Who Killed King Louie? The Mystery of a Prize Buck’s Death.

Early one morning, a picture of a dead deer in the back of a flatbed truck popped up in a group message on Snapchat. A half-hour later, someone else shared a picture of the same dead deer, a big buck with moose-like antlers.

This was not just any large whitetail, but a local legend whose size and majestic rack — a palmated crown shaped like two open hands with fingers extended — had earned him a nickname: King Louie. There was talk that he might one day qualify for a New York record.

Now, after eluding hunters for years, the king was dead.

“The whole community was in an uproar,” said Kyle Bevis, a state environmental conservation officer. He added later, “They had that sinking suspicion that something wasn’t right with the way the deer was killed.”

It happened in December about an hour’s drive northwest of Albany, in the Adirondack Mountain foothills. King Louie’s domain was a patch of mostly private properties in and around the towns of Johnstown and Fonda. Over his 5 and a half years, hunters had tracked his growth and largely nocturnal wanderings via trail cameras. To the small circle of people allowed to hunt on those properties, King Louie “was the deer that everyone was out to get,” said Jerrod Vila, a local hunter and outdoors writer.

Many hunters had never seen the big buck in the flesh, but Ron Hart Jr. said he had, once on the first day of hunting season two years ago. King Louie came out of the woods about 400 yards away along a power line and bedded down with a doe in tall grass. Mr. Hart waited maybe 45 minutes to get a clean shot. Then something startled the deer. They jumped up and darted into the woods.

On this morning, King Louie had practically come to Mr. Hart’s doorstep, appearing in a pumpkin patch on a property where he was the caretaker. That was where Christopher Brownell found the deer. But it would take him two days to admit it.