Death of a Deer Hunter: The Shooter Just Walked Away

The bullet broke several ribs when striking the 47-year-old hunter that Saturday afternoon, and then shattering his liver and slicing his spinal column, spleen, right lung, and both kidneys before stopping on the left side of his chest beneath the diaphragm. Pothour slumped against his nephew, Jon Pothour, who guided him to the ground and began shouting for help.

The next morning, an autopsy doctor found the mushroomed slug lying loose inside Gene’s rib cage, and wrote this terse summary: “He was shot with one — singularly effective — hunting round.”

Back at the shooting scene, things weren’t going easily. A team of 14 conservation wardens from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources worked nearly round-the-clock the next four days to solve the shooting. And over 25 years later, the lead investigators still consider Gene Pothour’s death one of the saddest and strangest cases they ever unraveled.

Pothour was hunting the opener with his son, Casey, 12, and nephew, Jon Pothour, 36, on public land within the Lower Wisconsin State Riverway near Avoca, a village of several hundred people 50 miles west of Madison. Gene and Casey Pothour shared a two-person treestand that morning while Jon Pothour sat in his treestand 200 yards away.

After meeting up at about 12:30 p.m., Jon walked westward down a hill and turned south into a pine plantation, intending to circle back toward his uncle and cousin. He found a fresh blood trail entering the pines and followed it. As he neared the pine stand’s far edge about 10 yards later, he found a freshly killed 6-point buck not yet tagged or gutted. After Jon talked to Gene and Casey, the Pothours decided to field dress the buck and wait to see if the shooter showed up to tag it.

Gene took photos of his son and nephew with the buck, and then led his son to a ravine 50 yards away to watch for deer and call occasionally with a grunt tube while he and Jon gutted the buck. Soon after, Gene removed his blaze-orange jacket and worked in his red plaid shirt, black fleece pullover, and tan-colored pants. Jon didn’t remove his blaze orange. When Jon finished the job and cleaned his hands in the leaves and grass, Gene let go of the buck’s leg and flipped it over to drain.

The time was about 2 to 2:30 p.m. A rifle blast made Jon flinch and look east toward the sound uphill from them. He saw two orange-clad hunters 50 away, but then noticed his uncle lift his hands toward his chest and then his mouth before slumping, his eyes widely bulged. Unsure what was happening, Jon shouted for help as Gene made only “a few noises.” Cradling Gene’s head in his right arm, Jon laid him on his back.

Jon told investigators a hunter soon entered the pines, followed by two others. He didn’t recognize any of them. Two quickly left when Jon cursed them and yelled for them to summon help. Jon recalled someone suggesting Gene had suffered a heart attack, but he knew that wasn’t right. He soon found his uncle’s gunshot wound. The other hunter pressed a vest against Gene’s chest to help stop blood loss while Jon performed CPR. When Casey Pothour heard the commotion and approached, Jon told him to stay back and start praying.

Jon knew his efforts were futile, but kept performing CPR because he didn’t want Casey to realize his father was dead. He didn’t stop until a sheriff’s deputy arrived with EMTs and an ambulance about 30 minutes after the ordeal began. The deputy, Lana Bowers, asked if she could relieve him. Jon said, “Please,” and threw himself to the side and pounded the ground in grief. Before Bowers could take over, an EMT said Gene Pothour had no pulse and his body was cold.

Meanwhile, other deputies and DNR wardens converged on the site, setting up a 2-square-mile perimeter, and recording identities and license-plate numbers. They encountered 54 hunters that afternoon and Sunday, and gathered details on their firearms, and when and where they were hunting.

After Jon Pothour finished talking with the investigating conservation wardens about 9 p.m., Deputy Bowers told Warden Kevin Mickelberg her concerns about the hunter who had helped Jon try to save his uncle. Bowers first thought the man was with the Pothours’ hunting party, but Jon didn’t know him. The man was John Strand, 51, of McFarland. Bowers said Strand was crying, emotional, and acting suspiciously, telling her he never wanted to hunt again.

Bowers also learned Strand had been hunting with his friend, Curtis Anderson, 45, of Cambridge, and Anderson’s sons, Jason, 18, and Christopher, 20. Bowers had encountered Jason Anderson when arriving with the ambulance at 3:04 p.m., and he helped direct them across a field to the shooting scene in the pines. Jason later checked with the deputy before returning to his stand 300 yards north of the scene, and told her that Strand and the Andersons were staying at a campground in Avoca.

The next morning, Sunday, Warden Jim Herrington approached a hunter near the scene, who turned out to be Jason Anderson. Jason told Herrington he had been on his stand when the shooting occurred. After hearing the shot and commotion, he left his stand as his father and brother approached across the field. Curtis and Chris Anderson had just left the shooting scene. Jason said his father sent him to seek help, noting that Jason was a nonsmoker and better able to run. Jason flagged down a pickup truck on nearby Highway 133. The driver had a mobile phone and called 911.

When Herrington introduced Warden Mike Nice to Jason, Nice asked if the rest of Jason’s group was also hunting that morning. Jason said no, they were at their Avoca campsites, and didn’t plan to return. He said they were “a little upset” about the shooting and hadn’t slept much. Nice told Anderson to go get them.

When the men returned, the wardens learned Chris and Curtis Anderson had rushed into the shooting scene with Strand seconds after the shot. Curtis said he told Strand to stay and help while he and Chris summoned help.

Meanwhile, another hunter told wardens Sunday morning that he had seen two hunters (Chris and Curtis Anderson) kneeling and talking 75 yards away in a field north of his stand for 15 to 20 minutes after the shooting. He said a third hunter (Jason Anderson) joined them after the ambulance arrived.

Wardens examined the site in the field and found cigarette butts and a Three Musketeers wrapper. Why hadn’t Chris and Curtis returned to the shooting scene to offer aid and talk to law-enforcement officers after sending Jason to find help? The sons said their father, Curtis, was a Vietnam veteran. They said he didn’t like gory movies and struggled with stressful situations.

Nice told MeatEater that Curtis emphasized the same things when he interviewed him. “He was evasive about any details regarding the deer hunting accident, and he must have gone through his Vietnam stories 10 times with us,” Nice said.

The wardens’ suspicions grew quickly. Chris and Curtis Anderson had been avoiding the wardens, which gave them time to craft a cover story and share it with Jason Anderson and John Strand.

“Almost every hunter who had been nearby circled back whenever they saw us Sunday, curious to learn if we’d found anything,” Nice said. “But there was something about that kid (Chris Anderson) and their group. They didn’t say much and wouldn’t admit anything. As things progressed (Sunday), we knew it was them and we had to figure out what happened.”

The wardens soon zeroed in on Chris Anderson. When they checked the rifles the group was carrying Sunday, Chris had a Savage Model 219B single-shot .30-30 rifle. He said he had the same rifle Saturday, and never fired a shot. But when Chris led Warden Mickelberg to a fallen log Sunday and said he had hunted there briefly Saturday around midday, they found three empty brass casings from a .243 Winchester. A follow-up search located a fourth casing.

“Nothing about that .30-30 made sense,” Warden John Glennon, now retired, told MeatEater. “The other three guys in his group had nice rifles and scopes, and here’s this guy with a beat-up piece-of-crap gun. And what are the odds of someone shooting from the same spot the same day with a .243, not far from where Gene Pothour got shot?”

The Andersons soon told different stories on how they happened to be nearby when Gene Pothour was shot. In one account, they said they were on their way to set up a drive for Jason. In another account, they said they were there to help Chris Anderson look for a buck he’d shot at.

As wardens searched for more evidence at the fallen log, they ran long strings from there to a bullet-scarred sapling and bullet-clipped twigs downrange, and then to the 6-pointer’s blood trail. Everything lined up. They also used metal detectors to check for spent bullets. They found none in the ground, but then Warden Scott Thiede checked the far field edge downhill and across the valley from the fallen log. He saw damaged bark and a bullet hole the size of a nailhead 12 feet up a birch tree.

A DNR forester cut down the tree and removed a foot-long section with the bullet. Wardens took the chunk to the state crime lab to extract the slug. Soon after, the lab’s ballistics expert identified the slug’s caliber as .243, and its rifling marks matched those on the slug that killed Gene Pothour.

“Based on what Jon Pothour saw when he looked up after the shot, we had a good idea the shooter was about 50 yards from where we found those four .243 casings,” Glennon told MeatEater. “We knew we had to find that rifle to make a solid case, but we figured the Andersons were hiding it. We even put an undercover warden in a campsite near them, hoping he’d see or hear something to lead us to the rifle and contradict what they were feeding us.”

Other statements by the Andersons also didn’t align. In follow-up interviews, Chris Anderson admitted to wardens he had shot at five deer running toward the pines and possibly hit a buck. But how did he shoot several times with a single-shot rifle, and where did all that .30-30 brass go? Also, nearby hunters told wardens they heard a four- or five-shot volley about an hour before the single shot and Jon Pothour’s cries for help.

When wardens questioned the Andersons further, Chris said he suspected he hit the buck, and left to get Strand and his father to help track it. He said if they found the buck, they planned to have Strand tag it so they could “open up” his bonus tags for antlerless deer. That plan, however, had flaws. First, it showed Chris intended to break Wisconsin’s group-hunting law by leaving the scene to get someone else to tag it. It also showed he didn’t know a simple fact: Deer hunters in 1998 could use buck tags and antlerless-only tags in any order. The rules never required shooting a buck first.

The Andersons also told wardens they heard a shot from inside the pine stand as they arrived to look for Chris’ buck. They said they raised their rifles in case a deer bolted out, but rushed into the pines when hearing Jon Pothour yelling. John Strand, described in DNR case reports as “stocky” and dealing with a sore leg, was trailing 25 yards behind the Andersons and didn’t have a clear view of them when hearing the shot.

The wardens were certain the Andersons were trying to lie their way out of a group-hunting citation and any involvement in the shooting. The wardens believed Chris Anderson knew all along that he killed the buck. Its blood trail was obvious and easy to follow. Why did he want Strand to tag the buck? “Group-hunting violations usually involve someone who’s either not hunting or doesn’t plan to keep hunting,” Glennon said. “I assumed Chris Anderson knew Strand would tag it so he (Chris) could keep hunting.”

The Andersons’ changing cover stories, however, inadvertently explained how one person could have fired shots an hour apart from two close-together sites. “One way or another, their stories put Chris Anderson near the scene of the shooting,” Glennon said.

Meanwhile, the investigation’s coordinator kept searching for the .243 rifle that Chris Anderson used to shoot the buck and Gene Pothour. Randy Stark, the DNR’s regional warden, issued a “Crime Stoppers” report to Madison TV, radio, and newspapers about the missing rifle. On Nov. 25, four days after the shooting, a man called the hotline to say Jason Anderson visited the man’s sister at her home the night of Nov. 22 and asked her teenage son (Jason’s friend) to hide a rifle and some ammunition. Jason told his friend the DNR was trying to hang the shooting on his brother Chris.

Stark and his team sought search warrants for the woman’s house, Curtis Anderson’s house (where his sons still lived), and his camper-trailer in Avoca. Stark also dispatched wardens to watch those places until search teams arrived with warrants, and then assigned wardens to interview Curtis, Chris, and Jason Anderson separately but simultaneously to ensure they couldn’t conspire on another cover story.

When searchers arrived with a warrant at the woman’s house, they found a Remington Model 700 BDL in .243 Winchester and three boxes of .243 ammo in her son’s bedroom closet. The search team informed Stark, and he relayed the find to wardens interrogating the Andersons. All three Andersons confessed when told the wardens had Chris Anderson’s rifle.

Curtis Anderson admitted he crafted the cover story to protect Chris from prosecution. Remarkably, Curtis had shot a hunter in the forehead with a shotgun slug when he was 14 years old, and said he didn’t want Chris to endure the long investigation he experienced. Curtis said he knew his sons would stick to the story and carry out his directions to lie and hide evidence because “my boys know to do what they’re told.”

Jason Anderson admitted lying to wardens to protect his older brother. He also admitted he first hid his brother’s rifle above the axle of the family’s camper-trailer Saturday night, and then took it to his friend’s house the next night when they realized wardens doubted their story. He also told wardens he didn’t consider Chris a serious hunter. He said he knew instantly his brother had shot someone when seeing his distraught face minutes after the shooting.

On Nov. 27, six days after Gene Pothour’s death, wardens re-enacted the shooting with information from the confessions. Chris Anderson admitted he found the dead buck soon after shooting four times from the fallen log, and then went to get Strand and his father.

When he and his father returned, Chris Anderson said he heard a deer bleat from within the pines. He knelt, raised his rifle, and thought he saw a buck’s antlers moving in his riflescope. He then aimed the crosshairs where he assumed the buck’s chest would be, and fired after his father nodded OK.

In the wardens’ re-enactment, two of them dressed in clothes like those worn by Eugene and Jon Pothour. About 50 yards to the east, where Chris Anderson knelt and shot, another warden kneeled and raised a scoped rifle to survey the scene while a colleague videotaped the re-enactment.

Although the “shooter” saw movements in the pine stand’s “very dark” interior, he struggled to see the warden portraying Gene Pothour, standing in a plaid shirt and tan pants. The “shooter” also couldn’t see the blaze-orange clothing worn by the kneeling warden dressed as Jon Pothour.

The “shooter” doubted he would have been able to see deer antlers, as Chris Anderson claimed, even with his scope set on 7X. The re-enactment didn’t include a yearling buck being turned over to drain, but wardens and prosecutors contended Chris Anderson shot even though he couldn’t see his target, supposedly a deer’s chest.

In April 1999, Curtis Anderson was found guilty of two misdemeanors for “resisting” the conservation wardens investigating the shooting. In September 1999, Christopher J. Anderson was sentenced to 5 years’ probation for the “felonious and reckless” death of Eugene Pothour, and his hunting privileges were revoked for life. The court dismissed misdemeanor charges for failing to render aid to Pothour after shooting him, for obstructing a warden by claiming he had been hunting with a .30-30, and for not immediately tagging the buck.

Nice and Glennon said they’ll never forget how outwardly cool the Andersons behaved during the four-day investigation. “The scene after a fatal hunting accident is a tough place to be,” Nice told MeatEater. “Everyone is upset, no one knows who fired the shot, and you’re trying to make sense of all this confusion. But those guys…they were calm, cool, and collected. That still sticks out to me. They seemed comfortable knowing they had shot someone. They just went about their business.”

Stark has similar memories. “Most people in accidental shootings can’t just walk away,” Stark said. “They come forward when realizing they could’ve fired the shot. Most people can’t live with a big lie and all the guilt. But these guys never showed a stitch of remorse. We knew they’d never admit anything unless we confronted them with physical evidence.”

Featured art via David Burgess.