Men Who Exhumed Billy the Kid Won’t Be Charged

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The New York Sun

Prosecutors won’t seek charges against two men who exhumed the remains of a man who claimed to be the outlaw William Bonney, also known as Billy the Kid.

A former sheriff of Lincoln County, N.M., Tom Sullivan, and a former mayor of Capitan, N.M., Steve Sederwall, dug up the bones of John Miller in May 2005. Miller was buried at the state-owned Pioneers’ Home Cemetery in Prescott nearly 70 years ago.

“It appears officials in charge of the facility gave permission and the people who were attempting to recover samples of the remains believed they had permission to do so,” Bill FitzGerald, a spokesman for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, which made the decision not to seek charges, said.

Messrs. Sullivan and Sederwall obtained DNA from Miller’s remains. The samples were sent to a Dallas lab to compare Miller’s DNA to blood traces taken from a bench that is believed to be the one Kid’s body was placed on after he was shot to death in 1881.

Messrs. Sullivan and Sederwall have been hunting for the Kid’s bones since 2003.

They began their quest in Fort Sumner, N.M., where history says the Kid was buried after then-Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down in 1881. But at least two men — Miller and Ollie “Brushy Bill” Roberts of Texas — claimed prior to their deaths that they were Billy the Kid.

Their stories presuppose that Garrett killed the wrong man and lied about it.


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