The Nice Alligator Snapping Turtle Poaching Scheme
Someday within the late summer season or early fall, probably in the course of the administration of Governor Pa Ferguson within the 1910s, an alligator snapping turtle hatchling poked his head out of the rubbery eggshell that had been his house for the previous couple of months. The 2-inch creature wriggled out of the sandy financial institution of a cypress-lined East Texas creek and slipped into the murky water of a small Sabine River tributary, close to the Texas-Louisiana border.
There, Brutus—as he would later be christened—spent his days in solitude. On daily basis he would relaxation on the creek mattress together with his mouth ajar, utilizing his pink, wormlike tongue to lure carp, gar, smaller turtles, and crawfish to stray near his beak. He additionally fortunately scavenged any useless or dying creature—mammals and birds included—that he got here throughout within the water. He remained so nonetheless beneath the floor that over time algae grew on his shell.
Many years handed. The human inhabitants of Texas doubled. Brutus grew to a formidable 171 kilos, however the turtle remained properly hidden. The elusive nature of alligator snappers makes them notoriously tough to seek out, and that their lifespans “might exceed these of turtle researchers,” according to a study funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, poses extra issues for these eager about learning them.
Within the sixties people upstream of Brutus constructed a dam on the Sabine, creating Toledo Bend Reservoir—the biggest man-made lake within the South. Brutus waddled on alongside the muddy creek mattress in the hunt for prey and of potential mates. He might have sometimes encountered on the riverbed one other monumental beast, this one 165 kilos, who would come to be referred to as Caesar. Within the seventies Texas listed the species as threatened, and thus it grew to become unlawful to seize the snappers within the state. The inhabitants grew comparatively strong in quantity, spreading out throughout just a few dozen counties, primarily in East Texas.
By the eighties, the reservoir had grow to be a well-liked space for boating and bass fishing. Round then, Brutus, who not often broke the floor of the creek, venturing upward solely to breathe, may need needed to studiously keep away from people for the primary time: divers competed yearly in a trash competition to scrub up the water. Principally, although, he would wake within the night, hunt, after which settle right into a spot on the backside of Tenaha Creek to relaxation, undisturbed.
April 26, 2016, figured to be no completely different. Someday that afternoon, nonetheless, a buffalo fish waltzed within the water in entrance of Brutus’s beak, tempting him at an odd hour. Ever an opportunistic eater, he chomped down on the fish and out of the blue discovered himself hooked. Brutus was pulled to the floor of the water, and he thrashed as he was grasped on both aspect of his shell. After a quick battle, he was hoisted over the gunwale of a small aluminum johnboat, the place he laid eyes on three people. Earlier than him crouched a sturdy lady with darkish hair and thick bangs named Viola Dietz Leckelt. Two of her dark-haired sons, half brothers named Travis Leger and Jason Leckelt, perched close by and helped their mom hustle Brutus right into a mesh bag.
The trio had come to Texas from their properties in Louisiana and Oklahoma to fish for alligator snappers. For 2 nights they’d camped alongside the banks of the river and stayed up properly previous 4 a.m. In preparation for the journey, Jason had texted Travis, “Inform momma to carry just a few ache meds. We are able to pay her out of the turtle cash or one thing.” The searching had been good; they’d caught a dozen or so of the reptiles.
Again on shore, they piled Brutus and the others into the mattress of a grey GMC pickup and drove to Viola’s home exterior Sulphur, Louisiana, about thirty minutes east of the Texas border. After they unloaded the turtles, the household posed for {a photograph} with Brutus on the lengthy gravel driveway. With a ridged carapace and sharp claws, he seemed like one thing from an historical time, carefully resembling his ancestors that first appeared within the Miocene epoch 23 million years in the past. Jason and Travis tipped Brutus awkwardly onto his tail, gripping his shell as they squatted behind him. His legs splayed huge and his head aimed skyward. As he was propped on this undignified posture, Brutus’s jaws, highly effective sufficient to snap by means of human fingers, lolled open, as if he had been shocked by his new predicament.
The household of hunters behind him confirmed hardly any emotion. They’d reeled in lots of of turtles like Brutus prior to now. They anticipated to reel in lots of extra.
The outside and nature’s bounty had lengthy had a maintain on the Dietz household. It’s unclear precisely when Dietz kinfolk first started searching turtles, however by all accounts they took simply to the bayou once they landed in Louisiana, from Germany by means of Iowa, within the Eighteen Nineties. Shortly thereafter, two unnamed Dietz males had been photographed holding a clutch of furry rodents after a squirrel hunt among the many cypress bushes. Within the Sixties, Roland Dietz, who lived in Evangeline—“the birthplace of Louisiana oil”—domesticated an eighteen-pound bucktoothed nutria, an invasive species, and gave it as a pet to his son Larry James “Colo” Dietz and his daughter Viola. “Mr. and Mrs. Roland Dietz of Evangeline have taken a web page from historical past or maybe added one by domesticating a NUTRIA,” the Crowley Publish Herald reported breathlessly. The household fed “Nuggie” a eating regimen of bread and greens and even dug him a swimming gap.
Roland taught his eight youngsters and stepchildren learn how to stay off “the groceries equipped by Mom Earth,” within the phrases of Mary Land, creator of the 1954 classic Louisiana Cookery. He may catch something, however his most important pleasure was turtles, which he hunted at each alternative. He offered their meat, too, even promoting within the Crowley paper in 1985: “Loggerhead Turtles on the market. 100 lbs. and fewer, $1.00 a lb.” (“Loggerhead” is native vernacular for the snappers.) He schooled his youngsters in learn how to search for disturbances within the mud to find out one of the best place to set a line to catch an alligator snapper. “She and her daddy would go get ’em with their ft barefooted,” a boyfriend would later recall of Viola’s upbringing.
These early classes knowledgeable the remainder of Colo’s and Viola’s lives. Viola grew to become a prolific hunter. As an grownup, she would head out to Toledo Bend and return with dozens of turtles in mesh baggage that she’d lay out in her carport for would-be consumers to examine. “You’d have to observe the place you’d step,” one shopper recalled.
Colo, in the meantime, labored as a roughneck for a time, later drawing Social Safety incapacity checks. He saved a metallic pirogue, a canoelike boat, on the dock close to his house in Evangeline and most popular to start out every morning and finish every afternoon on Bayou de Cannes. He used a camcorder to movie movies of searching journeys, setting them to a soundtrack of Cajun music. Others would document him too; in a 2013 clip, he reaches right into a barrel to select up nonvenomous water snakes, a cigarette pursed between his lips. As his dachshunds bark at his ft, Colo lets the snakes repeatedly chunk his arms and forearms, drawing blood with every strike. “It don’t damage,” Colo says smiling within the video. The individual filming explains: “This man was raised on the river, getting snakebit all his life, catching alligators, turtles, and frogs.”
If Colo received thirsty throughout a turtle hunt, he’d drink straight from the bayou. He’d hold his catch in a fenced pond on his property till he was able to dine on it, then he’d transfer it to a spherical tub full of fresh water for just a few days. His house grew to become recognized all through Evangeline as a spot the place you could possibly cease by to buy contemporary seafood and sport.
Generally Colo’s enthusiasm for pursuing sport would land him sideways with the regulation. At seventeen he was arrested after a high-speed chase by means of the woods for unlawful possession of geese and killing over the restrict. Six years later he was cited for searching raccoons illegally and for searching from a shifting automobile with a light-weight. In 1982, when he was 28, he confronted trial for taking deer at night time. “Larry J. Dietz and two companions had been stopped by Wildlife and Fisheries officers with bloodstains on the ground of his boat,” learn an merchandise within the Eunice Information. “A mile away, the place Dietz landed his boat, three field-dressed deer had been discovered beneath a bridge.”
The sale of alligator snapping turtle meat was banned in Louisiana in 2004 (and has lengthy been unlawful in Texas), however Colo, Viola, and different native sellers had no hassle discovering a big selection of consumers for his or her catches, together with a former beginning pitcher for the Boston Pink Sox, an auto mechanic, and an area businessman who has since been elected to the Louisiana Home of Representatives.
Bayou legend has it that there are seven kinds of meat on an alligator snapping turtle, together with turkey, fish, pork, and veal. The best way to cook dinner one relies upon largely on what a part of Louisiana you end up in. In New Orleans’s Creole delicacies, turtle is most frequently served in a hearty soup. Cajuns are keen on serving it in a “sauce picante,” a spicy, long-simmering, tomato-based stew. “The quickest method to get somebody to a supper round right here is to say ‘turtle,’ ” Jimmy Mistretta, a Lake Charles developer and restaurateur who purchased Caesar and Brutus from Viola, instructed me on the again porch of his Lake Charles bar, Loggerheads. “If it’s a turtle supper, everyone’s coming. You simply can’t think about the impact it has on folks.”
Enthusiasm for the protein predates the founding of our republic. George Washington attended a turtle feast at New York’s Fraunces Tavern quickly after the tip of the American Revolution. Terrapin was served at President Abraham Lincoln’s inaugural ball. In 1880 the Washington Publish declared it to be “Washington’s favourite delicacy,” writing, “ Stewed terrapin, Maryland fashion, types an vital a part of any Washington dinner laying declare to being a pretentious affair.”
Alligator snapping turtle meat grew to become the first ingredient in Campbell’s Turtle Soup (now discontinued) within the sixties, and business harvests helped deplete the species’ numbers. One turtle trapper named Steve Denino instructed a documentarian within the eighties that he had caught as many as eleven turtles in at some point. “However immediately, like I say, they’re very scarce right here in Louisiana. And if you catch one, you’ve simply received one thing that no person else has.”
Alligator snappers are extremely weak to overhunting “on account of [their] low fecundity, low juvenile survival, lengthy lifespan, and delayed maturity,” Fish and Wildlife biologists, who’ve been monitoring the turtles for years, wrote in a 2021 proposal to checklist the species as threatened beneath the Endangered Species Act—the landmark conservation regulation that marks its fiftieth anniversary in December. A choice on whether or not to checklist the species may come within the subsequent few months, granting the turtles uniform safety throughout their total vary.
Present Louisiana regulation permits residents to catch one alligator snapping turtle a day for private use, which has introduced the species to the brink of extinction within the state. In Texas, nonetheless, native safety has afforded the creatures the chance to develop in quantity—a scenario that has enticed some Louisianans to cross the border. So within the spring of 2016, Viola and her sons ventured into the Lone Star State, as they’d numerous instances earlier than, to catch a haul. Unbeknownst to them, this time they’d landed on the radar of federal wildlife authorities.
Sq.-jawed and lanky, Jim Stinebaugh has a deliberate and considerate presence that served him properly as an officer within the Marines. The 49-year-old grew up exterior San Antonio within the eighties. From a younger age he felt a calling to comply with within the footsteps of his father, who spent many years as a state sport warden and a particular agent with U.S. Fish and Wildlife earlier than retiring as head of Texas Parks and Wildlife’s regulation enforcement division. After graduating from Texas A&M College with a level in wildlife and fisheries science and serving energetic responsibility for 4 years within the Marines, the youthful Stinebaugh joined U.S. Fish and Wildlife as a wildlife inspector in Miami in 2001.
A fourth-generation Texan, Stinebaugh moved again to the state in 2009 to work out of the Houston workplace. His first yr on the job, he traveled East Texas assembly native sport wardens. Someday, over lunch, a wildlife official in Jasper County talked about he had just lately been referred to as out to a site visitors cease as a result of some males had been caught with a pickup truck loaded with alligator snapping turtles, which they had been taking from Texas into Louisiana. Stinebaugh’s curiosity was piqued. He contacted Parks and Wildlife officers within the area, they usually agreed that if any native sport warden discovered somebody attempting to depart the state with alligator snapping turtles, he could be looped in.
4 years later, on a gentle April night, Stinebaugh was grilling steaks when his cellphone rang. It was a sport warden from Sabine County named Sam Smith. Smith defined that he had come throughout a Louisiana man with a scruffy beard named Joe Guidry who was fishing for turtles in Patroon Creek, on the Texas aspect of Toledo Bend. Ten grownup alligator snapping turtles packed into mesh baggage and burlap sacks had been stacked within the mattress of his truck. Guidry claimed he was attempting to take the turtles to a sanctuary in Louisiana. Stinebaugh didn’t purchase it, however he rapidly devised a plan and urged Smith to not cite Guidry for a state-level wildlife crime. Thus started Operation Snap, a federal investigation.
A number of weeks later, Stinebaugh confirmed up in Guidry’s entrance yard in Iota, Louisiana, about three hours from Toledo Bend. An amazing odor of decaying meat crammed the air round a trailer, and a pack of malnourished, mangy canine yapped at his ft as he stepped as much as knock on the door. After just a few moments a girl—Guidry’s girlfriend, it turned out—appeared, shaking with worry and clutching “the most important butcher knife I’ve ever seen,” Stinebaugh recalled. As soon as he satisfied her that he was not there to get Guidry in hassle, she put the knife down and instructed Stinebaugh he may come again just a few hours later to talk along with her boyfriend.
That night, in Guidry’s kitchen, Stinebaugh defined that by catching alligator snapping turtles in Texas and making an attempt to carry them again to Louisiana, Guidry had violated the Lacey Act, a federal conservation regulation that prohibits the trafficking of illegally taken wildlife. He may face as many as 5 years in jail and substantial fines. However potential jail time didn’t appear to faze Guidry. “He rapidly let me know that he was a small-time turtle collector or salesman or no matter you wish to name it, and that there have been a lot larger gamers within the space,” Stinebaugh stated.
These extra prolific turtle hunters, Stinebaugh instructed Guidry, had been those who actually him. Stinebaugh reached into his entrance pocket, the place he had positioned a financial institution envelope containing ten crisp hundred-dollar payments, and laid them out on the desk. He invited Guidry to come back work for the feds as an undercover informant. Guidry instantly started naming different turtle poachers within the space. One, he stated, was a person named Colo Dietz.
Three weeks later, in early June 2013, Guidry confirmed up at Colo’s trailer in Evangeline with a hidden recording machine. Colo, then 59, was working in his backyard, shoeless—as he almost all the time was. Colo greeted Guidry, an acquaintance, with a query about his current turtle hunts. The dialog then alternated between dialogue of Colo’s tomatoes—one of the best fertilizer for them, why final yr’s crop was higher than the present yr’s—and alligator snappers. Colo shared that he had buried some turtle eggs in his yard and that his sister Viola’s son Jason had caught some snappers just lately on the Sam Rayburn Reservoir, in East Texas.
Twenty minutes into the dialog, Colo began regaling Guidry with tales of the previous days, together with one concerning the time he had borrowed his mom’s “little automobile,” tied his pirogue on high, and gone fishing for turtles. When he was able to go house, he draped a tarp over the again seat and loaded it with so many hundred-pound alligator snapping turtles that he blew out the engine’s head gasket. One other time, he instructed Guidry, the burden of all of the turtles he had caught had overwhelmed the brakes. “I attempted stopping at a cease signal; it pushed me clear throughout the primary freeway. The smoke was flying. Simply slid. Couldn’t cease that load,” Colo stated.
Guidry requested him to estimate what number of turtles weighing multiple hundred kilos he had caught in Toledo Bend. With out hesitation, Colo answered “5 hundred.” “There ain’t no person gonna ever catch as many turtles as I caught, since you may wipe out all the remaining that they’ve received in Louisiana and Texas and by no means have as a lot as I caught,” Colo boasted. “That’s all I used to do. Twice per week I’d go.”
Guidry fished for particulars about Colo’s poaching expeditions that yr. Colo talked about how on one current journey he had caught sixteen turtles—so many who they nearly sunk his canoe. He stated he had gone turtling solely in Toledo Bend that yr however that Viola and his nephew Jason had ventured farther west. Colo had thought-about that journey too dangerous.
Stinebaugh listened alongside from a close-by lodge room and was inspired. However after that preliminary dialog, Guidry declined to document any extra talks with Colo, cautious of what the poacher would possibly do to him if he came upon he was working with the feds. Stinebaugh additionally quickly decided that Colo’s poaching profession was getting into its twilight, whereas Viola and two of her sons, Jason and Travis, had been rather more energetic turtle hunters. Stinebaugh refocused the
investigation on them.
A month later he walked the perimeter of Viola’s property, in a rural space of Calcasieu Parish, some 125 miles southeast of Toledo Bend. Viola had a number of acres of land, that includes three giant ponds, which the prior proprietor had stocked with catfish. Your complete property was surrounded by a chain-link fence, and Stinebaugh seen that any gap a snapping turtle may wriggle out of had been meticulously patched. “It was very clear to me she was preserving issues in,” he recounted.
Viola wasn’t house, and he didn’t but have a warrant to go looking her property, however Stinebaugh would later be taught from neighbors that after she and her husband, a plumber, divorced in 2009, her funds grew shakier. That’s when she more and more relied on catching and promoting turtles to complement her revenue. By 2013 nearly each spring and summer season weekend she would go turtle fishing in Texas, carry a load again to her house, and hold the creatures in her ponds till they might be offered. When Viola butchered a feminine turtle and located eggs inside her, she would bury them in sand till they hatched, then rear the hatchlings in a heated aquarium inside the home till they grew giant sufficient to launch into the ponds.
Stinebaugh got down to catch her within the act of promoting turtles and hoped to proceed utilizing Guidry as his informant. However that was to not be. Guidry was more and more beset with persistent again ache and addled by drug habit. Although all the time mercurial, he was turning into much less dependable. One afternoon in July 2015, Guidry’s girlfriend referred to as Stinebaugh in tears. Guidry had simply shot himself within the head in entrance of her.
Stinebaugh was shocked, and he felt moved to attend the memorial service, held at a funeral house in Iota. There, Stinebaugh provided his condolences to Guidry’s mom, introducing himself as a pal due to the undercover nature of their relationship. The room was crowded with Guidry’s household and closest friends, who recalled his adventurous life and love of searching. His obituary, printed per week after his loss of life, identified him as “Turtle Man.”
With out an informant, Stinebaugh needed to pursue different investigative avenues. “We simply saved plodding alongside, hoping we’d get a break,” he stated. That break got here from Peggy Simon, the ex-wife of Viola’s new boyfriend, Rickey Simon. In Could 2016 Stinebaugh roamed the halls of a hospital the place Peggy labored as an in a single day janitor till he discovered her cleansing. She was completely satisfied to speak with him and agreed that night to assist coordinate a sale with Rickey.
A number of days later an undercover U.S. Fish and Wildlife agent phoned Rickey for the primary time, posing as a turtle purchaser. Within the first minute of the decision, Rickey requested him, “You don’t work for the sport warden, do ya?”
“Say once more?” the agent stated.
“You don’t work for Wildlife and Fisheries?” Rickey requested.
“The who?” the agent replied.
“Wildlife and Fisheries,” Rickey stated.
“No, no!” the agent replied.
Glad by this reply, Rickey turned to the small print. The agent stated he needed the turtle cleaned and butchered and the shell polished. In a subsequent name, Rickey talked about that his girlfriend had greater than 200 alligator snappers residing in ponds on her property. Days later, he met the secret agent at a relaxation space on Interstate 10 in Orange, simply throughout the Texas border, the place he offered him a freshly butchered 125-pound turtle, packed into ziplock baggage, for $335. When the shell was ready, the particular agent drove to Sulphur to select it up, paying one other $60. These gross sales had been proof sufficient for a choose to difficulty a warrant to go looking Viola’s place.
On a muggy late-July day in 2016, a convoy of federal brokers drove to Viola’s home and located her watering her vegetation. Seemingly calm, she continued to take action as Stinebaugh, carrying a police vest, defined that the brokers had been there to execute a search warrant. “Okay, do what you bought to do,” she instructed him.
Some thirty minutes later, Viola sat down voluntarily for an interview with Stinebaugh and his boss in her wood-paneled kitchen. Wearing a black tank high and shorts, Viola had her black hair partly pulled again. Her salt-and-pepper roots peeked by means of. A tattoo of an alligator snapping turtle was seen on her higher proper arm.
Stinebaugh defined to Viola that he had been surveilling her and her property for 3 years and that she had offered turtles to folks working undercover for him. “We imagine that you just cooperating with us could also be useful to you, however, full disclosure, I’m not right here that will help you. I’m right here to construct a case, and by cooperating it’s possible you’ll assist your self,” he stated.
As she learn the search warrant, she blanched when she discovered that the federal brokers had been going to take her turtles. “Y’all are gonna entice and take my turtles?” she requested. A couple of minutes later, she circled again up to now. “Catch all my turtles and take them out—what are y’all going to do with them?”
Stinebaugh answered that the turtles could be cared for at a safe location. Viola bristled at this. “I look after my turtles,” she insisted, including that she fed them rooster in addition to buffalo fish, which she caught particularly for them. Certainly one of her favourite pastimes, she stated, was sitting on her again porch and watching them poke their heads out of the water.
“Effectively, I’m not alleging that you just don’t care to your turtles,” Stinebaugh replied. “I’m alleging that you’ve got exploited them to your personal private achieve.”
It took twenty minutes earlier than Viola inquired about her personal destiny. “A query for you: Is it me that’s in hassle or my household?” she requested. Stinebaugh replied that she was the first focus of his investigation however that her sons and boyfriend had been additionally targets. He added that he was conscious of her brother, Colo, who claimed to have caught extra turtles than anybody alive. Viola took umbrage at this characterization. “Colo caught a variety of turtles, however so did I, again within the day,” she replied.
Stinebaugh unfurled a map of Texas in entrance of her and requested her to pinpoint the place she had been just lately. At first she identified lakes she had fished many years in the past with Colo. Ultimately she pinpointed Toledo Bend and Sam Rayburn as current websites, and he or she provided to assist cease Montaro Williams, one other prolific poacher that Guidry had placed on Stinebaugh’s radar. She admitted that she had offered two giant turtles—Brutus and Caesar—for $1,000 and $500 a bit, respectively, to Jimmy Mistretta, the proprietor of Loggerheads Bar and Grill. Her turtle gross sales, she defined, supplemented her month-to-month revenue—a $733 Social Safety incapacity test and $39 in meals stamps. She appeared to particularly remorse promoting Brutus. “I don’t know why I did it,” she instructed Stinebaugh by means of tears. “I really like my turtles.”
Viola’s cooperation happy Stinebaugh, who instructed her it may assist the species. “I’m enthusiastic about these items too. I don’t know should you can sense it in me. However it issues to me that these items are round for my youngsters and grandkids to take pleasure in,” Stinebaugh stated.
Later that afternoon, Viola’s son Travis Leger joined his mom in her kitchen to speak with Stinebaugh. He leered defiantly throughout the desk on the agent, proving far much less cooperative than his mom. He denied ever going to Texas to catch loggerheads and stated all of the reptiles within the ponds had been there once they purchased the property. “Travis, inform the reality!” Viola admonished him as she left the kitchen midway by means of the interview. Rickey, her boyfriend, additionally denied trafficking the creatures.
As Stinebaugh interviewed the household, brokers combed the home for proof to gather and {photograph}. Along with seizing sixteen firearms, they eliminated two turtle heads from the freezer, took down seven shells from the partitions, and picked up “assorted turtle claws” from a bowl on the dresser. Different proof included dozens of household pictures. There was an undated {photograph} of Viola grinning whereas holding up a big alligator snapping turtle shell, splattered with blood, as a number of giant hoop nets hung behind her. There was certainly one of Viola perched within the mattress of a crimson pickup truck, holding up an infinite turtle, her younger son Jason standing on the bottom close by. In a shot from 2001, Viola kneels upon a 150-pound stay snapper that had been positioned atop a tree stump.
Brokers seized two stay juvenile alligator snapping turtles from a small aquarium within the house’s mudroom. Then, for the subsequent three days, they dragged hoop nets by means of the outside ponds and retrieved 28 extra turtles. A dive crew from the Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Workplace netted a further 6. They had been weighed and tagged, then taken just a few hours away to 2 ponds on the Natchitoches Nationwide Fish Hatchery. Stinebaugh additionally went to Loggerheads to reclaim the huge snapping turtles Brutus and Caesar, who had been placed on show, nonetheless alive, whereas Mistretta, the proprietor, waited to butcher them. (Stinebaugh didn’t pursue fees in opposition to Mistretta as a result of the restaurant proprietor didn’t know the turtles had been smuggled into the state illegally and had not violated any federal legal guidelines.)
Because the brokers ready to depart on the search’s closing morning, Viola approached Stinebaugh and provided to assist him catch the remaining turtles within the pond. She additionally requested if she may come assist look after the turtles. She by no means received the possibility. Two days later, earlier than Stinebaugh may sift by means of the proof collected within the search, Travis referred to as 911 and stated Viola had dialed him and was suicidal. He stated she’d instructed him that she was by a graveyard two miles from their house and that by the point he received there it could be too late. The native sheriff’s deputies discovered her truck parked beside the close by Baptist church and her physique crumpled on the bottom within the cemetery. She had been shot within the chest with a Remington 870 pump-action shotgun, purchased by Travis in 2007.
A deputy found a word scrawled inside a spiral pocket book in her truck. “What I instructed you wildlife gents was true. I’m Using [sic] this to say I’m doing this to myself as a result of I don’t wish to go to jail,” the word learn. “Please take all fees on me solely please. . . . That is my determination.”
The Calcasieu Parish coroner dominated her loss of life a suicide, and the sheriff’s workplace agreed.
Via cellphone information, Fb posts, undercover recordings, and different proof found at Viola’s house, Stinebaugh was capable of weave a story displaying how the household had trafficked turtles from Texas to Louisiana. A federal grand jury indicted Viola’s sons Travis and Jason and her boyfriend Rickey Simon in April 2017, charging them with conspiring to violate the Lacey Act.
The defendants pleaded responsible and appeared in court docket in Beaumont that
December for sentencing. On the outset of the listening to, Joe Batte, an assistant U.S. legal professional for the Japanese District of Texas, had an announcement. “Your Honor, we’re going to have some turtles downstairs to have a look at after this.”
“To eat or to have a look at?” the choose, Marcia Crone, quipped.
“To take a look at, Your Honor. That’d be a variety of turtle soup.”
Of their pleadings, the brothers and Rickey acknowledged they’d trafficked 64 turtles between April and June of 2016. Travis, carrying a black-and-white jail uniform and orange Crocs, had his lawyer ask the choose for leniency; he was deeply affected by his mom’s suicide and had a four-month-old child he had but to fulfill. “He’s the one one of many three defendants who has agreed to forfeit the turtles,” his legal professional stated.
Crone was unmoved. “Effectively, he doesn’t actually personal the turtles as a result of he took them unlawfully. So I’m not likely impressed by that,” she stated, earlier than sentencing him to the utmost penalty: 21 months in federal jail adopted by three years of parole. Crone then sentenced Jason to 16 months in jail, additionally the utmost, citing his lengthy prison historical past, which included noodling—the follow, then unlawful in Louisiana, of catching catfish along with your naked arms. “He’s a menace to wildlife,” she stated. The choose was extra lenient with Rickey, who has coronary heart issues, and gave him three years of probation on one depend of the indictment.
After the sentencing, U.S. Fish and Wildlife workers unloaded Brutus and Caesar from plastic tubs they’d hauled in on a trailer and set them down on a packing blanket in entrance of the grand Tuscan columns exterior the U.S. legal professional’s workplace in Beaumont. Behind the turtles stood a podium and a desk the place lacquered turtle shells, affixed with proof tags, had been positioned. The hulking turtles had been the star sights at a press convention heralding the success of the case. However simply eleven minutes into the occasion, Brutus apparently received impatient. He started lumbering off towards the parking zone quickly after an agent handed the rostrum over to a Texas sport warden. “Brutus is getting away, y’all. Be careful!” somebody exclaimed because the turtle’s lengthy claws scratched the pavement. Stinebaugh and one other wildlife official scrambled over and picked him up and returned him to the blanket.
In that one morning, the Dietzes noticed the tip of a century-old household custom: “My grandpa lived off the land, and my dad lived off the land,” Colo’s youngest son, L. J. Dietz, instructed me over a bowl of chicken-and-sausage gumbo at a restaurant in Jennings, Louisiana, this previous January. “If the legal guidelines had been nonetheless the identical, I’d nonetheless be residing that manner. I might love to boost my youngsters that manner, within the nation, catching turtles.”
The sentencing was not the ultimate blow to the Dietz household, nonetheless. Seven months later, in July 2018, Colo, who had been identified with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, died at age 64. He was buried alongside Viola in Iota, the place a small snapping turtle statue rests on his grave. L. J. constructed a shrine to his father within the nook of his store, full with ceramic geese, an image of a deer, a number of shell casings, a whiskey jug, and two preserved alligator snapping turtle heads. “Miss you until my chest hurts,” he wrote on Fb.
Although Stinebaugh had been attempting for years to cease the household’s turtle poaching, he discovered a lot to admire in Colo. “He was nearly like a person plucked out of the previous, a Cajun from 100 and fifty years in the past,” Stinebaugh stated. “Lots of people attempt to fake that ‘I’m this Cajun residing the life within the swamp,’ however this man actually did. There’s a sure authenticity there that’s laborious to seek out.”
As Leger and Leckelt entered jail, the turtles seized within the case had been additionally adapting to a brand new life in captivity. On the Natchitoches hatchery, the creatures lived a lifetime of leisure, consuming a eating regimen of bream, catfish, and carp. Their two ponds had been retrofitted to accommodate them and had been surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire that was angled inward, to maintain the wily reptiles from escaping. Inside just a few years, two clutches of eggs had hatched on the fishery, and the hatchlings lived in fiberglass tanks and had been fed bloodworms, pellets of turtle meals, and chunks of fish.
In 2021, the grownup turtles and lots of the hatchlings had been ready for launch into the wild. The hatchery ponds had been drained with a flip of the deal with, and a crew of workers and volunteers started catching turtles at first mild on a heat Monday morning in June. They netted 24, and a veterinarian spent the day assessing the well being of every one. Brutus was whisked away to a different location earlier than anybody may {photograph} him—Stinebaugh deliberate to supply him on the market to a possible purchaser in China in a sting operation. However Caesar was useless. His naked cranium was discovered within the muck of the pond. His shell had already decomposed and fallen aside.
Scientists arrived at 3:30 a.m. the subsequent morning and loaded the turtles, which had geolocating units affixed to their shells, into burlap sacks. They mounted the luggage with zip ties earlier than wetting them down with a hose and packing them into vans for supply to 3 launch websites. The caravan set out at 5:30 a.m. beneath a straightforward, regular rain, and one convoy reached the north finish of Toledo Bend Reservoir shortly after 7 a.m. The turtles had been then loaded into all-terrain carts and pushed into the swamp. Stinebaugh had the respect of releasing a hatchling close to a bridge. He set it down on the water’s edge and gave it a nudge. “That is what East Texas is meant to appear to be. These turtles hit the jackpot,” Stinebaugh stated because the creature paddled into the inexperienced muck, surrounded by cypress bushes. The turtle paused for a second, turning round to look again on the scientists and officers, earlier than slipping noiselessly into the water.
Brutus was quickly launched too, when Stinebaugh’s cope with the Chinese language purchaser fell by means of. Two weeks later, biologists got down to patrol the swamp, finding the reptiles utilizing radio transmitters. Shortly after they launched in a lime-green kayak, the crew noticed a hulking turtle floating within the swamp—uncommon conduct for a stay creature. His head was bloated, and as they approached they may see chunk marks on his arms and the entrance of his shell. It was Brutus.
His physique was too heavy to tow behind the boat, so one of many scientists received into the water and dragged it to shore. The biologists decided he was probably killed by a territorial male turtle who patrolled that portion of the financial institution.
Ultimately, Brutus died not removed from the place he had hatched a century in the past—not an apex predator, in a swamp he not knew as house.
Sonia Smith is a author residing in Dallas.
This text initially appeared within the December 2023 difficulty of Texas Month-to-month with the headline “The Nice Cajun Turtle Heist.” Subscribe today.