I just wanted something here with my name on it.

[Billyman]

:D

[Mudflap]

:die:

[Billyman]

:moon:

[Koliedrus]

Everything in Headspace is slotted to be moved before this forum is deleted. It's intended to get smaller, not larger.

Off to MFC you go, Gent's Locker Room.

[Barbie]

Billy the Kid mystery pondered again (http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/WeirdNews/2004/01/13/311693-ap.html)

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) - Legend has it Billy the Kid was gunned down by a sheriff in 1881.

But was he? Homer Overton will tell you the dead man was an unwitting imposter, a drunk shot point-blank in the face by two unlikely chums - a lawman and the legendary gunfighter himself. Overton learned this some 63 years ago, at age nine, from the widow of Sheriff Pat Garrett. Overton's sworn statement was offered as evidence for exhuming the body of the Kid's mother, Catherine Antrim, to compare her DNA with that of a Texas man who claimed until his death in 1950 that he was William Bonney, known in Western lore as Billy the Kid.

Authorities in Lincoln County, N.M., where the Kid was convicted of killing a sheriff in the 1870s, want to know if that man - named Ollie (Brushy Bill) Roberts, of Hico, Texas - was the real Billy the Kid.

A hearing on the exhumation petition is planned Jan. 27 in Silver City, N.M., where Antrim is buried. Town officials oppose disturbing the gravesite.

Coroner's jurors concluded in 1881 that Garrett killed Bonney that July in the Fort Sumner bedroom of Pete Maxwell, son of New Mexico land baron Lucien Maxwell.

Garrett's widow, Apolonaria Garrett, told Overton and a buddy her husband and the Kid shot a drunk passed out in a street. With no face left, the drunk was just a body that could be passed off for Bonney, Overton's court affidavit said.

Overton's boyhood friend, Bobby Talbert, has not been located for comment.

Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan has said it is important to determine what is true and what isn't. He has noted Garrett's image is part of the logo on Lincoln County sheriff's department uniforms.

Overton lives in Alta Loma, Calif., where he issued a notarized sworn affidavit Dec. 27, 2003, that was filed in court in Silver City a week ago.

The affidavit said the boys visited Apolonaria Garrett in the summer of 1940, about 32 years after her husband was shot dead in 1908 near Las Cruces, N.M.

"I believe what Mrs. Garrett told us that day was the absolute truth...It made such an impression on me that I have remembered it in detail these 63 years," Overton's affidavit said.

Historian Leon Metz has said word of a faked death would have leaked; Silver City's motion to reject exhumation said suggesting such a cover-up could have worked "strains credulity."

Stories have persisted for generations of connections between Bonney and Garrett, said Sherry Tippett, lawyer for Sullivan, Deputy Steve Sederwall and DeBaca County Sheriff Gary Graves, who favour exhumation.

"It varies from: 'They just knew each other from a card game' to 'They were pals,"' she said.

In oral histories recorded during the 1930s under the U.S. federal Works Progress Administration, or WPA, several interviewees said they doubted Garrett shot Bonney, she said.

"There are a number of people who believe that and now that we have the tools to determine the truth," Tippett said, "don't we have the responsibility?"

[Billyman]

Fortunately, Billyman (although he has been shot) has not been gunned down.

[Mudflap]

Billyman :rl:

[Billyman]

See how the bullets have no effect?

Learn from that.