William Henry McCarty, a.k.a. William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, never really had a father. There was a step-father, but he disappeared shortly after the death of McCarty’s mother. The greatest father-figure of his life was John Tunstall, the English cattleman who employed the Kid when he was already a fugitive. When the rival Murphy-Dolan outfit murdered Tunstall, McCarty and his former colleagues formed the Regulators to dispense some classic frontier justice. The resulting Lincoln County War made the Kid’s reputation.
One hundred forty years after the Kid’s death, everybody wants to be his friend. Amongst the talking heads, only Bill Richardson, the scandal-tarred former New Mexico governor, tactfully reminds viewers McCarty was a “cop killer.” Everyone else sees in McCarty what they want to: a Robin Hood, an ally of marginalized Hispanics, or a simply a young man in need of a sense of belonging. Yet, as an alternative to a stone cold outlaw, McCarty would arguably best be described as a vigilante out to punish a gang of murderers, at least until Governor Lew Ben-Hur Wallace walked away from a deal for McCarty’s testimony.
