red Jacket and Mountains of the Misbegotten. The Woods Cop novels feature Grady Service, a contemporary conservation officer in the Upper Peninsula for Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources. The other series focuses on Lute Bapcat, a Rough Rider turned Michigan game warden in the 1910s. Heywood’s mystery series have earned the author cult status among lovers of the outdoors, law enforcement officials, and mystery devotees. Heywood lives half the year in the U.P. at Alberta (not Canada, eh) and spends winters Below the Bridge—in Portage, Michigan. Visit the author at JosephHeywood.com and check his blog: joeroads.com.