The complete and factual life of Billy the Kid

Billy the Kid: Robin Hood or hoodlum? After 90 years of romantic myths, this book shatters the spell and uncovers the brutal, even stranger truth about the youngest of the famous Western desperadoes. Billy Bonney, whose death in 1881 ended a reign of terror in New Mexico, has become legendary as a defender of small settles against big ranchers....a lightning draw who dropped 21 men, one for each year of his life...a "gentleman outlaw" who was gunned down unarmed and helpless. Author William Brent, who grew up among men who knew the truth, debunks these fables and many more. He got the real story from Pat Garrett, the sheriff who finally got the Kid, from his own father--who was Garrett's deputy--from his mother, grandfather and other survivors of the infamous, bloody Lincoln County War. He reveals here a twisted young killer who would be diagnosed today as paranoiac and a psychopathic liar, inflating his own gory crimes for a weird kind of glory.^ Brent unfolds the Kid's early years in Silver City and his runaway at 12--not after a killing, as the Kid boasted, but after a petty theft. He traces the Kid's drift into rustling and robbery at 17 and his debut as a hired killer in the n fiery, no-holds-barred Lincoln County War. Here are all the famous sieges and ambushes, captures and escapes of Billy the Kid's career--but as they really happened, not as folk-tales tell it. You see the Kid as contemporaries knew him: a runty braggart with a warped, almost perverted personality who killed for kicks, not for noble causes. Each shooting is probed, proving Billy notched only half the kills he claimed, almost none in fair face-to-face encounters. At the end of the crimson trail, Brent tells the true facts of Kid's last stand, clearing Sheriff Garrett of an unjust murder. Fascinating, exciting, here is the authentic bullet-scarred story of Billy the Kid--told by men who grew up with him, dodged his fire, and finally brought him down.^ It is a vital revelation in the history of the Old West.