FORT SUMNER, N.M. (AP) — Two southeastern New Mexico investigators have obtained DNA from a cowboy who claimed to be Billy the Kid.
Before dying in the 1930s, John Miller told friends and a son that he was the legendary Western outlaw.
Former Lincoln County Sheriff Tom Sullivan and Capitan Mayor Steve Sederwall obtained the DNA last May from Miller's remains, which are buried in Prescott, Ariz.
They say they will compare it with blood traces taken from a 19th-century bench that is believed to be the one the Kid's body was placed on after he was shot by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881. The bench was discovered on a Fort Sumner ranch.
Should the samples match, Sullivan and Sederwall say they could have a break that upends accepted historical accounts of the Kid's life and death.
"Wouldn't it be a coincidence if someone we dug up in Arizona, and who died in 1934 and claimed to be Billy the Kid, bled on that bench? That's like winning the lottery," Sullivan said.
Over the past century, at least two men surfaced claiming to be Billy the Kid — Miller and Ollie P. "Brushy Bill" Roberts of Hico, Texas. Those stories presuppose that Garrett killed the wrong man in Fort Sumner and lied about it.
Sullivan and Sederwall were rebuffed in their earlier efforts to exhume the remains of Billy the Kid in Fort Sumner and those of the outlaw's mother in Silver City.
Critics in the two towns said the Kid's death and burial in DeBaca County were well established.
Sullivan has said the impetus for uncovering the truth about the Kid began more than a decade ago when he visited a Hico, Texas, museum dedicated to Roberts.
Sederwall said if Miller's DNA does not match the blood on the bench, investigators will try to exhume Roberts' remains, which rest in Hamilton, Texas.