What's the name of the creek? This is Marameaton River. Marameaton River, okay. Yep. So we'll go up here. Ron Arsenault is on patrol. He's a conservation officer with New Hampshire's Fish and Game Department. We were walking along this little river looking for folks breaking the law. This is all general fishing, so this is open for anything. And this goes all the way up to Marameaton Lake. It's a cold, windy spring morning. Not too great for fishing, and there's no one really on the water. Ron is bundled up in a green fishing game jacket, black boots, same uniform he wears every day. And then, Ron spots something. Ooh, look what we have here. A length of rope just under the water. He starts pulling it in. These are always fun. Never know what you're going to get. So this is somebody's minnow trap, and they're supposed to have their name on their trap. So, looks like a crayfish in there. Oh yeah. Ron pulls out a small mesh wire crate, the kind anglers use to catch live minnows for bait. So this trap is illegal. There's no name, no nothing. So I'll let the crayfish go and we'll confiscate this trap, unless I see a name on here. Oh, so you'll just take it then, huh? Yeah, because it's illegal. What has he got in there, a cookie? That looks like a cookie, huh? Or no, it's a sausage patty. Yeah, sausage patty. Huh. All right, Mr. Crayfish. Bye. Most of Ron's days are like this. Walking or driving around central New Hampshire, enforcing all the hunting and fishing regulations here. And make no mistake, Ron is a cop. He carries a gun. He makes arrests. But this job is different from most forms of law enforcement. Hunting and fishing laws were made to prevent game animals from being wiped out and to keep people safe. Also, hunting is considered a sport. Yes, it involves killing animals. But there is a code of ethics, rules about what is and isn't fair, enforced by hundreds of laws. And that makes Ron a kind of referee of the wild. Nobody likes a cheater. You know, any game, any ball game, once you're a cheater, you're a cheater, you know. So that's kind of where the referee for the for the deer, you know, or the game animal or the fish, you know, we're catching the cheaters. That's what we're doing. And over the years, he's seen plenty of cheaters. But nothing in his career compares to the bust he and his colleagues made in the spring of 2023. When you write your book after you retire, where will Operation Nightcat land? I haven't decided because that could be a book in itself. Operation Nightcat. One of the biggest poaching cases in New Hampshire history. A case that Ron stumbled upon one cold December day in 2022. A case that slowly unraveled into one of the weirdest, wildest, darkest investigations of his life. One that made him question aspects of the justice system he had spent the past 17 years of his life working within. If you're abusing animals like this, are you abusing humans? I'm Nate Hedgie. From NHPR's document team and outside in, this is a special three-part series, Operation Nightcat. This is a kind of gleeful celebration of violence. It's like they're playing Grand Theft Auto behind their house, except with animals. They can do whatever they want and get away with it. Nobody can see over that wall. Episode 1. Why did the deer cross the road? Shopify.nl That's Shopify.nl It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles. Designer, marketer, logistics manager. All while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. From NHPR's document team and outside in, this is Operation Nightcat. I'm Nate Hedgie. Let's see if I can close this. This bag. I've had this forever. I got this bag in 2003 when I was in Iraq. Before becoming a fish and game warden, Ron Arsenault bounced around a bit. He served in the Navy for eight years, got deployed to Iraq. And when he got out of the military, he did some work as a landscaper, then at the town dump. But like that bulky green fish and game issued coat he wears almost every day now, this job fits him. In part because he is very chatty, good at explaining all the myriad hunting regs to people. And in part because he really believes in those rules. I mean, he's even dinged his own family members for breaking the law, including his own son and his niece. She shot her first deer, but it wasn't doe season and she shot a doe. She thought it was a buck. Went right to the check station, right in front of everybody and I wrote her a ticket. And everybody at that point was like talking and spreading the word. Ron will get anyone. Yeah, he's like, he wanted his own mother. So it's good because that goes around town. And then when the guy's like, gives you all the excuse, I'm like, I wrote my own kid for this. They're like, oh. There's no way I'm getting out of this now. Riding around with him, I could see how easily the idea of Ron being a bit of a hard ass could get around town. He's kind of like a small town sheriff. Everyone we saw knew his name or seemed to recognize his truck. It helps that he grew up here, a part of New Hampshire known as the Lakes Region. Down the road there, I played Little League in the ball field. This is where I took my hunter-ed when I was a kid. Like, that's what I mean, like, I'm vested. Right, yeah, yeah, this is like deep, deep ties. The Lakes Region is a maze of tight, winding roads, quaint little New England towns, yes, big lakes, and also dense, leafy woods. It's the kind of place where if you see a deer crossing sign, you're like, what's the point? Because there are deer everywhere, which makes it a hunter's haven. It's the kind of place where the town barber posted photos of everyone's deer on the wall of his shop. Ron remembers it well. When I was a kid you know I go there and they you know we see all the bucks on the wall like a thousand pictures probably on the wall It was a kind of locals trophy room a place to brag about the deer they hunted And many of the photos on that wall Ron told me were taken by a local family named the Kellys You know, the Kelly family was a well-known name, you know, around town for killing big bucks. Back in the day, the older Kellys would show off their big bucks at the barbershop. But nowadays, the next generation shows off their kills on TikTok. I just smoked an absolute stud in Illinois. Tom Kelly has more than 20,000 followers on TikTok. He mostly posts videos of himself hunting. I sat here as long as I could, and he came walking up through, and I smoked him with the old 308. And in these videos, you can see Tom is a young guy. He's in his early 30s, shaved head, decked out in expensive camouflage. He's pretty fit, lost a ton of weight on the keto diet, and he looks like an extra in some war movie like Black Hawk Down. In one video, he's trembling with excitement after he kills a deer in New Hampshire. Just killed a big buck. Can't even talk. There's blood everywhere. I absolutely smoked them. in another one tom uses that ai generated tiktok voice to call himself the alpha in these woods before shooting a coyote hashtag predator control hashtag night hunter i am the alpha in these woods Now, I want to be clear. Most hunters follow all the regulations out there. They care about safety and making sure there are still animals to hunt for generations to come. But Tom Kelly? He was developing a reputation as a guy who sometimes broke the rules to get his trophies. These rules were inspired by a hunting code of ethics. It's known as Fair Chase. In the United States, this code dates back more than 130 years to when Teddy Roosevelt, before he was president, got together with a group of his hunting buddies. They wanted to stop the mindless killing that almost wiped out entire species here. The idea was to level the playing field, to give animals more of an edge at surviving. It's why there are now regulations about, say, using a truck to chase down a deer, or killing a bear at night, or throwing some seed down to attract ducks. The consensus is, it's not fair. But in practice, these laws can also be really confusing. And I know this because I am a hunter myself. There are different licenses you need to get, restrictions on what firearms you can use, where you can hunt animals, what time of day, which season. And these rules, they can change year to year and differ state to state. Like, an animal that might be protected in New Hampshire could be fair game in neighboring Massachusetts. But it's a hunter's job to know these rules. And Tom Kelly, the guy who loved to smoke bucks for TikTok, he'd been caught cheating. For instance, Tom got in trouble in Maine for something called baiting. This is where you put out food to lure an animal into a certain spot, and then you shoot it. I hate baiting. Why do you hate baiting? Let me just say that. Why do you hate it? Because it's cheating in my book. Anybody can throw a pile of grain in the woods and shoot a deer. In 2020, Tom was charged with baiting and shooting a deer on some property his family owned in Maine, a state where you are not allowed to bait deer during the hunting season. Those charges were ultimately dropped, but then he was charged again in Maine, this time for illegally hunting a black bear over a bait site. Those charges stuck, and Tom lost his hunting privileges for a year. Point is, Tom was on Ron's radar as a person to watch when he got a call from a local police chief. It was a cold December night in 2022, and the chief said he was driving near Tom Kelly's house when he noticed something odd. So the chief calls Ron, and he says, We were heading to a call, and four or five deer just crossed right by his house. And I'm like, oh, I bet he's got a bait right there. I'll check it out tomorrow morning. So the next morning, Ron swung by Tom Kelly's property. It's a little two-bedroom house on six acres of land, a big yard surrounded by dense forest. When I pull off the side of the road, there's like, it looks like a cattle path that is going into the woods. I followed the path. It was only probably 150 feet, maybe. And I got to the edge of the yard, took out my binoculars and looked and I could see the pile of grain with a big bale of hay in front of it. So it was very clear that it was bait. Deer love to eat grain. And according to New Hampshire's baiting laws, Tom had left them an illegal feast. But then Ron noticed something else. A motion sensor camera aimed at the bait site. Ron suspected Tom Kelly could be using this camera to alert him whenever an animal came by the bait site so he could grab his rifle. And this potential shortcut for bagging game could also be evidence for Ron. So a couple days later, Ron comes back with a search warrant. He seizes Tom's camera and starts digging through the SD card. And sure enough, Ron found evidence confirming his suspicions. A picture of a deer at the bait site that Tom later killed. Like the night before he killed it, it was there at the bait, eating. So I'm like, well, he shot that deer and he used that bait to lure in the deer. So that's the aid and use of taking a deer over an illegal bait. So I'm like, well, I have a charge right there, but I want to go more because I want the phone. Considering his history, Ron suspected that Tom had illegally killed more than just one deer. So if he's killing a deer illegally, he's going to tell his buddy and he's going to say, hey, buddy, come meet me because I shot this, blah, blah, blah. And you're going to have all this information on this phone. So a few days before Christmas, Ron goes to Tom's house, knocks on the door, shows him another search warrant, and seizes Tom's phone. There's just so much data in that phone. It was like 1.6 terabytes of data. So these are photos? There's photos, there's text messages, there's videos, there's instant messages. Now, Ron, he is old school, not very good with technology. You know, give me a chainsaw, give me the wood, I'll cut the firewood, I'll split the firewood, you know, I'll drag the deer out, whatever. But you start getting into this technical stuff, and it's like sims and mims and texts, and, you know, I had no idea. Like, what the heck is this? But the thing about Ron is that he is obsessive. He's like a bird dog that once it catches a scent, he cannot break away. So we found younger colleagues to help explain how to comb through a phone's data. And then every night, Ron would spend hours on this old heavy laptop, searching through Tom's text messages, using keywords like deer, bait, night hunting. My wife would be, she's sitting there doing her games on her computer. And it like you still working on that I like yep still working on it This is what we got to do We got to get it you know And as he started sifting through all these texts and images looking for evidence of more illegal kills Ron found what he was looking for. He also discovered something that he did not expect. Something much bigger. That's next, after the break. Thank you. shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your 1 euro per month trial and start selling today at shopify.nl. That's shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. Starting a business can be overwhelming. You're juggling multiple roles, designer, marketer, logistics manager, all while bringing your vision to life. Shopify helps millions of business sell online. Build fast with templates and AI descriptions and photos, inventory and shipping. Sign up for your one euro per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.nl. That's Shopify.nl. It's time to see what you can accomplish with Shopify by your side. From NHPR's document team and outside in, this is Operation Nightcat. I'm Nate Hedgie. Poaching is a crime that usually conjures up certain images, mostly overseas, of dead elephants and rhinos with their tusks and horns removed for sale in the black market. But technically, poaching is any illegal activity used to take an animal. That minnow trap from earlier? That's poaching. That said, poaching is also a really loaded term. Many people who violate hunting and fishing laws do it on accident. So fish and game officers reserve the label for the ones who know they're breaking the rules. The poachers are the most egregious violators in our world. And as Ron was digging through Hunter Tom Kelly's phone, he found something that made him think poacher. Here's a video of Kelly. This is the bobcat. Let's play it. In this video, I could see a pair of red crosshairs trained on a bobcat. Its eyes are glowing because the camera is in night vision, and it's attached to Tom Kelly's rifle. The bobcat keels over. Dead. Bobcats are a protected species in New Hampshire. During the 20th century, they were hunted almost to extinction in New England. And I should say that it's also illegal to hunt most species at night for safety reasons. Ron thinks Tom lured this bobcat into his backyard using meat scraps from deer. He shot it, and then he sent the video to a group of friends. But that wasn't all. What Ron found next really got his attention. Tom's friends were sending back their own videos of themselves killing bobcats too. Ron sat me down in front of his work laptop to show me some of those kills. There it is. That's bobcat. Bobcat. Another bobcat. Bobcat. This group seemed to consist of at least five guys, including Tom Kelly. And to Ron, the evidence from Tom's phone showed all of them looked like poachers with a capital P. Not only because they were violating state law by killing a protected species. It seemed they were also violating federal law. Ron says he saw evidence of Tom and the others taking their dead bobcats across state lines. Then they would register or tag them in states where it's okay to hunt bobcats, making their illegal kills look legit. And this appears to be a violation of a federal law called the Lacey Act. It was written by a Republican congressman from Iowa, John Lacey, back in 1900, because at the time, we were raining hellfire on America's birds. Commercial hunters were killing them by the millions to sell as food and to literally put a feather in women's caps. While some states allowed this, others didn't. So in order to get around these state laws, these commercial hunters would launder their birds, pretending that they killed them in states that allowed this kind of hunting, when in reality, they killed them in states that didn't. The Lacey Act put an end to that. So Ron called up his colleagues at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service And he told them about what he was seeing Hey, we got some bobcats getting cranked in New Hampshire at night And they're tagging me legally going across state lines The feds, Ron says, were intrigued And this is the moment this bust became wide enough to earn its own name Ron's wife was the one to coin it We were sitting at the table one night And we're like, hey, we're going to meet with the feds We're going to make this an operation We've got to think of something She was like, Operation Nightcat I'm like, that's perfect. I'm like, hired. In his nearly two decades on the job, Ron had never stumbled onto a case this big. He was so jacked. It all started with four or five deer walking across the road. Because if you look at it all the way at the beginning, it was like, why'd the deer cross the road? To kill a bobcat. It's like, it's crazy. Before sunrise, on January 12, 2023, a month after those deer crossed the road in front of Tom Kelly's property, Ron and his buddies in law enforcement executed a search warrant on Tom's house. Inside, the officers find a taxidermied bobcat, rifles with night vision scopes and mounted cameras, and the bait sight in his backyard. They also find what looked like a sniper's nest on Tom's back deck, made so animals can't see him getting ready to shoot. Ron showed me pictures of it. This is where he's shooting from up here. See how he has the plywood around the railing so it's like a blind? Yeah. So he had a tripod up here with his 22 with a night scope and this is the bait pile like right here I'm standing at and he would just get a he had a motion sensor there it would go off and he would shoot right out of his porch. He'd just open the slider and come home. As Ron is searching Tom Kelly's house, his colleagues at New Hampshire Fish and Game, along with local police and federal agents arrive at the houses of the other guys in the poaching group One of them is a man named Randy Inman Randy apparently got tipped off that law enforcement were going to search his house Randy I think calls in sick He at work He says he sick and comes screaming home. This is Conservation Officer Sergeant Kevin Bronson. Honestly, at the beginning, when I got the information from Ron that he'd been shooting some cats, my hackles were still not really up. And I thought it would be like, okay, so we've got a cat somewhere and a red fox. And it wasn't. It was way more than that. They uncovered evidence that Randy had illegally killed at least 20 animals there at night. Foxes, bobcats, coyotes. It's like they're playing Grand Theft Auto behind their house, except with animals. Randy was shooting so much that his girlfriend at the time later told investigators she couldn't sleep. It was like Tom and Randy were in some sort of competition. Who could get the most kills? To show me, Ron scrolled through examples of photos and videos on his computer. Gray fox, bobcat, gray fox, bobcat, red fox, red fox, gray fox, gray fox, red fox, coyote, bobcat, coyote, crow, bobcat, red fox. They kill everything. They would shoot these animals using a night scope, record it, and then share the videos with the group. And they could talk to each other, like, hey, nice shot. And they'd communicate with their phones. Like, they all got the message. They all get to watch it. Like, they would get a message sent to their phone, and they could watch the video. And then be like, hey, nice shot. Oh, you shot that one in the eye. You know, whatever. With all this evidence, Fish and Game felt confident they could charge these guys for poaching-related crimes. They allegedly killed dozens of animals illegally. And yet, some of the most concerning stuff they found wasn't a violation of legal code. They were violations of moral codes. The stuff that goes beyond fair chase and into cruelty. And so what is this video? This is the deer video. Ron wanted to show me a particular video that disturbed him. So me and my producer, Lauren Chulgin, met him at a little cabin next to a lake to watch it. I had seen the first part of this video before on Tom's TikTok. It's from one of his scope-mounted cameras. This time it's daylight in a forest. And Tom shoots a deer. And then he cut it about here. But it gets worse. I mean, it looks like the front two legs are broken and it's plowing and jumping and just, I don't know why he wouldn't shoot it again. It looks like a fish that's like flapping when you pull it in the boat. This is like my one insight into your world. Is that like, the fish is like pissed at you. This is the beginning. Somebody else would be shooting at this animal. well it's you know clearly it's right there he has the scope up to it you should be shooting it again to put it out of its misery what ron lauren and i are watching here a deer flailing around on its back legs it is an ethical hunter's worst nightmare bad shots do happen of course but it's your job to kill an animal quickly and with as little pain as possible. Especially when it's as close to you as this deer was to Tom. You can see that he's got a pretty clear shot too, right through those two trees. Yeah, it's wild to think that the camera is on his gun. So his gun is pointed at the deer. Right. Because he wants to get everything on video so he can put it on, you know, whatever app that he has. Nope, he shoots at it again. so that was two minutes long before he shot again but when it was laying there not moving would probably been the best time to do it now it looks like he's chasing the deer yeah and there there it is again that's a clean shot to the head but tom doesn't take it instead he watches and he kept watching it through the scope for another couple of minutes before finally putting it out of its misery. And after the deer was dead, he said something. Stay down, asshole. My producer, Lauren, looked up from the video, a little stunned, and turned to Ron. You ever called a deer an asshole? No. He's not the one that put the bullet in him. Yeah. When you take it all together, you're like, oh man, these guys are really bad. Yeah, these guys should never hunt again. The protected bobcats, the killing at night, the videos, the bragging, it all bothered Ron. Not just because Tom and the other guys appeared to be poachers breaking the law, and they also seemed to be having a good old time doing it. It bothered Ron because a lot of these guys knew better. because they were law enforcement themselves, former and current corrections officers at the New Hampshire State Prison for men. And this is what really unnerved Ron. It just makes you wonder, like, is this happening somewhere else too? Like, if you're abusing animals like this, are you abusing humans? Next time on Operation Nightcat. Operation Nightcat is a special three-part series from NHPR's Document Team and Outside In. This episode was reported and written by me, Nate Hedgie, with help from Lauren Chulgin and Jason Moon. Jason produced and mixed this episode. He also wrote the music. It was edited by Taylor Quimby and Katie Culinary, with help from Rebecca Lavoie, Jackie Harris, Dan Barrick, Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Hanke. Special thanks to Rick White and Bill Chapman. Fact-checking by Dania Suleiman. Taylor Quimby is the executive producer of Outside In. Rebecca Lavoie is director of On Demand at NHPR. Operation Nightcap is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio. What is healthy spirituality and how does it help us thrive? We explore these questions on the new season of With and For, hosted by me, Dr. Pam King. With and For bridges psychology and spiritual wisdom to help you thrive, featuring conversations with experts like self-compassion pioneer Kristen Neff and author activist Parker Palmer. So go ahead, follow With and For, hosted by Dr. Pam King, wherever you get your podcasts. Curious about the future of health care? Tomorrow's Cure, the chart-topping and Ambie Award finalist podcast from Mayo Clinic, brings it to you today. I'm Kathy Wurzer, and in this new season, I sit down with researchers, doctors, and industry experts who are leading the way in medical innovation. From cutting-edge technology to breakthrough treatments, we'll explore how new solutions are improving and even saving lives. Follow Tomorrow's Cure wherever you listen to podcasts.
