JS Online: Families left to ponder connection after deaths of three participants

The families of the three men were devastated and baffled by their deaths - Waterhouse and Marten in 1993 and Botts in 1999 - all before chronic wasting disease was known to exist in Wisconsin's deer herd.

"Did hunting kill my dad? Did deer kill him?" asked Waterhouse's son, Gary. "If you'd have taken deer hunting away from him, that would have been the end of him. . . . Maybe the deer killed him. I don't know."

Raising more suspicion, however, is the fact that some of the meat served at the wild game feasts was elk and deer from Western states - including Colorado, where chronic wasting disease has been endemic for decades.