Billy the Kid: Dead? Or Alive?

I have been reading about Billy the Kid, who grew up in Silver City, a mischievous but amiable sort until he took to the gun at age 15. Depending on the historian consulted, he killed between 7 and 21 people in his short lifetime, quite a few who meant to kill him. Mostly he rustled livestock. Buck-toothed, blue eyed, slight build. There's a mural of him in Silver City wearing butterfly wings. 

His first crime was complicity in the theft of shirts off the clothesline of a local Chinese laundryman. Reportedly, he climbed out through the chimney of the town jail and, fearing he would face an even longer term for escaping, fled to Arizona. He killed his first man there, a blacksmith and former soldier who had been bullying him. Let out of the jail there, maybe for self-defense, he returned to New Mexico.

Henry William McCarty or Henry William Antrim as he was known changed his name to William Bonney. As Billy the Kid, he became a major player in the Lincoln County War, essentially a gang-war, which began as a feud between proprietors of two dried goods stores: McSwain-Tunstall on one side, Murphy-Dolan on the other. Billy the Kid joined on the so-called Regulators on the side of McSwain-Tunstall, the less powerful politically of the two factions. Murphy, serving as well as state legislator in Santa Fe, pretty much ruled the roost down in Fort Sumner, the area of most of the fighting.

One big shootout left Sheriff Brady of Fort Sumner dead. Billy had a price on his head now, though it's not clear his shot was the lethal one. In the midst of the shooting, he was observed retrieving the pearl-handled revolver that Brady, now corpse-Brady, had confiscated from him during his last stretch in jail. Newly deputized Sheriff Pat Garrett went after him and caught him, brought him in for trial. It looked as if Billy would hang. After being returned to Lincoln from Mesilla, where he had been sentenced, he made his escape, killing two men guarding him in the process, one of them Bill Olinger, a bad man whom even Garrett said he would not dare turn his back to.

The story is that Garrett killed the Kid. Billy was staying with friends out in the countryside after his escape. He left his room to get a slice of beef from the porch of Pete Maxwell's house and, entering the house, sensed a presence. “Quien es? Quien es?” he asked. Garrett was sitting on Maxwell's bed, shot the figure in the doorway in the stomach. Billy either fell back into another room or onto the porch, was declared dead by the coroner the next morning, quickly buried. A few say (and our neighbor Carl says) he didn’t die, but escaped again, and took on another identity.

What happened? Legend.

A convincing case is made in the book _Billy the Kid; Beyond the Grave_ by W.C. Jameson that Pat Garrett shot the wrong man and then covered it up, and that the true name of Billy the Kid was William Henry Roberts.

In 1948, a paralegal and history buff named William Morrison came across 89-year old Roberts living modestly in Texas. He was convinced the elderly but not frail man was the famous outlaw. At first, Roberts said he wasn't, but then said he was, and then that he wanted help getting a pardon for the murder of Brady from then New Mexico governor Thomas Mabry. Morrison taped interviews with Roberts and collected affidavits from people still alive who had known Billy the Kid and who swore that Roberts and the Kid were one and the same person.

Two years later, Governor Mabry agreed to meet with Roberts and Morrison, promising it would be a private meeting. When the two showed up in Sante Fe, however, they were confronted with a media circus and heavy law enforcement presence. Garrett's sons and other relatives and friends were there and along with Mabry were intent on disproving Roberts' claim. None of the evidence Morrison had accumulated was allowed to be presented. Moreover, Roberts was not pardoned and was sent back to Texas in humiliation. In December of 1950, he passed away shortly before his 91st birthday.

The author W.C. Jameson notes that the popular version of the death of Billy the Kid is based almost entirely on Pat Garrett's book _The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid_, co-written with Marshall Ash Upson, and published in 1882. Others acknowledge, including J.C. Dykes, who wrote the introduction to the 1954 edition of that book, that much of the narrative was cribbed from adventure novels of the time; yet, the consensus is that the description of the hunt for Billy the Kid and his subsequent death was written by Garrett and is mostly truthful.

In my reading, however, Jameson effectively demonstrates that Roberts' story is logically consistent and contains new, verifiable, information that only the real Billy the Kid could have known, whereas Garrett's is shown to be often inconsistent, unproven in significant details, likely contains lies, and contradicts other first-person accounts of the events surrounding the Kid's life and death, including what Garrett himself told others later in life.

The proofs offered by Jameson are legion. They include facial-analysis of photographs of Roberts and the one existing tintype of Billy the Kid that revealed a near-100 percent match; scars on Roberts' body that matched known wounds the Kid received; Roberts' knowledge of the original layout, much altered in 1950, of the former Sheriff's office in Fort Sumner, and other sites; his knowing certain details of the shootout with Brady and other Lincoln County War incidents, not recorded previously that have since been verified; etc., etc. 

Roberts said that the person who died in his stead was Billy Barlow, about his size and with the same blue eyes, but part-Mexican, and that his friends helped him, Billy the Kid, get away. Garrett's own deputy on the scene, John Poe, first declared the Sheriff had gotten the wrong man. As did others present. In his own book, however, Poe repeats the Sheriff's contention that he could not have been mistaken in recognizing the Kid's voice in the dark, having known the outlaw for years -- yet, in his book, Garret also reports that he asked Pete Maxwell, in the same room at the time, who the person was saying "Quien es? Quien es?"

Immediately after the killing, Garrett shut himself in that house with his deputies and the dead man and allowed no one else entry. He did not, as was the custom of the time, have photographs taken of the corpse or himself with the corpse, and allowed no one to see inside the coffin as it was taken to the cemetery. One old-timer joked it was really the side of beef from Pat Maxwell's bunkhouse that got buried.

Still, some person or other must have seen the body before it was interred, and informed the media. A Silver City newspaper of the time described the man in the coffin as having dark skin and a full beard, whereas a Las Cruces newspaper, only six months earlier, had described Billy the Kid as light-skinned with only an immature fuzz above his lip. He wasn't called the Kid for nothing.

Though three coroner's inquests were prepared under Garrett's supervision, describing the victim of the shooting as William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, none of these are currently on file in any jurisdiction of the state of New Mexico. Nor apparently, if filed then but now lost, were they acceptable to the authorities of the time. Garrett never collected the reward money. There were too many questions unanswered about the outcome of the case.

Could there have been a cover-up? Is a cover-up still going on?

Billy the Car Salesman

A goodly portion of southern New Mexico relies on the legend of Billy the Kid, as-it-is, for millions in tourism dollars -- museums and tours of jails and grave sites and historical markers that all say the Kid died young. There's a Billy the Kid Scenic Byway. Sheriff's deputies in Lincoln County wear appliques on their sleeves with Pat Garrett's image.

 

Bill the Lead Guitarist

The Lincoln County Historical  Trust in 1988 conducted their own photo-analysis concluding that Roberts and the Kid were not the same.

Billy's Bar-B-Q

Television journalist Sam Donaldson did a show investigating the possibility of whether William Henry Roberts and Billy the Kid could have been the same -- and concluded they were not.

What was not revealed to the audience at the time was that Donaldson owned property in Lincoln County.

You be the judge. Was William Henry Roberts the outlaw Billy the Kid? One important thing to consider when comparing the two is that Roberts had all his teeth pulled in his 30s and that aging changes a person's appearance considerably. Also, Billy was likely a person of delayed physical maturity when he was in his teens and early 20s and still growing.