The outlaw’s body was buried that same day. The next day, according to Garrett, a Coroner’s Jury held an inquest, determined that the dead man was Billy the Kid, and ruled that Garrett’s killing of him had been a justifiable homicide. “It was the first time, during all his life of peril, that he ever lost his presence of mind, or failed to shoot first,” Garrett wrote. If he hadn’t hesitated, Garrett might have been the one lying dead on the floor. When Garrett and the deputies examined Billy the Kid’s gun, they found that he had five cartridges and one shell in the chamber, with the hammer resting on it. “A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and The Kid was with his many victims.” Garrett quickly drew his revolver and fired two shots. “Who is it, Pete?” Garrett whispered to Maxwell.īilly the Kid realized that someone besides Maxwell was there in the darkness, and raised his pistol within a foot of Garrett’s chest. Garrett, the famous sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico who shot Billy the Kid. Just then, a figure appeared in the door, carrying a gun and a butcher knife, and asked in Spanish who was there. Garrett began questioning him, and Maxwell admitted that the outlaw had been around, though he wasn’t sure where he was at the moment. Leaving the two deputies on the porch, Garrett slipped into the darkened house and quickly found the room where Maxwell was in bed. Though they didn’t realize it, the man was Billy the Kid, who was headed for the house with the intention of carving for himself a piece of beef. The three men concealed themselves, as a man in a broad-brimmed hat, a dark vest, shirt and pants walked past them. Then they heard voices in Spanish-a language that Billy the Kid spoke as well as English and the Gaelic of his parents’ native country, Ireland. A short distance from the property, Poe spotted an acquaintance who was camped out, and the lawmen dismounted and stopped to have coffee with him before heading on foot through an orchard to the house. Poe and Thomas McKinney, went to the ranch where Maxwell lived. That night, Garrett wrote, he and two deputies, John W. Instead of depicting an epic gunfight out of a dime novel, Garrett makes his shooting of the outlaw seem like an incredibly lucky break. The 1882 biography The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico, which was written by Garrett, his killer, contains what seems to be the most credible account of the fatal confrontation, according to Motavalli. Pat Garrett's Account of Billy the Kid's Death “They didn’t do a lot of actual research when they did these biographies,” Motavalli says. Details of his early life are sketchy, and much of what was written about him just before and after his death was what Motavalli calls “scurrilous literature”-sensationalized newspaper accounts and quickie books churned out by publishing houses. To add to the confusion, the actual facts about Billy the Kid haven’t been easy to come by. “You want someone to buy you a drink, so you say, ‘I’m Billy the Kid.’” “Things like this typically start out as bar stories,” Motavalli says. After all, similar stories have arisen after the deaths of other people who captured the public imagination, from Elvis Presley to Adolf Hitler. The persistent belief that Billy the Kid survived and hid out somewhere shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, explains Jim Motavalli, author of The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Outlaws, that examines the legends and the reality of various famed desperados of the American West. The other, a resident of Hico, Texas named Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts, actually managed to get a meeting with the governor of New Mexico in 1950, in which he unsuccessfully sought a pardon for Billy’s murders. (His few possessions reportedly included a pistol with 21 notches on the grip, the same as the number of killings that some accounts attribute to Billy. Walker details in his book Legends and Lies: Great Mysteries of the American West, one prospective Billy was John Miller, a farmer and horse trainer who lived in a small village in New Mexico near the Arizona border and died in 1937. WATCH: ' Shootouts in the Wild West' on HISTORY Vault Men Who Claimed to Be Billy the Kid After His DeathĪs Dale L. To complicate matters further, at least two men emerged decades later who were believed by some to be Billy. Some have claimed that Garrett shot the wrong man and Billy escaped. But over the years, some of the murky details surrounding the death of Billy-whose real name probably was Henry McCarty, though he later went by the alias William Bonney-have proven to be fertile ground for alternative theories. Billy the Kid, pictured on a wanted poster.Īt least, that’s the most widely-accepted version of events.
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