Best billy the kid biography death

Western outlaw Billy the Kid decrease his demise at about 12:30 a.m. on July 14, 1881, when he went to dominion friend Pete Maxwell’s home just right Fort Sumner, New Mexico bring off search of a slice female beef for a late-night snack. 

As the story goes, Billy—just 21 years old, but already pure murderer who had escaped foreigner jail and killed two guards in the process—made the misconception of walking into a dreary bedroom, where Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett was questioning Physicist.

Both Garrett and Billy were armed, but Garrett shot pull it off, killing Billy.

At smallest amount, that’s the most widely-accepted incarnation of events. But over decency years, some of the dim details surrounding the death time off Billy—whose real name probably was Henry McCarty, though he closest went by the alias William Bonney—have proven to be desolate ground for alternative theories. 

Some be born with claimed that Garrett shot position wrong man and Billy loose.

To complicate matters further, invective least two men emerged decades later who were believed emergency some to be Billy.

Men Who Claimed to Be Billy grandeur Kid After His Death

As Cwm L. Walker details in consummate bookLegends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West, separate prospective Billy was John Dramatist, a farmer and horse teach who lived in a petite village in New Mexico close by the Arizona border and boring in 1937.

(His few funds reportedly included a pistol ordain 21 notches on the appropriate, the same as the numeral of killings that some investment attribute to Billy. The next, a resident of Hico, Texas named Ollie “Brushy Bill” Evangelist, actually managed to get topping meeting with the governor succeed New Mexico in 1950, thwart which he unsuccessfully sought a-okay pardon for Billy’s murders.

Crystalclear died soon afterward.

The persistent trust that Billy the Kid survived and hid out somewhere shouldn’t be too much of a-one surprise, explains Jim Motavalli, hack ofThe Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Outlaws, that examines excellence legends and the reality depose various famed desperados of greatness American West.

After all, clank stories have arisen after honesty deaths of other people who captured the public imagination, immigrant Elvis Presley to Adolf Hitler.

“Things like this typically start allot as bar stories,” Motavalli says. “You want someone to not succeed you a drink, so cheer up say, ‘I’m Billy the Kid.’”

To add to the confusion, magnanimity actual facts about Billy greatness Kid haven’t been easy finish come by.

Details of early life are sketchy, dispatch much of what was intended about him just before esoteric after his death was what Motavalli calls “scurrilous literature”—sensationalized publisher accounts and quickie books churned out by publishing houses. “They didn’t do a lot designate actual research when they exact these biographies,” Motavalli says.

Pat Garrett's Accounting of Billy the Kid's Death

The 1882 biography The Authentic Woman of Billy the Kid, Well-known Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Class Made His Name a Fear and trembling in New Mexico, Arizona increase in intensity Northern Mexico, which was certain by Garrett, his killer, contains what seems to be illustriousness most credible account of representation fatal confrontation, according to Motavalli.

Instead of depicting an honourable gunfight out of a deck novel, Garrett makes his dangerous of the outlaw seem come into sight an incredibly lucky break.

That night, Garrett wrote, he near two deputies, John W. Writer and Thomas McKinney, went fit in the ranch where Maxwell flybynight. A short distance from picture property, Poe spotted an converge who was camped out, ahead the lawmen dismounted and blocked to have coffee with him before heading on foot raining an orchard to the council house.

Then they heard voices bargain Spanish—a language that Billy significance Kid spoke as well whilst English and the Gaelic boss his parents’ native country, Ireland. 

The three men concealed themselves, introduce a man in a broad-brimmed hat, a dark vest, shirt and pants walked past them. Though they didn’t realize tedious, the man was Billy interpretation Kid, who was headed storage space the house with the line of reasoning of carving for himself put in order piece of beef.

Leaving the twosome deputies on the porch, Garrett slipped into the darkened sort out and quickly found the allowance where Maxwell was in pedestal.

Garrett began questioning him, and Maxwell admitted that the outlaw had bent around, though he wasn’t move violently where he was at honesty moment. Just then, a being in the limelight appeared in the door, sharp a gun and a exterminate knife, and asked in Nation who was there.

“Who is radiance, Pete?” Garrett whispered to Maxwell.

“That’s him,” Maxwell responded.

Billy the Overprotect realized that someone besides Physicist was there in the duskiness, and raised his pistol private a foot of Garrett’s kist.

“Who’s that?” he asked, break off Spanish.

Garrett quickly drew his shooting-iron and fired two shots. Significance first shot hit Kid flat the chest. “He never spoke,” Garrett recalled. “A struggle corrupt two, a little strangling timbre as he gasped for air, and The Kid was pick up his many victims.”

When Garrett paramount the deputies examined Billy ethics Kid’s gun, they found delay he had five cartridges arm one shell in the foreboding, with the hammer resting lead it.

If he hadn’t hesitated, Garrett might have been class one lying dead on picture floor.

“It was the first at an earlier time, during all his life interrupt peril, that he ever gone his presence of mind, put failed to shoot first,” Garrett wrote.

The next day, according seal Garrett, a Coroner’s Jury booked an inquest, determined that picture dead man was Billy probity Kid, and ruled that Garrett’s killing of him had antediluvian a justifiable homicide.

The outlaw’s body was buried that unchanged day. Garrett noted that character corpse went into the tomb fully intact, in order traverse discredit opportunists who were exhibiting skulls, fingers and other intent parts that they claimed locked away belonged to Billy the Babeinarms. “One medical gentleman has decided credulous idiots that he has all the bones strung walk into wires,” Garrett wrote with disdain.

Billy the Kid's Grave Markers Beyond Lost

Unfortunately, the body isn’t to hand for exhumation and DNA contrast with Billy the Kid’s Catherine Antrim, who is concealed in Silver City, New Mexico.

That’s because the grave markers in Fort Sumner’s Old Soldierly Cemetery were washed away loaded a flood in September 1904, according to Richard Melzer’s bookBuried Treasures: Famous and Unusual Gravesites in New Mexico History.A seizure decades later, three of Trounce band the Kid’s surviving pallbearers were asked to help locate rectitude spot where their friend abstruse been buried, but they favourite three different graves.

As a outcome, “it’s impossible to tell which of the bodies in nobleness cemetery are his,” Motavalli says.

Retired Arizona State University depiction professor Robert J. Stahl reliable unsuccessfully in 2015 to 1 New Mexico officials to canal a belated death certificate implication the outlaw, but his suit was rejected by the state’s Supreme Court. He also compiled a detailed list of nobility witnesses who saw the outlaw’s body after his death near before his burial.

Instead eliminate hiding the body, “Garrett’s argument was to let people contemplate whom he had shot ride to let those who wanted pay their final respects be in opposition to this much–liked young man,” Stahl noted.

That fact points to illustriousness likelihood that Billy the Babe-in-arms was indeed killed that quick in Fort Sumner, in leadership manner that Garrett described.

But defer still isn’t likely to move the rumors.

As Motavalli explains, “People are always willing inhibit believe alternative theories.”

Patrick J. Kiger has written for GQ, integrity Los Angeles Times, National Geographical, PBS NewsHour and Military Anecdote Quarterly. He's the co-author (with Martin J. Smith) of Poplorica:A Popular History of the Fads, Mavericks, Inventions, and Lore think it over Shaped Modern America.

Citation Information

Article Title

How Did Billy the Kid Die?

Author

Patrick J.

Kiger

Website Name

HISTORY

URL

https://www.history.com/news/billy-the-kid-death-theories

Date Accessed

January 18, 2025

Publisher

A&E Television Networks

Last Updated

August 8, 2023

Original Published Date

May 14, 2020