Most hunters spend decades dutifully buying licenses, applying for tags, and watching their preference-point totals creep upward like a slow-motion odometer. But for a pair of seasoned northern Oregon hunters, they decided to YOLO it and find a faster way to get ahead of the system. Rather than waiting like the rest of us, 70-year-old Bruce Clayton Luscombe of West Linn, and his brother 69-year-old Robert Arthur Luscombe of Wamic, decided to enlist the help of their local graveyard to help them score more tags.
The wonky case began to unravel just a few weeks ago on October 28th, when an Oregon State Police trooper rolled up to the Pine Creek Wildlife Management Unit near Halfway and found the Luscombe brothers gearing up for a rifle elk hunt. What should have been a routine license check turned into something straight out of a Coen brothers script. According to charging documents, the brothers had, back in May, resurrected the hunting careers of four deceased Oregonians including a 96-year-old woman from Tigard, a 98-year-old man, also from Tigard, a 68-year-old woman from Tualatin and a 94-year-old woman from Woodburn.
Using these identities from beyond the grave, the Luscombes allegedly purchased 2025 sportsman packs, applied for controlled hunts, and (because why stop there) even went as far as listing at least one of the deceased as the “party leader” on a group application for the coveted Wenaha unit rifle elk tag. According to reports, one of the ghostly applicants had been in the ground since 2018 and still somehow managed to rack up fresh preference points as recently as this spring. Take that, mortality.
The scam might have gone unnoticed longer if the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife hadn’t started cross-referencing license buyers against death records a few years ago (a quiet little upgrade that apparently came as a shock to certain septuagenarians in Realtree camo).
When the trooper asked to see their licenses near Halfway, the electronic trail led straight back to the digital séance the brothers had performed six months earlier. The findings led to instant citations for the reanimators which included one misdemeanor count each of possessing a falsely made license/tag, two counts each of unlawful application for license/permit and one count each of identity theft.
Maximum penalties per count can reach $6,250 and up to six months in jail, plus the near-certainty of lifetime hunting privilege suspension in Oregon—effectively a death sentence (get it?) for two guys who’ve been chasing elk since most of us were in diapers.
Bruce Luscombe, the elder brother, has been applying for Oregon controlled hunts since at least 1988. Old forum posts on Oregon Hunters Association boards show him as a respected (until now) regular who griped about point creep the way other people complain about the weather. Trooper notes in the citation packet dryly observe that both suspects “appeared surprised” the state now checks death records before handing out tags, indicating that as intricate as deceased identity theft is, the pair obviously overlooked one very important detail.
As the elderly men’s court dates are now pending in Baker County, the ODFW has taken the opportunity to remind hunters that preference points remain non-transferable—even to living spouses or children—and apparently now extend that policy to the dearly departed.
Meanwhile, four elderly souls who thought they were done with paperwork are probably wondering why the afterlife suddenly includes a controlled-hunt application deadline.
