All Kidding aside
Truth of Billy the Kid’s death remains as elusive as the outlaw.
Pat Garrett raised his revolver and aimed it at the figure outlined against the doorway of the dark New Mexico cabin. For months, the Lincoln County sheriff had been pursuing famed outlaw Billy the Kid. He had caught him and lost him. Now it was time to kill him once and for all.
Garrett pulled the trigger twice. A bullet struck the man’s back. But when Garrett flipped the corpse over, it wasn’t the Kid after all. The outlaw had escaped yet again. And rather than face ridicule, the sheriff covered up his mistake — leaving Billy the Kid free to live out his days in disguise.
Or so Bill O’Reilly would have you believe. Billy the Kid’s miraculous 1881 escape was the climax of a May 17, 2015, episode of Legends & Lies: The Real West, hosted by O’Reilly.
“Much has been fabricated about Billy the Kid’s life but the fact is that little can actually be proven,” O’Reilly said in the episode. “Evidence to support Pat Garrett’s claim (that he killed the Kid) is hard to come by. The truth is that we may never know for certain how Billy the Kid died.”
O’Reilly isn’t the first to sow doubt over the outlaw’s death. The 1990 film Young Guns II ended with a wizened old Billy the Kid wandering off into the desert.
But O’Reilly’s slickly produced episode has helped rekindle a long-raging debate over Billy the Kid’s death. For many Wild West historians, the Fox News anchor’s show simply recycled discredited rumours in a salacious attempt to court viewers.
Now, however, if one historian gets his way, the dispute over Billy the Kid’s death could officially be coming to an end.
Recently, historian Robert Stahl announced he was filing a lawsuit with the New Mexico Supreme Court demanding the state end speculation over Billy the Kid’s death by issuing an official death certificate.
Death certificate
“Enough is enough,” Stahl wrote in a February petition to a lower court. Noting the existence of several “impostor” Billy the Kids, Stahl continued: “A major reason millions have supported these impostors is their claim that no official death certificate was issued because there was insufficient evidence to confirm that it was the authentic Billy the Kid who was shot and killed that night.”
The story of Billy the Kid’s short and violent life isn’t just incredible. It is, as O’Reilly pointed out, indeterminate, with many parts still shrouded in mystery.
For decades, the primary text on Billy the Kid’s killing was written by none other than Garrett, the sheriff who said he shot the cattle rustler turned killer.
Published in 1882, a year after the reported shootout, Garrett’s book sought to dispel stories already swirling about Billy the Kid. From its title on, the book tried to lay ownership to the truth. It begins:
Yielding to repeated solicitations from various sources, I have addressed myself to the task of compiling, for publication, a true history of the life, adventures, and tragic death of William H. Bonney, better known as “Billy the Kid,” whose daring deeds and bloody crimes have excited, for some years last past, the wonder of one-half of the world, and the admiration or detestation of the other half.
I am incited to this labour, in a measure, by an impulse to correct the thousand false statements which have appeared in the public newspapers and in yellow-covered, cheap novels. Of the latter, no less than three have been foisted upon the public, any one of which might have been the history of any outlaw who ever lived, but were miles from correct as applied to “the Kid.” These pretend to disclose his name, the place of his nativity, the particulars of his career, the circumstances which drove him to his desperate life, detailing a hundred impossible deeds of reckless crime of which he was never guilty, and in localities which he never visited.
I would dissever “the Kid’s” memory from that of meaner villains, whose deeds have been attributed to him. I will strive to do justice to his character, give him credit for all the virtues he possessed — and he was by no means devoid of virtue — but shall not spare deserved opprobrium for his heinous offences
against humanity and the laws.
That tension — between sinner and saint, outlaw and avenger — is part of what has made Billy the Kid a legend of the West.
Short, chaotic life of crime
Details of his life are still in dispute. Even his name is uncertain. But most historians agree that Henry McCarty a.k.a. William H. Bonney a.k.a. Billy the Kid was born in New York City to Irish parents around 1860. His father died when he was an infant and his mother moved the family west, first to Wichita then to the territory of New Mexico.
When his mother also died, a teenage the Kid began to get in trouble. He was arrested for stealing clothes, but allegedly escaped by climbing out a prison chimney. It would be the beginning of a short but chaotic life of crime. A few years later, while still a teen, the Kid allegedly made his first kill, shooting Frank P. Cahill dead in Arizona after the older man bullied and beat him.
But it was Billy’s role in New Mexico’s Lincoln County War that would make him infamous. He fell in with an English cattle rancher named John Tunstall. When Tunstall was murdered by a rival posse, Billy the Kid and other ranch hands — who came to call themselves The Regulators — vowed revenge.
In the ensuing violence, Billy the Kid fatally shot at least several more men (some have claimed the tally is as high as 21). His victims included a pair of sheriff’s deputies during an escape from prison (after he was allegedly betrayed by the governor, Lew Wallace, who had promised him amnesty for co-operating only to order him hanged).
After his escape, the Kid sought refuge with his friend Peter Maxwell in Fort Sumner.
According to Garrett’s account, Maxwell betrayed his friend.
And so it was that Garrett was hiding in Maxwell’s bedroom when the Kid came in. From Garrett’s book:
He came directly towards me. Before he reached the bed, I whispered: “Who is it, Pete?” but received no reply for a moment ... The intruder came close to me, leaned both hands on the bed, his right hand almost touching my knee, and asked, in a low tone: — “Who are they Pete?” — at the same instant Maxwell whispered to me. “That’s him!” Simultaneously the Kid must have seen, or felt, the presence of a third person at the head of the bed. He raised quickly his pistol, a self cocker, within a foot of my breast. Retreating rapidly across the room he cried: “Quien es? Queen es?” (“Who’s that? Who’s that?”) All this occurred in a moment. Quickly as possible I drew my revolver and fired, threw my body aside, and fired again. The second shot was useless; the Kid fell dead. He never spoke. A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and the Kid was with his many victims.
“‘The Kid’ had a lurking devil in him,” Garrett wrote. “It was a good-humoured, jovial imp, or a cruel and bloodthirsty fiend, as circumstances prompted. Circumstances favoured the worker angel, and ‘the Kid’ fell.”
In the years since Garrett’s book was published, however, his account has been undermined by critics and events.
Some historians have come to doubt parts of Garrett’s story. Meanwhile, several of what Stahl calls “impostors” later claimed to be Billy the Kid.
One, in particular, gained a following. It’s a story recounted in both Young Guns II and O’Reilly’s Legends & Lies: in the late 1940s, a man named Ollie Roberts a.k.a. Brushy Bill came forward claiming to be Billy the Kid. He said he had escaped that night after Garrett mistakenly shot another man. And he demanded the governor of New Mexico live up to his predecessor’s promise and pardon him for his crimes. Brushy Bill died before his claim could be fully vetted, however, or before he could be pardoned.
At the same time, physical evidence showing whether Billy the Kid died that day has literally been washed away.
Gravestones marking the outlaw’s supposed final resting place in Fort Sumner were washed away multiple times by floods, making it a guessing game where, exactly, his grave is located.
In the mid 2000s, New Mexico officials decided to determine once and for all how Billy the Kid died. But without a body, they embarked on a costly and errorprone odyssey.
“Former Lincoln County, N.M., Sheriff Tom Sullivan and his partner, former federal officer and Capitan, N.M., Mayor Steve Sederwall, don’t believe that Sheriff Pat Garrett ambushed and killed Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner, N.M., on a July night in 1881,” the Arizona Republic reported in 2006. “They contend the Kid could have lived out his years peacefully using the alias John Miller.”
So the two officials dug up Miller’s grave. Then they sent the bones and teeth to a Dallas lab for DNA analysis. Even more outrageous, they pried splinters of wood off the bench where Billy the Kid’s bloody body was allegedly laid more than a century before. But lab results comparing the two samples were useless and the case just led to legal challenges and confusion.
That wasn’t the end of the ordeal, however. A judge refused to exhume the body of Billy the Kid’s mother, and local politicians balked at disinterring Brushy Bill. In a final twist, after a lengthy state investigation into the subject, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson decided in 2010 not to issue Billy the Kid the pardon he had been promised.
But the inconclusive state investigation still left uncertainty as to how, when and where Billy the Kid died. Two different towns — Fort Sumner, N.M. and Hico, Texas — both claim to host his remains.
With his detailed 28-page legal brief, however, retired Arizona State education professor Robert Stahl hopes to finally settle the story. In his February petition, he pointed out that Ollie Roberts a.k.a. Brushy Bill’s own family said he was lying.
A family Bible put his age in 1881 at just two years old: far too young for even a criminal nicknamed “the Kid.”
Stahl’s petition cites a coroner’s jury report, eyewitness accounts, news articles from the time, and a mountain of other evidence to support Garrett’s claim he killed Billy the Kid in July of 1881.
The professor is a member of the Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang, which is seeking to dispel errant accounts of the outlaw’s death.
“I already know what happened to him,” Outlaw Gang president Lori Goodloe told the Washington Post in an email.
“There’s not a doubt in my mind that Billy was killed by Pat Garrett in July of 1881. ”
She said the Outlaw Gang was founded in response to a Hico, Texas museum’s claim Brushy Bill was Billy the Kid. Goodloe said misinformation has always muddied the waters around the outlaw’s life and death.
Goodloe said she isn’t surprised myths persist about Billy the Kid’s death. “His story is a fun one — he’s the underdog you root for,” she said. But “the true story of Billy the Kid is amazing; it needs no embellishment.”
It may need no embellishment, but it does need an ending. Yet, even Stahl’s petition for the Kid’s overdue death certificate seems to admit the official document won’t end the debate.
“Today we have no remains that we can dig up in the old Ft. Sumner cemetery and no photographs of Billy the Kid in death,” he wrote, adding: “Even if we had the latter, doubters of Billy’s July 1881 death would find some reason to excuse these from being authentic.”
I already know what happened to him. There’s not a doubt in my mind that Billy was killed by Pat Garrett in July of 1881. His story is a fun one —he’s the under dog you root for.
LORI GOODLOE
BILLY THE KID OUTLAW GANG