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“A struggle or two, a little strangling sound as he gasped for breath, and The Kid was with his many victims.” Garrett quickly drew his revolver and fired two shots. Instead of depicting an epic gunfight out of a dime novel, Garrett makes his shooting of the outlaw seem like an incredibly lucky break.īilly the Kid realized that someone besides Maxwell was there in the darkness, and raised his pistol within a foot of Garrett’s chest.
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The 1882 biography The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, Noted Desperado of the Southwest, Whose Deeds of Daring and Blood Made His Name a Terror in New Mexico, Arizona and Northern Mexico, which was written by Garrett, his killer, contains what seems to be the most credible account of the fatal confrontation, according to Motavalli. Pat Garrett's Account of Billy the Kid's Death “They didn’t do a lot of actual research when they did these biographies,” Motavalli says. Details of his early life are sketchy, and much of what was written about him just before and after his death was what Motavalli calls “scurrilous literature”-sensationalized newspaper accounts and quickie books churned out by publishing houses. To add to the confusion, the actual facts about Billy the Kid haven’t been easy to come by. “You want someone to buy you a drink, so you say, ‘I’m Billy the Kid.’” “Things like this typically start out as bar stories,” Motavalli says. After all, similar stories have arisen after the deaths of other people who captured the public imagination, from Elvis Presley to Adolf Hitler. The persistent belief that Billy the Kid survived and hid out somewhere shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, explains Jim Motavalli, author of The Real Dirt on America’s Frontier Outlaws, that examines the legends and the reality of various famed desperados of the American West.