Historian seeks death certificate to put Billy the Kid tales to rest

An Arizona historian wants to put an end to claims of true believers who doubt whether Billy the Kid was really killed by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881 after he escaped from jail. The historian hopes to do so by persuading the state of New Mexico to issue a death certificate for the legendary outlaw. Most historians believe that Garrett shot the Kid, also known as Henry Antrim and William Bonney, in Peter Maxwell’s bedroom in Fort Summer, N.M., late on July 14, and that he died soon thereafter of a massive hemorrhage. Garrett later collected a $500 reward, indicating that territorial officials accepted the lawman’s account. But others say the Kid did not die that night. One story has him adopting a Navajo boy with his New Mexico wife and taking up ranching and later farming. And Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts of Hico, Texas, claimed he was the real Billy the Kid. In 1950, he sought a pardon from Thomas Mabry, then New Mexico’s governor, who denied it. Roberts died the same year. Such tales would go away if the state issued an official death certificate, according to Robert J. Stahl, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University and longtime member of the nonprofit Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang. In July 2013, his article on the fate of Billy the Kid’s trigger finger, floating in alcohol in a mason jar, was featured in True West Magazine. Stahl has written a 29-page petition containing a detailed account of the documentary record and extracts from the testimony of eyewitnesses that he believes show beyond any doubt that the Kid died by a bullet from Garrett’s pistol. On Wednesday, Stahl went to the New Mexico Division of Vital Records and Health Statistics in Santa Fe, which registers births and death in the state. There, he was told that he would have to get a court order for a death certificate to be issued. Stahl drove immediately to the state District Court in Fort Sumner, getting there near closing time. The clerk accepted his document and forwarded it to District Judge Albert Mitchell. Mitchell, in court in Las Vegas, N.M., on Thursday, has not yet had time to act on the matter, according to clerk Kerri Webb. Stahl’s petition says that within hours of the Kid’s death, a coroner’s jury was appointed and determined that the dead man was indeed William H. Bonney and that he died by a bullet from Garrett’s pistol. The report was handwritten in Spanish and signed by the men, all of whom knew the Kid. In order to claim the reward, Garrett had the document translated into English and signed by the same jurors. The petition includes Peter Maxwell’s account of lying in his bed at about midnight and seeing Garrett fire two shots at the Kid. It also includes a story published in the Las Vegas Optic on July 18, 1881, that quoted a recently discharged Pvt. George Miller, who heard the shots, saw the Kid’s body and helped dig his grave, as well as an account in another paper by the jury foreman, who said he knew it was “the Kid’s body that we examined.”...more