Beginning July 18, 1881, with telegrams from the Gazette and Optic newspapers in Las Vegas, word spread throughout New Mexico Territory and the United States that Billy the Kid was dead, having been killed the previous Friday morning by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett in Pete Maxwell’s bedroom in Fort Sumner. After a brief coroner’s jury inquiry confirmed the corpse as the Kid’s, his remains were buried that same morning. Within days, the news shifted to Garrett’s efforts to collec
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