The Guilty - Jason Pinter [85]
Internet resources as the Gazette, access to LexisNexis, and all
the historical newspapers on microfiche I needed. I wanted to
view the Roberts case from every media angle: not only Hico,
but by the major metropolitan papers in Texas, New York, Los
Angeles and elsewhere. You could get a good grasp of how a
story penetrated the national consciousness by how widely it
was reported, and with what veracity the conspiracy was given.
It was a crisp summer day and the steps outside the library
were teeming with people reading, hanging out, and even a
few sleeping on the stone. The NYPL itself is a behemoth that
takes up two full city blocks. The entrance is guarded by two
stone lions named Leo Astor and Leo Lenox, after John Jacob
Astor and James Lenox, both generous patrons. In the 1930s,
they were renamed Patience and Fortitude by Mayor Fiorello
La Guardia. Patience guards the south steps, Fortitude the
north. As I passed them by, I hoped they'd grant me both. The
three main doors are bracketed by six carved stone columns,
which lead into the great reading room where I'd spent many
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hours wrenching my back while poring over old texts. The
massive room is lit by grand chandeliers and surrounded by
thousands of volumes. I was here to use CATNYP, the online
system allowing subscribers access to the library's huge collection of journals, periodicals and newspapers.
I jogged up the steps and entered, making my way to a
computer stall where I took a seat, cracked my knuckles, looked
to see if the two cops had followed me inside. They hadn't.
I logged on to CATNYP and ran a search for Texas newspapers containing stories pertinent to the Brushy Bill case. I
typed slowly with my index fingers, my right palm aching
from the stitches. Guess I'd have to settle for old-fashioned
two-fingered typing for the time being.
The first article I came across was from the Austin Chroni-
cle, a story about one Judge Bob Hefner who, in 1986, published a booklet claiming Brushy Bill had in reality been the
real Billy the Kid. The booklet gained notoriety when it was
picked up by the Dallas Morning News. According to
Hefner's story, "Brushy Bill had no children and was at the
end of his life. Fame and fortune were not a consideration for
the old man."
Hefner continued, saying that Roberts desired only to be
granted the pardon promised by Governor Lewis Wallace to
the Kid years before. Hefner claimed that Pat Garrett had
actually killed a friend of Billy the Kid's that night in 1881,
solely for the purpose of collecting the five-hundred-dollar
bounty on Bonney's head.
It seemed strange that Brushy Bill Roberts would suddenly
decide, after years in hiding, that he wanted to be pardoned
for crimes committed in the 1880s. I noted that Hefner currently ran the Billy the Kid museum in Hico, making it two
different states with two different museums claiming to be the
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final resting place for Billy the Kid. Of course he had financial motivation for keeping the theory alive. But that didn't
make him a liar.
I then found an article published by the New York Times in
1950, concerning the spectacle surrounding a man who
claimed to be the real-life Jesse James. James had been
assumed murdered by two brothers named Bob and Charley
Ford back in 1882, but in 1950 a man named J. Frank Dalton
claimed to be the real James. After a media carnival descended upon the 102-year-old man during a hospital stay,
Dalton died. Yet the rumors persisted. Finally in 1995, the
body of Jesse James was exhumed from its grave in Missouri
and the DNA was found to match 99.7 to that of James's
family. Supporters of the Dalton theory did not give up hope,
and in 2000 a court order was granted to exhume the body of
J. Frank Dalton to end the speculation. Unfortunately the
wrong body was exhumed, and attempts to discredit Dalton
were halted. Dalton's actual body was never exhumed nor
tested. I wondered if this botched exhumation was part of the
reason Largo