Early one morning, a picture of a dead deer in the back of a flatbed truck popped up in a group message on Snapchat. A half-hour later, someone else shared a picture of the same dead deer, a big buck with moose-like antlers.

This was not just any large whitetail, but a local legend whose size and majestic rack — a palmated crown shaped like two open hands with fingers extended — had earned him a nickname: King Louie. There was talk that he might one day qualify for a New York record.

Now, after eluding hunters for years, the king was dead.

“The whole community was in an uproar,” said Kyle Bevis, a state environmental conservation officer. He added later, “They had that sinking suspicion that something wasn’t right with the way the deer was killed.”

It happened in December about an hour’s drive northwest of Albany, in the Adirondack Mountain foothills. King Louie’s domain was a patch of mostly private properties in and around the towns of Johnstown and Fonda. Over his 5 and a half years, hunters had tracked his growth and largely nocturnal wanderings via trail cameras. To the small circle of people allowed to hunt on those properties, King Louie “was the deer that everyone was out to get,” said Jerrod Vila, a local hunter and outdoors writer.

Many hunters had never seen the big buck in the flesh, but Ron Hart Jr. said he had, once on the first day of hunting season two years ago. King Louie came out of the woods about 400 yards away along a power line and bedded down with a doe in tall grass. Mr. Hart waited maybe 45 minutes to get a clean shot. Then something startled the deer. They jumped up and darted into the woods.

On this morning, King Louie had practically come to Mr. Hart’s doorstep, appearing in a pumpkin patch on a property where he was the caretaker. That was where Christopher Brownell found the deer. But it would take him two days to admit it.

At about 7 a.m. on Dec. 5, 2024, officials would say later, a man cleaning snow off his wife’s car at his Montgomery County home saw Mr. Brownell, a neighbor, pull in with a large deer carcass in the bed of his maroon truck.

The man came over to take pictures. He posted one on Snapchat, where a second man who was hunting nearby saw it and drove over to see. They knew right away they were looking at King Louie.

Mr. Brownell told the men he had killed the deer around 4:30 p.m. the previous day near a farm about 10 minutes away. He said he had been driving around after getting off work when he stopped, randomly walked into the woods, saw the deer and shot it. When he couldn’t find blood and hair from the animal, he decided to let it be overnight and had gone back that morning to find it.

The men weren’t so sure.

In New York, hunting big game is limited to the period a half-hour before sunrise until a half-hour after sunset. The sun set before 4:30 p.m. in Johnstown the previous day. That King Louie was known to have kept mostly to private property further raised the specter of poaching. To ethical hunters, such a thing is “despicable,” said Mr. Vila, the writer.

The photos spread quickly among local hunters, and calls flooded the Department of Environmental Conservation. Officers Bevis and Justanna Bohling began an investigation; Officer Shane Manns, who lives nearby, provided local expertise.

By the next day, Friday, the officers had reviewed surveillance video from a bridge on the Mohawk River between Mr. Brownell’s house and where he claimed to have shot King Louie. The footage showed his truck crossing several times in the overnight hours.

Later that day, the officers interviewed one of the men who had seen the buck on Mr. Brownell’s truck. He described touching the carcass and finding it softer than it should have been had Mr. Brownell shot it when he said.

“He was reluctant to speak with us at first,” Officer Bohling said of the man, who filed a complaint against Mr. Brownell. But, she added, he believed that this was a chance to “get justice for Louie.”

When she and Officer Bevis showed up at Mr. Brownell’s house on Saturday morning, he said he had been waiting for them. Using a mapping app popular with hunters, he showed them where he said he had killed the deer.

Together, they went to an auto body shop where Mr. Brownell had hung the buck’s carcass in a box truck. As he repeated his story, the officers saw a bullet hole in King Louie’s neck. Such a wound typically causes major trauma to the heart and lungs, killing the animal quickly.

The officers asked Mr. Brownell to take them to where he had shot the deer. When they got there, his story unraveled. They said he told them he had been lying.

He insisted that he had shot the deer during legal hours, but that he had done so after stopping his truck and walking up the road to a clearing, where he saw two deer and shot the bigger one.

The wounded deer, he said, had run across the road into a pumpkin patch and died. The officers asked him to show them the spot. There was blood and hair in the snow. Officer Bohling confronted him.

“I said, ‘I think you shot this deer in this pumpkin patch,’” she said.

He confessed, appearing to be ashamed and remorseful: Sometime after midnight, he had seen two deer in the pumpkin patch while driving around. He parked nearby, then walked back to find the bigger of the two facing him. He did not have a light, but the moon was out. He shouldered his .308 Winchester rifle and fired one shot from the road, dropping King Louie where he stood. Hearing cars, he got in his truck and drove home, returning several hours later to retrieve the remains, according to his signed statement and interviews with the officers.

Mr. Brownell said he had recognized the buck as King Louie only when he saw the body in the snow. “Of all the deer I could have shot,” he said to the officers, “why was it this deer?”

Mr. Brownell, 40, was charged with the illegal taking of deer, shooting on or from a roadway, hunting outside of legal hours and trespassing. He pleaded guilty, was fined $3,000 and agreed to have his hunting license suspended for five years. He could not be reached by phone and did not respond to an email request for comment.

Mr. Hart said the big buck had rarely been in the pumpkin patch and that his true home range had most likely been a couple of miles away. In breeding season, Mr. Hart said, King Louie’s search for does in heat pushed him farther afield.

After Mr. Brownell confessed, the officers retrieved King Louie’s carcass from the box truck. Driving through Johnstown on their way to a state laboratory with the buck’s 12-point rack poking up from the back of the truck, they caught the eyes of rubberneckers and were hailed as heroes for cracking the case. When they stopped for gas at a convenience store, Officer Bevis said, “that drew a crowd.”

“People were overjoyed,” he added.

At the lab, King Louie was “caped out” — his hide and head removed for mounting — and his meat went to a charity that gives venison to hungry New Yorkers.

The Department of Environmental Conservation reported in June that King Louie’s rack had been measured and, while substantial, fell short of a record. It was moot anyway: Deer taken illegally cannot qualify for such honors, nor can those who do the taking.

Susan C. Beachy contributed research.