Burton Alvord built his reputation the hard way. He served as a deputy for John Slaughter, the Cochise County sheriff whose name alone could quiet an Arizona saloon, and Slaughter called him fearless. By January 1899, Alvord had taken the constable’s badge in Wilcox, a railroad town beneath the Dos Cabezas Mountains, and began deputizing men he trusted. Among them was Billy Styles, a capable young man who asked no difficult questions.
By the summer of that year, the plan was complete. Alvord and his deputy constable Bill Downing would establish an alibi in a Wilcox saloon on the night of September 9th, 1899, playing cards loudly enough to be heard through the wall. Styles and a man named Matt Burts would board a Southern Pacific train at Cochise Station, eleven miles southwest of town. They would detach the express car, run it west away from witnesses, and blow the safe open with dynamite Alvord had stolen from a local powder house days earlier.
It worked precisely as planned. The blast tore the safe apart, and the men rode into the Chiricahua Mountains with at least $10,000 in gold coin and currency. Back in Wilcox, Alvord and Downing sat at their card table, visible and accounted for. The next morning, Constable Alvord personally organized the posse and led it south with visible fury, directing the search everywhere except toward the Chiricahuas, where the actual fugitives were hiding.
Sheriff Scott White and veteran detective George Scarborough rode with him. Neither found a track worth following because the man leading the column was the same man who had planned the robbery. The search dragged on for weeks and produced nothing. Five months passed.
On the night of February 14th, 1900, the gang camped in the Dragoon Mountains and laid plans for the following evening. Their target was the Wells Fargo express car on the Nogales to Benson run, which stopped at the depot in Fairbank, the closest rail connection to Tombstone. Alvord and Styles had planned the robbery for a night when Jeff Milton was not supposed to be on the train. Milton, a former Texas Ranger and Wells Fargo messenger, had been scheduled to take the night off.
A coworker called in sick that morning, and Milton took the run. Nobody told Billy Styles. On the evening of February 15th, five men loitered on the Fairbank platform looking like drunken cowboys. As the train slowed into the station, Milton stood in the open door of the express car.
The gang opened fire before he could step back, catching him in the left arm and side. He went down behind a trunk, wounded and bleeding, as the robbers moved toward the open door, certain the problem was resolved. Milton raised a Wells Fargo shotgun from the floor. Three-fingered Jack Dunlap, leading the rush, took eleven pellets of buckshot in the midsection at near contact range and dropped in the doorway.
Bravo Juan Yoas, a step behind, caught the rest of the load in his back. The remaining three men fled into the desert. The express car held. Not one dollar left it.
The robbers left Dunlap among the dead until a posse found him hours later, wounded in the sand several miles from Fairbank. Alive and conscious, he offered specific information about who had organized the robbery he was dying from. He named Burt Alvord and outlined the entire structure of the operation. Dunlap died in Tombstone on February 22nd, 1900, with the account in the hands of Sheriff White before his last breath.
The man who had led the posse for five months was now the subject of it. Wells Fargo detectives moved quickly, and Alvord was arrested and taken to the Cochise County jail in Tombstone. Billy Styles, calculating as ever, surrendered and turned state’s evidence. He convinced investigators to grant him trusty status, allowing him freedom to move about town while ostensibly cooperating with the prosecution.
It was a performance. On April 7th, 1900, Styles walked back into the Tombstone jail with a concealed pistol. Deputy Sheriff George Bravin, the man who had once employed Alvord as a deputy in Pearce years earlier, was alone on the cell block. Styles put the gun on him and demanded the keys.
Bravin refused. Styles shot him through the leg, the bullet passing through his calf and taking two toes off the other foot as it exited. He took the keys from the floor, opened every cell, and invited twenty-five prisoners to walk out into the April night. Most stayed.
Downing stayed. Bravo Juan and Alvord did not. One week later, a Mexican man walked into the jail at Benson and handed the jailer an envelope. Inside were the keys to the Tombstone jail, with a note signed by Alvord, Styles, and Bravo Juan.
It read in part, “Tell the boys that we are well and eating regular. ”
They ran for three years south into Sonora, through the mountain country of northern Mexico where the Arizona Rangers could not follow with legal authority. In 1902, Rangers captain Burton Mossman reached Alvord through intermediaries with a proposition: bring in the notorious Mexican murderer Augustine Chacon, and Mossman would put in a word for clemency when the time came to surrender. Alvord and Styles crossed back into Arizona territory in early 1904 to deliver on the arrangement.
The Rangers met them near the border in February of that year. There was a final confrontation. Alvord was shot twice and went down. Styles took a bullet and ran into Mexico, disappearing into a silence the historical record has never fully broken.
Alvord served two years in the territorial prison at Yuma. He was released in 1906 and crossed back into Mexico, where he reportedly worked as a miner in Panama in his final years. The exact date and circumstances of his death are not established by any recovered record. Billy Styles surfaced years later in Nevada, working as a deputy sheriff under the name William Larkin.
He was killed in 1908 in a confrontation whose specific details remain disputed. His grave was moved when the cemetery that held him closed, and the records were lost. His name appears on a peace officer memorial in Reno, listed as William L.
Styles, a fitting conclusion for a man who spent his life moving between the badge and the gun as if the two were never meant to point in different directions.