Sundance Kid DNA: Dead or Alive?

History says Harry Alonzo Longabar rode into Bolivia with Butch Cassidy in 1908, robbed one last payroll, and died in a shootout with the Bolivian cavalry. Shot, buried, case closed. That’s the story Hollywood told us. That’s the story in every history book. But when researchers finally tried to prove that death with DNA testing, they ran straight into a wall that’s been standing for over a century.
Because here’s what nobody talks about. When forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow traveled to Bolivia in 1991 to dig up the graves where Sundance and Butch allegedly lie, he found bones. He found DNA, but he didn’t find proof. The test came back with results that solved absolutely nothing. And when another team dug up a grave in Utah in 2008, testing a man who lived to 1936 and might have been the Sundance kid living under a false name, they hit the same wall.
Inconclusive, no match, no answers. So tonight, we’re putting science on trial. We’re looking at two graves on two different continents, both claiming to hold the same outlaw. We’re examining why DNA keeps failing to close this case. And we’re asking the question that’s haunted historians for decades. Why can’t anyone prove the Sundance kid is actually dead? The answer is more complicated than you think.
Let’s start with what everybody believes happened. The story goes like this. After years of robbing banks and trains across the American West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled to South America in 1901 with the Pinkerton Detective Agency breathing down their necks. They tried going straight in Argentina, bought a ranch, raised horses, but old habits die hard.
By 1906, they were back to robbing payrolls and banks. On November 3rd, 1908, two American bandits held up a courier named Carlos Perro, who was carrying the payroll for the Aramo Mining Company near the small town of San Vicente in southern Bolivia. The bandits made off with the cash and disappeared into the mountains. 3 days later, on November 6th, Bolivian authorities cornered two Americans suspected of the robbery in a rented adobe house in that same village.
The local administrator, Clato Bellow, had recognized the stolen mules and alerted a military patrol. A gunfight erupted that evening. One Bolivian soldier was shot and killed when he approached the hideout. After a brief exchange of gunfire, witnesses reported hearing three screams of desperation from inside the house, followed by two distinct gunshots.
When soldiers entered the house the next morning on November 7th, they found two dead Americans. One was slumped against a wall with bullet wounds to his body and a fatal shot to his forehead. The Bolivian police speculated that one man had shot his badly wounded partner to put him out of misery, then turned the gun on himself. The two bodies were buried together at the small San Vitensei cemetery near the grave of a German mining engineer named Gustav Zimmer.
No death certificates were issued. No positive identification was made. The report simply noted that two American bandits believed to be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance kid had been killed. But here’s where the story starts to crack. William Pinkerton, who ran the detective agency that had been chasing the pair for years, heard about the San Vitensei shootout and dismissed the whole story as fake.
The Pinkertons never officially called off their hunt. Family members insisted the men weren’t dead. Butch Cassid’s sister, Lula Parker Beatensson, wrote a book in 1975, claiming her brother visited the family ranch in Utah in 1925, 17 years after his supposed death in Bolivia. She said Cassidy told her that a friend had planted the story about Bolivia so he wouldn’t be pursued anymore and that he last saw the Sundance kid at a bull fight in Mexico City.
And when you dig into the Bolivian reports, the details don’t add up. Carlos Perro, the courier who was robbed, supposedly identified the dead bodies as the men who attacked him. But all he’d ever seen of the masked bandits were their eyes. Nobody took photographs of the corpses. Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions. The phrase that keeps showing up in every account is believed to be not confirmed, not identified, believed to be.
For decades, that uncertainty fueled every kind of rumor you can imagine. Researchers Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows spent years tracking down the story in South American archives and eventually identified 60 different versions of how Butch and Sundance supposedly died. 60. Some had them dying in North America, others in Europe.
Some claim they lived into old age in the United States under assumed names. But all of that was just speculation and family stories until 1991 when DNA testing finally entered the picture. Bucken Meadows teamed up with Clyde Snow, one of the world’s leading forensic anthropologists. Snow was the man who had identified the remains of Nazi war criminal Joseph Mangle.
If anyone could solve this mystery, it was him. The team gotpermission from Bolivian authorities to exume the graves in San Vicente where the two bandits were supposedly buried. An elderly villager whose father had reportedly witnessed the 1908 shootout guided them to the spot. The dig should have ended the debate. That’s what everyone expected. Open the grave.
Extract DNA. Compare it to living relatives of the Longaba and Parker families. Get your answer. Science at work. But when they opened that Bolivian grave, the problem started immediately. They found a skeleton of one man and a piece of skull from another. The bones were in poor condition. The grave markers had been unclear for decades.
Other bodies had been buried in the same cemetery over the years. The DNA they extracted was degraded after sitting in Bolivian soil for 83 years. When the lab results came back, they found something nobody expected. The DNA did not match living relatives of either Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid. Not a match.
After all that work, all that travel, all that anticipation, the answer was no. But what did that mean? Did it mean Butch and Sundance weren’t buried there? Or did it mean the family genealogy was wrong, or that the samples were contaminated, or that they dug up the wrong grave? The team had another problem, that elderly villager who showed them the grave.
He pointed to a spot based on his father’s memory from 1908. But memories fade, markers move, cemeteries get rearranged. There’s a very real possibility they dug up the wrong men entirely. In fact, later testing suggested the body they found was indeed Gustav Zimmer, that German mining engineer who worked in the area around the same time and was buried in the same cemetery.
So, if that grave in Bolivia doesn’t hold Sundance, then where is he? That’s where the second grave enters the story. In the small town of Duchain, Utah, there’s a headstone for a man named William Henry Long, who died in November 1936. According to his headstone, Long was born in February 1860. According to his obituary in the UN basin record, he was a farmer who was born and raised in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin.
He married a widow named Luzernia Morell with six children in 1894. On the marriage license long listed his age as 27, which would make his birth year 1867, not 1860 as his headstone claims. He worked on ranches, earned $2 a day, and lived a quiet life until his death. But family stories told a different tale.
Long-step greatgrandson Jerry Nickel grew up hearing whispers that Uncle Billy wasn’t just a farmer. He was the Sundance kid living under an assumed name decades after his supposed death in South America. Nickel heard stories from relatives about Long riding with Butch Cassidy, robbing trains and banks. The Sundance Kid was born Harry Alonzo Longab in May 1867 in Montlair, Pennsylvania.
Long reportedly claimed he was born in 1867. The coincidence was hard to ignore. At first glance, it sounds like every other outlaw legend, old family folklore, wishful thinking, the romance of having an outlaw in the family tree. But in 2008, Nickel convinced authorities to exume Long’s remains and test them against DNA from known Longabah descendants.
University of Utah anthropologist John McCulla examined photographs of William Long and compared them to the famous Fort Worth 5 photo of the Wild Bunch that includes the Sundance Kid. McCulla found what he called identical traits. A notch in the ear. Evidence of a broken nose, a cleft chin, matching height, hair color, and eye color.
Even the way Long’s fingers curled in photographs matched the way Sundance’s fingers curled in that famous Wild Bunch portrait. McCulla’s analysis was compelling enough to secure a court order for exumation. On December 12th, 2008, they dug up William Henry Long’s grave in the Duchenne City Cemetery. They found a badly decayed skeleton.
The wooden casket had disintegrated from underground water seeping through the cemetery over 72 years. The bones showed signs of water damage. Making matters worse, another relative had apparently dug up Long’s skull and a femur several years earlier for unauthorized testing, then rearied them in November 2007.
Contamination was a real concern. But they had bones, they had DNA, they had living relatives of Harry Longab to compare it against. This time, surely they’d get an answer. The samples went to Sorenson Forensics in Salt Lake City, then to an undisclosed laboratory for comparison with known Longabah family DNA.
Results were expected in four to eight weeks. Nickel was confident. McCulla said that before DNA became available in 1992, they could have gone into a court of law and convicted William Henry Long of being the Sundance Kid based on the photo analysis alone. But when the DNA results finally came back, they were devastating. Inconclusive.
The genetic material extracted from Long’s badly decayed skeleton yielded an inconclusive result with regard to a familial relationship with the Longaba descendants. Not amatch, not a definitive no, just inconclusive. Dr. McCulla explained that the DNA was probably fragmented. The bones were not in very good condition. They had been washed by water and possibly mixed with DNA of other individuals. Nicl refused to accept it.
He was convinced Long was Sundance. He speculated about other explanations. Maybe there was infidelity somewhere in the Longabah family tree generations ago that threw off the DNA match. Maybe the degradation was too severe. He funded the project with up to $200,000 of his own money and planned to have the bones sent to another lab for additional testing.
But the scientific community was skeptical. Historian Daniel Buck, who had been part of that 1991 Bolivia dig, said Long was just another pretender in another resurrection story. There’s a whole folklore around outlaw disappearances, Buck explained about the return of the bandit representing hope for the community, and that’s where we are right now. two graves.
One in Bolivia that supposedly holds Sundance, but whose DNA doesn’t match the family. One in Utah that supposedly holds Sundance, but whose DNA is inconclusive? Over a hundred years of history hanging in the balance, and science can’t tell us which story is true. But why? Why can’t DNA solve this? We use DNA to solve cold cases from the 1960s.
We use it to identify victims of disasters. We use it to prove paternity. We’ve used DNA to settle questions about Jesse James grave, about whether Anna Anderson was really Anastasia Romangh. DNA testing has rewritten history again and again. So why does it keep failing with the Sundance Kid? The answer comes down to four problems that make this case uniquely difficult.
First, there’s the passage of time. DNA degrades. The Sundance Kid allegedly died in 1908. We’re now more than 115 years past that date. Whether he’s buried in Bolivia or Utah, those bones have spent over a century underground, exposed to moisture, soil bacteria, and environmental conditions that break down genetic material.
The samples recovered from both graves were described as fragmented, degraded, and mixed with contaminants. When DNA deteriorates to that level, getting a clean, usable sample becomes nearly impossible. Second, there’s the family tree problem. DNA comparison only works if you have confirmed relatives to test against. You need people who are definitively descended from the Sundance kids blood relatives.
But the Longabah family tree has gaps. Harry Longaba had four older siblings, but tracing their descendants over five or six generations introduces uncertainty. A single case of adoption, infidelity, or misattributed paternity. Anywhere in that family line throws off the entire comparison. When Jerry Nichols suggested there might have been what he called Hanky Panky in the Longabah ancestry, he wasn’t being paranoid.
He was acknowledging a real limitation of genetic testing across multiple generations. Third, there’s the grave problem. Both exumations faced serious issues with knowing whose bones they were actually testing. In Bolivia, the grave was unmarked, located based on an elderly man’s memory of what his father told him decades earlier. Cemetery records from 1908 in a remote Bolivian village were essentially non-existent.
The team might have dug up Gustav Zimmer. They might have dug up other miners. They might have even dug up the right grave, but gotten bones that were mixed with other remains from burials that happened before or after. In Utah, the grave was marked, but had been disturbed by an earlier unauthorized exumation, and water damage had potentially contaminated everything.
And fourth, there’s the legal problem. You can’t just dig up graves whenever you want. Both exumations required court orders, permissions from multiple authorities, and cooperation from families. If researchers wanted to try again to dig in different locations or test different samples, they’d have to start that entire legal process over.
And what if the real Sundance grave is somewhere else entirely? What if he’s buried under a different name in a different state, and nobody even knows where to look? You can’t exume every suspicious grave from the 1930s hoping to find him. Each of these problems alone would make the case difficult. Together, they create a perfect storm that might make it permanently unsolvable.
And that’s what makes the Sundance Kid different from other DNA investigations. With Jesse James, researchers had a marked grave and recent enough DNA to get results. With the Sundance Kid, we have two graves on two continents, both with legitimate claims, both with failed or inconclusive tests, and no clear path forward. DNA has rewritten outlaw history before.
It proved that remains exumed in Missouri were Jesse James. It solved cases that seemed impossible. But the Sundance Kid presents something DNA can’t handle. A legend that might have been true in two different ways. Either he died in thatBolivian shootout and was buried under someone else’s name in an unmarked grave we haven’t found yet.
Or he faked his death, returned to America and lived out his years as William Henry Long in Utah. Both stories have evidence. Both have gaps. And DNA, for all its power, can’t bridge the gap between degraded bones and historical truth. So, what does that leave us with? Family stories from people who swear William Long told them he was the Sundance Kid.
Photo analysis showing matching physical features, circumstantial evidence of timelines and locations that line up. On the other side, we have Bolivian police reports from 1908, witness accounts of a shootout, and two bodies buried in San Vicente. We have Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows who spent decades researching in South American archives and are convinced Butch and Sundance died in that shootout.
We have historians who say William Long was just another pretender trading on an outlaw name. And between these two positions, we have science throwing up its hands and saying, “I don’t know. The DNA is too degraded. The samples are inconclusive. The graves might be wrong. Come back when you have better evidence. It’s a non-answer that leaves everyone frustrated.
” Jerry Nichols still believes Long was Sundance. DNA be damned. The scientific community dismisses the claim. Tourists still visit San Vicente in Bolivia looking for Butch and Sundance’s graves, even though nobody can prove the outlaws are actually buried there. And maybe that’s fitting. Maybe the Sundance kid’s greatest escape wasn’t from the Pinkertons or the Bolivian army.
Maybe it was from history itself. He’s become a ghost that DNA can’t catch. A question science can’t answer. A legend that exists in that space between what we know and what we can prove. The more we dig, the less certain we become. Every test that fails adds another layer to the mystery instead of solving it.
Right now, no laboratory on Earth can tell us whether the Sundance Kid died in Bolivia in 1908 or lived to old age in Utah. The bones are too old. The family trees are too uncertain. The graves are too questionable. And unless someone discovers a new grave with perfect DNA preservation and an ironclad chain of custody connecting it to Harry Longab, this might be one outlaw legend that stays unsolved forever.
So, here’s the question I’ll leave you with. If you had the power to exume just one more grave in this entire story, which one would you choose? Would you dig deeper in San Vicente searching for that unmarked grave where the real Butch and Sundance might be buried? Would you test William Henry Long again with newer technology? Or would you look somewhere else entirely following some other thread that historians haven’t explored yet? Drop your theory in the comments.
I want to know which grave you’d open and why. And if this case fascinates you because DNA didn’t solve the mystery, you need to see what happened when DNA actually did rewrite history. Check out my video on Butch Cassid’s grave, where some researchers have their own theories about his survival.
And if you think the Sundance Kid case is complicated, wait until you see the Jesse James DNA controversy. That’s a case where science gave answers, but the answers opened up even more questions. The Sundance Kid wrote out of history over a century ago. And despite our best technology, despite forensic science and DNA testing and everything modern investigation can throw at this case, he’s still riding, still ahead of everyone chasing him.
Still just out of reach. Some outlaws, it turns out, are too good at disappearing. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this deep dive into one of the Wild West’s greatest unsolved mysteries, hit that subscribe button. New historical mysteries every week. I’ll see you in the next one.