His death has become a myth
One of the interesting facts about Billy the Kid is that his death has become a myth. Over time, legends arose suggesting that McCarty was not murdered and that Garrett fabricated the event and death out of the kindness in order for McCarty to avoid prosecution. Several men claimed to be Billy the Kid throughout the next 50 years. In 1948, a man from central Texas named Ollie P. Roberts, better known as Brushy Bill Roberts, claimed to be Billy the Kid and petitioned New Mexico Governor Thomas J. Mabry for a pardon. Mabry rejected Roberts' assertions, and Roberts died soon after. Nonetheless, Roberts' hometown of Hico, Texas, profited from his claim by building a Billy the Kid museum.
John Miller, a man from Arizona, also claimed to be McCarty. His family did not support this until 1938, sometime after his death. Miller's body was interred in the state-owned Arizona Pioneers' Home Cemetery in Prescott, Arizona; without permission from the state, Miller's teeth and bones were exhumed and analyzed in May 2005. DNA samples from the remains were transferred to a Dallas laboratory and examined to compare Miller's DNA with blood samples recovered from the old Lincoln County courthouse floorboards and a bench where McCarty's body was supposedly deposited after he was shot. According to a July 2015 Washington Post report, the lab results were useless.
In 2004, researchers attempted to exhume the remains of McCarty's mother, Catherine Antrim, whose DNA would be analyzed and compared to that of the body buried in William Bonney's grave. Her body had not been unearthed as of 2012.
Gale Cooper, an author, and amateur historian sued the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office under the Illinois Inspection of Public Documents Act in 2007 to get records of the results of the 2006 DNA tests and other forensic evidence acquired in the Billy the Kid investigations. In April 2012, 133 pages of documents were released; they gave no definitive proof verifying or refuting the widely believed tale of Garrett's murder of McCarty, but they did prove the existence of the records and that they might have been supplied earlier. Cooper received $100,000 in punitive damages in 2014, but the decision was later overturned by the New Mexico Court of Appeals. The lawsuit ended up costing Lincoln County approximately $300,000.
