Daniel Dills at sentencing | Kaye Thornbrugh/ Coeur d’Alene Press
It was back in April when we first wrote about Eddy, Angela, and Daniel Dills of St. Maries, Idaho. Back then, the case still looked like a family-sized poaching operation that included four mountain lions and eight bobcats, license-less dogs, a paper trail in Angela’s name, and a Moscow buyer on the back end for about $1,700 in hides and carcasses. The question we asked back then, and one that still hangs over the file is: at what point does illegal hunting stop being a violation and start looking like a system?
A Kootenai County jury answered that question in June, and not the way prosecutors wanted.
After a week of trial and roughly ten hours of deliberation, jurors convicted all three on felony conspiracy to conceal evidence, while acquitting them of conspiracy to unlawfully kill wildlife and conspiracy to sell unlawfully taken wildlife. In the end, the “business,” as charged, did not stick. The dump did.
And that dump is the spine of what the state actually was able to prove.
According to a recorded conversation on Feb. 1, 2025, another hunting party ran into the Dillses near the Little North Fork Coeur d’Alene River. Eddy was recorded telling another hunter they’d killed a mountain lion and planned to go back for it. Blood was photographed dripping off the back of his truck, leading a Fish and Game investigator to follow bloody footprints, and dog tracks from where the lion was found to where he believed it was killed. Investigators soon found three sets of prints at the site, including bloody boot prints that matched the size and tread of boots later recovered from Daniel’s house.
Prosecutors said the family dragged a juvenile male lion to another location and dumped it after being found out. Prosecuting attorney Monica Bushling put it without decoration, reminding the court that they dumped the lion “like a piece of garbage.”
“It was removed from the gene pool,” she said. “It’s not going to produce any offspring. The citizens of this state have been deprived of what it could have contributed.”
First District Judge John Cafferty used the same register at sentencing on Aug. 31.
“The wildlife of this state belongs to all the citizens of Idaho, not to any citizen in particular,” he said. “The victims are all the citizens of Idaho, hunters and non-hunters alike.”
He ended up splitting the family three ways.
After noting three prior wildlife cases and a 2024 guilty plea in Latah County for illegally selling a lion hide, the 22-year-old son was hit hardest. Daniel Dills was handed five years in prison with parole eligibility after 18 months and a $7,000 fine.
Eddy Dills looking to a bailiff | Kaye Thornbrugh/ Coeur d’Alene Press
His father Eddy Dills got four years with no fixed minimum and is eligible for parole immediately. How long he spends behind bars ultimately hinges on his behavior while incarcerated. When bailiffs took Daniel out in cuffs, Eddy reportedly made a scene, cursing at them and offering to take his son’s place.
“My youngest son is going to prison because of my past,” he said.
Cafferty shut that door. The family, he said, was not being punished for Eddy’s checkered past of wildlife violations in both Washington and Oregon. They were being punished for what they did here.
In 2017 Eddy was tied to one of Washington’s larger documented poaching investigations. He later pleaded in Washington to hunting a mountain lion with a dog, and, in a separate case, to unlawful big-game hunting, illegal bear baiting, and wasting wildlife. He was also tied to an Oregon conviction for using dogs on bears or lions and lest we forget the fact that the state of Idaho pulled his hunting privileges for life back in 2019. Bushling went on to tell the court that all three of Eddy’s children have wildlife convictions.
“It isn’t a stretch to suggest that Mr. Eddy Dills has set an example for his children and it’s played out in their lives,” she said.
As for Angela Dills, she was the only one who still had a license during the charged window. She walked away with a withheld judgment, five years of supervised probation, a $5,000 fine, and 30 days of discretionary jail. For those five years she cannot hunt or fish, cannot accompany or assist anyone who is, and cannot possess weapons, hunting dogs, or hunting equipment.
Angela Dills awaits her fate | Kaye Thornbrugh/ Coeur d’Alene Press
In one final act of desperation, she tried a new story.
For the first time in court, Angela told the judge her husband and son didn’t kill and dump the lion. A man she knew only as “Chance” did. According to her sudden revelation, Chance shot it without a tag and just so happened to be wearing her son’s boots while he did it.
“Sounds like a very good alibi, but we had a trial,” Cafferty said. “I don’t find it very credible.”
In the end, the jury declined to treat the Dills as a trafficking conspiracy. It instead treated them as people who got caught moving a dead lion after they were seen.
The sentences landed heavily because concealment is a felony in Idaho, because Daniel already had a hide-sale conviction on the books, and because Eddy has spent a decade demonstrating that losing a license does not, by itself, end the season.
