As dead deer kept turning up in Cody in mid-2024, game wardens decided to stake out the Park County Complex, where most of the carcasses were showing up.

“Essentially, we just went out and we sat in an unmarked vehicle at a city park and we were there from dark until 3 a.m. some nights,” Game Warden Spencer Carstens recently recalled.

However, the first few stakeouts proved fruitless, Carstens said, and by the fifth night, “we’re kind of tired, kind of getting sick of it, trying to figure out, what are we going to do next, because this isn’t working.”

Then, he and warden Grant Gerharter heard the sound of a compound bow being fired. And with the use of night vision, they spotted a man standing over a freshly killed deer.

“So we got our guy,” Carstens said.

The warden recounted the investigation for a Wednesday episode of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast, produced by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department. Titled “9 Deer, 1 Cow, and a Midnight Foot Pursuit,” the 26-minute video outlines how Carstens, his colleagues and other law enforcement agencies caught the young Michigan man behind the poaching. Through their efforts, the Game and Fish not only tied Joshua L. Wielhouwer to the nine deer killed in Cody in the summer of 2024, but also to the killing of a cow north of the city in 2023.

When the first dead deer was reported, “it kinda seemed to maybe be a one-off deal,” Carstens said, “and then it … turned into a bigger case.”

Surveillance footage and DNA evidence

The in-town investigation turned out to be “a big learning experience,” Carstens said, in part because they had access to more resources — including surveillance footage from residences and businesses near the kill sites.

“Normally, we’re working out in the sticks where there’s no witnesses, nobody around,” he said, “so being in town just added a new aspect working wildlife investigations.”

Surveillance cameras helped the wardens hone in on a man in a silver car, who’d been caught on video walking near one of the dead deer with a flashlight. They started looking for silver cars, but “it’s one of those deals where there’s just silver cars everywhere you look once you start looking for them,” Carstens said.

That’s how the wardens ended up resorting to nighttime stakeouts — and catching Wielhouwer in the act on Sept. 4, 2024. 

They’d later learn that Wielhouwer “basically went out to get groceries [and] on his way home decided to pull over and shoot a deer in the park,” Carstens said.

Though Wielhouwer was able to run away and briefly return to Michigan, authorities identified him as their suspect. And after learning there was a nationwide warrant out for his arrest, Wielhouwer returned to Cody to face the charges.

Meanwhile, wardens and other agencies executed a series of search warrants and seized Wielhouwer’s archery equipment. The department’s forensics lab then managed to match blood found on the equipment to blood samples taken from eight of the dead deer, Carstens said.

“The work that they did was awesome,” he said, “just being able to match just the smallest amount of tissue in that little metal insert … to a deer.”

Additionally, photos and data found on Wielhouwer’s phone helped tie him to the September 2023 killing of a cow on the Mooncrest Ranch north of Cody.

‘We were happy overall’

Last summer, Wielhouwer agreed to serve a year in jail and three years of supervised probation for a felony count of property destruction and nine misdemeanor counts of taking a big game animal without a license. He also lost five years of hunting and fishing privileges while being ordered to pay $18,000 for the dead deer and $3,000 for the cow he’d killed in 2023.

Though Deputy Park County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Eichele said in court that Game and Fish personnel didn’t feel the negotiated sentence was stiff enough, Carstens said on last week’s podcast that “we were happy with that agreement.”

The warden called it a case of good collaboration by multiple agencies and said the community was supportive.

“There’s been some people that have said, like, ‘Oh it’s just town deer, whatever,’” Carstens laughed, “but our community, you know, everyone enjoys these town deer and likes to have them around for the most part.”

Wielhouwer didn’t say much about his actions during his court appearances. While he was involved in archery, Carstens said Wielhouwer wasn’t a traditional hunter, having purchased perhaps one license in his life and none in Wyoming.

“He wasn’t really the usual suspect that we’re dealing with when it comes to Game and Fish violations,” Carstens said. “It’s hard to say why he did this.”

Wielhouwer was allowed to serve the bulk of his jail time near his home in Michigan, and records show he was booked into the Kent County Correctional Facility in Grand Rapids in early September. Combined with the two-plus-months time he served in Cody before making bail, the 22-year-old appears to have less than four months left to serve.

To watch the episode of the Wyoming Wildlife Podcast on YouTube, visit youtu.be/5bnBIAQfyVY or listen on Spotify at wgfd.info/WyomingWildlifeEP3.