The Confessionals - 307: Billy The Kid: The Man Who Died Twice

Episode Date: January 24, 2021

Did Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid?It was a moonlit night in Ft. Sumner, NM when history tells us that Sheriff Pat Garrett shot down the notorious outlaw Billy “the Kid”. Newspapers across the country quickly reported that the Kid was dead and Garrett quickly put the body in the ground. But rumors spread that the Kid had survived and the testimony of Garrett’s posse was contradictory about how, exactly, the shooting had gone down. Nevertheless, without evidence, the story of the heroic Sheriff stood for almost 70 years. Then, in 1950, an old man from Hico, TX petitioned the governor of New Mexico for a pardon for crimes he committed as Billy the Kid. No one took him seriously, and yet the old man was an exact match in physical characteristics and knew intimate details about the Kid’s life. He also knew details about the fateful shooting the night Garrett claimed to have shot him that had been erased by history. Details, for example, that Garrett had killed his very drunk bearded half-Mexican partner, a claim that has only recently been verified by modern research.It has been said that the living write history and not the dead, but when one returns from the dead, so to speak, that which was lost to history is restored. This is the true story of Billy the Kid, complete with new evidence that he lived to a ripe old age and died a free man.THE STORYIn 1882 the notorious outlaw Jesse Evans, a childhood friend of Billy the Kid and a participant in the Lincoln County War, walked out of jail after serving a sentence for killing a Texas ranger. Jesse walked out of prison a free man and disappeared, never to be heard from again. Never, that is, until 1949 when Jesse came out of hiding after almost 60 years to claim an inheritance left to him by his brother.In the course of proving his identity to a court, Jesse told some amazing stories of his time when he was an outlaw but his biggest revelation of all was that his good friend Billy the Kid was still alive. Jesse led a young lawyer named William Morrison to an old man named not William H. Bonney but William H. Roberts who after some consideration finally agreed to come forward and reveal himself as Billy the Kid. He agreed to this on one condition- that the lawyer helps him obtain the pardon he was promised by the Governor but never received so he could die a free man. You see, Billy the Kid was still wanted for murder and was condemned to hang. To reveal himself was to risk arrest and death. This was a risk that William H. Roberts was willing to take. He sat down with Mr. Morrison and told his story.This book contains that story. It is the one true autobiography of Billy the Kid. A story that aside from some definite highlights and adventures that one would expect from the Kid, was remarkable normal and focused on his skill breaking horses as much or as more as his skill as a gunslinger. Billy the Kid was, in fact, just a gifted young cowhand who found himself juxtaposed against corrupt officials and lawmen at what became a key moment in American History.Before one dismisses Mr. Roberts it should be considered that 5 living acquaintances of Billy the Kid, aside from Mr. Evans who revealed him, were willing to sign legal affidavits that Mr. Roberts was the man they knew as Billy the Kid. Further, the new photographic comparison shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that they were the same man. Mr. Roberts' story became the inspiration for the opening scene in the hit movie "Young Guns II" starring Emilio Estevez as Billy the Kid. Also, Consider that Pat Garrett was denied his reward for killing the kid for many months and that only a special act of the legislature allowed him to finally receive it. All of this and more is contained in this book. Thanks to Mr. Morrison each of us can now pull up a chair, sit down across from Billy the Kid, and listen as he shares his story.Check out Daniel Edwards book below: https://www.amazon.com/Billy-Kid-Autobiography-Daniel-Edwards-ebook/dp/B00P44T42M BECOME A MEMBER AND GET ADDITIONAL SHOWS: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/joinSPONSORS:GET FEALS: https://feals.com/tonyGET SIMPLISAFE TODAY: https://simplisafe.com/confessionalsGet Emergency Food Supplies: http://www.preparewiththeconfessionals.comGet Beard Oil: https://bit.ly/2FbOhN5CONNECT WITH US:Website: www.theconfessionalspodcast.comEmail: [e-mail] Community: Text "YUP" to 844-215-0819 Subscribe to the Newsletter: https://www.theconfessionalspodcast.com/the-newsletter SOCIAL MEDIA:Subscribe to our YouTube: https://bit.ly/2TlREaI Show Instagram: theconfessionalspodcastTony's NEW Instagram: rage_against_dystopiaMeWe: https://mewe.com/i/tonymerkel5Gab.com: https://gab.com/TonyMerkelFacebook: www.facebook.com/TheConfessionalsPodcast Twitter: @TConfessionals Tony's Twitter: @tony_merkelSHOW INTRO: Show Intro INSTRUMENTAL: www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyub39AXxUw Show Intro FREE DOWNLOAD: https://bit.ly/2HxNcw3

Thought you lost me. You weren't kidding, were you? Charles Fielin, sir. Stackpole, McPhee, Lasseter, and Feelein. Attorney's at law. How you doing? So, what is it I can do for you, sir? I'm died.

I don't want to go. I want to be pardoned. Pardoned? For what? For the killing of 21 men. I was promised to pardon. 70 years and three months. ago and you tell him that you're bringing in Rushie Bill Roberts.

Hey, Lee is William Antrim, also known as William H. Bonnie. Well, William H. Bonnie? Billy is Billy the Kid. Billy the Kid was shot and killed by Pat Garrett. Everybody knows that. It's common knowledge. This was all circulating around the base that a giant had been killed, but no one was supposed to talk about it. Each up underneath the door, curl up to grab it, and then disappear. When he came over to me, dude, he slithered over to me.

A giant comes out of the cave and they're all frozen. And he starts running and firing at this giant. Well, the giant moves. He's got a spear in one hand and he's running really fast and spears, Dan holds him up like this. Somebody else, shoot him in the face, shoot him in the face. They basically decapitated. over and there are two.

Bush and I touch air because I know I'm seeing a monster. Billy the kid, one of the most notorious outlaws of the Old West. Known to be deadly with a pistol, he also had an uncanny ability to escape after being captured. During his final escape from jail, Billy killed two deputies, Deputy Bell, which he later said he regretted, and Deputy Ollinger, who he did not care for. Hello, Bob! In fact, most didn't care for Bob Ollinger.

Very few tears were shed the day he died. As the story goes, almost three months after his escape, Garrett, according to rumors that Billy was in the vicinity of Fort Sumner, left Lincoln with two deputies on July 14, 1881. He wanted to question Pete Maxwell, a friend of Billy's. According to Pat Garrett, Billy entered the room and failed to recognize him due to the poor lighting. Drawing his revolver and backing away, Billy asked in Spanish,

Who is it? Who is it? According to Pat Garrett, recognizing Billy's voice, Garrett drew his revolver and fired twice. The first bullet struck Billy in the chest, just above the heart, while the second missed. When Garrett's two deputies entered into the room, they both said, you shot the wrong man. This isn't Billy the Kid. An argument started. Finally, the deputies agreed that it was Billy the Kid. They rushed to bury him and get him in the ground as quickly as possible.

That's what Pat Garrett says anyway. The story really doesn't make any sense when you think about it. Reward money was collected. and Garrett went on to be known as the man that killed Billy the Kid. For many years, there was whispers in Lincoln County that Garrett had shot a Mexican ranch hand and passed him off as Billy. There was many sightings of Billy the Kid after his quote-unquote death. The strange part is it were still issuing warrants for his capture,

even after Pat Garrett had claimed to have shot and killed the kid. Over the years, many people have come forward and said, I was Billy the Kid. They were quickly dismissed and disregarded as liars. Only one has really stood out. Brushy Bill Roberts from Hico, Texas. Not only did he look like the kid, he had the same physical attributes. Facial recognition software said there was over a 90% match that this was Billy the Kid. Not only looking like Billy the Kid, all the same wounds that Billy the Kid said he had, this guy had.

People who rode with Billy the Kid sat down with him in 1950. There was a total of five. And all five who sat with him privately said afterwards, that's the Billy the Kid I remember. That guy is Billy the Kid. What really happened on July 14, 1881? Welcome to the show, everyone. being here tonight. Get a great show plan for you tonight. I'm your host, Wes. I normally host Sasquatch Chronicles. If you're into Bigfoot, definitely come and check it out. Sasquatch Chronicles.

Tony was kind enough to allow me to come host the show tonight, and I've been bugging him for a long time to do this show, and I think Tony thought nobody would ever listen to it, and I told him he's wrong, so I hope I prove him wrong tonight. But, you know, Billy the Kid, what a confession, coming forward and saying, I'm Billy the Kid, and many people have done it over the years, and many people were quickly proven to be liars. And I was saying in the intro there, Brushy Bill really stands out to me because he knew very small, intimate details of the Lincoln County War. He knew people, places, he knew the layout of the place where Pat Garrett shot, or claimed

to have shot Billy the Kid, was Pete Maxwell's house. It was this huge mansion, and it used to be a fort. and I believe it was 20 rooms and Brushy Bill Roberts knew the whole layout of the place he could tell you where every room was at in that house and the house didn't exist in 1950. So either he was there or he had taken a tour or something because this guy knew the whole layout of the Pete Maxwell house.

Also with the courthouse where Billy had been kept. You know in the intro I talked about him shooting Deputy Bell and Deputy Ollinger. Brushy Bill Roberts explained the law. whole layout of that place. Now I believe the courthouse and the jail, which is one and the same, had burnt down and they rebuilt it. And so what you see today isn't exactly how it was laid out back in Billy's Day. Well, in 1950, Bershey Bill's telling you the exact layout of the courthouse. You know, what room, you go up the stairs, you turn left here, you go right here, and he's telling exactly how the original courthouse was laid out. So either he was there or he was Billy

the kid. And there's a lot of mounting evidence. For me, I think it's been proven that Burshey Bill probably was Billy the Kid. But I encourage you to do your own research. Kind of look into it if you're into this subject. But either way, I hope you enjoy the show tonight. My guest is Daniel Edwards. And I know he won't call himself an expert on this subject, but I'll go ahead and call him an expert on this subject. And he wrote a book. If you go to Amazon, look up Billy the kid and autobiography and kind of has that old tin type picture on the on the front cover the author again is daniel edwards and he kind of he took over where morrison left off um and if that makes no sense to you we'll kind of explain it as a show goes on um but he looked into a lot of the

details of what brushy bill was saying and everything he was saying was actually true uh so i really hope you guys enjoy the show tonight i want to welcome I'm Daniel Edwards to the show. Dan, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it, West. Thanks for having me. Yeah, I really appreciate you being here, Dan. You know, you and I were talking before we went on the air, and I was telling you, you know, when I was a little boy, I'm probably, I don't know, this is probably 1984. And I'm writing a book report on all the different outlaws of the Old West, you know, Billy the kid, Jesse James, the Dalton's. I mean, I'm going down the list. And I'm fascinated by the Old West. you know, these old outlaws. And I met my grandmother one time, only once in my life. And I was telling her about this book report. Now, my dad was born in 28. So he was already an old man by the time I was a small boy. And my grandmother, again, she would have been around during this time. And she lived in New Mexico. And she told me, you can't put Billy the kid in the same category as like a Jesse James. And to me, they were all the same. And I remember, I looked up at her and I said, well, what do you mean? And she said, Billy the kid wasn't an outlaw. He was a good boy. And I said, well, why do you say that? She goes, I've met Billy the kid on a few occasions. I lived in New Mexico. And what you're reading in that history book is wrong. He was actually a really good boy. And it just shocked me. She said that. And I got to the point about Pat Garrett, you know, shooting and killing Billy the kid. And she just shook her head and looked at me. And she said, Pat Garrett didn't shoot.

Billy the kid. And I said, what do you mean, Pat Garrett didn't shoot Billy the kid? She told, Pat Garrett was a damn liar. And, you know, so I just kind of wish I could go back in time and talk with her and ask her more questions. You know, she was kind of this old Native American lady. And she said that Billy was very kind to people. He was very kind, especially to the Mexicans. At a time when people weren't kind to Mexicans or Native Americans, Billy was very kind to them. he would bring them food he would go out hunting come eat with the family then leave all the rest of meat for them and so they loved them and they protected him and you know at the end of young guns too there's a scene where it actually opens up with it and then ends with it it's an old man on the side

of a road and he's talking to morrison this this guy and he's telling him you know i'm i'm billy the kid yeah i have my scars and they don't really explain the old man they don't really explain how billy got out of the situation. It's a very vague scene that they do at the end of Young Guns, too. But I've been fascinated by the subject. And again, I recommend that people go out and get your book. Billy the Kid and autobiography by Daniel Edwards. For the audience, go to Amazon. Definitely get yourself a copy. I think by the end of the book, at the very least, you'll have more questions and answers. And I'm convinced that Brushy Bill probably was Billy the Kid. And I know you are too. but what got you into writing this book?

Well, you mentioned it. You know, young guns. I've been a fan of the Wild West since I was a little kid. And it's funny, I mean, I appreciate you sharing your story because it resonates with me. My grandfather, I think, was born in 1907. And so, and I'm 47. So here in 2020, so 100 years ago, right? So I was, my granddad was the baby.

My dad was the baby and I was the baby. And so, you know, you end up going back to where, you know, that's how I have a grandfather that's born in 1907. So I've always been into the Wild West, watching the Lone Ranger in that. And, you know, like you, Billy the Kid, you know, I thought he was an outlaw. He's a bad guy. And as I saw Young Guns, and I started looking into the story, you know, I was just fascinated by it. I mean, and I think what your grandmother said is really what caught me where Brushy Bill says, I wasn't no outlaw.

I never robbed banks or stagecoaches. And so, you know, as somebody, a modern person in the modern era, we don't make those kind of distinctions, right? Like, to us, you know, a bad guy is a bad guy. If you wrestle cattle, you're a bad guy. But back then, an outlaw was somebody that robbed a bank and robbed a stagecoach. You know, it's not when you're on open prairie and you butcher a cow that may or may not be branded, you know. It's a different set of norms back then. It's a really different society. And so anyway, that's what got me into it is young guns where,

I thought Brushy was, I thought Billy the Kid was killed by Pat Garrett, you know, and here we have Emilio O. Estevez looking like he's about 400 years old, claiming to be Billy the Kid. So anyway, it's great story. And that's what sucked me into it. Yeah, and there's so much to this brushy bill account. And so much of what he says is actually true. And it's stuff where you almost have to kind of go look it up and go, well, how did he know that? And, you know, with Billy the kid, the problem is you capture him. and he always gets away. He always seems to have this weird, uncanny ability to escape. And so I'm sure it drove Pat Garrett and other people who were searching for him at the time.

Probably drove them crazy. The weird part is after Pat Garrett said, oh, I shot Billy the kid and killed him, buried him, and here's how it happened. They were still issuing arrest warrants for Billy well after he was quote unquote dead. But, you know, Billy must have known because he had escaped. so many times and made a fool out of guys like Pat Garrett and people who captured him, there wasn't going to be a capture this time that were going to shoot him. He must have known that. And Pat Garrett, you know, he was also known to shoot people in the back. He was an ambush,

surprise attack. There were several people that he shot. He thought were Billy the kid, and they ended up being someone else. So he didn't have a great track record as far as shooting people. No one ever seems to mention that. You know, back in the old West, when you shot an outlaw, what's the first thing they all did? They propped the bodies up and took pictures, let people come see it, kind of almost like a trophy. I mean, they did it with Jesse James. Anytime someone got shot, they propped them up, especially if it was an outlaw. It was kind of like a hunter shooting a trophy and posing with a picture of it. Billy the kid was the biggest trophy. you would think he would want to take a picture with the body.

I mean, it sounds morbid now when we think about it. But back then, that's the way it was. But Pat Garrett couldn't wait to bury him. Couldn't wait to get him in the ground. Why do you think that is? Yeah, and there's no question about it. And what, you know, as I started getting into the story, Wes, the first thing that kind of, again, I started just kind of vaguely interested.

I'm not obsessed with Billy the kid. I didn't really care if he had lived or died. I mean, not to be callous about it, but, you know, it's just interesting. But what really got me interested as I started finding things that history had either missed or overlooked or de-emphasized. I mean, you mentioned, you know, Pat Garrett shot three men from ambush without warning. And that's something that I think, candidly, I'm the first one to articulate in that way. And it's just something that jumped out to me as I was researching that, you know, he killed Charlie Bodry. and then he killed, I'm sorry, he killed Tom O'Falliard first, then he killed Charlie Boudry.

And if you read the disparate accounts in a historical record, you know, there's many where they'll say, you know, warning was given. We gave warning. But Bresci Bill says warning was not given, right? And so you got to choose who you believe, but that pattern of hiding in the bushes and jumping out and shooting people from the darkness without warning is something that Pat Garrett, you know, did multiple times. And I don't think anyone really keyed on that before. So that was just like an example of something that Brushy Bill said that as I read the, I guess because I heard it from Brushy first, as I'm reading the historical record, it maybe jumped out at me, whereas it wouldn't jump out to just a casual Billy the Kid researcher. But the other big thing is the body looked like a dead Mexican. And there's an article from five days after the shooting in the local paper, the Las Cruces Sun Times that said Billy the kid was lingering at Fort Sumner because he had friends days.

and he was staining his skin brown and putting his skin through a coloring process to make himself look like a Mexican, and he had grown a beard. So this is the first way they tried to explain the fact that the body looked like a dead Mexican. That article has been completely ignored by history. So if you talk to anybody, they'll say, oh no, Billy the Kid was killed by Garrett. Everybody knew him. They recognized the body, and it looked exactly like Billy the Kid. It was Billy the Kid. They don't say, well, it was Billy the Kid, but he had disguised himself as a Mexican. They threw that misdirection out very early. They're like, well, we don't really need this because nobody is really talking about

what the body looked like the body. Tell everybody, no, it looked exactly like Billy the Kid. So which is it? And why would the local paper five days after the shooting say he was literally staining his skin brown? I mean, that's a pretty drastic step to take. But it was their attempt to explain that the body, you know, look like a Mexican because that was the first problem they had after they shot.

So they dang sure didn't want to take a picture of it, right? Because you're going to see a picture of a dead Mexican with a mustache as opposed to Billy the kid. Yeah, and there's a lot of questions. There's a lot of questions that I have, especially when he start to really dissect this whole thing and look at old records. Like you mentioned in the newspaper talking how he was dyeing his skin. What I'd like to do is kind of back up for people who don't know this story. I'm sure everyone out there has seen young guns too. there's a scene and it looks like it's from the 50s and this guy pulls up in a car and he's talking to

this old man that's obviously Billy the kid, Amelia Estevez in the movie. Can we back up and can he kind of start from who was the guy in the car and how did Brushy Bill come about? Because he kind of came out of nowhere. Yeah, great question. Because this is really the core of the whole story. So the man in the car was a probate attorney by the name of William Vincent Morrison. And Mr. Morrison was a court-appointed probate attorney that had been assigned to work on a case to settle an estate in North Dakota. And the gentleman who was the inheritor of the property in North Dakota, his brother had died and left him some property, was a guy named Joe Hines who lived up in Pensacola, Florida. So the court assigns Morrison. Morrison goes to talk to this guy. and he was using the name Joe Hines.

And during the course of conversation, Morrison finds out that this guy is really Jesse Evans, the notorious outlaw. If you ever saw, I think it's Tombstone. And I've said in other interviews mistakenly, it was in Young Guns, but I know it's in Tombstone. I just, you know, you speak, you misspeak every now and then. So in the movie Tombstone, they have the boys,

you know, Curly Bill Brocious and Johnny Ringo and all those guys with the red sashes. And that's the boys. Well, that was a real gang. and Jesse Evans was the leader of that gang. And he and Billy the kid supposedly knew each other in Silver City before the Lincoln County War. And then they both fought in the Lincoln County War. Jesse was on the other side of it. But it's well established that he and Billy the Kid were good friends.

In 1883, I think it is Jesse Evans killed a Texas Ranger, went to jail, escaped from jail a year later, and disappeared. No one ever knew what happened to Jesse Evans. So here as Morrison's interviewing Joe Hines, he finds out that this is actually Jesse Evans, the notorious outlaw. And since he knew Billy the Kid, Morrison tells him, you know, I just so happened to be related to Pete Maxwell, who owned the house where Pat Garrett killed Billy the kid. And Morrison was into genealogy. So the Maxwell family, very prominent family that opened one of the first trading post west of the Mississippi. There's a whole island up in Illinois somewhere that's like famous for the Maxwell family. And then there's a guy, Lucy and Bonaparte Maxwell, who's like the patriarch of the Maxwell family, that Morrison was a descendant of.

Well, another descendant of that same guy was Pete Maxwell, who owned the house where Billy the kid was killed. And sorry if I'm getting into too much detail here. No, no. Keep going. Morrison says to Evans, wow, well, you know, I'm related to Pete Maxwell, who owned the house where Pat Garrett killed Billy the kid. And Jesse Evans says, laughed at him and said, Pat never killed Billy, not in 1881, not ever. And so Morrison's like, what are you talking about? He goes, no, he's still alive. Me and Jim McDaniels see him every now and then.

He lives in Texas. But Evans would not reveal who he was. So anyway, long story short, Morrison does a lot of research, finds out that there's this guy in Hico, Texas, named Ali Pleasant Robert, supposedly, that is Billy the Kid. So he starts this writing campaign to say, hey, you know, I heard you have information on Billy the Kid.

He's a lawyer, right? So he's not going to come right out and say, you know, hey, you're Billy the Kid. But he says, hey, you know, some folks have said, I should talk to you because, you know, you might have information on Billy the Kid. So they go back and forth with this dance of Morrison gaining Billy's trust. Finally, Morrison makes the trip from El Paso out to see him in Hico, Texas. And the story's in the book.

But basically, once Morrison gains his trust, initially, Brushy denies it and says, I'm not Billy the Kid. Billy Kid was my half-brother, you know, but he lives in Mexico, whatever. But the reason he was doing that was one, Billy the Kid was wanted for murder and still had a death sentence hanging over him. Two, his wife was there and he didn't want her to know that he was Billy the Kid. So after Morrison, kind of, he finds out that Morrison's a lawyer. He says, come back tomorrow. I want to tell you some more stuff. And Morrison's like, I kind of need to get on the road.

But if it's important, I guess I'll stop by on my way out of town. He goes, yeah, that'd be great. So Morrison comes back the next day and Brushy had sent his wife to do an errand so he could talk freely. And he says, I'm Billy the kid. He goes, if you help me get the pardon that Lou Wallace promised me in 1879, now this is 1950, a destitute old cowboy living in a shack in Hico, Texas. He says, you know, I'm Billy the kid. Lou Wallace promised me a pardon in 1879. I never got it.

I think I deserve it before I die. If you'll help me get it, I'll tell you whatever you want to know. And then he proceeds to tell him intimate details of the Lincoln County War, things that historians didn't even know about. Like, you know, John Chisham's a big cattle baron out there. and he had a daughter supposedly named Sally Chisholm. Well, historians up until the 1970s thought that Sally Chisholm was his daughter, but Brushy Bill Roberts in 1950, again, living in Hico, Texas, way far away from Lincoln, New Mexico, says, no, Sally was John's niece, not his daughter. And how did he know that? And he knew that there was black soldiers during the Battle of Lincoln, which everybody, historians would say, oh, there were no black soldiers back then. There were black soldiers back then. It's in the court marshal of Colonel Nathan M. Dudley. And you can read in there and see all, all, kinds of obscure things that happened during the Lincoln County War that Brushy Bill Roberts and Hico, Texas knew that no one knew, not even historians knew at the time. So anyway, that's kind of how Morrison, but Morrison, one of the conditions of Brushy sharing his story with Morrison is he wanted no

publicity, zero publicity. And if you know the facts of what happened with Brushy Bill Roberts, there was no publicity until the governor released it about a month before he died. So he went in front of the governor. The governor turned it into a media circus, and the governor's the one that put out that this guy's claimed to be Billy the Kid. Brushy Bill never one time went after publicity. And I actually have all of the letters between Morrison and Robert, some of which have never been seen. And it says very clearly in those letters, you know, I don't want publicity. I just want to die a free man. So anyway, obviously, as I get into all that stuff, I got really interested in the story and wanted to help tell it to a new generation. Yeah, and I'm glad you did. And I hope people

go out and get the book, Billy the Kid and Autobiography, Brushy Bill Roberts by Daniel Edwards. You know, in the book, there's a lot of things I want to get to regarding what Burschie said, because he did say a lot of things that he either he was there at the time or he knew Billy the kid or, I mean, because he knew way too much information. Before we get into that, I want to ask you about Burshey Bill's wife. Do you think that she knew who, who Brushy Bill actually was. Because there's a lot of really weird stories in Hico, how in Hiko, Texas, when Brushy Bill or Roberts would walk down the street with his wife,

he wouldn't really hold his wife's hand. She either walked, you know, 20 or 30 feet in front of them or 20 or 30 feet behind them. And from that behavior, it kind of makes me think he thought he was going to get shot. But do you think that she knew who he actually was? There's a, there's a quote in the book where she says, she basically says to her, he's like, honey, after the governor makes a big mess of it and tells the whole world that he's Billy the kid, he basically goes to her and says, honey, I'm sorry, like, you know, I'm sorry for all the bad things. He didn't want to tell his wife he's a murderer, right? And she said, she said, I ain't quitting you. I knew you as Bill, or I may not have known you as Billy, but I suspicioned it. So, you know, they have that old country way of talking, like, I suspicioned you as Billy the kid. So, so. So, so. Anyway, but yeah, I've heard those stories. I mean, I've heard the anecdotal stories about how, you know, the family of a retired U.S.

Marshall was walking down the street and pulled his gun on him and said, that's Billy Bonnie. I know him anywhere, and Brushy runs around the corner. And his family, his grandkids, thought he was just crazy. You know, he's got dementia and stuff. But apparently that's a real story that actually happened where, you know, he pulled his pistol on Brushy and said, come here, Billy, Bonnie. I know you anywhere. And so, you know, it's hard to prove those stories, but they're out there for sure. But one thing that is documented and verifiable are the things that he told Morrison. One, Morrison would have no way of knowing these things. And Brushy absolutely would

have no way of knowing these things. And yet he knew them. And in my book, I was able to verify a lot of stuff by connecting some of the dots and some of the more mundane things that Brushy said that happened to be true. Yeah, and I would like to talk a little bit about that. It is fascinating. You know, I think there's a thing with Americans, especially with the Old West, we don't want our heroes to die. And, you know, we think of like Jesse James. He, I mean, he was a serial killer and a thief, basically. But Billy was very different. You know, the situation with Billy was very different. He didn't rob people. He didn't, and it never clicked at the time when my grandmother said that. She said, who's a very different. He was very different. You know, the situation with Billy was very different. He didn't rob people. He didn't. And it never clicked at the time when my grandmother said that. She said, he said, he said, he said, he said, he said, He's a very sweet, kind boy, and he was very respectful to, because, you know, I don't think at that time too many people cared for the Native Americans or the Mexicans or, and he was always, she said he was always very polite, very kind, very giving. And it's different than when you read the history books, especially at that time when I was reading it. What are some of the

things that Billy talked about regarding the Lincoln County War? or Brushy Bill talked about that he shouldn't have known or would not have known unless he was Billy the kid. Yeah. Yeah, great question. Well, I mean, the first part, the first thing is he says that Colonel Dudley came in with black soldiers. So the battle of Lincoln, I don't know if your listeners are familiar with it. But basically, in Lincoln County, this is the era of cattle barons. And there was corruption all through the territory at the time. It was before New Mexico was a state. And there was an Irishman named, there was. There's Dolan and Murphy, the two Irishmen that ran the county store, the store, basically, the general store. And what they would do is they would sell cattle to the army, but they, you know, it was all corrupt, right? So they'd rustle the cattle and then sell them to the army and then steal them back and then take the money. They were absolutely corrupt. The sheriff was in on the corruption, and they had a lawyer named Alexander McSween.

And they got, McSweene basically was a good guy and broke ranks from the Murphy Dolan faction. So then you have this Englishman named John Tunstall who comes in Lincoln and opens a store in competition with what they called back then the house, the Murphy Dolan factory. The house always wins, right? You've heard that. So, you know, we're the house. The house always wins. You're not going to let some Englishmen come in and open a general store across the street from ours, you know, and compete with us for business. We're going to have you murdered. So that's really the genesis. And then you had John Chisholm involved. So basically all these factions in Lincoln County fighting over stolen cattle and all kinds of stuff. blows up into the Lincoln County War. Well, Billy the kid worked for Tunstall, and basically, there's all kinds of legal maneuvers. One interesting thing, well, I'll get to that in a second,

if that's okay. But one interesting thing is, you know, there was badges on both sides of the Lincoln War. So, like, I'm going to get a judge to, you know, write you up, and then you get a judge to write me up. It's like, well, you know, who's right? You know, we got judges on both sides saying that you're a criminal. No, you're a criminal. So it was really a mess, and so much so that the president of the United States, Ulysses, as a grant, withdrew, remove the governor and put in Lou Wallace, the general, to oversee the territory. So it's a complete disaster. So the Murphy Dolan faction gets a writ against Tunstool to bring his allegedly stolen property, which really wasn't stolen property, it was his own property, into Lincoln so it could be, you know, the matter could be settled in court. And so Billy the kid saddles up with a couple other guys, and they're riding to Lincoln to turn in the, the, Tunstall's property and a posse comes to capture the property. But it was a posse comprised of Jesse Evans for one, Bob Ollinger, who was a bully U.S. Marshal and a bunch of outlaws. So he had a lot of criminals in this supposedly law-abiding posse trying to get Tunsel's property. So they ambush him, Billy the kid and the guys run off. Tunstall stays and they shoot Tunstall in cold blood, take all of

his property. They actually posed him with his horse because he was known to like fine horses. they posed him like he was having sex with his horse, which is pretty messed up. But, you know, here's a dead guy, and you're going to pose him with his dead horse. They shot his horse just because they're mean, and then posed the two of them like they were having sex. I mean, these are twisted, sick people. And those are the guys that killed Billy the Kid's boss. Well, Billy the Kid and Dick Brewer, who is the foreman of the Tunstall Ranch, go to a judge and get sworn in his constables to bring the killers of John Tunstall to justice. Now remember, the killers of John Tunstall were a posse that were appointed by the sheriff.

So now you have one judge making Billy the kid a police officer. So people don't think of that, but Billy was a deputy constable under Dick Brewer. He had a badge. That's where in young guns is like regulators mount up. You know, these were, they were going to regulate justice. They were law enforcement. And so at least for a little while, until the corrupt powers of the territory got a hold of the newspapers and branded them as outlaws and all this stuff.

So it was an information war for sure. and a lot of crazy stuff going on. But all that culminated really in the battle of Lincoln, which is where Billy the kid and his group comes into town. They're at McSweene's house, and the Murphy Dolan factions are in town, and they're fighting one another, and Billy the kid and his crew are winning

until the army comes from Fort Stanton to reinforce Dolan's people. And so he comes in with Gatlin guns and cannons, and Billy the kid and his friends are in this house. You remember the scene from Young Guns where... Yeah, absolutely. They set it on fire. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and they throw Emilio Estevez out in the trunk. It's not exactly how it happened, but it's a great scene in the movie.

But what Brushy Bill said, he knew all of the details of that. He knew the names, he knew the details, he knew everything about that. And then he said, if it wasn't for those black soldiers, we would have won. Nobody knew that, that there were African-American soldiers in Colonel Stanton's regiment. And it only came out in the court-martial documents. I mean, you're talking 1879, right? I mean, this is now 1950. no one had access to those court martial records.

Nobody even thought to look in those court martial records. And here's a destitute old cowboy living in Hico, Texas, no internet, no library, no nothing, who said, yeah, if it wasn't for those black soldiers, we'd have won that day. So it's, again, minor thing, but a major thing, right? Like, how do you know that? Then there's a lot of other little things in the book where he describes intimate details in a lot of ways. And I don't know if you want me to get into this stuff like where he said he had a house in San Patricio. Yeah, please do, yeah, because it is fascinating.

because he talks about a lot of things. And like I said, that didn't, I don't think they existed in 1950 or you would almost have to be there at the time to know what he's talking about. Yeah, and remember, the other side is Billy the kid is dead because Pat Garrett said so. The deputy, the people that were there that night all disagree with what happened. Supposedly there was a coroner's jury. Pat Garrett ripped it up and rewrote it himself personally and had a bunch of people sign it, supposedly. But there's no, it doesn't exist. So from 1881 until 19, I think 51, they talked about we have this coroner's jury document.

The coroner's jury document doesn't exist, right? Now we have a copy. Well, the copy that we have today came out after Morrison took Billy to the governor. The governor turned into a media circus. People started looking for the document in Lincoln that everybody had been talking about, supposedly in history books on this. Maurice Fulton, who is the custodian of the courthouse, says, let me go look in the records.

He comes out with a piece of paper that's a photocopy and says, look, I just found this in the records. After all these years, it's been missing, but I found it. It's the original coroner's jury on Billy the Kid. I just found it. Here's a photocopy. And look, you can tell it's not a fake because all the handwriting is different on all the names.

He literally said that out loud. It's like, that's not suspicious at all. So they keep, so he comes out with a forged photocopy, and the original doesn't exist. If you look in the archives, it doesn't exist. So there is no coroner's jury. Supposedly, Pat ripped up the first one, and I was on Mysteries of the Museum, and the producer was telling me about another guy who's anti-brushy, who's on the program. And he says, well, this guy says, you know, you can't argue with a jury of 12 of your peers that say you're dead.

And I said, did he say that? And he goes, yeah, I said, he said 12. He said a jury of 12 of your peers. And he goes, yeah. And I said there were seven on the court or six people on the coroner's jury plus the president. There were seven total, whatever it is. It may be seven or eight. But at the time I knew this and I wasn't as rusty as I am now.

But I said there's six people on the corner's jury and one president and not 12. So these guys, they don't know what they're talking about, right? They're historians allegedly, but they don't do the work, you know, to dig into the primary evidence and find out what the reality is. And the reality of that document is it did not exist before 19, 51 until a photocopy was produced by a guy who was blatantly anti-brushy bill and the original can't be found that he supposedly photocopied doesn't exist. So it's stuff like that. So my point is John Poe, who is a deputy, the first thing you said to Garrett was Pat, the kid would

not have come here, you shot the wrong man. I mean, this is a guy who's on the scene. You know, him and another deputy, McKinney and his sheriff are at Pete Maxwell's house. Garrett goes in to talk to this sheepherder Mexican comes up on the porch and they say, we're not going to hurt you. He pulls a gun on him, supposedly. They said that after the fact. But Billy the kid didn't carry a double action Colt Lightning.

He carried a 4440 Colt Army single action. So anyway, supposedly this guy comes up on the porch and he's all spooked and they say, we're not going to hurt you, it's okay. We're your friends. And he says, KianS. And he says, no, no, no, we don't we don't we're not going to hurt you we're friends and he says kines now if you've ever been in

miami or camp and go to a Cuban restaurant I'm kind of darkheaded so I go in and they start talking to me in Spanish as soon as I say could I get a cafe con leche and a pulled pork sandwich they start talking to me in English right because right you don't respond in Spanish when another English person talks to you in English right so if this was Billy the kid who was bilingual why would he return, respond to John Poe's comment in Spanish. It doesn't make any sense, right?

So he goes into the bedroom, Pat Garrett kills him. Pat Garrett runs out. He says, that was the kid. I think I got him. And the first thing John Poe says, Pat, the kid wouldn't have come here. He shot the wrong man.

So anyway, they don't agree. There's no coroner's jury. They put the body in the ground right away. They didn't take a picture. Pat was out of his jurisdiction. There's a lot of things there. But at the end of the day, what we're up against is Pat Garrett said so.

There is no other evidence that Pat Garrett killed Billy the kid, other than he didn't show up ever again until 1950, where he has, you know, multiple witnesses and sworn affidavits of people that knew Billy the kid that said, yeah, this is the guy that I knew, including Severo Gallegos, who helped him escape from the Lincoln County jail when he killed Bell and Ollinger, and knew him, knew him very well. They had a house in San Patricio, Billy had a house in San Patricio where he stayed, and he'd go over to their house, eat meals, they do target practice. So anyway, all that is stuff that Billy knew, Brushy Bill Roberts knew that no one else knew. And I'm rambling a bit, so I apologize. But I was going to tell you about San Patricio. Once you have the context of what Brushy says and you look in the historical record, you start to see things that historians ignore. So they don't ever talk about San Patricio.

Billy the kid was supposedly this whimsical dumb kid that stumbled in and out of trouble. and he slept on the couch, basically. You know, he didn't enter in a house. He was like a homeless guy that just, you know, worked for tons stole and all that. So, but Brushy Bill Roberts said many times, I had a house in St. Patricia. I had a house in St. Patricia.

Now, why if you were claiming to be Billy the kid, and here's the problem with claiming to be Billy the kid. All people know is what's in the history books. Right. So you agree with what's in the history books, they're going to say, everybody knows that. It's in the history books, right?

If you disagree with what's in the history books, they'll say, well, history tells us this. You must be wrong. You don't know what you're talking about. There's no way you're really to get. So you can't win. If you agree with history, you stole it from history. If you disagree, you don't know what you're talking about because history says it happened this way. So you really can't win with that argument.

So I decided to look into the things that don't matter, little details, side details, and see if I could find validation. So when he said, you know, I have a house in San Patricio, I went and pulled the 1880 census for San Patricio. Well, in 1880, Billy the kid using the alias William Bonney, is in Fort Sumner with the Bodry family, or Baldry. I say Bodry, but I know it's Baudry. So he's with the Baudry family in Fort Sumner, so I guess no one ever thought to look

in San Patricio. But if you pull the 1880 census from San Patricio, you will find it's an all-Mexican town, except for two people. There's 230 residents in 1880, only two white guys. One is John Newcomb and his wife. He's 49 years old. The other one is a single person who's from Texas, which Billy the Kid said, or Brushy Bill said he was from Texas, not New York City, all that. So he's from Texas, just like Brushy said.

He's the same age as Billy the kid. He's 20 years old. And on the day of the census, he's not there. Well, he's not there because he's in Fort Sumner with the Bodrys, right? But it says the reason he's not there is he's sick of a gunshot wound. So he's the only one in town who's sick of a gunshot wound. He's a white kid 20 years old from Texas. And the name it gives is John as,

Murphy. So that doesn't match, right? We don't, I mean, that's never, we've never heard of that as an alias as Billy the kid. However, the two sides of the Lincoln County War, John S. Chisholm and Lawrence Murphy, and Billy did have a half-brother name, you know, Antrim, right? So he could have pulled an alias out of those names and said, I'm going to be John S. Murphy, or it may be Joseph S. Murphy. Yeah, he had a brother Joseph Antrim. So Joseph S. Murphy, but we don't know. But I, I looked through all the other things Brushy claimed to see if there was a Joseph S. Murphy. And in the Rough Riders, there's a guy that did everything that Brushy said he did. He was in charge of the horses.

He's the guy that gave Roosevelt the Bronco Buster statue at the end of the war. There's pictures of him that look exactly like Brushy. Everything matches, and the name is not Joseph S. Murphy. The name is William S. Murphy. like he kept the same alias but he wanted to be go by billy so he kept it that was that him or not i don't know but there's a picture of him and it's definitely him it's got the pinky ring it's got the same facial features everything so you know i tend to think that there's a very good chance that that could have been an alias that he used he said he used dozens and dozens of aliases i think it's very likely that that could

have been there's no record of any joseph s murphy in history in any other place and there's no mention of william s murphy anywhere in history despite the fact that in 1890s 98, he's in every major newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, every major newspaper, talking about how he gave Colonel Roosevelt the Frederick Remington Bronco Buster statue, and yet the guy doesn't exist before or after the war. And so it's because it's an alias. So back then, you could, you know, join the Army as a volunteer using an alias. You didn't have birth certificates. You didn't have those security cards. You didn't have driver's licenses. People, what's your name? They tell them, and off you go. So anyway, there's a lot more to it than that. I'm giving you just. Yeah, you're given a lot, and I really appreciate it. I appreciate you going into some of the stuff. And I highly recommend that people buy the book, because I think after you read the book at the very least, you'll walk away and go, I don't think Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid. Whether you believe Brushy Bill is Billy the Kid or not, that's up to you. I think he is. I think he was Billy the kid. And I want to get into a lot of different things, but one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, after Pat Garrett supposedly shot Billy the kid,

which the story is a mess in my opinion. But why do you think that Billy the kid left New Mexico? Because for the longest time, he wouldn't leave. And I know you're speculating, but I'm just kind of curious after your research. Why did Billy leave at that point? Yeah, I mean, I can tell you what Brushy said. He, first of all, he didn't want to leave New Mexico until he killed Pat Garrett and he killed John Chisholm. That's what he says.

He says, I didn't want to leave. So he wanted to marry Polita Maxwell and going to Old Mexico, but not before he killed Chisholm and not before he killed Garrett. Now, during the shootout with Garrett, he was wounded. So the way he tells that story, and I don't know if your readers knows, but he claims, I mean, the logical question is, okay, if Garrett didn't kill him, who did he kill? Brushy says he killed a half Mexican cowboy name that went by the name Billy Barlow. Billy Barlow is the Wild West version of John Doe. It's a nonsense. It's a fake name, right?

So if you want to say, if you say, what's your name? And I say, none of your business, I say, my name's Billy Barlow. And you're like, okay, got it. You don't want me to ask you that. And that was very common back in the Wild West. Like, you don't ask people their name. You don't ask them where they're from. Like a lot of people, this is after the Civil War.

A lot of Confederates went west to the Wild West. They didn't want to know, you know, some were wanted for war crimes. Some of them wanted to be, you know, they wanted to find them and catch them. They didn't give their names in the Wild West. Wild West. So, you know, obviously, Brushy used a bunch of aliases or claims he did. But this guy was going by Billy Barlow, which means none of your business. So Billy Barlow, half Mexican with a beard, about the same height and weight as Billy. They're at a dance. They go to, actually, Garrett's ex-wife's brother-in-law's house. It's funny because everybody, Garrett had an ex-wife from Fort Sumner,

and everybody hated him there. And everybody loved Billy the kid. So him and Barlow go to this guy's house and his buddy was drunk and he says, I'm hungry. And he says, well, I have his beans and, you know, tortillas. And he says, well, I need some meat. You know, I'm hungry. He goes, well, go next door to Pete Maxwell's. He killed a steer and he's hanging on the back porch and you can get some meat and come back and I'll cook it. And Billy had, the kid had heard that Garrett was in town. So he told him, he goes, look, just stay here. And he goes, no, I'm hungry. I'm going to go. So he says, his drunk buddy stumbles out into the darkness. And if you look at the account of John Poe, one of the deputies who's on the porch at Maxwell's house is this drunken Mexican comes walking across the yard. He says that he was zipping up his pants or buttoning up his pants.

They didn't have zippers back then. So he's buttoning up his pants. And a lot of historians have speculated that Billy the kid, which it really wasn't Billy the kid, if you take this view, it was Billy Barlow, was coming from a romantic encounter with Pete Maxwell's sister. That's why Pete Maxwell betrayed him, whatever. My theory is that he took a leak in the yard because he's drunk, right? And so you go out, you take a leak in the yard, you button up your pants, you walk onto the porch, barefoot, and you're going to get some meat. And then that's where the scene unfolds that I described earlier, where he says KNS, KNS, but when Garrett kills him, Billy hears the gunshots, runs out the door, and it was a bright moonlit night. And he sees him on the porch.

He sees his dead buddy on the porch, and he starts shooting. And he jumps over the fence, and he's shooting at him. Well, they can see him in the yard because it's a bright moonlit night. And now this is Brushy Bill's story, right? And he can't see them because they're under the shadow of the porch, and he takes a few hits. And so he's like, okay, screw this. I'm jumping over the fence. He goes to jump over the fence, and a shot catches him across the top of the head, just barely grazes him, but almost knocks him out.

So he goes, stumbling down the alleyway, and this Mexican woman had opened her door to see what was going on. He sees Billy the kid, grabs him, pulls him in, shuts the door. he grabs she takes a piece of meat and puts it on his wound he says reload my six shooters and then he passes out he says around 3 a m frank lobato comes around and says billy you got to get out of town they killed billy barlow and they're passing him off as you let's get out of here so he's wounded he's hurt they take him to a sheep camp south of town and as he's recovering he stays there for three months and finally he's like you know what screw this i'm all alone i'm wounded everybody's dead they think they killed me I might as well start fresh. So he goes back to Texas. So that's the story of supposedly. Now, one thing I'll just share with you real quick, it was a bright moonlit night.

There was a full moon that night. How would Brushy Bill Roberts know that? There's no way for him to know that. But it was a bright moonlit night that night. Yeah, I find the whole account very fascinating, how he actually got away. And what's strange is when you hear Brushy Bill's account of what happened that night, it actually makes more sense than Pat Garrett's account.

And I can't remember what newspaper was at the time. I remember reading that when they were talking about how Billy the kid went to such extent to hide his identity. He was growing a black beard and he was dyeing his skin to look like a Mexican, which really didn't make any sense at that time if you think about it. Well, there's a lot of fake news. The term is the term predates the modern era. for sure. But that's basically what happened. They used the newspapers to brand him an outlaw. And they said he, you know, he leads a gang of 20 outlaws. And he's, he's dressed kind of like a swashbuckler and he's got this silver belt buckle and all this crazy stuff. There's a letter that Billy the kid's sent to the governor. This is, hey, none of that's true. So, I mean, you literally have firsthand primary examples of Billy the kid saying, that's ridiculous. There's nothing to that. That's not true. But they were using the newspapers to make him an outlaw. And that's where this story of he was such a bad guy. He killed 21 people before his 21 birthday. He would do all these cruel things, puppies, you know, whatever, the stuff that they make up to make you hate the guy. But it seems like, you know, there's, there's really no evidence of any of that being the case. It's strictly a matter of the powers that be wanted to get rid of this guy. So they turn the newspapers against him. And, you know, it's kind of interesting. History may repeat

itself at times. Yeah. I wanted, yeah, it does. I wanted to. I wanted to asked you. Did Brushy Bill Roberts ever address the fact that Polita Maxwell's son sure looks a lot like him? No. No, but I've heard that too. So Morrison engaged Brushy. Let's see. I see if my dates are right. I think he went in front of the governor, November 30th, 19-50, this is off top of my head. November 30th, 1950. I'm pretty sure he first met Brushy, because I have the correspondence. I think they started writing in April of 1940. They met perhaps in June of 49. And Morrison, in a pre-internet, pre-cell phone world, had one year to get brushy ready to go in front of the governor to get a pardon. So that meant he had to cover the entire Southwest. He had to find people that knew Billy the kid. He had to prepare affidavits, get him to sign the affidavits, had to prepare legal matter.

And he still had a day job. So, I mean, literally in less than 12 months, he had to pull all this stuff together, get all the information from brushy record as much of it as he could so he really didn't have a lot of time to really get into every aspect of the story and i i believe that you know in morrison's book alias billy the kid which was published in 1955 which really is the the primary it's it's the primary source for my for my book but then obviously i added a lot of stuff and that's what i tried to do i tried to come alongside morrison and just give him the benefit of all the stuff that he didn't have access to you know in 1950. And so hopefully I was successful with that. His family appreciates it. And that's really,

as I said, I think to you privately, the fact that Morrison's daughter and his family supports what I've done and endorses it, that means more to me than really anything. But anyway, I think Brushy in the beginning only told him what he needed to tell him for the pardon. And I think he lied a lot. So I do think Brushy, like, I'm not going to tell you that I killed this guy. I'm not going to tell you I did that. There's no reason for me to confess to a bunch of other stuff when I'm trying to get a pardon. So I think he did hide some things. And the evidence of this, and this is kind of a big deal to the Billy the Kid history, actually a huge deal to the history of Billy the Kid. In Morrison's book, he says that Brushie told him that Catherine Bonnie, the mother of Billy the

kid, was actually his aunt. Okay. So it was Catherine Antrim, and then she married, Bonnie and now she's Catherine Bonnie. That's why it was William Bonnie, right? You've heard that Billy Bonnie. I didn't know that was his aunt, though. That's interesting. Well, that's what he said, right? So when Morrison published his book, that's the story that he went with in his book.

I have a letter between Morrison and Brushy, right before Brushy died, after he went to the governor. He had a stroke on the spot in the governor's mansion. So people like, oh, he didn't know the name of Pat Garrett. Well, the guy was in the middle of his stroke. So, yeah, I mean, he did. One, one, it was a hostile crowd. They were making fun of him or trying to do. He knew he wasn't going to get the pardon.

They tried to get him to confess to a bunch of murders and stuff. He wasn't going to do that. And three, he was in the middle of a stroke and died 30 days later. So, I mean, they make fun of him, oh, he was a dumb guy. I didn't know anything. I mean, that's pretty cruel and ridiculous to make fun of an old man who's in the middle of a stroke, you know, being grilled by a bunch of jackasses, candidly, you know, that are trying to prove him wrong. So anyway, I don't have a lot of patience for that stuff.

But anyway, after he gets back home, he writes Morrison and says, look, my doctor says, if I don't stay in bed, I'm going to be dead. And that proved to be true a few days later. But he says, I want to tell you where I got the name Bonnie, which is weird, because he had already told Morrison a year ago, it's my aunt. That's where I got the name Bonnie. And Morrison says, well, don't worry about it. You know, he writes him back. Now you're saying letters that you're going to get in a couple days, right?

And then you're going to write me back in a couple days. So time's burning here. So he writes Morrison says, I want to tell you where I got the name Bonnie. Morrison says, don't worry about it. I'll be to see you eventually. and you can tell me in person. And Brushy writes him again and says, no, I want to tell you where I got the name Bonnie.

And I don't know why he just didn't tell him. But I think it was on the third letter. Morrison says, yeah, yeah, you can tell me when you get there. And Brushy says, well, hire a lady to write this up. And when he goes, no, no, just wait until I get there. I'll get it on audio tape. So we'll have it on audio tape. Finally, Brushy says, no, I'm going to tell you,

Bell Star gave me that name. It's my outlaw name. And that explains why no one ever in history has ever been able to find a genealogical link between Catherine Antrim and Catherine Bonnie. It doesn't exist. Bonnie doesn't exist. Bonnie was a completely made-up name that Bell Star, the outlaw queen, gave him. And he called her Bell-Reed, which, who knows that?

Who knows that Bell Star was really Bell-Reed? Like, definitely he should not have known these things, right? But the Bell-Reed was Bell-Star was Bell-Star was Bell-Reed before she was Bell-Star. But, yeah, I mean, that's a huge thing, right? And nobody knew that. If I hadn't revealed that because I have this obscure letter between Brushy, People would, well, I think people still are searching for Bonnie, but there is no Bonnie. And they'll even say, oh, we found the Bonnie family in England and they moved to New York.

And, you know, there's no genealogical record. What they'll do is they'll take, because, you know, traditional historians say, well, Billy the Kid was born in New York. We found him. We found him in New York City. Here's an Irish family, but they made a mistake. It's not McCarty, it's McCarthy. They spelled it wrong. And then you, and so then you say, okay, that's,

kind of you're you're just making that up right like you're literally saying you know he's got a sister he's got another brother and you're saying that that's you know him because it's close but if you do actually the work and your research that those same people in that same ward in new york city are quoted saying yep that's billy the kid yep and you know how you know it's him when he was a teenager he was scarred from head to toe because he was in a building fire and all of his hair was singed off and his eyebrows and everything. So he's easy to recognize because he looks like a freak. That's not the same Billy the kid. They're talking about a completely different person. So it's like it's such a joke. They'll try to say, you know, Bonnie's connected to McCarty. But you get what I'm saying, right?

Yeah. And even historically it doesn't make sense because, you know, the picture of him, the one quote unquote known picture, at least when he was young, it's not a very flattering picture. But people at the time said he was a really good looking kid. I mean, he was a really charming and good looking kid, you know, they, no one ever talked about the, you know, like the fire and the scars and, you know, the whole thing, and I really hope people go out and buy your book and I'm going to include a link to it. And I need to get myself a hard copy of it. I moved and I lost my paperback copy, but, and good luck, try, hard copy. Oh, I'd love to have one. And good luck trying to get Morrison's book. That thing's almost impossible to get. But one of the questions I wanted to ask you was, So he leaves New Mexico

And can you kind of give just a brief What did he do up until Because the whole situation is very sad And one of the reasons why I really think that he He probably was Billy the kid Is he didn't want publicity You know if you're going to make up with the story And go, oh, I'm Billy the kid

You're going to be you know You're going to want everyone to know it But the fact that he just wanted his pardon He was promised makes me almost believe The guy even more But what did he do once he left New Mexico. You mentioned the Rough Riders.

What other things did he do prior to coming out as an old man and saying, yeah, it was Billy the Kid? Great question, Wes. Because remember, Oliver Pleasant Roberts was a farmer his whole life. Everybody in his local area knew him. He lived there forever.

His family knew him. He didn't do anything exciting. He was a farmer. He lived in the same place, didn't do anything exciting. So here you have Brushy Bill claiming to be Ollie Roberts, because that was his disguise, his alias, gunshot wounds, knife wounds, all kinds of stuff that you can't make up,

that showed he had lived the life of an adventurer, and not all of that adventure was during the Lincoln County Wars, Billy the Kid. He said he went back, before he went to Lincoln, he was known as the Texas. First, he was just the kid. Oh, that's a kid. And then they called him the Texas kid. And then that's what Bell Star called him. And then when he went out west, they started calling Billy the kid. And then he said later on, he was the Hugo kid. but they always called him kid because he looked young. But anyway, he said he left, he went to Old Mexico, he broke Selman out of jail. So he kept doing the same kind of stuff that he was doing before he said he tried to break Jesse Evans out of jail after he was arrested for killing Houston Chapman. There's a Jesse James element to this too, by the way, which Steve Cedarwall talks about in his book, The Dirty on Billy the Kid, which is super interesting.

But anyway, he says he went on to be a deputy marshal. he said he worked for the hangin judge Isaac Parker out of Indian territory and I think I found him doing that so brushy says this was a really great find I think because some of this stuff you know it's like man

I wish I could run that down man I wish I could run that down so brushy says I was in the bunch that captured crazy snake the Indian and when I read that I thought who is crazy snake I don't have I think

99.99% of the people, if you said, have you ever heard of Crazy Snake the Indian? Nobody's ever heard of Crayonimo. I might have heard of Pocahontas, but who's Crazy Snake DeAnne? He's not a character that anyone would remember. So I start doing research, and he says he was a U.S. Marshal.

I was a U.S. Marshal, and I was in the bunch that captured Crazy Snake the Indian. Crazy Snake, there was a revolt called the Smoked Meat Rebellion, very obscure kind of thing in history, where this guy worked, everybody up about smoked meat. They weren't getting enough allocation of smoked meat because they were on a reservation. I guess the army gave them food. And so it's basically a form of welfare, I think. And if I'm butchering this, historians hopefully forgive me. But there's a smoked meat

rebellion where we were not not getting enough smoked meat and we're all going to riot and we're all going to take over and whatever. So they sent dozens and dozens and dozens of people looking for crazy snake, the ringleader of this rebellion. The army had people out. The sheriffs had people out, everybody was out looking for the sky. There's multiple posseys running here, running there all over Indian territory. But Brushy says, I was in the bunch that caught him. Well, there's only, I think, five people that caught him. And there's only one U.S. Marshal that caught him. So, Brushy, and he tells other details about Joan, Deputy Jones, there was a Deputy Jones. They roped into a tree until these other Indians, they roped into a tree and got him to confess where he was. Like, little details

that people didn't know and people wouldn't want to admit to if they did know that Brushy knew at the time that was later revealed through research. Anyway, there's only one deputy marshal in the bunch that captured crazy snake, and the guy is not William H. Bonnie or William H. Antrim. It's William H. Carr. So how strange that the guy that caught Crazy Snake has got the same first name and middle initial as Billy the kid, and he just changed his last name. But here's what else is interesting. William H. Carr, so I'm friends with David Turk. He's a friend. historian of the U.S. Marshals. And this was the U.S. Marshal.

So I reached out to Dave, and I said, Dave, can you run this guy down, William H. Carr? Oh, yeah, yeah. He finds his records. He doesn't exist. He only exists during the time that Brushy says he was U.S. Marshal in the 1890s. The other thing is, he is known to be friendly without loss. He's also known to shoot prisoners, which is what Billy the kid did when he killed Morton and Baker at Aguenegr. and he, although he was friendly without laws, he hated the Dalton's.

And Bresci Bill tells the story that when he was a U.S. Marshal, he caught all these stagecoach robbers and bank robbers, and he had a run-in with the Dalton's. And there was more, they were outnumbered whatever. And they said to him, we know who you are. You keep your hands up. If you don't keep your hands up, you're going to be dead. Because we know who you are. They knew he was Billy the kid.

So even though, so this guy's profile exactly matches Billy the kid and exactly matches what Brushy Bill Roberts said. And his name was William H. Carr. And he disappeared. He was indicted for helping the Christian brothers escape and he disappeared. And so anyway, it's just fascinating stuff. Like, I don't know, but why would Brushy say that? Why would you say I was in the bunch that captured Crazy Snake? One, nobody knows or cares who Crazy Snake is. And two, how would you know that the deputy was William H. Carr? Like, it's just crazy stuff. So, again, the body of evidence, I hope, you know, I'm convinced, you know, I always say I'm 99.99. And I also always say, I don't really care. I mean, I care for Morrison's family because Morrison was a man of utmost integrity that I think has been completely misrepresented by history. I care for Brushy Bill because, you know, he wanted to die a free man. And I think he did die a free man. And I'm happy about that. But, you know, I'll follow the evidence wherever the evidence leads.

But I'm very much aware. The alternative is Pat Garrett said so. And Morrison wrote, somebody, you know, back when he came out, Garrett's kids and all that were still alive. And, you know, they were threatening to sue him. And he says, look, you can sue me. I have evidence in my files that Pat Garrett lived in the panhandle of Florida, had another family, and he left his wife and kids to come to New Mexico. And Brushy Bill says, we bought Pat, he goes, he was one of us. He wasn't a saint. He said, we bought him his first pair of boots when he got to Lincoln.

and he goes actually Fort Sumner and he says and we you know we we we bought him his outfit for his wedding so I mean Garrett was this derelict who basically was an outlaw himself that saw a chance to go straight but you know

he ended up getting shot in the back of the head over a screwy deal supposedly shot by Wayne Bressell he stopped his horse and buggy to take a leak on the side of the road and the guy shot him in the back of the head and also Teddy Roosevelt appointed him I think somebody appointed him for one term as for an office and then failed to report him, appoint him for the second term.

He had a really pretty lame life. I mean, other than coming out with his book that I guess did okay, but I think he died broke. And, you know, really was not this, you know, it's kind of. Yeah, he was no saint. I think history has shown that. And you know, Pat Garrett really wasn't liked by a lot of people. He was kind of a bully and he did a lot of shady things. quite this upstanding angel lawman that I think history tries to portray. And you know, with his

death, you're right, the guy, it was some sort of, I'll go back and look at it, but I think he was trying to screw the guy. He was renting land or leasing land from Pat and something to do with sheep and he was trying to screw the guy over and the guy shot him. Yeah. So, you know, so he said so. That's why we should believe that, you know, Billy the kid was killed because he said, So when ever since that happened, the locals have said Billy lived. Again, Severo Gallegos is undisputed. Every time you tell the story of Billy's amazing escape from the Lincoln County Jail, I mean, here's this guy that looks like a schoolboy with buck teeth and big goofy ears.

It looks like a big pansy. Five foot six, five foot eight maybe. Size six shoe, little tiny hands, little tiny feet. It looks like a little kid that you'd stomp in a school yard. and he murders two deputies and escapes. I mean, this guy had a sociopathic demon inside him that was, you know, scary. And he was, it was insane how he was able to escape

from these crazy situations, but they're well documented. We know what happened. He was an amazing individual. And, you know, Severo Galliugos knew it. And he used to visit him in the Lincoln County Jail and bring him berries. And so he signed an affidavit and he says, you know,

I know Billy the kid very well. He used to come to my house. We shared many meals together. him and Florentio Chavez would shoot target practice in our backyard with my brother. I used to visit him in the Lincoln County Jail, and I bring him berries to eat. And I even helped him escape when he escaped the Lincoln County Jail. And I never saw him again until April 1st, 1950, when, after talking to him for a couple days, looking in his eyes, I know that this is Billy the kid. So, I mean, I don't care what Pat Garrett says.

I have a sworn affidavit from Severo Gaiegos, who every time they tell the story, they talk about how Severo Gallegos helped him escape. and they failed to mention that Severo Gallegos were signed a sworn affidavit that Bresci Bill Roberts was Billy the kid. So I don't know how much evidence you need, but if you need more than that, I mean, I don't know why we even, there's a mountain of evidence, you know, same height, same weight, same shoe size. You look at the photos of the guy. He's got the same asymmetrical eyebrows.

You know, everything that this guy said for the most part is verifiable in history, including his service and the rough writers. And we have sworn affidavits from people that said they knew him. I mean, what do you have to do to establish your identity? I mean, that's pretty thorough, in my opinion. Yeah, it's very thorough. And like I said, your book is awesome, man. I love the book.

I must have read it a few times. The last two questions I want to ask you, I want to come back to the Jesse James thing you were going to go into. Before we get into Jesse James, I want to ask you about everyone knows the scene from Young Guns where he says, hello, Bob, and he shoots Bob from the window. Did Brushy Bill ever talk about that escape? And how, you know, in the scene, it's a prostitute that shows up.

And obviously, it looks like she leaves a gun in the porta potty. But did he ever explain how he got out of that situation? He did. Yeah, in detail. Matter of fact, this should be represented. I was on History Channel. It's been filmed. Well, I can't talk about it, I guess.

But it should be coming out eventually where we go in depth on this topic. But what Brushy said is that Sam Corbett had. hit a sixth shooter in the privy, as they called it, the outhouse. And that was the plan. So Olinger, who he hated. He's absolutely, you know, Billy regretted killing Bell, who was the deputy guarding him, but he hated Olinger. Ollinger was a bully. He's a bully with a badge. He shot an unarmed, I think it was Jim Jones in front of his wife and kids. He was serving a small civil fine and shot the guy on his porch in front of his wife and kids for no reason. He's just a real bad guy. This guy was a really, really bad guy.

So that was one of the deputies guarding Billy the kid. So Brushy says Sam Corbett had hit a six gun in the outhouse. And so he says to Bell, after Ollinger takes the other. There's other prisoners in there, too. That's what people forget. There's other prisoners in the Lincoln County Jail with Brushy or Billy. And Olinger went and took him to lunch at the Wortley across the street. And he says to Bell, I need to go to the privy, Bell.

And Bell says, I don't know, Billy. I don't know about that. And he goes, come on, Bell. Like, I got to go to the privy. So he says, when Bell bent over to, he said he had his hands shackled and his feet shackled, and there's a ring in the floor. And he said they were padlocked to the ring in the floor. So they really had him covered.

What's interesting, though, is he describes the layout of the Lincoln County Courthouse. And if you talk to the park ring, no disrespect to them. They do a great job. But they'll tell you how it was laid out. That's not how it was laid out. Brushy describes how it was laid out. when you go to the top of the steps there was a there was

it's one big room now there were two rooms one was Garrett's office you had to go through Garrett's office and there was another room in the corner I think it's a northeast corner um overlook in the Wortley hotel and that's where they were so he's shackled to the floor he's a and Billy could slip handcuffs so that's another kind of a big thing that he was known to do

where he could slip his his his hands are smaller than his wrists which are very odd characteristic and we already talked about how he's got like you know big goofy years. He was kind of anatomically pretty freaky, um, you know, in some ways, but as you said,

a handsome man, I suppose you could say. But anyway, it's like in cuffs. And, um, so when bell bent over, he says he slipped his,

his cuff off his right hand and smashed bell on the head, which if you worked through that, uh, Bell left side of his, the back left side of Bell's head was crushed, which is exactly what would happen if a left-handed person slipped the cuff off the right hand. when you're bent over in front of them

and smashed you on the back of the head. He says when Bell came up, he was looking down the barrel of his own six shooter. And he said, Bell, I'm not going to hurt yet. You walk into the armory. So the armory, you'd go through Garrett's office,

across the hallway, and into the armory. While Billy's shuffling, he has his feet shackled. So as he's shuffling through Garrett's office, Bell gets to the hallway and Jukes left where Billy can't shoot him and he's got these stupid chains on his feet.

So Billy goes running. So Bell juke's left down the hall, and then you had to juke right to go down the steps. So Bell juke's right down the steps. Billy gets to the hallway, sees Bell juke right down the steps, and dives to the left, firing blindly down the steps. Allegedly, it ricocheted off the wall under the left armpit of Bell. There's a landing back then at the top of the stairs.

Now you can only, I think, go left. Back then there was a landing at the top of the stairs. You'd go right or left. Bell hit the bottom, went left, went out the back door into the arms of Godfrey Goss the Cook. And then Billy shuffles, he grabs Olinger's shotgun, who was laid against the window, says Bob comes running across the street after hearing the gunshots. And what's funny is he had his gun out. And then he's putting it in his holster as Billy says, look up, Bob. So I guess he thought that Bell had killed the kid.

So originally his instinct is pull his gun. So he goes running across the street, and then he's like, well, that's just Bell killing the kid. So he puts it in the holster, and he looks up and gets blasted with two barrels of buckshot. So, that's how Brush he describes it. And in the book, I talk about John Meadows, who Pat Garrett, who says Billy, the kid later told him how he escaped and says he was laying on his stomach when he shot him, which matches what Brushie said, where he dove to the left, landed on his stomach and shot down the steps. So anyway, there's so many details. so many. I mean, this guy knows way too much not to be the kid. I mean, in my opinion, I mean, he just knew in the research that you did in the book. And I know, you know, it was kind of a continuation. You had access to stuff Morrison didn't. But, and I haven't read Morrison's book because it's impossible to get. But your book, I mean, I'm telling you, by the time you get done reading it, you're like, I kind of think this guy's Billy the kid. At the very, like I said, at the very least, Pat Garrett didn't shoot him. This guy knew way too much. What's the story with Jesse James?

So Jesse James, so I've been saying for a while now, my next book is going to be called After Jesse James, because I'm after him, and then also the possibility of, you know, after he was Jesse James, did he live on as somebody else, right? The Jesse James story is so crazy. There's a guy named J. Frank Dalton that came out,

and I'm not a conspiracy guy. I mean, you know, I don't hate conspiracy people either. You know, I think there's a lot of conspiracies in life. But I mean, I don't, you know, the history channel wanted me to be, or no, travel channel wanted me to be on like, Mummies Unwrapped and a lot of these other shows. And I said, look, I'm not your conspiracy guy, man. Like, I just honestly believe this guy's Billy the kid, you know, that, like, you know, I'm not saying that, you know, Elvis is alive or anything like that, although he may be, I don't know, I wasn't there. But you get my point, right?

Like, I don't, I don't, I'm not going to. And that's what I liked about the way you did the book, because you didn't go into it going, this is Billy the kid, and let me prove, this is Billy the kid, through your research, you walk away from what you wrote in your research and you're like, holy crap, I think this is Billy the Kid. It wasn't, and I know that wasn't your mindset going into it. You weren't trying to prove Brush your Bill's case by any means. Well, and the way I say it, and maybe I should say it differently, but I don't care if he was Billy the Kid. It doesn't matter to me. You know what I mean? Like, I'm not trying to sell books. It is what it is. I could just as easily in the book say, yeah, you know, could be, you know, but, you know, I don't think he was. But I

honestly did think that that's where the evidence took me. And so with J. Frank Dalton, I don't know. I still don't know. But this guy basically claimed to be Jesse James. And he is involved in the Brushy Bill story. So it's either a sticky wicket, as they say, or it could be if you, you know, if the fact that, let's say we find Dalton's not credible, does that mean that Brushy Bill Roberts is not Billy the kid? I don't think that those two things have to go together. I think that Jay Frank Dalton could be a complete fraud. and Brushy Bill could still be Billy the kid. And I kind of talk about this in the book,

but here's what's interesting. There's this whole Knights of the Golden Circle thing. And I don't know if you've ever heard about this or talked to me. No, no, no. Oh, really? Yeah, no. Oh, my God. Talk about an interesting conspiracy theory.

The idea is that after the Civil War, the, a lot of very, a secret society of very powerful people went underground and said the South will rise again. And it was called the Knights of the Golden Circle. And so the idea is that Jesse James did all those robberies. If you notice, he only robbed union banks. He only robbed union people. And what happened to all the money?

He robbed over $200,000 back in the 1800s of union gold. And supposedly that was to fund a Second Civil War. He was the treasurer for the knights of the Golden Circle. And it involved including like who was Lincoln's, vice president and all those guys, right? But here's the thing. It's freaking front page of the New York Times. The Nice of the Golden Circle was real.

There really was a Nice of the Golden Circle. And on the night that Lincoln was assassinated, another guy attacked Seward and Secretary of Defense or whatever. I'm getting this all butchered up. But that night, there was a conspiracy. They hung, you know, a lot of people for being involved in the conspiracy to kill Lincoln. And that same night, they tried to kill the Secretary of Defense or whatever. So a lot of this stuff actually happened.

And then you have the guys in the 30s in Baltimore that dug up the kids that dug up all the gold in the basement of the house that was supposedly Knights of the Golden Circle Gold. Then you have Brushy Bill Roberts saying to, who would he say it to, DeWitt Travis, who was an oil man. He says, DeWitt Travis says, I'm going to Round Rock, Texas. And Brushy says, I know where a bunch of gold is buried over there. and he goes, next time you go, let's go get it. And then DeWitt says, hey, I'm going. And Brushy says, we better not touch it. I don't want to end up dead.

It's Knights of the Golden Circle, gold. And he was just thinking in 1950, well, maybe enough time has passed to where if I take a little of it, they won't kill me. And then he thought, maybe not. But, I mean, so again, I don't know if it's true. I don't think it's true. But there's some crazy stuff. This is where they talk about John Wilkes Booth and the Booth Mummy and Phineas Bates, who Kathy Bates, the, you know, very prominent actor that was in misery with James Kahn.

Her grandfather was the state attorney general for Tennessee. He's the one that claimed that the booth mummy was John Milk's booth. So anyway, we're getting to a whole bunch of stuff. But here's my point. The assassination of Lincoln, what a lot of people don't know, there was a previous attempt to kidnap Lincoln as he traveled, I think, to Richmond in his stagecoach. Okay, they were going to kidnap him.

Knights of the Golden Circle were supposed to kidnap him. Frank James was in on that. It's in the newspaper. That Frank James tried to kidnap Lincoln on his way to Richmond, I think it was. And again, I'm sorry if I'm butcher this, but you can look into it. But how crazy is that? So here's Jay Frank Dalton supposedly Knights of the Golden Circle and all this stuff, who claims to be Jesse James.

And there's actually evidence of it in the newspaper. Now, the problem of Jesse James is there may have been four or five guys all claiming to be the Jesse James like like I don't know an Elvis impersonator or something I mean there could be so so what people say Jesse James did there could have been other people using the name it's like what's a good and now I forget a good analogy of that one but you get what I'm saying there could have been more people doing it and they claim that Bigelow was one of the people you know impersonating like a copycat impersonating Jesse James using the name and they set him up to be killed and not Jesse James. So anyway, it's a very convoluted story. What is actually

true is that 1934, Henry Hoyt, a doctor put in his book that he was in Las Vegas, New Mexico, not Las Vegas, Nevada. And he's at dinner. And Billy the kid introduces him to his friend, Mr. Howard, from Tennessee. And he later found out that was Jesse James. So that's the first. point that puts Jesse James and Billy the kid together, because a lot of his historians will say they never met each other, okay? And now Brushy Bill says he knew him, right? Then Brushy Bill says Jesse James was in Lincoln, New Mexico, and everybody laughs their head off about that one.

Like Jesse James is no, he's a Missouri outlaw. There's no way Jesse James was in Lincoln. Guess who says he was in Lincoln? The governor of New Mexico says that when Houston Chapman, which is Alexander McSween's wife's lawyer. So McSween building is where Billy the kid escaped and all that. After her husband was killed,

McSween's wife hired a lawyer, Houston Chapman, to go after him because all the corruption and whatever. And Jesse Evans killed him in cold blood in the streets of Lincoln. Lou Wallace, the governor, says when Houston Chapman was killed, we rounded up all of the outlaws in the

area that were in Lincoln, and among them was Jesse James. That's interesting. So he, did, I mean, Brushy Bill, again, is saying something that unless he was there,

he wouldn't have known, especially at that time. Yeah, and there's more evidence on Brushy's side than the historians who say, that's ridiculous. There's no way this

who ever knew each other. So I believe the, I mean, I believe the evidence is pretty clear that, and then they say, oh, no, Lou Wallace misspoke.

He met somebody else. It's like, come on, guys. Like, how many times can you say that there's a spelling mistake and, you know, he meant, you know,

somebody else. But, you know, so I think, And then Steve Cedarwall, who's a cold case investigator that does Wild West crime scenes, which is really cool. He has a book called The Dirty on Billy the Kid, which is really awesome. And actually, he's not a brushy guy, but a lot of this stuff he discovered supports Brushy Bill Robert's story. And one of the things is that Billy the Kid was passing counterfeit money in Lincoln. And Steve actually got the counterfeit money from the Secret Service.

He wrote the Secret Service, and they had it. They had the actual money that Billy the Kid was passing. it in the files from the 1880s. And nobody had ever thought to look there. So, anyway, Jesse James was involved in the counterfeit money ring that was moving counterfeit money from Missouri

and passing it off in the Wild West in Lincoln. And Billy the kid and Jesse James were doing this ring. And he's got stuff on that in his book. But there's a whole lot here, man. They don't just come out and say, hey, let me tell you all the crazy, you know, illegal stuff I've been doing. But it's a lot.

Yeah, especially. when you're an old man, you know, you don't want to go through and say, well, I killed this person. I killed that person. You know, if you're faking and you're not really Billy the kid, you're going to be like, well, let me tell you about this. And let me tell you about this guy. And let me, you know, here's a guy I killed that they didn't write down. He didn't really do that. He really didn't want to relive the past. He just wanted his pardon. And it's kind of a sad story because I think brushy Bill Roberts, you know, time hadn't caught up with him. He didn't really. He didn't really. realize in 1950, you know, times were completely different. I think Brushy Bill was kind of still living in the past. Yeah. I really hope people go out and get the book. Billy the Kid, an autobiography, the story of Brushy Bill Roberts. It's a fantastic read. I really hope people go and get the book and do some research for yourself, you know, come to your own conclusions. Dan, is there a place where people can get the book beyond Amazon? No, Amazon is great.

the publisher's website is creative text so creativetext.com with an S. So there's other books on, I think Steve Cedarwall's book is on there and my book is on there. So no, I just, I appreciate the support for sure. And thanks for getting the story out. You know, it's important to me that what I found, Wes, is the old, I don't know, 20, 30 years ago, you have all these people that get really angry. Oh, no, Pat Garrett, how dare you? line, Pat Garrett, I can tell you my daughter, her friends, you know, the new generation,

they don't have the baggage, you know, that we have, you know, with what we were taught in school. Number one, most people say, who's Billy the kid? They don't know. Like, you know, to you and me, it's like, hey, Pat Garrett didn't kill Billy the kid. It's like, who's Pat Garrett, who's Billy the kid? Like modern kids have no idea what you're talking about. But when people read the book with fresh eyes and without a bias, to your point, they come to the same place that I came too based on the evidence, which is this makes a lot of sense he probably really was, Billy the kid. And, you know, he didn't get his pardon on earth, but I think that he was able to straighten out the story in all the lies. He said, I want, he said, I want Mr. Morrison to help me straighten

out all, straighten this mess out once and for all. And at the end of my book, I say thanks to you, Brushy, because if he hadn't had the courage to come forward, you know, he wouldn't have never gotten it's straightened out. So anyway, I'm thrilled to be a part of it. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me. No, I appreciate your time, Dan. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time to come on. Okay, buddy. Thank you. And that's it for tonight, everyone. If you've had an encounter, be sure an email Tony Merkel. Definitely check out theconfessionals.com, but I want to thank Tony for allowing me to come on and do this show. And thank you for taking the time to listen. Until next time. I was a highway man.

Along the coach roads I did ride With sword and pistol by my side Many a young maid lost her bibles to my trade Many a soldier shed his life blood on my blade The bastards hung me in the spring of 25 But I am still alive I was a sailor day to buy I sailed a little after

Because they said that I got killed But I'm living still I was a dam building Across a river deep and wide We're steel and water did collide A place called boulder on the wild Colorado I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below They buried me in that great tune

That knows no sound but I'm still around I'll always be around and round and around and around I'll fly a starship across the universe divide and when I reach the other side I'll find a place to rest my spirit

if I can perhaps I may become a highway man again Or I may simply be a single drop of rain, but I will remain. I'll be back again and again and again.