The Murder Of Game Protector John Howie Woodruff
New York State Department of Environmental Conservation/FacebookJohn Howie Woodruff, the New York game protector who may have been murdered by an angry hunter in 1919.
On the morning of Thanksgiving 1919, Mabel Woodruff anxiously busied herself preparing a holiday feast so the family could sit down and dine together when her husband returned from work.
The young mother of two had good reason to worry as she cooked and cleaned in their Scotia, New York, home: Her husband, game protector John Howie Woodruff, had been receiving threatening letters since joining New York’s conservation force just weeks earlier. According to the New York Almanack, one anonymous writer had warned, “I’ll get you,” and “I’m not afraid of you.”
When Woodruff read the threats, he tore up the letter and assured his wife, “Well, they’re not going to get me.” But as Mabel watched her husband leave at 7 a.m. that Thanksgiving morning, her fears proved tragically prescient. The holiday dinner she prepared would go uneaten. John Howie Woodruff would never return home due to a chilling Thanksgiving crime.
Woodruff had achieved his goal of becoming a game protector just weeks before that fateful Thanksgiving. The rugged outdoorsman had scored first place on the competitive civil service exam and received his appointment on Nov. 1, 1919.
His job was to protect New York’s dwindling fish and wildlife populations by confronting defiant poachers who flouted conservation laws. The work was dangerous — game protectors had already been murdered in the line of duty — and Woodruff had earned a reputation as being “zealous in his prosecutions” and “hated by hunters of game out of season.”
When Woodruff failed to return for Thanksgiving dinner that evening, Mabel immediately contacted the police. A massive search commenced, but Woodruff had seemingly vanished.
Then, a witness came forward in 1920 claiming he had seen John Howie Woodruff on Thanksgiving Day.
Fred Ferredino said he was at a local train station around 11 a.m. on Thanksgiving Day when he observed two men arguing about ferrets, which were illegal to hunt with at the time. One man told the other — a hunter carrying a shotgun — that he was under arrest. The hunter then fired two shots into the air before both men disappeared into the woods. Investigators theorized that the shots were meant to summon hunting dogs.
However, this sighting was later discounted due to conflicting reports of Woodruff being seen that evening.
Then, on April 3, 1921, skeletal remains were found in a nearby creek. Heavy slate stones had been deliberately placed atop the body, creating a makeshift tomb. The corpse had two gold teeth.
John Howie Woodruff had been found.
Investigators surveyed the grim scene. Woodruff’s skull had been smashed open by what the coroner determined was “a powerful blow” to the back of his head, suggesting the killer had struck when his back was turned. His hunting boots, clothing, gold watch, and Conservation Commission papers were with the remains, but his gun and badge were missing.
Evidence suggested Woodruff’s body had been buried in a snowdrift during the severe winter storm that struck on the night of Thanksgiving 1919.
Another twist in the story came in 1947, nearly three decades after Woodruff’s disappearance, when two men visited the FBI claiming their stepfather had confessed to killing a game warden near Schenectady around 20 years earlier.
The stepfather allegedly claimed that he’d either tied his victim to a tree where he died during a snowstorm or killed him with a shotgun blast to the head — details that aligned disturbingly with Woodruff’s case and the Thanksgiving night storm. However, during polygraph tests, one stepson admitted to fabricating the story in a family dispute, and no arrest was made. The disturbing Thanksgiving crime remains unsolved to this day.
