On the night of July 14, 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett shot and killed William Bonney, the man known across the American Southwest as Billy the Kid. Within days, the territory of New Mexico had begun the formal process of paying Garrett the reward offered for the outlaw’s capture. Yet even as the reward was approved and the body was laid in the ground at Fort Sumner, a different story was already taking shape—one that would grow into one of the most enduring hoaxes in Western history. The claim that Pat Garrett never collected the bounty for killing Billy the Kid is provably false, and the historical record leaves no room for doubt.
Garrett had already received a $500 reward in January 1881 after arresting the Kid near Stinking Springs in December 1880. That arrest had been made possible by a reward notice issued by Governor Lew Wallace, who offered $500 to anyone who would capture Bonney and deliver him to any sheriff in New Mexico. Garrett succeeded, and grateful citizens supplemented the official bounty with additional money, leaving him with roughly $1,000 in total. After the Kid escaped from jail in Lincoln, Garrett pursued him again.
The second reward came only after a delay, but the reasons were bureaucratic, not evidentiary. The notice Governor Wallace had published stipulated that payment would be made for capture, and Garrett had killed the Kid rather than taking him alive. Governor Lionel Sheldon later observed that when Garrett encountered the Kid in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom, capture was out of the question. The second issue was whether the reward remained a binding territorial obligation after Wallace resigned as governor in May 1881, before the Kid’s death.
Acting Governor William Ritch consulted the district attorney, who ruled that the reward was Wallace’s personal offer and that the territory could only pay it with legislative approval. When the legislature met in February 1882, members voted unanimously to pay Garrett the $500 reward and explicitly stated that the delay had been caused by a technicality. The more serious misconceptions concern the killing itself. One recurring claim is that Deputy John W.
Poe told Garrett he had shot the wrong man. Poe did make that statement, but the full account tells a different story. In his book The Death of Billy the Kid, Poe described the shock of the moment: Garrett emerged from the room and said he believed he had killed the Kid, and Poe, stunned, replied that the Kid would not have come to that place and that Garrett had shot the wrong man. Two paragraphs later, however, Poe described how he and the others examined the body by candlelight and found a dead man lying on his back with a six-shooter at his right hand and a butcher knife at his left.
He wrote plainly that the body was that of Billy the Kid. The body was not buried in secrecy. Billy the Kid was killed late on the night of July 14 or shortly after midnight on July 15, and he was not buried until the following day. Justice of the peace Alejandro Segura formed a six-man coroner’s jury, which viewed the body and issued a finding that William Bonney had been killed by a bullet fired from a pistol in the hand of Pat Garrett.
Many residents of Fort Sumner saw the corpse. Pete Maxwell’s household heard the shot and came to investigate, and other witnesses helped prepare the body for burial. Jesus Silva, who served as chief pallbearer, later recalled that the Kid was buried beside his former companions Charlie Bowdre and Tom O’Folliard. Historians have identified more than two dozen witnesses by name who agreed that Garrett had killed the Kid.
Not one person who was present at Fort Sumner in 1881 ever claimed that the whole affair was a hoax. The absence of a photograph has also been cited as suspicious, but the expectation that a dead outlaw would automatically be photographed is largely a modern assumption. There was no photographer living at Fort Sumner at the time. The only known photograph of Billy the Kid, the famous tintype showing him holding a rifle, had been taken by a traveling photographer in 1880.
There was no practical way for Garrett to obtain a photographer quickly, and no photograph was needed to establish proof of death. The coroner’s jury report and the testimony of numerous eyewitnesses were accepted by the authorities, who paid Garrett the reward. The suggestion that Garrett killed the wrong man rests almost entirely on the later claims of an old man named Brushy Bill Roberts, who insisted that a Mexican named Billy Barlo was the man actually shot that night. No resident of Fort Sumner ever mentioned anyone by that name, and there is no evidence that such a person ever existed.
The story of Brushy Bill Roberts has been kept alive by a network of questionable claims. Roberts did not become famous until 1950, when a lawyer named William Morrison introduced him as the real Billy the Kid. By that time, Billy the Kid had been dead for nearly seven decades, and Roberts, who was born in 1879, had been telling tall tales for years. In 1936, he was interviewed in a Texas newspaper and described a dramatic encounter with machine-gun-toting outlaws who had supposedly trapped him near Gladewater.
The story was impossible, and it was only one of many. Roberts claimed to have been a Pinkerton detective, a deputy U. S. marshal, a Rough Rider under Theodore Roosevelt, a fighter alongside Pancho Villa, and a participant in a dizzying array of other adventures.
None of these claims were ever documented. The so-called evidence supporting Roberts was equally weak. Morrison claimed that Roberts had twenty-six scars on his body matching the wounds Billy the Kid supposedly received, but there was no independent verification of any of these scars, and no autopsy report ever backed the claim. Roberts was said to possess inside knowledge of the Kid’s life, but much of what he told Morrison came directly from Walter Noble Burns’s 1926 book The Saga of Billy the Kid.
Even the claim that a facial recognition study conducted at the University of Texas proved a 93 percent match between the two men fell apart when the professors who conducted the study were contacted directly. Professor Alan Bovik said the tools used in 1990 were crude and that no positive conclusion was reached. He added that the results had been misstated by someone who wanted to believe Roberts was the Kid. His colleague, Scott Acton, said he believed the two men were not the same person.
The affidavits that Morrison obtained in 1950 also failed to hold up under scrutiny. None of the people who signed them were peers of the historical Billy the Kid. Three of the five had never even met him. In the end, the case for Brushy Bill Roberts rested on the word of an admitted fraud and a handful of old men who had known the Kid only as children and whose stories were riddled with inaccuracies.
The historical record points in one direction only. Pat Garrett had proven he could catch Billy the Kid long before the night at Fort Sumner. He had arrested the Kid at Stinking Springs in December 1880, and he had hunted him successfully on more than one occasion. The Kid, for his part, had proven himself catchable.
After escaping from jail in Lincoln, he made the fatal decision to return to Fort Sumner, the place where everyone knew he could be found. He walked into the darkness of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom on the night of July 14, 1881, and Garrett shot him dead. For the killing to have been a hoax, every resident of Fort Sumner—hundreds of people—would have had to maintain the deception for the rest of their lives. Several of the eyewitnesses lived for decades after Garrett’s own death, and none of them ever changed their story.
The many eyewitness accounts, the coroner’s jury report, the letters and official records, and the unanimous testimony of everyone present all point to the same conclusion: Pat Garrett killed Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, and the legend of Brushy Bill Roberts was nothing more than a fabrication.