Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The Death of Billy the Kid

Episode Date: July 22, 2020

Sure, together Young Guns and Young Guns II form an exhaustive biography of Billy the Kid’s life. But did you know they also contain misleading information? Billy the Kid may not have lived to 100 under an alias after all! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we're Chuck, and this is short stuff, so let's go.

So we're talking today about the death of Billy the Kid, which I thought I learned from a Billy Joel song called The Ballad of Billy the Kid. That seems like an appropriate place to learn it. Great song, but it turns out the Billy Joel stopped at what was to be the hanging of Billy the Kid, and growing up, I thought that's how his story ended. Boy, you were misinformed, buddy.

Yeah, I mean, the song literally stops with the town folk in their kin, like the sea came rolling in, to watch the hanging of Billy the Kid. Then there's one more chorus, and that's it. You know, now that makes me question if whether we really did start the fire. Hey, did you see that video of him

playing the piano on the street the other day, and where he's from? No, no, I did see a tweet that mentioned it in a link that I surmised from the headline what had happened, so yeah, basically. It was pretty neat. Someone was throwing out a piano, and Billy Joel goes over there, and he's playing it,

and he's like, hey, there's a good piano, it's out of tune, but he's got good action, the pedals work, you should somebody should donate this thing. It sounds like he's like riding Dangerfield now. Well, he's not too far off. So, no, it turns out that Billy the Kid, everything I know about Billy the Kid,

I learned from young guns, and Billy the Kid didn't die at all. He went on to live to about 100-something years old in New Mexico, because he escaped, and his death was faked. That's right, was that Emilia, was he Billy? Yes. Yes.

Yeah, and man, that was a great movie. To me, Billy the Kid is Chris Christofferson from the great, great Sam Peckampal movie, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. I never saw that one. Well, there's two versions. See if you can watch the director's cut, because the other one's a mess.

Oh, is that right? It's like a Hurricanes episode. Yeah, and funny enough, you mentioned Hurricane. Bob Dylan is in that movie, and does the soundtrack and score. Who does he play in the movie? Let me guess the undertaker. No, something like that.

I think he's just like a stranger in town that does a couple of things. It's not a big part. Sam Peckampal was a Bob Dylan fan. Sure, he did tons of drugs and was an alcoholic. Sure, but a Bob Dylan fan? Yeah, man. All right, so can we get going on this?

This is a short stuff. We wasted three and a half minutes. Well, we'll just say this, Billy the Kid died. That's that. That's right. I think we should kind of reverse this a little bit and talk a little bit about Billy the Kid first. Yeah, I agree, did you know he was a born New Yorker?

I did, because I'm kind of into these Old West dudes, and I've researched some of them to certain degrees, and he was born William Henry McCarty Jr. And if you've heard the name William Bonney, that was a name he went by a lot. I think you've heard William Bonney a lot more, probably than McCarty. Yeah, for sure.

I actually had never heard Henry McCarty until today. Yeah, and he was orphaned at 14 and became one of the Lincoln County regulators. Yeah, and so regulators will sound familiar. If one, you are a Young Guns fan, or if you're a Nate Dogg and Warren G. fan, either way, the regulators were kind of a group of hired hands for a guy, and hired guns, I believe too,

young ones, for a guy named Tunstall, I believe, down in Lincoln County, New Mexico. And Tunstall was killed from what I understand, fairly unfairly, and that kind of set Billy the Kid and his posse of regulators off on a bit of a killing spree. It started what's known as the Lincoln County War. That's right, and during one of those skirmishes, there was some murders that happened,

and Pat Garrett, who's a sheriff in New Mexico, played by James Coburn in the Bob Dylan movie. Played by Bob Dylan in Young Guns. He was, I haven't seen Young Guns in a long time. That was a big college movie for us. I need to see that again. It was like, it didn't come out when you were in college. Sure.

No. Yeah. I don't think so. Look it up, and I'll keep going. All right, I got nothing else to do. Live corrections. So, Pat Garrett formed a posse, captured Billy, and that part of the Billy Joel song checks out,

and he was sentenced to hang. They captured him at Stinking Springs, New Mexico. Nice. And while he was awaiting his execution, he was kept in a, it wasn't even a prison. It was a room, a locked room, at the Lincoln County Courthouse. I found, this article says two.

I heard, I saw there were five other prisoners. Regardless, there were other prisoners being guarded by some armed men. One of them was an enemy of Billy's named Bob Olinger, and at one point, he took all the rest of the guys over to a hotel across the street to eat, left Billy there under the charge of Deputy James Bell. Man, these are some great old timey, old West names,

aren't they? Oh yeah, when was Young Guns out? 88. So, if you were in college at age 17, then I'm impressed. I said it was a big movie in college. I didn't say it came out in college. I asked you if it came out in college and you said, oh yeah.

I thought you mean, was it out in college as if it came out after 1996? Nobody, no one listening to that thought that that is what I meant. No, it came out in high school, but we watched the heck out of it in college. Oh, whatever. I should have said that.

So, James Bell is watching Billy. Billy says, hey, I got to use the bathroom. Can you take me out to the outhouse? He said, I really gotta go. He shackled, his arms and legs are shackled. Take him out, use the bathroom. On the way back in, they're going up the steps. Billy's in front and the account I read

was that he ducked around a blind corner, got his hands out and then smashed this guy in the head with his arm irons. The guy went, what? Billy pulled his gun from his holster. The other guy's holster, yeah. Of course, Billy didn't have a gun on him. Why would they do that?

He's like, why didn't I think they were using that first? They were like, well, he's in handcuffs, just go ahead and keep his gun on him. And so he pulls the guy's gun on him and the guy tries to run and Billy shoots him dead in the back. And so now, roughly, we reached the end of the Billy Joel song,

which I think is a good time for an ad break. What do you think? Sure. We'll be right back. Varmints. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends

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on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck, we're back. And Billy the Kid has just shot the deputy that's in charge of watching him. Another deputy runs back, or runs back from the hotel. Olinger. Okay, Olinger apparently is, he's running

and he hears his name and looks up. And Billy the Kid's got Olinger's own rifle on him and shoots him dead like a dog in the street. So Billy the Kid's killed two people now. He's out of his shackles and he grabs a horse and hightails it out of town for a life on the run that would last about four more months. Yeah, that's the only dispute I have with that account

is it supposedly took him about an hour to get out of his leg shackles with an axe. And I guess no one just came up there. When Olinger came to find him, Billy actually yelled down, look up, oh boy, and see what you get. Wow. And that's the last words that he heard. Wow.

So Billy's on the run at this point. And obviously, Pat Garrett has a B in his bonnet to go get him again. Well, sure, he's the sheriff of Lincoln County and Billy the Kid, who's become one of the most notorious bandits in the country, has just escaped out from under his watch. So yeah.

And there's a reward. Well, sure, there's a reward too. So Pat Garrett had this history of lying in wait and ambushing people and shooting them whether they were ready to shoot back or not, killing them very frequently. He'd done it before and he went to go look for Billy the Kid. Like we said, he made his way as an outlaw,

like a double outlaw by this point on the lamb for a good four months before he was caught up with I think still in New Mexico in July of 1881. And he apparently was staying at the house or nearby the house of a friend named Peter Maxwell. And Peter Maxwell had a younger sister that Billy the Kid was sweet on. And Peter Maxwell didn't like

that Billy the Kid was sweet on her. And by sweet on her, I mean that they were having extramarital sexual relations. And Peter didn't like that because he was planning on marrying off his sister to a rich land bearer nearby. And Billy the Kid was kind of toying with that possibility. So Peter Maxwell is in this kind of mindset

allegedly when Pat Garrett shows up. That's right, Garrett shows up. This is it. Well, he doesn't show up at night, but eventually night falls. And well, actually maybe he did show up because supposedly he found him asleep. Pete Maxwell that is.

And Garrett very presumptuously goes into his room and sits down next to him and says, Petey, wake up, wake up. And then he wakes up and he says, where's that Billy the Kid? And as the story goes, and we're gonna poke holes at it in a second. Right then Billy the Kid actually walks into that room,

that dog gone room and has a gun and a knife because he had just went to cut some meat off. He was hungry, I guess after some, he had post-coital hunger pains. Sure. And carved some meat off and was from a yearling supposedly and had just eaten a little bit. And so he has a knife and a gun

and can't really see in the dark and starts going, Quienas, Quienas, Spanish for who is it? Who's there? And Maxwell, or I'm sorry, Pat Garrett supposedly recognizes the voice as Billy in the dark and shoots him dead. Yeah. And I just wanted to make sure we're all on the same page

here, a yearling is a young horse. Who's after some horse meat to eat? That's right. So this was the death as far as Pat Garrett said of Billy the Kid. But like we said before, Pat Garrett already kind of had developed a reputation of ambushing people, of lying in wait, catching them off guard

when they least expected it. And even in this story that he told, this is the official line that Pat Garrett told in the biography he wrote about Billy the Kid, that that was how he died. But even that, which is kind of on the edges of fair, is disputed as probably untrue in that the truth is probably involves even more

of an ambush and more surprise, and even less of Billy the Kid being able to defend himself than that. Yeah, I think the other version is that he was actually ambushed and set up by Maxwell because he didn't like him being with Paulita, his little sister. And basically said, hey man, it's all going down here

and here's your chance to come over to Fort Sumner and take care of this kid once and for all. And so he did so. And a lot of people say that's how it really went down. Yeah, that he tipped off Pat Garrett, right? Yeah, and that he in fact even changed his age, who was, he was supposedly like 18 or 19 when he was shot dead and said, no, no, no,

he was really 21. So I didn't have this extra judicial killing of some kid. He was a full grown man and it was just happenstance that he happened to walk in the room where I was sitting there with a loaded gun. Yeah, and the other people historians think like probably Billy the kid didn't walk in with a gun and a knife looking for some yearling meat.

He probably walked in fully unarmed expecting Pete Maxwell's sister to be waiting for him there. And instead Pat Garrett and his gun was waiting for him there. So he probably was fully ambushed and killed, murdered, I guess it's the other way to put it. And that that's probably how Billy the kid died. Either way, he died at the other end of Pat Garrett's gun that much we know about.

Right, even though there were and have been rumors over the years that he was in cahoots with Pat Garrett and he let him escape and that he lived to be a ripe old age. There've been exhumations and there've been DNA tests over the years. Obviously nothing's ever come back with any sort of conclusion. Young guns seem to be pretty concluding.

I got a little cherry on top too, if you're interested. Let's hear it. You know that very famous picture of Billy the kid? Uh-huh. Sort of one of two, although the second one they aren't quite sure it's him, but there's that one very, very famous ferro type which is a picture on like a metal plate.

That photo, that ferro type, the original plate was bought for $2.3 million by none other than William Koch. Who's that? The Koch brothers. Oh yeah, I forgot he's super into like old West stuff. Apparently. Yeah, I forgot about that. Well, that's pretty interesting.

Quite a cherry on top. I'm glad the millionaire gets what he wants in the end. As for Garrett, he was originally denied the $500 reward. A bunch of the cities felt bad for him and raised $7,000 and then a year later, there was I think an injunction or a vote or something where he actually finally got the reward. So in today's dollars, supposedly if that all checks out,

he got about $200 and something thousand dollars for killing Billy the Kid. He's like that barista from Starbucks who refused service to that woman who wouldn't wear a mask. Now they're rich, right? Yep. Man, I don't serve anyone coffee without a mask. Say he's some money.

There you go. We'll start to go find me for Chuck, everybody. Well, that's it for short stuff, right Chuck? That's right. Giddy up. Giddy up.