A 27-year-old man from rural Wisconsin spent the better part of a year and a half completely ignoring the fact that his hunting and fishing privileges had been revoked, and has now been slapped with six new charges.
Dylan Wolff, of Pulcifer, is believed to have gone hunting and fishing roughly 174 times across five counties while banned from doing either. On those trips, he put on an absolute clinic, killing roughly 22 deer, two turkeys, and about 43 fish.
“In total, the investigation revealed that between the dates of 10/15/2024 and 1/8/2026 Dylan Wolff hunted and fished approximately 174 times during his period of revocation. The illegal hunting and fishing activities occurred in Shawano, Oconto, Waupaca, Brown, and Forest counties,” the complaint states.
By sticking his truck with a GPS tracker, Wisconsin wardens were able to identify some patterns in our young man’s activities. The data soon revealed that Wolff took a liking to Zion Lutheran Church Cemetery, as if he was visiting deceased loved ones. When investigators arrived at the cemetery, where Wolff had been pinged nearly a dozen times during prime hunting hours, they didn’t find any flowers left carefully at headstones. Instead, they found tire tracks, foot trails into the neighboring woods, scent killer spray and a nice offering of corn kernels scattered on the ground.
In early January of this year, wardens finally confronted him at the cemetery and found that he just so happened to have a loaded rifle in the front seat and a young ‘nubbin’ buck in the bed of his truck. In a last ditch effort to convince the wardens that there was nothing illegal about his setup, he initially claimed his mother was the triggerwoman on the deer in his truck and that he simply registered it under her tag for her.
It didn’t take long for wardens to break down our fearless poacher and he soon admitted to killing the button buck himself with a crossbow while trespassing on private land. As the interrogation went on, Wolff soon spilled the beans on a number of other specific kills, including a buck taken with a muzzleloader on public land near Pella and another buck taken with a crossbow on Stockbridge-Munsee trust land near the North Star Mohican Casino.
The pattern here, wardens soon learned, was not subtle. It was a sustained, multi-county refusal to refrain from hunting after the state told him to stop.
He’s now facing a pair of felony bail-jumping charges (stemming from a prior Shawano County case) and a collection of misdemeanors for hunting without a license, hunting out of season, and hunting after revocation — all while he already had a recent conviction for the same basic offenses.
The system, in other words, had already tried the gentle approach, but unfortunately, it did not take.
After a court appearance, Wolff was released on a signature bond. He is now scheduled to return to court on August 18 for the balance of his initial appearance, but only time will tell if there is any level of sentencing that would deter him from breaking the law again in the future.
