Billy the Kid’s Grave Has Been Stolen So Many Times They Built a Cage Around It 

Every year, thousands of people make the pilgrimage to Fort Sumar, New Mexico to stand before a simple granite marker locked inside a cage of iron bars. They toss coins through the gaps, leave bullets and whiskey bottles, and snap photos beside the famous name carved in stone.
Billy the Kid’s grave has become one of the most visited burial sites of the American West. But here’s the uncomfortable truth that most tourists never hear when they’re standing there in that sunbaked cemetery. We can’t be completely certain this is where Billy the Kid is actually buried. In that headstone they’re photographing, it’s got its own outlaw history that rivals anything Billy himself ever pulled off.
The story of Billy the Kid’s grave is really three stories tangled together. There’s the story of what happened the night he died. There’s the story of what the Peko’s River did to that cemetery. And there’s the story of a chunk of granite that’s been stolen more times than most bank robbers ever dreamed of.
Let’s start where it all began. On a hot July night in 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid around midnight on July 14th, 1881 inside Pete Maxwell’s bedroom at Old Fort Sner. The accounts from that night are pretty consistent. Billy was either 21 years old or possibly 22, depending on whether his actual birth date was September 17th or November 23rd, 1859.
He was barefoot, wearing only trousers and an undershirt. He’d come into Maxwell’s room looking for a late night snack. Had no idea Garrett was sitting there in the dark and got shot once through the chest. He died almost instantly. The next day, July 15th, they buried him in the Fort Sumner Military Cemetery just a couple hundred yards from where he’d been killed.
They laid him to rest between two of his friends who died a few months earlier. Tommo Foliard had been shot in December of 1880, and Charlie Bowra got killed in the same gunfight that led to Billy’s capture at Stinking Springs. According to the people who were there, including three men who actually served as Billy’s pawbearers, they buried all three outlaws in a row side by side in the middle section of the cemetery.
Billy’s grave was marked with something simple. Most accounts say it was a wooden cross or a wooden marker. Nothing fancy, just a piece of wood with his name on it. That first marker didn’t last long. Some stories say drunken soldiers used it for target practice, riddling it with bullet holes.
Other accounts say it was just stolen outright by souvenir hunters. Either way, within a few years of Billy’s death, there was nothing marking his grave except the memories of the people who’d been there when they lowered him into the ground. And that’s where things get complicated. Fort Sumner sits in the Pekos River Valley, and anyone who knows anything about rivers knows they have moods.
The Pekos River flooded in 1889. It flooded again on October 8th, 1904, and this second flood was the big one. 4 ft of water covered the old cemetery. The flood didn’t just wash away markers and headstones. According to some accounts, it redistributed everything, including the remains themselves.
Bodies that had been in the ground for decades allegedly got shifted around, mixed up, scattered. Now, here’s where historians start arguing. Some say the flood story has been exaggerated over the years, that it makes for good drama, but the actual evidence doesn’t support the idea that graves were completely destroyed. Researcher David G.
Thomas, who wrote an entire book on Billy the Kid’s grave, points out that when contractor Charles Dudro dug up 26 soldiers from that same cemetery in 1906, just 2 years after the big flood, he found those remains in excellent condition. They were right where they were supposed to be, identified and reeried in Santa Fe without any major problems.
If the flood had been catastrophic enough to scatter Billy’s bones all over creation, why were the soldiers graves still intact? The answer might be simpler than it sounds. The soldiers were buried along the west wall of the cemetery. Billy and his two friends were buried in the middle. Different parts of a cemetery can experience different levels of flood damage depending on elevation and how the water flows.
It’s entirely possible that the flood did serious damage to some sections while leaving others relatively untouched. We don’t have aerial photographs from 1904. We don’t have detailed engineering surveys of the cemetery before and after. What we have is testimony from people who were there. And those testimonies don’t all agree. What we know for certain is that by the early 1900s, Billy the Kid’s grave was unmarked and had been for decades.
The original wooden marker was long gone. When tourists started showing up in the 1920s, thanks to the popularity of Walter Noble Burns 1926 book, The Saga of Billy the Kid, there was nothing to see. People would arrive at Fort Sumner asking to visit Billy’s grave.
and thelocals would have to admit they weren’t exactly sure where it was anymore. This is where Charles Uncle Charlie four enters the story. Four didn’t know Billy personally, but he’d arrived at Fort Sar just a few months after Billy’s death in 1881 when the grave was still fresh and people could point to it. Thor gave cemetery tours for years, collecting tips from visitors.
In 1930, four men decided to settle the question once and for all. Three of them had actually known Billy the Kid. Duvena Maxwell, a Navajo woman who’d worked for the Maxwell family, had reportedly been placing flowers on Billy’s grave for years. She knew where it was. The men consulted the old-timers, compared notes, and agreed on a spot.
In 1931, four used his save tip money to pay for a simple marble tombstone with one word carved on it, pals. That marker covered all three graves, Billy the Kid, Charlie Bowra, and Tommo Foliard. It was modest, respectful, and it lasted exactly 19 years. On July 6th, 1950, somebody stole it. The theft happened right after a visit from a man named Brushy Bill Roberts, who claimed he was the real Billy the Kid and that Pat Garrett had shot the wrong person back in 1881.
Whether Roberts had anything to do with the theft or if it was just bizarre timing, nobody knows. What matters is the stone vanished. It stayed missing for 26 years. In 1976, a couple from Texas mentioned to some folks in Fort Sumner that when they’d sold their house in 1969, the new owner had found a headstone partially buried on the property in Granbury, Texas.
That headstone turned out to be Billy’s. A man named Joe Bolan recovered it and returned it to Fort Sumner, where it was placed back on the grave with much ceremony. But wait, we’re not done yet. That wasn’t the headstone that’s there now. That was the pal stone. In 1940, before that first stone was stolen, a Colorado stone cutter named James Noah Warner had carved a different marker.
Warner, who lived in Celita, Colorado, apparently decided on his own that Billy the Kid deserved something more dramatic. He carved a granite stone decorated with two crossed pistols and 21 notches, one for each man Billy supposedly killed. He added the epitap’s truth in history and the boy bandit king. He died as he had lived.
On March 23rd, 1940, Easter Sunday, Warner drove 400 miles with this 100 pound granite marker in the backseat of his family car and placed it at the foot of Billy’s grave. So now there were two stones at the site. The original Pal’s marker covering all three graves and Warner’s more elaborate stone specifically for Billy.
When the PAL’s stone was stolen in 1950, Warner stone became the primary marker, and that’s the one that’s caused all the trouble ever since. The Billy the Kid Museum in town built a replica grave display so people could see what it looked like. But that didn’t stop anyone from wanting the real thing. When the original Pal Stone came back in 1976, the town threw a celebration.
There was a Wild West Bank robbery reenactment and square dancing on Main Street. They anchored the return stone to its concrete base with a steel safety cap and thought they’d solved the problem. They hadn’t. On February 8th, 1981, somebody stole it again. This time it was a truck driver who went by the CB radio handle Billy the Kid.
He pried the stone loose with a crowbar and drove it all the way to his home in Huntington Beach, California. The authorities caught him within 4 days. Governor Bruce King arranged for Debbaca County Sheriff Big John McBride to fly to Los Angeles on Texas International Airlines to personally escort the gravestone back to New Mexico.
On May 30th, 1981, Fort Sumner officials reset the marker. But this time, they weren’t taking any chances. They shackled it to the ground with iron chains. Then they built a 9- foot high chainlink fence around the entire grave site. Then they enclosed the whole thing in steel bars, creating what looks like a cage you’d see at a zoo or a professional wrestling match.
Billy the kid’s grave now sits behind more security than some bank vaults. The cage solved the theft problem, but it created a strange new reality. The whole setup looks less like a memorial and more like Billy’s being punished even in death. Visitors have to peer through the bars to see the headstone.
They slide coins and bullets and whiskey bottles through the gaps. Gerald Klene, executive director of the Fort Sumner Chamber of Commerce, whose office sits next to the cemetery, cleans those offerings off the grave almost every day. He said he’ll sometimes come down late at night and find people walking around with flashlights paying their respects to a legend locked behind bars.
The thefts did have one positive outcome. They inspired the Fort Summoner Billy the Kid Tombstone Race, an annual event where contestants run around carrying an 80 lb replica tombstone, reenacting the crimes committed against Billy’s final resting place. The actualstone weighs 100 lb, but apparently that was a bit much for a fun run.
So, after all the floods and thefts and relocations and security measures, is Billy the kid actually buried where that caged headstone says he is? The honest answer is probably, but we can’t be absolutely certain. The case for yes is fairly strong. Multiple eyewitnesses who knew Billy identified the spot. Duovina Maxwell tended his grave for decades.
The 1906 Dudro map drawn when Charles Dudro exumed the soldiers remains shows the locations of Billy Bodro and Foliard in the middle of the cemetery. That map indicates Billy was buried right beside Tommo Foliard with Charlie Bodro slightly to the south. The flood damage, while real, may not have been as catastrophic as legend suggests, at least not in that section of the cemetery.
The closest point the Petco’s River carved away from the cemetery is about 1,300 ft from the outlaw’s graves. The case for maybe not is harder to prove, but impossible to completely dismiss. The original wooden marker disappeared. The cemetery had no official records precise enough to pinpoint individual graves. The floods definitely happened and they definitely caused damage, even if that damage wasn’t total destruction.
By the time people started trying to relocate the exact spot in 1930, nearly 50 years had passed since Billy’s burial. Memory is a tricky thing, especially over that kind of time span. The people who claim to know where Billy was buried might have been right, or they might have been making their best educated guess. There’s also the question of what Billy’s grave even means at this point.
If the floods did redistribute some remains, if wooden coffins rotted and collapsed, if the exact 6×3 ft rectangle of dirt isn’t precisely where it was in 1881, does that matter? Billy’s buried somewhere in that cemetery, almost certainly within a few yards of that marker. Whether he’s directly underneath the granite or 10 ft to the left doesn’t change the fundamental fact of where he ended up.
Some people have suggested digging up the grave and using DNA testing to settle the question once and for all. There’s a major problem with that plan. Even if you found remains and even if DNA testing somehow showed they weren’t Billy’s, what would that prove? Would it prove Billy isn’t buried there or just that you dug up the wrong spot? Would you then have permission to excavate the entire cemetery looking for him? What about the other people buried there? Do their families get a say? The legal and ethical complications multiply fast.
And honestly, there’s something fitting about the uncertainty. Billy the kid’s entire life was a mess of conflicting stories and questionable facts. People couldn’t agree on how many men he’d killed. The legend says 21 men, one for every year of his life, but historians now believe the actual number was closer to nine with four deaths he was solely responsible for and five where he may have played a role alongside others.
They couldn’t agree on whether he was a cold-blooded murderer or a kid caught up in a bad situation. They argued about his personality, his morals, his motivations. The legends that grew up around him after his death had only a passing relationship with the truth. So maybe it’s appropriate that even his grave refuses to give us a simple definitive answer.
What we can say for certain is this. Warner’s granite marker with its crossed pistols and 21 notches has become one of the most famous artifacts of the Old West. It doesn’t matter that it was carved in 1940, nearly 60 years after Billy died. It doesn’t matter that the 21 notches represent a myth because Billy almost certainly didn’t kill 21 men.
What matters is that the stone itself has become part of the legend. It’s been stolen twice, traveled to Texas and California, been locked down with chains and bars, and survived more drama than most historical monuments ever see. That headstone tells us more about how America remembers Billy the Kid than it tells us about the actual person who died in 1881.
The cage around it speaks to our obsession with owning pieces of history, even if we have to steal them. The coins and bullets left by visitors show we still can’t decide if we’re honoring an outlaw or celebrating a rebel. The uncertainty about what’s actually underneath that marker reflects the uncertainty that surrounded Billy’s entire existence.
There’s a broader truth here about historical sites and how we interact with them. We want definitive answers. We want to stand in the exact spot where something happened and know absolutely that we’re connecting with the past in a tangible way. But history doesn’t always cooperate. Records get lost.
Rivers flood. Memories fade. Markers get stolen by people with crowbars and pickup trucks. Sometimes the best we can do is stand in the general vicinity of where something important happened and admit we don’t know every detail. Billy the Kid died on July 14th, 1881. That muchis certain.
He was buried the next day in the Fort Summoner Cemetery. Also certain he was laid to rest near his friends Charlie Bodra and Tom Faliard. Definitely true. The exact spot that’s where certainty gives way to reasonable confidence. The headstone marking that spot that’s where history gives way to artifact and artifact gives way to symbol.
If you visit Fort Sumner today, you’ll see the cage, the chains, the offerings left by pilgrims. You’ll read the plaques explaining the floods and the thefts. You might visit the nearby museum or walk over to the spot where Pete Maxwell’s house once stood before the POS River washed that away, too. You’ll be standing on ground where an American legend ended, give or take a few yards.
The real question isn’t whether Billy’s bones are exactly beneath that 100 pound piece of granite shackled to the ground like a prisoner. The real question is what we’re looking for when we make these pilgrimages. Are we honoring a person or are we honoring a story? Are we paying respects to William H.
Bonnie, who died at 21 with a complicated past and participated in nine confirmed killings. Or are we celebrating Billy the Kid, the legend, the myth, the boy bandit king who never really existed except in dime novels and Warner Brothers films? The grave itself can’t answer that question. And maybe that’s the point.
It sits there in the New Mexico sun behind its bars, collecting coins and bullet casings, drawing visitors from around the world who want to connect with something larger than facts. The stone says Billy the Kid. The bars say, “We learned our lesson.” The uncertainty says the west was messier than you think. If Billy could look up from wherever he’s actually lying, whether that’s 3 ft down or 10 ft to the east, what would he think of all this? Would he be amused that his gravestone needed to be locked up like he once was? Would he appreciate
that people still care enough to argue about exactly where his bones ended up? Would he laugh at the fact that his memorial has been stolen more times than he ever robbed a bank? We’ll never know. What we do know is that Fort Sumner’s old cemetery holds at least part of Billy the Kid’s story, even if we can’t point to the exact square foot of dirt.
The floods were real. The thefts were real. The uncertainty is real. And somehow all of that is more honest than any perfectly preserved, definitively located, undisputedly authentic grave site could ever be. The West was never as clean as the legends make it seem. Graves got washed away. Records disappeared.
People remembered things differently. And sometimes the best we can do is admit that history is messy, incomplete, and frustratingly human. Billy the kid’s grave, wherever it actually is, tells that truth better than any stone marker ever could. If you found this story interesting, let me know in the comments. Would you still visit Billy’s grave knowing we can’t be completely certain it’s the right spot, or does the uncertainty make it more fascinating? And make sure you subscribe for more stories about the complicated, messy, and often surprising truth behind
Old West legends.