Farmer, wildlife officials square off over prize antlers

Grant Rodgers | The Des Moines Register

DES MOINES, Iowa — Marvin Clark says it was an act of mercy three years ago when he killed a trophy whitetail buck he found stuck in a creek bottom with a broken leg.

But authorities say it was more like an act of greed — they say the Marion County farmer is lying, and the prize buck actually was shot by an Oklahoma man hunting illegally in Iowa.

Out-of-state poaching has become a perennial problem for conservation agents tasked with enforcing Iowa’s wildlife laws. The court system is sorting out this dispute over the dead buck, its prized 14-point set of antlers, and whether state agents had the right to seize them.

But the case is also now part of a broader ideological fight playing out nationwide over the government's authority to seize money and property from people suspected of committing crimes.

A district court judge in October threw out a simple misdemeanor charge tied to the kill that the Iowa Department of Natural Resources had brought against Clark. But a county prosecutor is still fighting for the state to keep the antlers, worth up to $20,000, by using Iowa's controversial civil asset forfeiture laws.

A Des Moines Register investigation this year found that Iowa law enforcement agencies seized nearly $43 million in cash or property over the past six years, including from owners who were not convicted of crimes. State and federal lawmakers have criticized civil forfeiture, and one Republican state representative is now calling for the antlers to be returned to Clark — who maintains he's their rightful owner.

"I don't think they (the DNR) wanted to go back and admit they were wrong," Clark said in an interview at his attorney's West Des Moines office. "That's why they were pushing this, and they're still pushing it."

Kevin Baskins, a spokesman for the DNR, said the agency could offer little public comment because of the ongoing litigation.

"The DNR does fully support the efforts of the Marion County Attorney's Office, and if we prevail in court, we do intend to keep the antlers that have been forfeited," he said.

'YOU COULD ACTUALLY SEE THE BONE'

On Nov. 11, 2013, during Iowa's archery season, several conservation agents went into a garage on a rural property in southwestern Marion County, 40 miles south of Des Moines, according to the narrative laid out in a prosecutor's brief on the case.

The agents were investigating an informant's tip about four Oklahoma men staying there — a father, two sons and a friend — who'd traveled to Iowa for a week of hunting. The agents believed the four men had hunted in Iowa illegally as well in 2012.

Leonard Monks, the 56-year-old father, told officers they'd hunted both years and that none of the four had the nonresident licenses they needed to hunt Iowa deer.

Licenses are awarded to out-of-state hunters based on a lottery ahead of each fall season, and there's no guarantee of getting a tag. Last year, just 58% of the 3,582 nonresident bowhunters who applied for an Iowa tag drew one, according to the DNR.

On a microwave inside the Marion County garage, officers found the antlers Clark is fighting to keep. The conservation officers seized the rack as evidence in the poaching case against the Oklahoma men and Rodney Alexander, their Iowa host and a close friend to Clark.

In a meeting with a reporter at the Kutmus, Pennington and Hook law offices, Clark shared his story of how he says he killed the deer.

Around 10 a.m. Nov. 11, 2012, Clark was plowing a field along the banks of English Creek, he said. It was exactly one year to the day before conservation officers seized the rack.

Looking down the steep banks, he said he noticed the big buck in the creek bottom. He didn't know how the deer had been injured, but it clearly had a broken leg.

"The bone was sticking through the leg between the knee and the hip," he said. "You could actually see the bone."

Clark said he got his bow from his house and shot the deer, because he believed it was suffering and he had an unused landowner/tenant tag to take a deer himself.

Faced with moving the 250- to 300-pound deer up a steep creek bank, he cut the head and antlers from the body and moved them up first, he said.

Clark said he called his brother and together they hauled the remaining carcass to a terrace on his farm, where it could decompose. The deer's body appeared to be "full of infection," so he chose not to keep the meat.

A year later, Clark said he took the antlers to Alexander's garage, where the Oklahoma hunters were staying, so he could show them off at a potluck dinner. They were all acquaintances, and Clark and Alexander had visited Oklahoma to hunt hogs with the group, he later told a DNR officer in an interview.

Clark left the antlers behind when he made the short drive home, he said.

When agents found the antlers in the garage the next morning, they were marked with a landowner/tenant tag issued to Clark and a harvest date of Nov. 11, 2012. In court papers in the forfeiture case, the antlers are valued at anywhere between $5,000 and $20,000.

PROSECUTOR: STORY IS 'SELF-SERVING'

In a court brief filed Wednesday, Assistant Marion County Attorney Benjamin Hayek called the farmer's story "self-serving" and "incredible," writing that even by Clark's own account of killing the buck, he violated Iowa law regarding properly tagging and transporting harvested deer.

Under an Iowa administrative rule, a harvested deer is supposed to be tagged within 15 minutes of being found, and the head and antlers are supposed to stay attached to the deer while it is transported.

Further, conservation officers believe there's evidence that one of the Oklahoma men, 34-year-old Todd Monks, actually shot the trophy deer himself during the November 2012 trip, and that Clark's tag was used to make it look like a legal kill.

"No evidence of lawful possession of the antlers has ever been provided to conservation agents," Hayek wrote. "Instead, conservation officers have been presented with a series of self-serving, incredible, after-the-fact excuses regarding why, in Marvin Clark's view, he should be excused from following the law."

The investigation into the illegal hunts was triggered partly by a photo of the severed deer head lying in grass that an unidentified informant sent to conservation agents on Nov. 14, 2012, three days after the Oklahoma men returned home from their Iowa hunt that year, Hayek wrote in the brief.

The informant told conservation officers that he got the photo from one of the Oklahoma hunters, and that the deer was killed earlier that month. Then, in November 2013, before the DNR search, a different informant provided officers screenshots of text messages that showed Monks claiming he'd shot the deer.

After the search of the garage, the four Oklahoma hunters, as well as Alexander and his son, have all been convicted of various charges of unlawful hunting or aiding and abetting in connection with the killed deer.

Clark is still facing a March trial on an aiding and abetting charge, tied to his admission to an officer during the investigation that he loaned the Oklahoma men a pickup truck to use during their hunt, according to a report written by conservation officer Eric Hoffman.

During an interview with the Register, Clark's defense attorney, Bill Kutmus, advised him not to talk about the aiding and abetting charge. But the misdemeanor charge for unlawful possession of a whitetail deer, stemming from his account of killing the trophy deer, was dismissed in October after one day of trial.

District Judge Gregory Hulse ruled that the statute of limitations for the crime had passed.

The county prosecutor and Clark's attorneys are set to argue over the antlers at a Dec. 21 hearing in Knoxville.