In 1950, an elderly Texas man named Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts made a claim that should have been laughable. He said he was Billy the Kid, the notorious outlaw who was supposedly shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881. Roberts claimed he had survived that night and lived in silence for nearly seven decades. He wanted a pardon.
The story began years earlier, in the 1940s, in the small town of Hico, Texas. Residents later recalled an incident involving an old man on a quiet street. A mother screamed her son’s name, “Billy!” and the old man spun around, his hand dropping to his hip as if reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. The reflex was startling, but the moment passed, and no one thought much of it at the time.
That old man was Roberts. The incident became part of the legend, cited by supporters as evidence of a gunslinger’s instinct that never faded.
William Morrison, a Texas lawyer and probate investigator, first encountered Roberts in 1948. Morrison had been following a lead and found Roberts in Hico. Roberts was reluctant to talk, which supporters say cuts against the idea that he was seeking fame. Morrison came to him, not the other way around.
When Roberts finally spoke, he claimed he was William Henry McCarty Jr., the man history knew as Billy the Kid. He said Garrett had not killed him in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, in 1881. Instead, he claimed Garrett killed a man named Billy Barlow, a stand-in whose death closed the book on the Kid’s legend. Roberts said he fled to Mexico and spent decades under assumed names before settling in Texas.
Morrison was skeptical until Roberts removed his shirt. The lawyer counted 26 bullet and knife scars on the old man’s body. Morrison compared them against the documented wounds Billy the Kid was known to have sustained during the Lincoln County War. He said they matched.
Morrison began building a formal case. He tracked down elderly men who had known the Kid during the Lincoln County War, hoping to bring them face to face with Roberts. He found Jimmy McDaniels, a former member of the Jesse Evans gang. Morrison delivered a simple message from Roberts: “The kid says hello.”
McDaniels’ reaction was immediate. The color drained from his face. His hands shook. He looked like a man who had just been told a ghost was real and knew where he lived. He did not dismiss the claim. He reacted with visible fear.
Another encounter had already occurred in 1945, before Morrison arrived. An old lawman named Henry Anthony spotted Roberts on a Hico street and shouted, “Billy Bonney, throw up your hands.” Anthony later swore Roberts was Billy the Kid, claiming he had known the Kid during the Lincoln County days.
Morrison also took Roberts back to New Mexico. Roberts walked the ground of the Lincoln County War, identifying locations, describing events, and recounting details about buildings, trails, and ambush sites with striking specificity. Morrison was convinced no impostor could fabricate that level of detail.
Morrison found five elderly men willing to sign sworn affidavits confirming Roberts’ identity. Seferino Gallegos, Martile Able, Jose Montoya, Jim McDaniels, and a man named Robert E. Lee all signed statements saying they recognized Roberts as Billy the Kid.
But Morrison also approached other potential witnesses with stronger connections to the Lincoln County era. Bill and Sam Jones, brothers of prominent Lincoln County figures, refused to sign. They said there wasn’t enough proof.
The case had other problems. Robert E. Lee’s sworn affidavit stated he first encountered William Bonney in 1889. That was eight years after Billy the Kid was supposedly killed. If the date was accurate, Lee was either identifying a dead man walking or someone who adopted the Bonney name years after the real Kid’s death.
The birth records were even more damaging. Roberts was born in 1879. Billy the Kid was born around 1859. If Roberts was two years old when the Kid was 21, the math does not work. Roberts could not be Billy the Kid because the two men were born two decades apart.
Roberts had also been telling some version of this story since 1918, according to his own family. That was 30 years before Morrison arrived. Morrison did not discover a secret. He walked into an existing story and gave it a stage.
Roberts also appeared publicly alongside J. Frank Dalton, a man who claimed to be the outlaw Jesse James. Dalton’s claim was thoroughly debunked by historians and eventually by DNA evidence. The association damaged Roberts’ credibility.
In 1950, Roberts formally petitioned Governor Thomas Mabry of New Mexico for a pardon. He asked to be recognized legally as Billy the Kid and pardoned for crimes committed seven decades earlier. The governor’s office reviewed the petition, but the hearing never took place in full. Roberts’ health was failing rapidly.
Brushy Bill Roberts died in Hico, Texas, in 1950. He was 71 years old. He died without his pardon and without official recognition. He never recanted. In his final days, he maintained that he was the man history said had died in Fort Sumner.
Billy the Kid’s burial site at Fort Sumner has been disputed for decades. The original grave was reportedly damaged by flooding. The exact location of the remains is unknown. Roberts’ grave in Hico is marked and undisturbed.
DNA testing could potentially settle the question, but it has never been done. Multiple attempts to exhume and test remains have been blocked by legal challenges and landowner disputes. Without confirmed Billy the Kid DNA to compare against, testing Roberts would prove nothing.
The overwhelming consensus among professional historians is that Brushy Bill Roberts was not Billy the Kid. The flawed affidavits, the impossible birth date gap, the association with a confirmed fraud, and the refusal of the most credible witnesses to sign all point toward that conclusion.
Roberts was either a deliberate con artist or a man in the grip of a deeply held personal delusion he maintained for decades. The case cannot be closed because the tools to close it do not exist.
The story endures because it taps into a cultural instinct. Billy the Kid died at 21, and that early death is inseparable from his power as a mythic figure. A Billy who survived, who lived to old age, who shuffled along Texas sidewalks, is a different kind of figure entirely. Less romantic, but more human.
The frontier was a place where a man could become anyone. In a world without social security numbers, where photographs were rare and record keeping was haphazard, being someone else was not just possible. It was common.
Brushy Bill Roberts may not have been Billy the Kid. But he was something almost as interesting. A man so committed to a story, whether truth or invention, that he carried it across seven decades, asked a governor to ratify it, and left behind a mystery history still cannot solve.