Every famous outlaw seems to attract an old man who says he is him. Jesse James had J. Frank Dalton; Billy the Kid had at least two, an Arizona man named John Miller and, far better known, a Texan named Ollie Roberts, nicknamed Brushy Bill. Roberts’s claim reached the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe, and his hometown has defended it ever since.
What happened
The accepted history is short. Henry McCarty, known as William H. Bonney and Billy the Kid, escaped from the Lincoln County jail in April 1881, killing two guards. Around midnight on July 14, 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett was talking with the rancher Pete Maxwell in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner when a man came in asking who was there in Spanish. Garrett fired twice. The dead man was laid out, recognized by townspeople who had known the Kid well, examined at a coroner’s inquest and buried the next day in the old military cemetery.
Nearly seventy years later a St. Louis probate investigator, William V. Morrison, followed a tip from an elderly veteran of the Lincoln County War who insisted the Kid was alive in Hamilton County, Texas. The trail led to Roberts, who after some correspondence told Morrison that Garrett had killed another man, that he himself had slipped away to Mexico, and that he wanted the full pardon Governor Lew Wallace had dangled before the Kid in 1879. Morrison collected affidavits from a handful of old-timers who said they believed him and filed a pardon application.
The hearing
Governor Thomas J. Mabry received Roberts, Morrison, historians, reporters and two of Pat Garrett’s sons at the executive mansion on November 29, 1950. Accounts agree it was a disaster for the old man. Visibly frail and frightened, he could not answer simple questions about people and places the Kid would have known, and by some reports could not remember Garrett’s name. Mabry told reporters he would take no action on the application, then or ever, because he did not believe the man was Billy the Kid. Roberts went home to Hico and died there on December 27, 1950.
The investigation
The case against him is mostly arithmetic. Roberts claimed a birth date of December 31, 1859, which would have made him about the Kid’s age. His niece, writing in 1987, said the family Bible recorded her uncle Oliver P. Roberts as born on August 26, 1879, which would have made him not yet two when Garrett fired. The Kid read and wrote English and spoke fluent Spanish; Roberts spoke little Spanish. A photo study commissioned by the Lincoln County Heritage Trust from the forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow compared the one authenticated tintype of the Kid with pictures of Roberts and about 150 other men; Roberts came in 42nd. Supporters cite a different, more favorable comparison made in 1990 at the University of Texas, but it has not settled anything for historians.
DNA briefly promised a cleaner answer. In 2003 the sheriffs of Lincoln and De Baca counties, with the mayor of Capitan and the support of Governor Bill Richardson, proposed exhuming the Fort Sumner grave and the Silver City grave of the Kid’s mother, Catherine Antrim, and comparing both with Roberts’s remains. Fort Sumner’s mayor vowed to chain himself to the grave, the state medical examiner’s office warned that neither grave could be reliably located after floods and moved headstones, and the courts blocked the exhumations in 2004. No DNA was ever tested.
Where it stands
Roberts is buried in Hamilton, Texas, under a stone that calls him William Henry Roberts, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, and Hico runs a Billy the Kid Museum in his honor. Reference works such as the Albuquerque library’s NMPedia note that an 1879 birth rules him out and that few historians accept him. The weight of the record, from the 1881 inquest to his own family’s Bible, says Billy the Kid died at Fort Sumner and Brushy Bill was someone else who wanted to be him.