May 17, 2016
From YakimaHerald.com
ELLENSBURG, Wash. — Bullwinkle was as smart as he was big. The most photographed bull elk in Kittitas County, if not the state of Washington, he had figured out as long as he stayed in that idyllic pastureland where people fed him and treated him like royalty, nobody would shoot him with anything other than a camera.
Yet in December a hunter shot and killed him.
“He’d lay in the middle of an alfalfa field and wouldn’t even bother getting up; he’d feed laying down. People would come by and take pictures. Some people would come by on a daily basis. He was famous.”
“He was a big-time local celebrity,” echoed Brad Duncan. “You could get right up close to him. He lived in people’s yards. He would jump the fence and lay 10 feet from people’s homes.
“He was the tamest bull I’ve ever been around, and I’ve hunted for 40 years. There’s people who hand-fed him.”
The man charged with killing the big bull is Tod Reichert, 76, of Salkum.
He’s charged with second-degree unlawful hunting of big game, a gross misdemeanor, and — having waived his right to an arraignment — is scheduled for a pretrial hearing in Lower Kittitas District Court on May 31.
After shooting the elk, Reichert and a small group of Ellensburg residents who had helped him locate the bull loaded it into a truck. According to eyewitnesses, the elk was then driven to a private field in the 328 unit and field-dressed.
This isn’t the first time a Reichert hunt has come under legal scrutiny.
In 2007, he bought the state’s eastside elk auction tag and, that December, killed a bull elk in the Blue Mountains. But the day before the hunt, his Oregon-based guide, Jon Wick, used a helicopter to spot the elk — illegal in Washington — and the hunt took place outside the area in which the U.S. Forest Service had authorized Wick to operate.
In 2011, a federal grand jury indicted Wick and Reichert on felony and misdemeanor offenses related to the hunt. A year later, as part of a plea deal, Reichert pleaded guilty to interfering with and providing false information to a Forest Service officer, both class B misdemeanors. He was fined $5,000 and sentenced to two years of probation, during which he wasn’t to hunt on national forest lands.