307: Billy The Kid: The Man Who Died Twice

<div> <strong>Did Pat Garrett kill Billy the Kid?</strong><br> 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.<br> <br> 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.<br> <br> <strong>THE STORY</strong><br> In 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.<br> <br> 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 wa