North Richland Hills man ordered to pay back $13,000 in cattle theft case

A North Richland Hills man on Monday received two years of deferred adjudication and was ordered to pay back $13,000 for stealing cattle from a rancher in Wise County.

Jerry Dean Kulow, 58, was found guilty in September of theft of livestock, a third-degree felony, according to a news release from the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, which investigated the case.

Kulow, who was arrested in 2015, had been working as a foreman for a rancher in Boyd, northwest of Fort Worth.

When a neighboring rancher’s cattle kept getting onto the property Kulow managed, Kulow’s boss gave him about $3,000 to build a new fence, the TSCRA news release said.

But Kulow never built the fence and the money disappeared, according to special ranger John Bradshaw, the TSCRA investigator.

The investigation revealed that Kulow sold 95 head of his boss’s cattle and 49 head of the neighboring rancher’s cattle at livestock sales and kept the money, the TSCRA news release said.

Kulow confessed to the sales, which totaled about $98,000.

Initially, Kulow was also charged with theft of livestock from the elderly, a second-degree felony, for the sale of his boss’s cattle. But that charged was later dropped and determined to be a civil issue, said Jeremy Fuchs, the TSCRA spokesman.

This story was originally published March 28, 2017 at 1:09 PM with the headline "North Richland Hills man ordered to pay back $13,000 in cattle theft case."