What REALLY Happened to Billy the Kid?

Did Pat Garrett’s widow really say that her late husband did not kill Billy the Kid? What about his own daughter, Elizabeth? Is it true that she gave an interview in the 1980s making the exact same claim? I get questions like this all the time, mostly due to people repeating false or unsubstantiated information they find online.
But what does the historical record have to say? And where exactly does the truth lie? Well, let’s start off with Garrett’s widow, Apollina. See, back in 2003, over 120 years after Billy the Kid’s death, a man named Homer Overton came forward claiming that he knew a pollinaria when he was a child. And according to her, Billy the Kid’s death was indeed a hoax.
Per an article published by NBC on the 13th of January 2004, quote, “Legend has it that Billy the Kid was gunned down by a sheriff in 1881. But was he? Homer Overton will tell you that the dead man was an unwitting impostor, a drunk shot point blank in the face by two unlikely chums, the law man and the legendary gunfighter himself.
Overton learned this some 63 years ago at age nine from the widow of Sheriff Pat Garrett. Overton’s sworn statement was offered as evidence for exuming the body of the kid’s mother, Katherine Antrum, to compare her DNA with that of a Texas man, who claimed until his death in 1950 that he was William Bonnie, known in western lore as Billy the Kid.
Authorities in Lincoln County, where the kid was convicted of killing a sheriff in the 1870s, want to know if that man named Olly Brushy Bill Roberts of Haiko, Texas, was the real Billy the Kid. A hearing on the exumation petition is set for January 27th in Silver City where Antrram is buried. Town officials oppose disturbing the grave site.
Garrett’s widow, Apollinia Garrett, told Overton and a buddy that her husband and the kid shot a drunk passed out in a street. With no face left, the drunk was just a body that could be passed off for Bonnie. Overton lives in Altaloma, California, where he issued a notorized sworn affidavit December 27th, 2003. that was filed in court in Silver City a week ago.
The affidavit says the boys visited Apollinia Garrett in the summer of 1940, about 32 years after her husband was shot to death in 1908 near Los Cusus. I believe what Mrs. Garrett told us that day was the absolute truth. It made such an impression on me that I’ve remembered it in detail these 63 years.” End of quote. And there you have it.
By the way, that whole movement to exume the bodies is a very fascinating story in and of itself, and I do hope to share it at some point in the near future. Turns out there may have been a few ulterior motives, but like I said, that’s another topic for another day. And no, contrary to popular belief, neither Billy’s mother, Catherine, or Brushy Bill Roberts, or even Billy the Kid, have ever been exumed.
Anyone who tells you that there’s DNA proving that Billy and Brushy are one and the same is either grossly misinformed or just lying through their teeth. That said, so far as Mr. Overton’s statement is concerned, it remains uncorroborated. Garrett’s widow never said any such thing publicly, and by the time Mr. Overton shared his story, Apollina was already long gone.
As it currently stands, all we have to go on is the word of one man who was born a half a century after Billy the Kid’s death. And his statement is in direct contradiction to multiple eyewitnesses. Okay, fine. But what about the claims that Garrett’s own daughter, Elizabeth, also said that her father didn’t kill Billy the Kid? Now, this one’s a little harder to track down, and to be completely honest, I don’t even know where the rumor first originated, uh, nor was I able to even find an exact quote. All I could locate were other
people just repeating the story. Or an article on historyolction.org or written by Patrick Lynch. Quote, “During an interview in 1983, Pat Garrett’s last surviving daughter, Elizabeth, claimed that her father did not kill Billy the Kid.” Now, thankfully, the author did provide a link to a source, but unfortunately, it’s a dead link.
It just says that the page, which appears to have come from Voices of America in 2003, no longer exists. That said, there’s an old Angel Fire website titled Questions and Inconsistencies Regarding the Killing of Billy the Kid that says pretty much the same thing. Quote, “In 1983, Elizabeth Garrett, last surviving daughter of Pat Garrett, claimed to interviewer Paul Kaine that her father did not kill Billy the Kid.” That’s it.
No source and no additional information. I did find the same sentence verbatim on another website that appears to have just copy and pasted everything from the Angel Fire site. And you can also find similar claims on the Brushy Bill Roberts Pro boards forum, but once again, no sources are ever given.
As far as I can tell, it’s just a circular rumor with everybody just repeating one another without any evidence to back it up. I did try to find information onthat Paul Kaine guy who allegedly interviewed Elizabeth in 1983, but once again, I came up completely empty-handed. couldn’t find anything on anybody named Paul Kaine, even being remotely involved with Billy the Kid or Brushy Bill Roberts history.
That said, I didn’t spend a ton of time looking for him. Okay, if you have information to the contrary, if you know about Mr. Kane or you just have additional evidence in regards to Elizabeth Garrett, I am all ears. Feel free to hit me up at josh wildwest.com. And I promise if I get anything wrong here, I am more than willing to make another video correcting my mistakes.
You have my word on that. And just in case you think I’m being too much of a stickler for detail and constantly harping about pesky sources and whatnot, here’s why it matters. Elizabeth Garrett died in 1947. 1947. So, how could she have possibly given an interview in 1983 claiming that her father didn’t kill Billy the Kid? And really, this is the crux of every single other false claim out there regarding the kid’s death.
And trust me when I say there are a lot of false claims and they’re always just unsourced or anecdotal stories. My great great-grandmother’s cousin was best friends with Pat Garrett’s hairdresser and according to her he did not kill Billy the Kid. So suck on that historians. Or sometimes they’ll just take things completely out of context in order to prove their wild assertions.
Case in point, how many times have you heard that one of Pat Garrett’s own deputies said that he killed the wrong man? Well, believe it or not, that did come directly from Deputy John W. Poe in a book that he wrote with his own two hands titled The Death of Billy the Kid. When describing what occurred immediately following the shooting, Po writes, quote, “An instant later, Garrett came out rushing against me as he passed.
He stood by me close to the wall at the side of the door and said to me, “That was the kid that came in there onto me, and I think I’ve got him.” I said to Pat, “The kid would not come to this place. You shot the wrong man. Yikes. Sounds pretty damning, right? Well, as it turns out, context matters. In that very same book, Po makes it abundantly clear that both he and Garrett felt like they were just wasting their time.
He even wrote that Garrett seemed to have little confidence in our ability to accomplish the objective of our trip, and that Garrett stated he believed we were on a wild goose chase and had little faith in our ability to achieve anything. By the way, it’s worth noting that they were in that area, mostly on account of information received from locals, including nearby rancher Manuel Brazil.
They knew Billy the Kid was somewhere in the vicinity. They just didn’t think he’d have the balls to actually be hiding out at Fort Sumner, much less at his girlfriend’s house. Or as Deputy Poe put it, Maxwells was the one place at Fort Sumner that I considered above suspicion of harboring the kid. Now, what the naysayers invariably fell to mention is what Deputy Po wrote just a couple paragraphs after telling Garrett that he killed the wrong man.
Quote, “The darkness was such that we were unable to see what the conditions were on the inside or what the result of the shooting had been.” After some rather forceful persuasion, we induced Maxwell to procure a light. He finally brought an old-fashioned tallow candle from his mother’s room at the far end of the building. He placed the candle on the window sill from the outside.
This enabled us to get a view of the inside where we saw a man lying stretched upon his back dead in the middle of the room with a six shooter lying at his right hand and a butcher knife at his left. Upon examining the body, we found it to be that of Billy the Kid. End of quote. And amen. Deputy Po’s statements taken in full context cannot be misinterpreted unless you’re trying to misinterpret them.
He is clearly describing his misgivings in the days leading up to Billy’s death. how neither he nor Garrett felt like they would actually encounter the kid there at Pete’s place. And then once they did, Po remained skeptical until examining the corpse and seeing the reaction of the locals.
It was only then that he declared the body to be that of Billy the Kid. The title of his book is literally the death of Billy the Kid. So, no, Deputy John W. Poe never actually accused Garrett of killing the wrong person. That’s just one example of the many false claims that are constantly repeated. Hey, we’ll get back to the story in just a moment, but today’s episode is brought to you by the Wild West Extravaganza, Patreon.
But Josh, what is a Patreon? Long story short, it’s a subscription-based platform that allows you to directly support shows just like mine. As it currently stands, there’s only one tier. It’s just $5 a month, and that gives you both early and adree access to the entire back catalog of The Wild West Extravaganza. No more commercials. Youget each new episode before anyone else.
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Frank Dalton, that Jesse James Impersonator? Well, we had a similar discussion recently about a little someone known as Beaver Smith. Yes, that Beaver Smith, crusty old saloon owner from Young Guns 2. Turns out he was a very real person. Not only that, but James was even able to determine his true identity. We also spoke about his life before and after Billy the Kid, and we veered into probably at least a dozen other topics.
It was a really fun talk, and it is only available on Patreon. And yeah, I do plan on adding additional discussions. Oh, got to fix my mustache. In the very near future, I also have a new series where I’m narrating the biography of George W. Co. If you’re not familiar, George W. Co was a major player in the Lincoln County and Kfax County Wars.
Matter of fact, speaking of young guns, sorry. Uh, remember that scene where they get into the gunfight with Buckshot Roberts? Well, George Cole lost his finger in that fight. Dude lived a very long time. He knew a lot of people, not just Billy the Kid, but even gunfighters like Klay Allison. And he shared his story later on in life in a book titled Frontier Fighter.
And if you’d like to hear what he had to say in my voice, that too is a Patreon exclusive. Here’s the catch, though. On September 15th, I am changing the $5 tier. Or to be more specific, I will be adding extra tiers with additional perks. If you’re already a member of the Patreon, this will not affect you whatsoever.
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That is patreon.com/w wildwest extra. All right, let’s get back to the show. And look, man, there’s a reason why Brushy Bill proponents, and yeah, it’s almost always Brushy Bill proponents who spread this type of misleading information and take things out of context, but there’s a reason why all they have to rely on are shady forensics and anecdotal stories told by people who weren’t even there.
It’s because all of the historical documentation and all of the eyewitness accounts clearly point to the kid being killed at the hands of Pat Garrett. Not a single person who was at Fort Sar on July 14th, 1881, said anything about the kid’s death being a hoax. Not one person, not two persons, but zero of them, okay? A lot of these people lived a very long time, even decades after Garrett’s death.
They spoke with journalists and historians, some even published books of their own. Certain details may differ, but the one thing that they all agreed on is that Garrett killed the kid. But Josh, what about Shotgun Collins? Well, I’m glad you brought that up. For those of you who are unfamiliar, Abraham Graham, aka shotgun John Collins, was a real life Old West outlaw.
Collins would die in 1922, but years later, his son said that according to his father, Garrett killed the wrong man, and they just passed the body off as being Billy the Kid. This is no different from the Overton claim. Once again, we’re hearing third-hand information from someone who was not there.
As of the year of our Lord, 2025, there is zero evidence that Collins was at Fort Snar on July 14th. His name is not mentioned in any of the contemporary articles or even the eyewitness accounts. So why would I take the word of his son over the word of the people who were actually there? Now, speaking of evidence, Rushy Bill Roberts is on every single census from 1880 to 1950. We know who his family was.
We know where he lived. Spoiler alert, it was not New Mexico. and we know what he did for a living. His entire life is very well documented. We don’t even have to rely solely on the census data. Thereare marriage certificates, a family bible, one of his own nephews wrote a book denouncing him, and there’s even a World War I draft registration that all prove that he was a toddler in 1881 when the real Billy the Kid was killed.
There is no evidence that Brushie had the same scars as Billy the Kid. In fact, there’s no evidence that he had any scars. I know I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but all we have to rely on is the word of one person, his attorney, William Morrison. You’d think that at some point Morrison would have documented the scars, maybe snap a few photos, but he did not.
There is also not an autopsy report. Okay, I see that claim made all the time, and it is simply not true. Brushy Bill Roberts did not have an autopsy. Furthermore, none of Billy the Kid’s former associates ever vouched for Brushy Bill. Best they could locate were two old men who may have possibly known Billy the Kid when they were young children.
This is yet to be proven, by the way. And even then, one of them initially stated that Brushy was far too young to be the kid, which he was. I only bring this up because a lot of people have the false impression that some of Billy the Kid’s former outlaw buddies, or maybe even the ex-law man who used to chase him down, that they vouched for Brushy, and nothing could be further from the truth.
In all actuality, there were still people alive who knew Billy the Kid, like Bill and Sam Jones, but they just flat out refused to sign the affidavit because they knew Brushy was not Billy the Kid. Another very common misconception is that Garrett had the body buried before anyone could get a good look at it.
This sort of ties in with the shotgun Collins story, but it’s also provably false. But don’t just take my word for it. According to Fort Sumner resident Frank Labato, who was present at the time of Billy’s demise, quote, “Soon after Billy left, we heard two shots from Maxwell’s direction, and Silva and I went over immediately.
We found a great deal of excitement. Pat Garrett and two other men whom I did not know, were standing outside the house, rifles in hand and ready to shoot. Pete Maxwell and the household were standing at the door of Pete’s bedroom. Someone had been shot in the bedroom, and we were told it was the kid.
Jesus Silva and Delvina Maxwell, the old Navajo woman, went in to see who it was. Delvina came out sobbing, “My little boy is dead.” We took the kid’s body over to the carpenter shop, laid him on a bench, and held a wake over him. Billy had been very popular at Fort Sumner and had a great many friends, all of whom were indignant toward Pat Garrett.
If a leader had been present, Garrett and his two officers would have received the same fate they dealt. The next day, I went to the graveyard and saw Billy’s burial. Asus Silva Vicenteo dug the grave. For another Fort Sumar local, the aforementioned Vicente Ottero, quote, I was at Fort Snar the night Billy the kid was killed. I went to the carpenters shop and stood at the wake all that night.
Jesus Silva made a wooden box which served as a coffin for the kid. The next day, Silva and I dug the grave and buried the body in the old graveyard. Speaking of Jesus Silva, here’s what he had to say. Quote, “Billy took the butcher knife and went over after the meat. He had been gone only a few minutes when Loato and I were startled by two shots coming from the direction of Pete Maxwell’s house.
We ran over as quickly as we could, finding Pat Garrett and his two deputies by the door of Pete Maxwell’s bedroom. Delvina, an old Navajo woman who had always been particularly devoted to the kid, went into the room to find out whom Garrett had shot. I went in with her. There on the floor, we saw Billy stretched out face down.
We turned him over and when Delvina realized fully it was the kid, she began to cry bitterly, interspersing with her tears the vilest curses she could bestow on the head of Pat Garrett. We asked permission to remove the body. Pete Maxwell suggesting removal to the old carpenters shop. We laid the body on the carpenters’s bench and placed lighted candles around the corpse.
News of the killing spread quickly through the town and surrounding country and consequently a large number of Billy’s friends were gathered at the wake. Everyone’s grief at the kid’s death was genuine and sincere. Pat Garrett and his two companions were badly frightened and did not dare sleep that night. They remained awake, arms and readiness for any emergency.
The next morning, a coroner’s inquest was held before Alcal Sigura, no relation to Tom, and a jury which declared that Sheriff Pat Garrett killed William H. Bonnie in the discharge of his official duty and that the homicide was justifiable. The next morning after the killing, I measured Billy’s body and made a rough box which we used as a coffin.
That afternoon, we dug his grave and buried him. I have read reports which say that Billy the kid is still alive. I know that PatGarrett killed the kid on the night of June 14th, 1881 in Pete Maxwell’s room. I also know with absolute certainty that he was buried in the old graveyard the next day. End of quote.
As for Delvina Maxwell, she would confirm many of these statements when she said the following. I went in and I was the first to discover that they shot my little boy. I hated those men and I’m glad that I have lived long enough to see them all dead and buried. End quote. But wait, there’s more.
We also have the words of Pete Maxwell, the only other eyewitness to the actual shooting itself other than Pat Garrett. Quote, I being in my bedroom at about midnight on the 14th day of July, Pat F. Garrett came into my room and sat at the edge of my bed to converse with me. A short while after Garrett had sat down, William Bonnie came in and got close to my bed with a gun in his hand and asked me, “Who is it? Who is it?” And then Pat F.
Garrett fired two shots at the said William Bonnie. And the said Bonnie fell near my fireplace. And I went out of the room. And when I came in again in about 3 or 4 minutes after the shots, the said Bonnie was dead. And I could go on and on. Private George Miller, Mike Cosgrove, Charles, and Milner Rudolph.
These are just a few of the names that we know of, not counting all the other people who attended the wake, which according to Jesus Silva, was attended by many of Billy’s friends. There was an official coroner’s jury inquest and an official coroner’s jury report. Pat Garrett was given the bounty that had been placed on Billy the Kid’s head.
And most convincing of all, the kid was literally never seen again. Look, I’ve said this before, but there is a ton of mystery surrounding the life of Billy the Kid. We don’t know for certain where or when he was born. We don’t know how old he was at the time of his death, who his father was, or even his mother’s maiden name.
There are a ton of blanks that still need to be filled in. But his death was probably the least mysterious aspect of his entire life. I’d even go so far as to say it was one of the more well doumented deaths in all the Old West. Are there issues with the official narrative? Yeah, there are. I and pretty much everyone I know think that maybe things didn’t exactly occur as Garrett claimed.
Matter of fact, I am not aware of a single historian who takes Pat Garrett’s word as gospel. But nevertheless, the end results were the same. I love Young Guns 2 as much as anybody. I had the damn soundtrack when I was a kid and we played Young Guns at recess. Nothing would make me happier than to know that Billy escaped death at Fort Sumner and lived to be an old man.
But so far as the historical evidence is concerned, it simply did not happen. I know it’s fun to think about, but why would I possibly believe all these uncorroborated anecdotal stories over the people who were actually there and witnessed the kid’s lifeless body with their own eyes? And when it comes to history, evidence matters.
Billy the Kid led a very charmed life. He was an extremely charismatic and intelligent young man. I do think he’s a very sympathetic character, but he wasn’t bulletproof. He got complacent and then he got got.