Billy the Kid

The case

On the evening of 28 April 1881 the only prisoner awaiting the gallows in Lincoln, New Mexico, was being held on the upper floor of the county courthouse. He was twenty-one, shackled and handcuffed, and due to hang in two weeks. Within minutes both of his guards were dead and he was sitting a horse in the street. Accounts say he took an hour to cut through his leg irons, and nobody tried to stop him.

He was born Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859; the exact day is disputed. His widowed mother took him west and married William Antrim in Santa Fe in 1873, and when she died of tuberculosis in Silver City the following year, the boy was fourteen and on his own. His first arrest was for stealing clothes from a Chinese laundry. He slipped out of jail, drifted into Arizona as a ranch hand and horse thief, and in August 1877 shot the blacksmith Francis Cahill in a saloon brawl at Bonita. By the end of that year he was calling himself William H. Bonney.

Back in New Mexico he went to work for John Tunstall, a young Englishman whose ranch and store, run with the lawyer Alexander McSween, challenged the merchants Lawrence Murphy and James Dolan, who had long controlled Lincoln County's trade and its official contracts. On 18 February 1878 members of a sheriff's posse sent to seize Tunstall's livestock shot him dead on the road. His cowhands, Bonney among them, formed the Regulators and set out to avenge him with warrants of uncertain legality. On 1 April they ambushed Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman in Lincoln's main street, killing both. The feud ended in July with a five-day siege at McSween's house, which burned; McSween was killed and Bonney escaped through the gunfire.

In 1879 Governor Lew Wallace, whose amnesty for the war did not cover men already indicted, met Bonney secretly in Lincoln. The young man agreed to testify about a separate murder in return for clemency, allowed himself to be arrested, and gave his evidence. The local prosecutor would not let him go, and in June he walked out of custody. Through 1880 he lived around Fort Sumner as a rustler. Pat Garrett, a former buffalo hunter elected sheriff that November on a promise to end the trouble, pursued him through the winter, and on 23 December 1880 captured him and three companions at a stone hut at Stinking Springs after Charlie Bowdre was shot.

In April 1881 Bonney was tried at Mesilla for the murder of Sheriff Brady. He was found guilty, the only conviction that came out of the Lincoln County War, and Judge Warren Bristol sentenced him to hang on 13 May. He was returned to Lincoln under guard of deputies James Bell and Bob Olinger. With Garrett out of town and Olinger across the street with other prisoners, Bonney asked to use the outhouse, slipped a cuff on the stairs on the way back, and shot Bell with the deputy's own revolver. He then took Olinger's shotgun from the armoury and shot Olinger from the upstairs window as he ran back toward the jail.

He did not leave the territory. He went back to Fort Sumner, where he had friends. Garrett heard as much, rode there with two deputies, and around midnight on 14 July 1881 was in Pete Maxwell's dark bedroom questioning him when Bonney came in. According to the standard account, the Kid asked in Spanish who was there, and Garrett, recognising the voice, fired twice. The first shot struck him in the chest and killed him. A coroner's jury identified the body the next day, and he was buried in the old military cemetery at Fort Sumner beside Bowdre and Tom O'Folliard.

Garrett had trouble collecting the $500 reward and faced talk that he had shot an unarmed man without warning. He answered with a ghostwritten book, The Authentic Life of Billy, the Kid, in 1882. It sold few copies but supplied much of the legend that followed.