307: Billy The Kid: The Man Who Died Twice

Did Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid?
It was a moonlit night in Ft. Sumner, NM when history tells us that Sheriff Pat Garrett shot down the notorious outlaw Billy “the Kid”. Newspapers across the country quickly reported that the Kid was dead and Garrett quickly put the body in the ground. But rumors spread that the Kid had survived and the testimony of Garrett’s posse was contradictory about how, exactly, the shooting had gone down. Nevertheless, without evidence, the story of the heroic Sheriff stood for almost 70 years. Then, in 1950, an old man from Hico, TX petitioned the governor of New Mexico for a pardon for crimes he committed as Billy the Kid. No one took him seriously, and yet the old man was an exact match in physical characteristics and knew intimate details about the Kid’s life. He also knew details about the fateful shooting the night Garrett claimed to have shot him that had been erased by history. Details, for example, that Garrett had killed his very drunk bearded half-Mexican partner, a claim that has only recently been verified by modern research.