Operation Night Cat, Episode 1: Why Did the Deer Cross the Road?

November 5, 2025·31 min·2 clips

Officer Ron finds an illegal deer bait pile with a motion-sensor camera, the first concrete evidence linking a social media hunter to systematic poaching.

1. Outside/In host Nate Hedgie presents the first episode of Operation Nightcat, a three-part series about one of the biggest poaching cases in New Hampshire history, told through conservation officer Ron Arsenault. 2. Ron Arsenault is the primary narrator; Tom Kelly (suspect), Randy Inman (suspect), and conservation officer Sergeant Kevin McNeely also appear; the episode is reported by Nate Hedgie with producer Lauren Chulgin. 3. The episode asks whether the behavior of people who abuse animals in secret might reflect what they do to humans — specifically, whether corrections officers who poach with impunity might carry similar attitudes toward the people they guard. 4. Ron Arsenault is a Fish and Game conservation officer who grew up in New Hampshire's Lakes Region, served eight years in the Navy including a deployment to Iraq, and has spent 17 years enforcing hunting and fishing regulations. 5. Ron describes himself as a strict enforcer who once wrote a ticket for his own niece when she shot a doe out of season on her first deer hunt, and who also cited his own son; he says this reputation means people know they can't get out of charges. 6. The Lakes Region of New Hampshire is characterized as a hunter's haven — dense woods, plentiful deer, and a local culture in which the town barber once displayed photos of everyone's kills on his shop wall. 7. The Kelly family was known around town as skilled deer hunters whose photos appeared frequently on the barber shop wall; the next generation, Tom Kelly, moved to TikTok with over 20,000 followers. 8. Tom Kelly's TikTok persona involves filming his own hunts with scope-mounted cameras, trembling with excitement after kills, and using TikTok's AI voice to call himself 'the alpha in these woods' before shooting coyotes. 9. Tom had prior legal trouble: charged in Maine with baiting deer during a season when baiting is prohibited (charges dropped), then charged with illegally hunting a black bear over bait (charges stuck, lost hunting privileges for one year). 10. In December 2022, a local police chief called Ron after seeing four or five deer cross the road near Tom Kelly's property at night; Ron found an illegal grain bait pile with a hay bale the next morning, plus a motion-sensor camera aimed at the site. 11. A search warrant revealed a photo on Tom's SD card of a deer at the bait site the night before Tom killed it, confirming illegal baiting; Ron then seized Tom's phone with a second warrant to look for evidence of additional illegal activity. 12. Tom's phone contained 1.6 terabytes of data; Ron, self-described as 'old school' with technology, spent nights on a heavy laptop searching keywords including 'deer,' 'bait,' and 'night hunting' while his wife asked if he was still working on it. 13. Among the videos on Tom's phone was footage from a night-vision scope-mounted camera showing crosshairs on a Bobcat — a protected species in New Hampshire, hunted almost to extinction in New England during the 20th century — being killed in his backyard. 14. Tom's friends were sending back their own Bobcat kill videos, suggesting a group of at least five men engaged in systematic protected-species poaching and sharing the footage as a social activity. 15. Ron determined that the group transported their dead Bobcats across state lines and registered or tagged them in states where Bobcat hunting is legal, making illegal kills appear legitimate — a violation of the federal Lacey Act, originally passed in 1900 to stop commercial bird hunters from laundering kills across state lines. 16. Ron's wife named the investigation 'Operation Nightcat' at their kitchen table when Ron mentioned they would be partnering with federal agents from U.S. Fish and Wildlife. 17. Search warrants executed before sunrise on January 12, 2023, at Tom Kelly's house revealed a taxidermied Bobcat, rifles with night scopes and mounted cameras, the bait site in the backyard, and a sniper's nest on the back deck — plywood around the railing with a tripod mounted .22 and night scope, pointed at the bait pile. 18. Randy Inman, another member of the group, called in sick from work and drove home when he learned officers were coming; investigators found evidence he had killed at least 20 animals at night illegally, and his former girlfriend later told investigators the constant shooting prevented her from sleeping. 19. Ron showed Hedgie a video of Tom Kelly watching a badly wounded deer flail on its back legs for two minutes — scope-mounted camera pointed at the animal — before finally shooting it again and calling it an asshole. 20. The detail that most unsettled Ron: Tom Kelly and the other men in the poaching group were current and former corrections officers at the New Hampshire State Prison for Men — people with law enforcement training who were systematically breaking the law, raising Ron's question about whether this behavior extended to their treatment of prisoners.

As heard by us

A riverbank bust turns into a patient, oddly absorbing deer-poaching investigation.

Outside/In starts with a conservation officer on a cold spring morning pulling an illegal minnow trap from a New Hampshire river, then widens into deer poaching and baiting.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a wildlife case that starts small and keeps getting stranger.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Outside/In