First off, let me address the story of M. Mule Deer.
The key portion of your stories is the small bullet holes on the other side. I would indeed agree that the bullets did not expand the way you expected. The point of there being no blood trail is extraneous.
One of the questions I used to field was "What round produces the best blood trail?" Blood trails are more a function of where the entrance and exit wounds occur on the animal. The size of the hole is a secondary matter. The chest cavity is like a bucket. If you shoot a hole in it, blood will leak out when the blood reaches the hole. If the hole is high, a lot of blood has to fill the bucket before it starts leaking. I've had a .308 blow a hole the size of a tennis ball on the far side and seen zero blood for the first 80 yards. In this case, in this case, both entrance and exit wounds were high. On the other hand, I have seen a buck with a quarter-sized hole leave a gusher, because I'd shot him from a high angle in a treestand.
Your two examples are good ones. However, I'd just throw out that a failure to open that was endemic to a particular bullet would be hard to hide in this modern world of the Internet and customer reviews.
Now to M. Savage 99's comment:
Look, it's really easy to blame the indian in a situation like this. However, I'd say maybe 1 in 10 whitetails we shoot here at camp have some anomalous behavior after the shot. The first shot is a good boiler room shot, and either there is zero reaction, or the deer runs off a bit and then resumes feeding, or stands there defiantly like this story from 2005.
Hubert D. Buck meets Mr. Whelen If memory serves, the exit wound was one ragged hole. After that episode, I switched from Remington PSPCL to the round nosed SPCL's. I have no idea if it was the bullet's fault, but I was determined to blame the mess on something.
My last instance with this was 2010. I shot the buck with a 165 grain Hornady Interlock SP fired from my Savage 99 in 308 WIN. The first shot was about 100 yards broadside. The finishing shot was under 70 yards slightly quartering away. The entrance and exit holes were touching. Heart and lungs were destroyed, so it was hard to tell which shot had done what.
The shaman Bags an 8 pointer I've used this bullet to take a large percentage of the whitetails at our camp since 2001. I have the utmost confidence in the Hornady 165, both SP and SPBT. I'd be the first to admit stuff does happen every now and again.
