William H. Bonney, known as Billy the Kid, was convicted at Mesilla, New Mexico Territory, in April 1881 of the murder of Lincoln County Sheriff William Brady, and was sentenced to death. It was the only conviction returned against him, and the only one returned against anyone for the killings of the Lincoln County War. He was about 21. Born Henry McCarty in New York City, he had come west as a child and by 1877 was a fugitive in Arizona. In New Mexico he went to work for the Englishman John Tunstall and, after Tunstall was killed in February 1878, rode with the Regulators, the band of men who backed Tunstall's side in the feud.
Sheriff Brady and his deputy George Hindman were killed in Lincoln on April 1, 1878. Bonney was indicted for Brady's murder and was tried for it three years later. Fifteen days after his sentence, on April 28, 1881, he escaped from the Lincoln County court building, and the two deputies guarding him, James W. Bell and Bob Olinger, died. He was never tried for those deaths. On July 14, 1881 he was killed at Fort Sumner by Sheriff Pat Garrett, who had taken him into custody the previous December. A coroner's jury called the death justifiable homicide.
His name has been attached to far more deaths than the documents support. The popular figure of twenty-one, one for each year of his life, is a legend; historians working from the record credit him with four killings by his own hand and a part in several others. A posthumous pardon was considered and declined by Governor Bill Richardson on December 31, 2010.
Bonney was born Henry McCarty in New York City in 1859; November 23 is the date usually given. He came west as a child through Indiana and Kansas, and from 1873 he was often known by another surname, as Henry Antrim, Billy Antrim or Kid Antrim. By his mid-teens he was living in Silver City, in the southwest of the territory, and keeping rough company.
He was arrested in Silver City in 1875 on a charge of theft, after he took a bundle of clothing from a laundry. He escaped from the local jail on September 25, 1875 and made for Arizona. In March 1877 he was arrested with a gang accused of stealing army horses, and he escaped again.
The first death attributed to him came in Arizona. On August 17, 1877, after a dispute at a card game near Camp Grant, he killed Francis "Windy" Cahill, who died the next day. A coroner's jury found the act "criminal and unjustifiable." Some historians have judged that he acted in self-defense. He fled the following day and was never tried. The Cahill case is the earliest of the killings that historians treat as his own, and it was part of the record that followed him back to New Mexico.
In December 1877 he was hired as a cowboy on John Tunstall's ranch at Río Feliz, in Lincoln County, and by 1878 he was using the name William H. Bonney. The county was the setting of a dispute over trade, credit and cattle between two groups. On one side stood L. G. Murphy and Company, a trading house later run by James Dolan and John Riley, which sold goods on credit and bought local produce and which counted Sheriff William Brady as an ally. On the other stood the lawyer Alexander McSween, the cattleman John Chisum and Tunstall, who had opened a competing store in the town of Lincoln.
The conflict turned violent in early 1878. In January the sheriff arrested McSween, and he sent a posse to Tunstall's ranch with the stated purpose of recovering stolen stock. Tunstall was killed by members of that posse in February 1878; February 18 is the date given in the usual chronology. His supporters, Bonney among them, called themselves the Regulators. In early March the Regulators killed Frank Baker and William Morton, two men suspected in Tunstall's death, and the territorial governor, Samuel Axtell, declared the Regulators outlaws.
On April 1, 1878 Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman were killed in Lincoln, while a grand jury was due to meet on the Tunstall and McSween matters. Hindman had been part of the posse that killed Tunstall about two weeks before. A party of five, Bonney among them, is credited with the deaths, and the Regulators left town before troops from Fort Stanton could arrest them. Brady was the county's sheriff and an ally of the Murphy side, and those who killed him are said to have believed he was working for that faction.
The grand jury dismissed most of the charges against McSween and returned indictments against members of both sides. For the death of Tunstall, Jesse Evans and others were indicted. For the death of Sheriff Brady, the grand jury indicted Bonney, John Middleton and Henry Brown, and no one else. Hindman's death produced no separate conviction of any kind.
Three days later, on April 4, 1878, the Regulators, Bonney among them, fought Andrew "Buckshot" Roberts at Blazer's Mill. Roberts and the Regulator leader Dick Brewer died in that encounter. Bonney was later named in a federal indictment over Roberts's death.
The decisive battle of the war took place in Lincoln in July 1878 and lasted five days. McSween and more than fifty followers rode into the town, and ten men, Bonney among them, held McSween's own premises. Dolan's men came in from San Patricio to support the new sheriff, Peppin. After several days Colonel Dudley arrived from Fort Stanton with troops. He was supposed to be neutral but in practice supported Dolan. On the fifth day McSween and several of his men died. Bonney got away.
Samuel Axtell was removed in the autumn of 1878 and replaced as governor by Lew Wallace, who asked President Hayes to declare martial law and issued an amnesty proclamation on September 30, 1878 for those who laid down their arms. The amnesty did not extend to anyone already under indictment, which excluded Bonney because of the Brady and Roberts matters. In February 1879 Bonney, Evans and Dolan agreed to a truce.
A lawyer named Chapman had been killed, and on March 13, 1879 Bonney wrote to the governor offering to testify about it if the charges pending against him were annulled. Wallace replied, in words later cited by the pardon petitioner, that he had the authority "to exempt you from prosecution if you will testify to what you say you know." Bonney gave evidence to the Lincoln grand jury in April 1879. His testimony named Dolan and a man named Billy Campbell, and both were indicted, but the case against Dolan did not end in a conviction. Wallace never issued the pardon.
Bonney's later petitions to the governor went unanswered, and the district attorney refused to drop the charges. Bonney then left Lincoln County.
In November 1880 Pat Garrett was elected sheriff of Lincoln County, in the hope that he would bring in Bonney and other outlaws, and he was also appointed a deputy United States marshal, which allowed him to act beyond the county line. A reward notice for Bonney was issued on December 3, 1880, and on December 13 Wallace authorized a reward of five hundred dollars for his capture. On December 19, 1880 Bonney's companion Tom O'Folliard was killed at Fort Sumner by Garrett's posse.
Four days later, on December 23, 1880, Garrett and a posse of about a dozen men surrounded the group at Stinking Springs, east of Fort Sumner. One of Bonney's companions, Charlie Bowdre, died at dawn. After a day-long standoff the others surrendered. Bonney was taken first to the jail at Las Vegas, then to Santa Fe, and finally south to Mesilla for trial.
He was moved from Santa Fe on March 28, 1881, after 91 days in jail, and brought to Mesilla, the seat of the district court for Doña Ana County. The case against him there was Territory of New Mexico versus William Bonney, alias "Kid", alias William Antrim, Doña Ana County Criminal Case Nos. 531 and 532, which had been opened in 1878.
At Mesilla, Judge Warren Henry Bristol presided over both the federal and the territorial sessions of the court. Bonney was first called in the federal court on the indictment over the death of Roberts. On April 6, 1881 Bristol overruled the prosecution's demurrer, quashed the indictment and discharged Bonney on that charge, and Bonney was remanded to the sheriff to face the Brady indictment in the territorial court. Prosecutors are said to have judged that the federal charges, the Roberts matter and a second death on the Mescalero reservation, were likely to end in acquittal, and so they went forward on the Brady murder.
The prosecutor was Simon Bolivar Newcomb, the territory's acting attorney general. Bonney pleaded destitution, and the court appointed two lawyers for him: Albert Jennings Fountain and John D. Bail. He then pleaded not guilty.
The jury consisted of twelve men, almost all of them Hispanic. The defense had struck the four Anglos in the pool. The jurors were between 27 and 56 years old, and five of them could not read or write. The prosecution called four witnesses, and none of them had seen who caused Brady's death. The defense called no one, and Bonney did not testify.
The judge's instructions shaped the outcome. Bristol rejected the instructions Fountain proposed and gave the jury three pages of his own. His language on premeditation was broad enough to fit almost any killing, and he told the jurors that they could return only a verdict of first-degree murder or an acquittal, even though territorial law recognized five degrees of murder. The instructions were read in English, though few of the jurors, and possibly none, spoke it. Fountain sought a verdict on a lesser offense, and Bristol tried to prevent one. Bonney was said to have threatened the judge, which has raised the question whether Bristol should have stepped aside.
The jury found Bonney guilty of the murder of Sheriff Brady on April 9, 1881. On April 13 Judge Bristol sentenced him to death and set the execution for May 13, 1881, at Lincoln.
No appeal was filed. Bonney could not pay for one, and territorial law provided counsel for the trial but not for an appeal. He was the only person convicted for crimes arising from the Lincoln County War.
Bonney was taken to Lincoln, where he arrived on April 21, 1881 under heavy guard and was held in the county court building. His guards were Deputy James W. Bell and Bob Olinger. On April 28, 1881 Garrett was away in White Oaks on a collecting tour.
On that day Bonney escaped. Bell and Olinger died, and Bonney left Lincoln. He was not tried for either death and was never convicted of them. They are attributed to him by the newspapers of the time, by historians and by the governor who considered his pardon in 2010.
On the night of July 14, 1881 Garrett, with deputies John Poe and Thomas McKinney, arrived at Fort Sumner, on the Pecos River about 150 miles from Lincoln. Bonney was killed there that night, at the age of 21.
An inquest was held early on July 15. It was presided over by the local postmaster, Milnor Rudolph, who was summoned from a few miles away, and it was heard by a jury of five men. Garrett and a local rancher gave statements. The jury found that the dead man, named in the report as William Bonney, had been killed by Pat Garrett, ruled the act "justifiable homicide," and added that Garrett deserved a reward. The territory's attorney general gave an opinion on payment of the reward on July 21, 1881, and Governor Sheldon approved it in a letter to the legislature on February 14, 1882. Garrett published his own version of events as a book in 1882.
By the end of his life the popular press had decided on a figure: twenty-one men, one for each year. The figure has no support in the documents. Robert Utley's study, widely used by later writers, found that Bonney killed four men himself and was present and firing when six others died.
On December 14, 2010 the Albuquerque attorney Randi McGinn filed a petition for a posthumous pardon with New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, after about six months of work on the question. It rested on the amnesty that Lew Wallace was said to have promised in 1879 and never delivered. The petition covered only the Brady matter, not the deaths of the two guards. Descendants of Garrett and of Wallace opposed it, saying that no promise had been made.
The governor's office received about 430 messages in favor of a pardon and 379 against. On December 31, 2010, his last day in office, Richardson announced that he would not grant it. He cited "a lack of conclusiveness and also the historical ambiguity as to why Gov. Wallace reneged on his pardon," and he said that the later deaths of the two guards "tipped the scales." He called it a very close call. McGinn replied that a future governor could still grant a pardon.
New Mexico was a territory in these years, not a state, and a district judge such as Bristol sat in both the federal and the territorial courts. That is why one session at Mesilla could begin with a federal indictment and end with a territorial one. Bristol had presided at the Lincoln County War proceedings before Bonney's trial: he dismissed the charges against Dolan over the killing of Chapman, and the former State Historian Robert Torrez counted seven death sentences that Bristol imposed between 1875 and 1881, Bonney's among them.
Territorial law provided counsel for a trial but not for an appeal, which is the reason no appeal followed the sentence. It recognized five degrees of murder, yet the jury in this trial was left with a choice between first-degree murder and acquittal.
The Lincoln County War ran from 1878 into 1879. Its two sides were the Murphy and Dolan trading house, allied with the sheriff, and the McSween and Tunstall group, which had opened a rival store in Lincoln. Tunstall was killed by a sheriff's posse, and the Regulators formed in response. Wallace's amnesty of September 1878 left out anyone under indictment, and Bonney was one of those. In 2010 the governor's office said a pardon would not have cleared all of his crimes and would only have honored the reprieve Wallace was said to have promised.
Pardon promise. Whether Wallace promised Bonney a pardon in return for his testimony in 1879 is disputed. Wallace's reply, as quoted, offered exemption from prosecution if Bonney testified. Descendants of Wallace and Garrett deny any promise, and Richardson's decision of 2010 rested on the ambiguity.
Number of killings. The twenty-one is a legend. The figure of four killings by his own hand is the working estimate of a leading historian. The deaths of Hindman, Roberts, Bell and Olinger were never tried as his.
Fairness of the trial. It has been questioned whether Bristol should have heard the case at all, given the threats Bonney was said to have made against him. No appeal was filed, so no higher court addressed the question.
1859: Born Henry McCarty in New York City (November 23 is the date usually given).
September 25, 1875: Escapes from the Silver City jail after a theft arrest.
August 17, 1877: Francis "Windy" Cahill dies the day after a dispute at Camp Grant, Arizona Territory; a coroner's jury calls the act "criminal and unjustifiable."
December 1877: Hired on John Tunstall's ranch in Lincoln County.
February 1878: Tunstall is killed by members of a sheriff's posse.
April 1, 1878: Sheriff William Brady and Deputy George Hindman are killed in Lincoln.
April 4, 1878: Andrew "Buckshot" Roberts and Dick Brewer die at Blazer's Mill.
July 1878: The five-day battle in Lincoln.
September 30, 1878: Governor Lew Wallace's amnesty proclamation, which does not cover Bonney.
March 13, 1879: Bonney writes to Wallace; in April 1879 he testifies before the Lincoln grand jury.
November 1880: Pat Garrett is elected sheriff of Lincoln County.
December 13, 1880: Wallace authorizes a reward of $500 for Bonney's capture.
December 19, 1880: Tom O'Folliard is killed at Fort Sumner.
December 23, 1880: Bonney surrenders to Garrett's posse at Stinking Springs.
March 28, 1881: Brought from Santa Fe to Mesilla.
April 6, 1881: Federal indictment over the death of Roberts quashed; Bonney remanded to face the Brady indictment.
April 9, 1881: Verdict of guilty of the murder of Sheriff William Brady.
April 13, 1881: Sentenced to death, execution set for May 13, 1881.
April 21, 1881: Arrives at Lincoln under guard.
April 28, 1881: Escapes from the Lincoln County court building; Deputies James W. Bell and Bob Olinger die.
July 14, 1881: Killed at Fort Sumner by Sheriff Pat Garrett.
July 15, 1881: Coroner's jury rules the death justifiable homicide.
February 14, 1882: Governor Sheldon approves payment of the reward to Garrett.
December 14, 2010: Pardon petition filed with Governor Bill Richardson.
December 31, 2010: Richardson declines to grant a pardon.