Before the Hollywood Buck there was another deer. A big one, people said. The kind of buck that made a man pull over and stare, the kind that got a name the way most deer never do. They called him King.
Nobody can tell you much about him now. That is the strange part. For a deer that supposedly lived long enough to leave a son behind, King left almost nothing. No score sheet. No rack hanging in an office somewhere. No folder of year-by-year photographs. Just a name, passed from one Richmond local to the next, and one strange story about how it ended.
The story goes that King died under a falling tree. Crushed, the way the Washington Post later repeated it, careful to call it what it was: something some people around there believed, not something anyone had proven. There is no body, no photograph of the scene, no date. A deer that big should have left behind something you could hold in your hands. King left a rumor.
And then, a few years later, another deer showed up in the same part of Richmond, and people started calling him Prince.
The Son Who Lived in Public
That is the thing nobody writing about the Hollywood Buck ever quite slows down enough to say. Prince supposedly had a father, a buck the locals called King, and that deer is basically lost to history while Prince himself had the opposite problem. For eight years, give or take, the deer lived his whole life in front of a camera.
The Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources, behind all the careful bureaucratic language, says it plain. The Hollywood Buck was also known as Prince. He was a nontypical 29-point buck. He spent most of eight years around Hollywood Cemetery and Mount Calvary Cemetery, and because his antlers were so strange, so unmistakable, you could pick him out of any photograph the way you pick out an old friend in a crowd. The DWR called him one of the most famous and most photographed deer in Virginia, and that was years before any of the ugliness started.
Think about what that means for a wild animal. Most whitetails live their entire lives unseen. A man might glass a buck once, get lucky, and never see it again. Prince was known. Named. Followed. He had home ground small enough that a photographer named Bill Draper could tell you, in his last four years, roughly where the deer would be on any given week. Maymont Park. Mount Calvary. Riverview. Hollywood Cemetery itself, where he was photographed lying among the headstones. The North Bank Trail along the James.
Draper was the one who really kept the record. He is a wildlife photographer in Richmond, and he photographed Prince for years, for Hollywood Cemetery and Maymont Park and for his own reasons. He had access to places the public did not. By the end he said he knew the deer well enough that he could recognize the individual bumps and crooks of its antlers from different angles. That is not a man taking a snapshot. That is a man keeping a file on a living thing.
And he was careful with it. He would not post a photo that gave away exactly where the deer was. He worried, out loud, that naming a spot would get Prince poached, killed, tracked down by somebody who wanted him for his head. In hindsight that worry reads almost like an omen, but Draper did not know that yet. He was just a guy who had watched a deer grow old and was trying to keep it alive a little longer.
A Life in Antlers
Here is what eight years in front of a camera actually looks like, and it is worth going through slowly, because it is the only real record we have of this deer, and it tells the whole story if you let it.
There is a photograph from 2020, Draper’s, of Prince in Hollywood Cemetery. He was already enormous. The rack was nontypical, heavy, the kind of headgear you do not expect to see on a deer that crosses a city street to eat someone’s azaleas.
October 2021, another photo. This one shows Prince with a main beam partly broken. Not the whole story of the year, just one snapshot. A buck like that lives a rough life in a city, catching antlers on fence wire, on branches, on whatever a 29-point rack finds to hang itself on.
And then the strange part, the part that matters if you want to understand what a wild animal’s life actually is. Prince’s best rack probably was not the one he died with. Jeff Phillips, who runs Star City Whitetails, said after the deer was gone that the 2023 antlers had fallen off hard compared to the years before. Draper went further. About four years before Prince died, Draper said, the deer had true world-class antlers, better than the famous 29-point rack people remember. The rack he was killed over was already the rack of an old animal in decline.
A shed antler two years before he died scored roughly 100 inches on one side, by the account of Brandon Overstreet, a hunter and watcher who followed Prince for years. That single side was eventually auctioned to a collector. Even the pieces of this deer that fell off every spring were valuable enough to argue over.
So you have this strange ledger. A wild buck lived eight years in a major city, and because his head was strange, people kept score of it. His antlers were photographed in 2020, in 2021 with a broken beam, and they got smaller as he got older. An entire life, told in inches.
The Small, Well-Known World of Prince
Overstreet knew the deer as well as anybody not holding a camera. He watched Prince long enough to describe his home range with a kind of confidence that only comes from years of sitting still in the same places. Prince, Overstreet said, never went more than about a mile. Not because he could not, but because he did not have to. The stretch along the James had everything a city buck needs. Food. Water. Places to bed down. And, in Overstreet’s phrasing, plenty of does.
He put it in a way that got quoted everywhere, because it was too good not to. Asked about Prince’s rutting behavior, Overstreet said the buck had about thirty girlfriends in that little patch of ground, so he never had to travel the way a big woods buck does. The neck never got that swollen, rut-thick look you see on bucks that run themselves ragged chasing does across three ridges. Prince stayed put. He was the mayor of a very small, very comfortable kingdom, and he had been there so long that everybody knew his routes.
There is a detail in the Washington Post worth sitting with: two photographers named in the coverage both treated Prince’s location as a secret. Ben King, a professional wildlife photographer who shot the Hollywood Buck, deliberately hid where the photos were taken. He would not say where, because saying where put the deer at risk.
Two men, Draper and King, both spent years photographing the same animal, and both went out of their way to keep it findable by no one else. When you think about how the story ends, that detail lands hard.
The Old Buck’s Last Year
By 2023 Prince looked old, and Draper was not shy about saying so. The deer was worn down, less mobile, less wary. He held tighter to predictable spots. He would bed down close to traffic, near a fence at Maymont where cars rolled past.
Draper watched him one of those last times and had a thought he probably did not want to be right about. He thought the deer might not make it through the next winter.
It is not a diagnosis. It is the judgment of a man who had watched an animal for years and knew what a tired buck looks like when the cold is coming. But it is the kind of observation you only get from somebody who kept the record. The same reason we know almost nothing about King is the reason we know this much about Prince. Somebody was watching, and he wrote it down, and he passed it along.
About a week before the deer died, something happened that Draper later described to Outdoor Life, and it has not sat right with the people who knew the buck ever since. Someone posted a photo of Prince on a Virginia Wildlife Facebook page and, in the same post, wrote down where the deer lived and where you could go see it. That set off a small storm among the people who had spent years protecting exactly that information. Draper went on the record saying he did not know whether the post had anything to do with what came next.
He was careful about it, the way careful men are. He did not claim a connection. But you would have to be willfully dense not to understand why that post mattered to him, and why it matters now. For years the rule had been simple. You could enjoy Prince, you could photograph Prince, but you did not tell anybody where to find Prince. One post, one week before the end, broke the rule.
December 14, 2023
The actual death of the Hollywood Buck is the part of this story that got the most ink, and it deserves only a fraction of it here, because the deer himself had been the point long before any of it happened.
On December 14, 2023, a man named Jason Walters sent photographs of a massive nontypical buck to Jeff Phillips of Star City Whitetails. Walters said he had killed it in Prince Edward County with a .50 caliber muzzleloader, about twenty yards, early that morning, his third mount of the year. The photos went up. Within a very short time, the comments started. People recognized the deer.
Here is the number that turns the whole case from a hunting story into something else. Hollywood Cemetery sits about seventy miles from where Walters claimed he shot the deer. A buck that Overstreet insisted never wandered more than a mile from its home range was, per the story being told, seventy miles away on the morning it died.
The antlers did it. After years of Draper’s photographs, Prince’s rack was so individual that strangers online could line up Walters’ photos against Draper’s and see the same animal. The post pulled in something like twenty-four hundred comments in days, and within a few days dozens of tips and emails had reached DWR. By 3:30 that afternoon, DWR had already opened an official call for service.
The investigation does not need long here, because it was never the deer’s story, only the ending of it. Ten conservation police officers. Ten search warrants. Ring cameras and Flock cameras and cell data, a second suspect named Alan Proffitt, and two more deer tied to Walters, both killed illegally around Richmond. One of them Draper recognized as an eight-point buck he had photographed slipping through a gap in the Hollywood Cemetery fence.
In the end Walters pleaded guilty to twenty wildlife violations. Six months in jail, three suspended. Two thousand five hundred dollars in fines, another eleven thousand in replacement costs for the Hollywood Buck and the two other deer. And a hunting ban of twenty-four years, the number most people remember.
The deer that had lived eight years in public died because somebody wanted his head, and the state took twenty-four years of somebody’s privilege in return. Whether that is justice is a longer argument. Whether it brings back a buck that a whole city knew is not an argument at all.
What Is Left
The rack itself scored 212 and 7/8 inches on the Buckmasters scale, shown at Antlerstock in 2026, brought out by DWR alongside the two other deer from the case. That number gets repeated now, in the posts that made the Hollywood Buck a legend even after death. It is a useful number if you are scoring a rack. It is not the number that matters here.
What matters is that there were two deer, supposedly one bloodline, and they left behind completely different kinds of history.
King is four sentences in a newspaper and a rumor about a falling tree. No score sheet, no photographic record that has survived the way Prince’s did. A man could tell you King was the biggest buck Richmond ever saw, and there is nothing on record to settle it either way.
Prince is eight years of photographs. A broken main beam in 2021. A shed scoring a hundred inches on one side, auctioned to a collector. A photographer who kept his location secret out of fear for his life, and was right about why. A final year described by a man who knew the deer well enough to guess it would not survive the winter. A death seventy miles from home, recognized within days by strangers because the antlers matched the file.
One deer lived his whole life in front of the lens and left a photograph for every season. The other left a name and a story nobody can confirm. Same city. Same lineage, if you believe the locals.
The difference between them is not blood. It is who was watching.
There is no lesson to tack onto that. A famous deer got poached, a man went to jail, and somewhere upstream there is another deer the city will never see, remembered only because his supposed son happened to be unforgettable.
King left a name and a rumor. Prince left a name, too, and an entire public record. The difference is not whether they were remembered. It is how much of them survived.