On the night of July 14, 1881, Sheriff Pat Garrett fired two shots in a darkened bedroom at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The man who fell dead was known to history as Billy the Kid, the outlaw who had escaped from jail just three months earlier after killing two guards. Garrett said he recognized the figure in the dark by his voice, and the body was buried the next day in the old military cemetery. The Kid was twenty-one years old.

The story closed, and for decades, that was that. But in 1948, a probate investigator from St. Louis named William V. Morrison found himself listening to an old man named Joe Hines talk about the Lincoln County War.

Hines had been there, and he had lived with those events for a lifetime. In the course of the conversation, Hines let something slip that stopped Morrison cold. He hinted that Billy the Kid was still alive. He would not say the name, and he would not say where.

Morrison pressed, but the old man would go no further. The question hung in the air, and Morrison could not let it go. He began searching. During that same year, he met another elder, a man named J.

Frank Dalton of Dalton, Oklahoma, who was making headlines of his own by claiming to be the outlaw Jesse James. Dalton made another assertion that seemed even more fantastic: he said that Billy the Kid was living in Hamilton, Texas, under the name C. V. Roberts.

Morrison started a correspondence with the man in Hamilton, and in time the man made a confession that would ignite one of the wildest controversies in Western history. He said he was William H. Bonnie, better known as Billy the Kid. He had a different name now, though.

People called him Brushy Bill Roberts. Brushy Bill Roberts was known by a tangle of names over the years: William Henry Roberts, Ollie Partridge, William Roberts, Oli N. Roberts, Oli L. Roberts.

He claimed his birth date as December 31, 1859. He had lived quietly for decades in the small town of Hico, Texas, in Hamilton County, far from the dusty drama of the New Mexico Territory. But his claim, once it surfaced in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, drew intense attention. He insisted he was the Kid, the outlaw the whole country believed had been shot down by Garrett in 1881.

To support his story, Roberts offered Morrison intricate details about his alleged outlaw life. He shared anecdotes that seemed to fill gaps in the known history of Billy the Kid. More importantly, he asked for Morrison’s help in securing a full pardon. He said that Governor Lew Wallace of New Mexico had promised him exactly that in 1879, after the Lincoln County War ended, and that the promise had later been rescinded.

Without the pardon, Roberts said, he would not reveal the whole truth. Morrison would have to work for it. Morrison listened, and what Roberts told him hinged on a startling revision of the night at Fort Sumner. Roberts claimed that Pat Garrett had not killed Billy the Kid at all.

The man Garrett shot, Roberts said, was a different individual named Billy Barlow. Garrett had passed the body off as the Kid’s corpse, and the real Kid had been allowed to vanish into Mexico, free to live out his life under a new identity. Roberts was that man. The story had a certain logic to the parts that could be checked.

The only three witnesses to the killing at Fort Sumner were Garrett himself and his two deputies, John W. Poe and Thomas McKinney. Poe had never laid eyes on the Kid before that night. The room was too dark for a visual identification.

When Garrett fired, Poe told him he had shot the wrong person. Garrett held his ground, saying he recognized the Kid by his voice, though those in the room could hear only whispers. Eventually both Poe and McKinney went along with Garrett’s assessment. Years later, though, McKinney retracted his statement and repeated what Poe had said earlier: that Garrett had killed someone else.

There had been unease from the start. Local residents of Fort Sumner voiced their disapproval over the Kid’s presumed death, suspicious of the official version of events. Garrett quickly organized an investigation, conducted by politically affiliated allies who cemented the murder claim and secured the reward. The next day the body was hastily buried in a grave that later disappeared in floods.

For many years the grave was marked as likely to contain no remains at all, and requests to exhume it were officially denied. In 1950, Roberts’s claim came before the governor of New Mexico, Thomas J. Mabry. Roberts sought official recognition and the pardon he said had been promised.

Mabry dismissed the claim. The governor was not convinced, and the state made no move to revisit the record. Brushy Bill’s story, though, had already taken root. It gained traction with the help of the Billy the Kid Museum in Hico, Texas, the town that had become his home.

Over the years the story appeared in various media, reaching a wide audience through a 2011 episode of Brad Meltzer’s Decoded and a 1989 segment on Unsolved Mysteries narrated by Robert Stack. The claim refused to die, even as Brushy Bill himself would not live much longer. The sudden appearance of Roberts, and his plea for a pardon, had a profound impact on the descendants of Pat Garrett. They had grown up with the account of their ancestor bringing down the most feared outlaw of the West, and now a man was publicly saying it had all been a lie, that Garrett had murdered an innocent man and taken credit for a killing he never committed.

The family’s legacy was on the line. Researchers dug into the story from both directions. Marshall Trimble, Arizona’s official historian, cited Frederick Nolan, an authority on the life and times of Billy the Kid. Nolan pointed to a letter written by Geneva Pitman in 1987 to Joe Bolan, the founder of a history-loving group called the Billy the Kid Gang.

In that letter, Pitman wrote that her uncle, known at the time as Brushy Bill, was named Oliver P. Roberts and was born on August 26, 1879, as recorded in the family Bible. That single detail struck at the heart of the claim. If Brushy Bill Roberts was born in 1879, he would have been only two years old when the Kid died at Fort Sumner.

The birth date in the family Bible did not match the outlaw’s timeline at all. But Roberts had given his own birth date as December 31, 1859, which would have made him old enough to have lived the Kid’s life. The discrepancy became a central piece of evidence in the debate, though it never settled the question in the eyes of his believers. Brushy Bill and his story were largely forgotten by the wider public until the 1990 film Young Guns 2 portrayed him as the narrator of the events surrounding the life of the Kid and the Lincoln County War.

The movie reignited interest, and a wave of books followed, all examining whether Brushy’s claims could possibly be true. Researchers made several failed attempts to obtain permission to excavate the grave at Fort Sumner and run DNA tests. The requests were turned down, one after another. In 1990, a significant investigation took place at the Advanced Imaging Research and Graphics Laboratory at the University of Texas.

Image experts Scott Acton and Alan Bovik used image comparison tools to examine photographs of Brushy Bill Roberts at the age of fourteen. Surprisingly, the images bore a striking resemblance to the likeness of Billy the Kid widely recognized in the popular Dedrick Upham newsletter. The comparison did not stop there. When examining a photo of Brushy Bill at age seventy-one, Acton and Bovik determined that there was an impressive 93 percent similarity between the aged Roberts and the iconic image of the Kid.

Both experts agreed that the results undeniably showed a striking similarity between the two men. For Morrison, the physical evidence only reinforced what Brushy had told him. On December 27, 1950, Brushy Bill died of a massive heart attack in Hico, Texas. He was buried in Hamilton County, twenty miles south of town.

When Morrison examined the body, he found twenty-six bullet and knife scars. The outlaw who had supposedly died in 1881 had carried the marks of a violent life to the end. The story did not end with Brushy Bill’s death. In 2003, a concerted effort was initiated by Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan, Captain Mayor Steve Cederwall, and DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Graves.

Their goal was to exhume the remains of Billy the Kid and his mother, Catherine Antrim, with the intention of using DNA analysis to determine once and for all who was buried in the Fort Sumner grave. The effort encountered many challenges. The exact location of the remains was uncertain, the grave markers had been moved or lost over time, and legal obstacles mounted. The court eventually intervened, preventing the exhumation of both sets of remains.

The question was never answered. The grave at Fort Sumner remains marked as likely to contain no remains at all. The state of New Mexico has denied every request to dig. The descendants of Pat Garrett hold to the version of events their ancestor gave them.

The researchers point to the family Bible that says Oliver P. Roberts was born in 1879. The believers point to the twenty-six scars and the 93 percent facial match. Brushy Bill Roberts died in 1950 insisting he was Billy the Kid, and the mystery he left behind has never been settled by any court, any DNA test, or any document.

What remains is the story of an old man in Hamilton County, Texas, who said he had been the most famous outlaw in America, that Pat Garrett had killed the wrong man in a dark room in 1881, and that the Kid had slipped away to live the rest of his life in peace. The body in the Fort Sumner grave was never proven to be his, and the body buried in Hamilton County was never proven to be anyone else’s. The case remains open.