RICHMOND — Lee Williams hopped onto her bike and pedaled toward the park. She was going to look for the scene of a killing.
A week before, she and neighbors in her hilly community of cottages above the James River had circulated Facebook photos of a deer hunter in camouflage claiming credit for bagging the biggest buck of his life. He said he shot it in rural Prince Edward County, about 70 miles southwest of Richmond.
But to Williams, to wildlife photographers and to hunters around Virginia and beyond, the pictures clearly showed an animal they all recognized: the Hollywood buck, Prince, a legendary deer in Richmond’s urban wilds.
Comments flooded in to the Facebook page, Star City Whitetails. Jeff Phillips, a Roanoke real estate agent who runs the page as a hobby, took another look and realized that the images did resemble the famous deer, which he knew well. Outdoor Life published a long article about the situation, with hunters expressing outrage on social media.
If it was true that Prince had been shot, the killing posed problems on several levels. Hunting with firearms is illegal in Richmond. Officials at the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources quickly opened an investigation.
The issue was more than legal, though.
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Old cities are built on myths and legends, and Richmond has many. The ghost train buried in a collapsed tunnel. The graveyard vampire. Edgar Allan Poe’s unhappy shade. Prince qualified, with the added virtue of being both real and exhilarating, a world-class deer with an unusual rack of giant proportions. Where a respectable buck might have eight, 10 or even 12 points on his antlers, Prince had 29.
He got his name because he was the son of King, a comparably spectacular deer who, according to some, was crushed by a fallen tree. Sometimes Prince could be found wandering the ancient lanes of Hollywood Cemetery, a Victorian fantasy of a burying ground, where moss-covered tombs dot hillsides along the rushing falls of the James River near downtown Richmond. Other times, Prince might appear in a yard or in the middle of a street, like a celebrity in a grocery store.
Ben King is a professional photographer in Charlottesville who has traveled the world seeking exotic wildlife. Deer are his favorite subject, he said, and the Hollywood buck was the best of the best. “That deer was very unusual. They don’t come along very often,” King said. He always made sure to conceal the exact location of a photograph to thwart trophy hunters.
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During the height of the pandemic and the racial justice protests of 2020, Williams — 58, a retired nurse — would come home from the chaos to find Prince leading a silent herd through her neighborhood. “There was so much struggle and injustice going on out in the world, then you’d come here and see, like, the majesty of these beautiful animals,” she said.
For the past week, though, no sign of Prince. In the Facebook photos of the dead buck, the shooter posed next to a tree stump amid grass and leaves. Williams thought that if she could find that spot, she might get some sense of what really happened, and maybe closure.
On her bicycle, she traced the herd’s usual path. The neighborhood is enclosed on three sides by parkland — to the west, Maymont, an 1800s estate owned by the city; to the south, down a steep wooded slope, the James River and a network of trails; and to the east, three cemeteries — Mount Calvary, Riverview and Hollywood, separated by natural ravines.
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The does and fawns would roam through in one direction every morning, Williams said, and back the other direction in the evening. Prince and three other bucks were a little less predictable.
Williams rode past the grounds of Maymont and stopped at the head of a steep gully that drains into the river. A neighbor, Emily Monroe, was out walking. Joy Rogers, the head of the neighborhood association, strolled up, and the three compared notes. Someone’s front-door camera showed two men walking up the street on that fateful night and meeting a third at a truck, Rogers said. Williams suggested that Prince could have been trapped in the gully behind them and killed like a fish in a barrel.
No, Monroe said, it would be hard to get him out, and the landscape didn’t match the Facebook photos. She had explored the cemeteries, she said, but with so much ground to cover, hadn’t found any evidence.
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Williams got back on her bike and headed a few blocks up to a skate park and community garden. Two nights before, several residents gathered here to hold a memorial vigil for the deer. Now Barry O’Keefe, an art teacher, was hanging out with his daughter and other children. He told Williams that he had a contrarian take on the apparent demise of Prince that she wouldn’t want to hear.
Namely, that the killing might be a good thing.
“Whitetail deer are tremendously overpopulated in the James River park system,” O’Keefe said. They eat mainly native plants, he said, allowing invasive species to run wild. “People get sentimental about this buck … [but] without some form of population control, since we don’t have predators or hunting, [deer are] going to continue to mess with the ecology of the park.”
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Williams turned away before he finished.
She biked a little farther, then set out on foot into the cemeteries. Down trails, into clearings, looking for that stump, or spent shotgun shells, or something. But it was no use. Maybe, she reasoned, the shooter drove the carcass home and took the photos there.
Wildlife investigators were, in fact, busy on the case. They interviewed the man who posted the photos on the Facebook page, seized evidence and announced that they anticipated filing charges against him for, they believed, poaching the Hollywood buck.
“We were able to determine that the deer was killed illegally, based on that recovered evidence, but we still have a lot of unanswered questions,” said Maj. Ryan Shuler of the Department of Wildlife Resources. The questions involve possible accomplices, he said, as well as other deer — the man posted photos of two other bucks several weeks ago that also might have been “harvested” in Richmond.
Williams, who rode her bike back home, said she thought Prince’s killer should get more than a slap on the wrist. For starters, shooting so close to homes and hikers and dog-walkers is dangerous. But also because he took a little bit of magic out of the world. Sure, she said, the buck was probably about 9 years old and diminished from his full youthful glory. But nature should have been allowed to run its course.
And that still could happen. In the spring, when the new fawns arrive, there’s always the chance that Prince will have produced a successor.
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