In 1950, an elderly man walked into the governor’s office in Santa Fe and made a claim so audacious it should have been laughable. He insisted he was William H. Bonney, the outlaw known to the world as Billy the Kid, and he wanted the pardon that New Mexico’s governor had supposedly promised him seventy years earlier. The Kid, after all, had been shot dead by Sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881, at the age of twenty-one.
The man before Governor Thomas J. Mabry, however, said that was a lie. Calling himself Brushy Bill Roberts, he claimed the famous outlaw had never died at all. Mabry listened, investigated, and dismissed the claim as a hoax.
Yet the story refused to die. It gathered supporters, spawned books and television specials, and eventually led to court battles over the right to dig up a grave and put the legend of Billy the Kid to the test of modern science. The man known as Brushy Bill Roberts carried many names over his long life: William Henry Roberts, Ollie Partridge, William Roberts, Oliver N. Roberts, and Ollie L.
Roberts. He claimed his birthday was December 31, 1859, which would have made him ninety years old when his story first attracted serious attention in the late 1940s. He gained a following and cemented his place in Wild West lore, drawing support from the Billy the Kid Museum in his hometown of Hico, Texas. The tale reached a wide audience through popular media, including a segment on Unsolved Mysteries in 1989 and an episode of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded in 2011.
The saga began in 1948, when a probate investigator from St. Louis named William V. Morrison came across an elderly man named Joe Hines. Hines told Morrison about his experiences during the Lincoln County War, the vicious New Mexico range conflict that had made Billy the Kid a legend.
Then Hines dropped a bombshell: Billy the Kid was still alive. Hines refused to reveal the outlaw’s real name or whereabouts, but the hint was enough to send Morrison on a quest. Later that same year, Morrison met another old man, this time in Dalton, Oklahoma. The man called himself J.
Frank Dalton and made an even more outrageous claim: he said he was Jesse James. Dalton then insisted that Billy the Kid was living in Hamilton, Texas, under the name C. V. Roberts.
Morrison began a correspondence with Roberts, and the old man made a startling confession: he was indeed Billy the Kid. Roberts offered intricate details about his alleged outlaw life, telling anecdotes that seemed to fill gaps in the historical record. He also asked Morrison to help him secure a full pardon, which he claimed had been promised to him in 1879 by then-Governor Lew Wallace, only for the promise to be withdrawn. To back up his story, Roberts demonstrated an uncanny ability to slip out of handcuffs.
His account of how he survived depended on the theory that Pat Garrett had killed the wrong man. Roberts maintained that Garrett shot another individual named Billy Barlow and passed the body off as the Kid’s, allowing the real outlaw to escape to Mexico. The three men present at Garrett’s shooting were Garrett himself and deputies John W. Poe and Thomas McKinney.
The room was dark, and Poe admitted he had never laid eyes on the Kid before. He immediately told Garrett he had shot the wrong man, because visual identification in the dark was impossible. Garrett, however, claimed he recognized the Kid by his voice, even though those present could only hear whispers. In the end, both Poe and McKinney accepted Garrett’s account.
Years later, though, McKinney retracted his statement and echoed Poe’s original claim that Garrett had killed someone else. Local residents of Sumner voiced their disapproval over the Kid’s presumed death. Garrett organized an investigation, stacking it with politically affiliated allies who cemented the story of the murder and the accompanying reward. The next day the body was hastily buried in an unmarked grave that later disappeared in floods.
To this day, the grave is marked as likely containing no remains, and requests for exhumation have been officially denied. Morrison, convinced by Roberts’s story, pressed the case. Roberts said he was willing to reveal the whole truth on one condition: the complete pardon that Governor Wallace had allegedly promised Billy the Kid after the Lincoln County War. This sudden appearance of a pardon-seeking old man had a profound effect on Pat Garrett’s descendants, who had a great deal invested in the official version of history.
Even after Governor Mabry dismissed the claim, the story did not fade away. Researchers dug deeper into Roberts’s background and found troubling evidence. Marshall Trimble, Arizona’s official historian, cited Frederick Nolan, an authority on the life of Billy the Kid. Nolan pointed to a letter written in 1987 by Geneva Pitman to Joe Bolan, founder of a history group called the Billy the Kid Gang.
In that letter, Pitman said her uncle, known at the time as Brushy Bill, was named Oliver P. Roberts and was born on August 26, 1879, as recorded in the family Bible. That birth date would have made him barely a year old when Billy the Kid was terrorizing New Mexico, not the outlaw himself. The controversy might have faded into obscurity had it not been revitalized by popular culture.
The 1990 film Young Guns II portrayed Brushy Bill as the narrator of the events of Billy the Kid’s life and the Lincoln County War, introducing the story to a new generation. Books were written about the mystery, and researchers tried repeatedly to gain permission to excavate graves and conduct DNA tests, only to be blocked time and again. In 1990, a significant investigation took place at the Advanced Imaging Research and Graphics Laboratory at the University of Texas. Image experts Scott Acton and Alan Bovik used computer comparison tools to examine a photograph of Brushy Bill Roberts at age fourteen and compare it with the widely recognized likeness of Billy the Kid.
The images bore a striking resemblance. When they compared a photo of Roberts at age seventy-one, they determined there was an impressive 93 percent similarity between the two men. Both experts agreed that the results undeniably showed a striking physical match between Roberts and the iconic outlaw. Brushy Bill Roberts died of a massive heart attack on December 27, 1950, in Hico, Texas.
He was buried twenty miles south, in Hamilton County. Morrison examined the body and reported finding twenty-six bullet and knife scars, details that struck him as consistent with the violent life Roberts claimed to have lived. The claim remains unsettled to this day. In 2003, a serious effort to resolve the mystery once and for all was launched by Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan, Captain Mayor Steve Cederwall, and De Baca County Sheriff Gary Graves.
Their goal was to exhume the remains of Billy the Kid and his mother, Catherine Antrim, from Fort Sumner, and use DNA analysis to determine whether the body buried under the Kid’s headstone actually belonged to the outlaw. The effort ran into immediate difficulties. The exact location of the remains was uncertain, and legal obstacles mounted. The court eventually intervened, preventing the exhumation of both sets of remains in September 2004.
The mystery of Brushy Bill Roberts was never definitively resolved. No DNA test was ever performed, no grave was ever opened, and no official conclusion was ever reached. The story of the old Texan who claimed to be the dead outlaw remains exactly what it was when he first walked into the governor’s office: a legend that blurred the line between fact and fiction, and a puzzle that no amount of modern science has been able to solve.