Steve Sederwall peers down at a rectangle of dark wood flooring. The panel, which sits at the top of a steep, dark staircase, is probably oak or pine, and it’s been here since 1874, when this two-story adobe courthouse in the Sierra Blancas — the mountain range that rises through central and southern New Mexico — was built. "We sprayed the luminol right here," Sederwall says. He's talking about the chemical compound made famous by the techno-minded crime drama: When its yellowish crystals are applied to even trace amounts of blood, the hemoglobin produces a stunning blue glow.
At 63, Sederwall is a big man with a goatee, a garrulous disposition, and a drawl made raspy by a nasty cough. It’s a bright Thursday afternoon in April, and as he recalls the Sunday 12 years ago when he was a reserve deputy with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office watching this floorboard ripple with color, he excitedly veers into the 134-year-old backstory that led him here. There was the newspaper account from 1890. There was the book from 1936. They offered firsthand information about one of the most sensational events in the history of the American West — the double cop killing and jailbreak committed on April 28, 1881, by a skinny, buck-toothed young man named William H. Bonney, who was known by various aliases during his brief life, but in death would be known forever as Billy the Kid.
Deputy Steve Sederwall
Pascal Guyot / AFP / Getty Images
Bonney was among the most notorious celebrity outlaws of the West, someone who briefly thrived amid the lawlessness of 19th-century New Mexico. Some newspapers of the day portrayed Bonney as a knuckle-dragging murderer — he was said to have killed a man for every year he lived, supposedly 21 — though history cut a far more complex portrait. His most sympathetic admirers offer him up as a charming, whip-smart idealist, a Robin Hood–like folk hero who fought with righteous passion during the Lincoln County War.
A few months after Bonney’s jailhouse escape, the Lincoln County sheriff tracked the fugitive to a town near the Texas border and shot him dead. In the 134 years since, Bonney has become one of the West’s most mythologized and tragic antiheroes, someone whose “pliable” biography, as the historian Paul Andrew Hutton put it, provided a ready-made Hollywood storyline that attracted generations of followers. Bonney has been the star of dozens of movies — everything from the Young Guns films to the campy Billy the Kid Versus Dracula — probably even more cable television shows and countless biographies. Though the only confirmed photo of Bonney was purchased by one of the Koch brothers for $2.3 million four years ago, National Geographic, Kevin Costner, and a television production crew are exploring claims of a recently discovered, disputed image that, if authenticated, could apparently be the most valuable photo on the planet.
Sederwall says he didn’t care all that much about Bonney’s cult following. As far he was concerned, Bonney was "saddle trash," and Sederwall was in that stairwell for one thing only — to conduct a modern investigation into the murder of J.W. Bell, one of the deputies killed during Bonney’s escape. The logic behind the investigation was simple. "I’m a cop. He’s a cop,” Sederwall explains. “He gets killed. He was a footnote. I’m thinking, Why?"
If this had been the private pursuit of another Billy-phile, Sederwall’s detective work may have ended up as a blip in the twisty history of William Bonney. But it wasn’t. It was part of an official homicide investigation backed by two sheriff’s offices, promoted in a History Channel program, given front-page treatment in the New York Times, and championed by then-governor and soon-to-be presidential contender Bill Richardson.
The luminol on the courthouse floor was just one element of that investigation. The sheriffs were also examining one of the stranger storylines of Bonney’s afterlife: the theory that the man who shot Bonney, Pat Garrett, didn’t actually kill him, but helped him fake his own death and escape to Arizona, perhaps, where he lived as a rancher named John Miller, or to Texas Hill Country, where he died in 1950 as Brushy Bill Roberts.
Asagan / Wikipedia
Both of these men claimed to be Bonney long after 1881, and a vibrant subculture of amateur historians, authors, and enthusiasts continues to argue that they may have been telling the truth. In the small Texas town where Roberts died, there’s a storefront museum dedicated to claiming him as the real William Bonney, and his nearby tombstone is framed by a large granite arch with an outsized engraving. "Billy the Kid," it says.
For this branch of Bonney’s devotees, Sederwall’s investigation was huge. It’s not that there hadn’t been efforts like this before: In 1950, the work of a man named William Morrison even earned Brushy Bill a meeting with the governor of New Mexico to request a pardon for a murder indictment that he said he’d been promised as a young man. (He was denied.) But there had never been a modern, state-run operation relying on the latest in crime scene technology. “Nobody had said, let’s prove this — empirically,” recalls Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of the magazine True West. “That’s what was so unique.”
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The broader sweep of historians, however, sneers at this subculture. The most aggressive protector of Bonney’s accepted biography is a Harvard-trained doctor and retired psychiatrist who traded her practice in Beverly Hills for a cabin in New Mexico, where, in the late 1990s, she began writing books about Bonney. Her name is Gale Cooper, and in 2003, as the sheriffs’ investigation was getting underway, she challenged every aspect of it. Unlike the sheriffs, Cooper worked behind the scenes — at least at first — to generate opposition, partnering with newspapermen, lawyers, and fellow Billy-philes who were comfortable being in the spotlight. In her emphatic telling, Sederwall, Richardson, and the rest were no more than opportunistic interlopers, the equivalent of global warming deniers operating a state-sponsored con.
The events that followed tracked a tangled and at times unbelievable trajectory, one that hemmed in an ever-expanding cast of characters including everyone from the governor to one of the state’s most prominent open records advocates. The story has played out as a protracted civil lawsuit that currently resides in the New Mexico Court of Appeals, and it has been painstakingly detailed in one of Cooper’s recently updated books, Cracking the Billy the Kid Case Hoax. In print and in court, Cooper has alleged all manner of scandalous activities against her adversaries, everything from pay-to-play politics at the highest levels of state government to grave robbery and records tampering.
But Cooper’s crusade also exposes a dramatic struggle over a question far older than Bonney himself: Who controls history? Is it the “Dead Bandit Society,” as Sederwall mockingly calls the mainstream scholars who accept Bonney’s conventional life and death storyline and who, in Sederwall’s view, refuse to challenge the history they’ve written? Or is it the “hoaxers,” as Cooper calls Sederwall and his noncredentialed comrades?
Dangling in the balance are not only their reputations — Cooper as Bonney’s chief defender, Sederwall as a leading insurgent — but the biography of one the West's most iconic characters and the media machine his life has produced.
Mpi / Getty Images
I meet Sederwall at a Shell station in Capitan, New Mexico, a village 11 miles west of Lincoln, the setting of Bonney’s courthouse escape and a town that has been preserved as an eerie memorial to Bonney and the Lincoln County War. Today, it’s a massive tourist draw, the most widely visited monument in the state. I hop in the passenger seat of Sederwall’s white Ford pickup, and as we drive toward the courthouse, barreling past juniper-blanketed hillsides, he tells me he grew up far from Billy the Kid country, in Hannibal, Missouri.
By 2003, he’d become the mayor of Capitan and an unpaid volunteer deputy with Lincoln County. (He also co-owns an RV park and runs a private detective agency.) Someone left a book about Bonney at his office — The West of Billy the Kid — and one day he came across a line about the courthouse escape. “It said, ‘Chances are, we’ll never know what happened in that courthouse,'" Sederwall recalls. As he pondered what that meant, in walked Tom Sullivan, the county’s four-term sheriff and Sederwell’s close confidant. (“We’d talk about everything in the world,” Sederwell says.)
Sederwall wanted to “open up a case” about the deputy’s killing, which was somewhat out of character. It’s not like he was an aspiring amateur historian, or even an Old West buff. But he’d always loved being a cop, and running investigations was his retirement pastime of choice. “Everybody else goes out and plays golf,” he says. “I go out and look at dead bandits.”
Lincoln County jail
New Mexico Archive
How would Sederwall do it? By reconstructing some of the most important moments from Bonney’s jailbreak. After Bonney shot and killed Bell, for instance, the second guard was down the road at the Wortley Hotel, feeding the jail's other inmates. When he heard the shot, he dashed toward the courthouse; Bonney leaned out a second-floor window and shot him to death. But could a gun fired inside the courthouse, which had 60-inch adobe walls, actually be heard at the Wortley, about 250 feet down the road? As Sederwall plotted the experiment, Sullivan decided to tag along.
On April 28, 2003, the men stood shoulder to shoulder at the top of the courthouse staircase. Sullivan pointed a .45 Long Colt pistol down the steps and fired two blanks. Sederwall’s hypothesis, it turned out, was unfounded. The shots were heard nearly a mile away.
A $5,000 reward poster for the capture of Billy the Kid, "dead or alive," by Sheriff Jim Dalton.
Hulton Archive / Getty Images
What happened next set off a series of unintended consequences that Sederwall says reshaped the investigation. Sullivan walked outside and, with his police radio, told the dispatcher he was working a homicide. "The suspect is William Bonney," Sederwall recalls him saying.
Sederwall huffs and chortles as he tells me this. It was nothing more than a flippant joke, but because the local newspaper monitors the police radio, the experiment became an official police matter. From there, he recalls, "all this stuff started going crazy." The Albuquerque Journal picked up the story, and, on June 5, 2003, so did the New York Times.
The day the Times story ran, Sederwall says, his cell phone rang. Gov. Richardson wanted to chat. "The first thing he tells us is, ‘I’ve got a tourism department across the street and they’ve got a $5 million budget and they can’t buy the shit you guys are pulling off,'" Sederwall recalls.
Five days later, the sheriffs, the governor, and a handful of other officials appeared before a throng of reporters at the capitol. The sheriffs, Richardson said, were seeking to "answer key questions that have lingered for over 120 years surrounding the life and death” of one of New Mexico’s most legendary icons.
Richardson was prepared to fully support the endeavor: The state police, the national laboratories at Sandia and Los Alamos, the University of New Mexico — they would all contribute. There would be ground-penetrating radar and the best forensic technology. There would be hearings in Silver City, Lincoln, and Fort Sumner. "Getting to the truth is our goal,” Richardson said. “But, if this increases interest and tourism in our state, I couldn’t be happier."
Mpi / Getty Images
Sederwall’s story about the beginnings of the Bonney investigation has been mercilessly scrutinized, and much of it is at odds with the record. In the May 2003 edition of the Capitan mayor’s report, for instance, Sederwall didn’t describe it as a project that sought to spotlight the killing of a long-forgotten officer, but as an opportunity to examine the claim that Brushy Bill Roberts actually might have been William Bonney. Nor did his report describe the investigation as something that, through ignorance and accident, became an official matter; rather, it appeared to be an organized effort, one that "will put a positive light on the county, our town, and the state.” Even the governor, during his press conference, said it was Sullivan and Sederwall who reached out to him — and not the other way around. (In an interview, Richardson, who was governor until Jan. 1, 2011, told me he doesn’t recall telling the sheriffs about his flailing tourism agency.)
These may seem minor, a few details lost in the fog of 12 years. But once the sheriffs' investigation had become a thing of perpetual controversy, Gale Cooper would point to these inconsistencies and others as evidence of a cover-up, a self-serving altering of history designed to evade accountability.
Back when the investigation was just beginning, though, Cooper was still a novice in the Billy the Kid scene. With her cowboy boots and jeans, she looked the part of a Western woman, but she’d moved to New Mexico only a few years before. Raised in New York City, she’s a self-described overachiever — a high school valedictorian who joined the prestigious honors society Phi Beta Kappa and, in 1971, earned a medical degree from Harvard. By 1975, she’d settled in California. In Beverly Hills, she ran a psychiatric practice specializing in the effects of violent crime; in a gated community in the San Fernando Valley, she lived in a big house where she bred miniature horses. At Barnes & Noble one day in the summer of 1998, Cooper picked up a copy of Pat Garrett’s The Authentic Life of Billy the Kid. She finished it in an hour. "I said, ‘This is the great story of America,’" she recalls thinking. Mesmerized, she flew to New Mexico and visited Bonney’s grave in Fort Sumner.
Gale Cooper
Via youtube.com
Cooper started writing a novel, Joy of the Birds, about one of Bonney’s supposed romances, and revisited New Mexico, this time to get a clearer picture of Bonney’s terrain. "I was changing," she wrote. "Shy, bookish, and reclusive, never having danced, I bought CDs of old-style, Mexican ranch music: music to which bi-cultural Billy would have danced." She came to view Bonney not as an outlaw, but as someone done wrong by history who should instead be remembered as a rebel on a righteous path. "It’s an unquenchable passion," she tells me in a phone interview, adding, "I sold everything I had and moved to a log cabin. That’s where I am now."
This must have been a strange transition: a bicoastal, Ivy League–educated doctor transplanted to one of the poorest states in the country, pursuing an interest that was, as she puts it, "a tangent." I didn’t get to ask Cooper about it in detail, though, because our conversations were limited. When we spoke earlier this year, I told her I wanted to write about her, and she held forth on her "adversaries," on how she "lived in fear of being assassinated," on Bonney’s "unsung freedom fight." She barely paused for a breath. At one point, she asked how fast I could read.
When three of her books about Bonney arrived in the mail a few days later, I knew why. They ranged in length from nearly 600 pages (Billy the Kid’s Writings, Words & Wit) to more than a thousand (Cracking the Billy the Kid Case Hoax). When I called back a few weeks later to see about possibly scheduling a visit, she seemed wary of my intentions and protective of her reputation — of being portrayed as an "oddity," as she puts it. In a follow-up email, she told me perhaps we could talk at some point in the future. When I told her I wanted to pursue the story anyway — and that I at least hoped we could meet — she accused me of "railroading" for an interview. Despite repeated requests to talk, I never heard from Cooper again.
