The 5 Most Controversial Trophy Bucks in Recent History

Yahoo

15-05-2025

As the whitetail deer hunting industry has grown through the decades, so too have the controversies. Record bucks get poached and then shared on social media as legitimate trophies. Hunters shoot high-fence deer and enter them into free-range big buck contests. And even the relatively boring world of deer scoring can get upended over differences in opinion.
What follows is a short list of the most controversial bucks and the biggest hunting scandals in recent history. What all of these cases have in common is a truly gigantic deer, and then, sadly, lots of discord within the hunting community.
This 49-point buck was said to have been killed free-range in Wisconsin during the muzzleloader season. With a net score of 306, it would have become the state record nontypical.
The giant buck was displayed at the 2025 Open Season Deer and Turkey Expo in Wisconsin Dells in March and, not long after, the controversy began.
Critics argued the buck had been a pen-raised deer that was being passed off as a wild buck. As evidence they pointed to the mount's bleach-white antlers and unbroken tines.
As of our most recent reporting on this story in April, neither the Wisconsin Buck and Bear Club nor the hunter (who was identified on the score sheet as Richard Waters) have publicly addressed the criticism. Waters reportedly signed an affidavit with WBBC saying the buck was a free-range whitetail, and that he shot it with a muzzleloader near Harrisville in Marquette County.
The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources opened an investigation into the buck, a DNR spokesperson told Outdoor Life last month. Read the full story here.
A Virginia man received a sentence of six months in jail and lost hunting privileges for 24 years after he poached a famous buck out of an urban cemetery. The buck — known as 'The Hollywood Buck' for its habit of hanging around the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond — was a giant nontypical. It had been videoed and photographed countless times by locals and professional photographers.
After poaching the deer, Jason Waters submitted photos to a popular Facebook hunting page called Star City Whitetails, claiming he'd killed the deer in Prince Edward County, which is about 70 miles from the Hollywood Cemetery.
When Star City published the photos, the post blew up almost immediately. Dozens of people identified the deer as the Hollywood buck by its unmistakable antlers.
Social media sleuths also discovered Walters had poached at least two other deer from the cemetery. After a thorough investigation, he was arrested and charged with trespassing, failing to check and tag a deer, at least one earn a buck violation, illegal possession of wildlife, and littering. Read the full story here.
In December one of the boldest and most outrageous poaching cases came to a close. CJ Alexander of Willmington, Ohio, was sentenced to 90 days in jail and fined a total of $43,000 dollars after he poached an absolutely giant buck in 2023.
Alexander's charges included: one felony count each of theft by deception and tampering with evidence, and 12 misdemeanors related to hunting violations, falsification, jacklighting, and the sale of wildlife parts.
Back in December 2023 Alexander claimed he had killed a 200-plus-inch buck (which would have been one of the biggest typicals ever taken in Ohio) with a borrowed crossbow while hunting his sister's 9-acre property in Clinton County. But soon rumors swirled that another hunter had the buck on trail camera, on the same day that Alexander claims he killed it — and the camera was located several miles away.
And even after a formal investigation began, Alexander stuck with his story, responding to criticism on social media, and even accused DNR officers of attempting to frame him.
Public court records obtained by Outdoor Life's news editor Dac Collins detail how investigators used cell phone records to unravel Alexander's offenses. Text messages and GPS location data prove that Alexander targeted and killed the 18-point buck on private land where he knowingly did not have permission to hunt. He recovered the illegally harvested deer with an accomplice and staged photos on his sister's property so he could profit off the deer and mislead investigators.
'I'm gonna get offered stupid money for this deer head babe … Like buying house type money … This deer is gonna make us money,' Alexander texted his fiance Carissa Weisenberger on Oct. 17, 2023, before killing the deer. Read the full story here.
In 2006, Wisconsin deer hunter Johnny King shot what some folks believe is the true world-record typical whitetail. King was posted up on a family deer drive when the massive buck was pushed his way. He shot the buck with his .30-30, using open sights.
In fact, he shot several times, and so did his cousin, and they ended up putting a slug through the buck's rack (which was eventually repaired). When they recovered the deer, they found it was a massive 6X6 with an inside spread over 21 inches.
Initially a Boone and Crockett scorer grossed the rack in the 220s and gave it a net typical score of more than 215 points, which means it would have surpassed Milo Hanson's current world record typical buck scoring 213⅝ inches.
The measurer warned King, however, that the buck's broken rack would need to be panel scored by the B&C for record consideration. The buck was eventually panel-scored, and while the broken rack was not an issue, the B&C panel decided the deer should be scored as a 5X5 with abnormal G3s.
After much controversy and petitioning, the rack was eventually panel-scored again — and again B&C considered it a typical 5X5, scoring it at only 180 typical points.
In 2012 the B&C issued a press release on the Johnny King Buck stating, 'The panel determined the third tine on the right antler arises from the inside edge of the top of the main beam, and also arises partially from the base of an adjoining point, thus establishing it as an abnormal point. With this confirmation, two of the rack's tines must be classified as abnormal points resulting in an entry score well below the current World's Record.'
Another B&C article states: '​​On the King buck, the right G2 has been ruled normal, the projection on the anterior edge of the G2 is not a G3 and does not have a common base point; it is an abnormal point because its base comes out of the webbing where the G2 point meets the main beam. As a result, the tine on the opposite side that roughly correlates is thus an unmatched non-symmetry point and is therefore an abnormal point. This moves the total of the lengths of both these tines to the difference column, dropping its typical Boone and Crockett Score to 180 points. With this change, it makes more sense to enter this deer as a non-typical at a score of roughly 217 points.'
But still many within the whitetail world (including Deer & Deer Hunting contributor Duncan Dobie) think the King Buck is the rightful world record. They argue that B&C adopted the 'common base' scoring methodology only after the King buck was killed, but then applied those rules to its rack years later. Read Dobie's column, 'The Real Reasons Why the King Buck Isn't #1.'
The single most controversial and mysterious whitetail story of all time is that of the Mitch Rompola Buck. As the story goes, in 1998 the experienced deer hunter shot an enormous typical whitetail buck in Grand Traverse County, Michigan, that reportedly scored 216⅝ inches net. That score would have put it ahead of the Hanson buck in the record books.
According to veteran outdoor writer Richard P. Smith, who has covered the Rompola buck from the very beginning, the rack had an inside spread of an astounding 30⅜ inches. Both main beam antlers were more than 32 inches in length. Even the largest trophy whitetail antlers typically end up with main beam measurements less than 30 inches. For reference, the Hanson buck had main-beam measurements of 28⅜ and 28⅛.
In fact, the rack was so wide, with antlers stretching outward instead of upward, that people believed it to be a fraud. Plus many people simply believed that Northern Michigan could not grow a wild deer with a rack that size.
The fact that Rompola never officially submitted the buck's score to the Boone & Crockett club only adds fuel to the controversy. Detractors claim this is proof that the trophy rack isn't legit.
It's important to note that the Rompola buck was scored by a panel of three 'Commemorative Bucks of Michigan' measurers, one of whom was a B&C scorer as well. None of them found anything suspicious about the rack, according to Smith.
But still, when Rompola started doing radio and magazine interviews he was met with all kinds of criticism and backlash, claiming his deer was a fake. So, if it was real, why didn't he just submit it to the B&C and be done with it?
'He knew what he accomplished and that was good enough for him,' Smith wrote in an Outdoor Life article about the Rompola buck. 'What had been a highlight of his hunting career was turning into a soap opera, with Rompola painted as the villain by those who never saw the deer or the antlers and didn't know much, if anything, about it. Rompola didn't feel he had to prove anything to anybody. He got tired of dealing with false claims and negative comments about the deer and his own character, and said, 'The hell with it!''
Eventually, Rompola signed a legal agreement with representatives of Milo Hanson's existing world-record which stated that Rompola would not enter the deer into the records and would not claim that his deer was a world record — since doing so would devalue the Hanson buck.
Just like with all things about the Rompola buck, there are two ways for skeptics to interpret this fact. Maybe Rompola signed the agreement with Hanson because he knew his deer was a fraud. Or maybe Hanson's representatives went through the trouble to create a legal agreement because they believed Rompola's buck was legit. And since Rompola had no intention of entering it as a record anyway, there was no reason not to sign the agreement.
Since then Rompola and that incredibly wide rack have all but vanished from the public eye.