The Billy Buff War
Will investigators ever cease digging up Billy the Kid?
By: Leo W. Banks 07/01/2006
Billy the Kid’s legend has hovered over the landscape of the American West for 125 years, a Hindenburg of hype and fantasy, always there to nourish those who merely look up. It will never crash and never burn.
The only question is where will it go next? In its latest incarnation, Airship Billy has come to Arizona.
Last May 19, Tom Sullivan and Steve Sederwall traveled to Prescott to exhume from the Arizona Pioneers’ Home cemetery the bones of John Miller, a man who claimed that he was the real Billy the Kid.
True West readers should recall those names. They’re the New Mexico investi-gators who caused a ruckus in 2003 with their ambitious plan to extract DNA from Billy’s mother, buried in Silver City, and from Billy himself in Fort Sumner. Entrenched interests in New Mexico stopped them cold, and it seemed as if the investigation was dead.
Then Sullivan and Sederwall found what they believe is the workbench on which Billy’s body was laid after Pat Garrett killed him on July 14, 1881. Dr. Henry Lee, famous for his forensic work on the O.J. Simpson trial, pulled DNA from the bench, possibly Billy’s DNA.
Enter range ruffian John Miller.
He died at the Home in 1937 after injuring his hip in a fall. Miller had always sworn that he was the Kid, and Helen Airy seconded that very thin contention in her 1992 book, Whatever Happened to Billy the Kid.
Pretending to be the real Billy has become a booming business. Sullivan and Sederwall recorded the names of 26 men—including crazy, old Brushy Bill Roberts—who claimed to be the homicidal Lincoln County gunman.
Imagine that—26 otherwise sane men raised their hands in public to declare that these others are frauds and liars. “It’s me, I tell you! I’m the cold-blooded killer and how dare you suggest I’m not?!”
It seems everybody wants a piece of the Kid, and they’re willing to sully their own names to have it. Why? Because our Western legends hold such power. They define the frontier that continues to define us, and that gives them entry into the deepest part of ourselves as a people.
Maybe Miller figured that out and used it to grab fame he never earned in life. Sullivan and Sederwall believed his claim, and the two former lawmen sneaked into Arizona on stocking feet before their critics could “lawyer up” to stop them.
But the exhumation was hardly clear-cut. The investigators found two sets of remains side by side but didn’t know which was Miller. So they pulled bones from both graves. Dr. Laura Fulginiti, the forensic anthropologist supervising the dig, said the first body had buck teeth and a scapula fracture, which caused excitement.
“He had buck teeth just like the Kid,” Sederwall said, “and a bullet hole in the upper left chest that exited the shoulder blade.” An equally enthused Sullivan suggested this might be the man Garrett shot.
But Fulginiti didn’t support their enthusiasm: “There was evidence of trauma on the scapula, but I couldn’t tell whether it was from a gunshot wound or not.”
Fulginiti examined the second body, finding no evidence of gunshot wounds. But she did find a hip injury, which fit Miller’s story. Based on this, Fulginiti proceeded on the assumption that this man was Miller, and continues to do so. Told of Fulginiti’s statement, Sullivan responded, “Well, we think it’s the other guy.”
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