Part 1 of 3 - The Death of Billy the Kid

Mysterious Circumstances

Age Of Radio + Bleav

True Crime, Society & Culture, Documentary

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2018

⏱️ 108 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

No other historical figure from the Old West has stirred up more controversy and eluded historians and biographers more than Billy the Kid alias William H. Bonney. This young man in his short life has established his place in history and legend, but there is more to the myth there’s the man. Who was Billy the Kid? How did he become a legend? Was he more of a victim of circumstance? In Part 1, that’s what we try to figure out while we separate fact from myth.

“I don’t blame you for writing of me as you have. You had to believe other stories, but then I don’t know if any one would believe anything good of me anyway.”

~ Billy the Kid’s comment to a Las Vegas Gazette reporter (December, 1880)
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Transcript

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0:00.0	Of all the legends from the days of gun slingers and desperados, no one fires our collective imagination
0:06.8	more than Billy the Kid.
0:08.8	Now maybe that's because no outlaw better blurred the lines between good and bad.
0:14.0	He's actually going to jail and he's probably going to be hanged and yet he's laughing
0:20.4	about it.
0:21.4	From his point of view, he would have been killed within a matter of days if he hadn't killed them first.
0:25.8	But at the same time, I think that's not a justification for murder.
0:28.5	If the law had not been so incredibly corrupt, he wouldn't be in this situation.
0:33.0	The kid had learned a hard truth about the way the world worked in New Mexico.
0:37.0	Just a few years earlier, he'd been a skinny orphan boy from New York City.
0:41.0	Calling themselves the regulators, they vowed to dispense
0:44.7	their own brand of justice.
0:46.7	Now Billy was the most feared man in New Mexico.
0:50.5	One of the things about the kid he was able to deceive people he was able to get him to think that he was inconsequential
0:57.6	And the sheriff returns to jail and there's no kid the sale sale's empty. The hallway is empty.
1:04.7	With that jailbreak, he's a wanted man at the age of 16.
1:08.8	Law completely broke down in Lincoln County. There was really no semblance of law and order. Every son of a
1:14.9	bitch up there wanted to kill somebody. He's the only one of the soldiers that was in every single skirmish, every fight, every face off, every no you don't.
1:29.0	He was there.
1:31.0	And he just kept getting better at it.
1:33.0	Billy had one capacity above others, and that was loyalty.
1:38.0	He was extremely loyal.
	...

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