Billy the Kid’s jailer had a sordid past

New Mexico lawman J.W. Bell is best known for guarding (and being killed by) Billy the Kid in 1881. Usually, Bell is portrayed as a kind man, at least toward Billy, and a solid officer. But until recently, not much else was known about him.

Until Billy the Kid’s Historical Coalition board member James Townsend looked into Bell’s story—and found a blot on the record.

Bell was born in Maryland in 1853; at what point he moved to Texas is unknown. But somewhere in the early 1870s, Bell fell in with bad company in Montague County, Texas (north of Fort Worth). Led by the Brown family, the group called itself a “vigilance committee.” In reality, according to Townsend, it was a violent gang that used murder and intimidation to gain power in the region.

And Bell was part of at least one killing.

In the early morning of September 5, 1873, Bell approached a sheep’s pen on the property of Brown enemy Ratliff “Rat” Morrow. He let the sheep out. When Morrow began looking for the animals, the Browns gunned him down.

For whatever reason, it took law enforcement two years to arrest the shooters. Bell was among them—temporarily. One report says he bailed out and walked away. Others say he was released since he didn’t pull a trigger in the shooting. In any case, Bell never faced justice.

Just what happened to Bell after he walked away from the murder charge is unknown. The Brown outfit was involved in at least another dozen killings over the next three years (including Mrs. Rat Morrow). But Bell apparently wasn’t suspected in any of those cases; newspaper accounts don’t mention him. Two of the Browns would hang in 1879; two others did serious jail time into the 1890s.

By the late 1870s, Bell moved to New Mexico Territory to be a miner. It’s not clear if he found much—but he did find an enemy. On November 22, 1880, somebody tried to steal Bell’s horses; he and a posse went in pursuit. Among the alleged thieves: Dave Rudabaugh, Billy Wilson and William H. Bonney (aka Billy the Kid). When posseman Jim Carlyle was killed in a confrontation, Bell retreated.

The next year, he became a Lincoln County deputy sheriff (and a deputy U.S. marshal).

For James Bell, the end came in a staircase of the Lincoln County Courthouse on April 28, 1881. Billy the Kid—who’d somehow gotten a gun—put two bullets into him. The Kid then killed Deputy Bob Olinger and escaped. He was free for less than three months, until he was gunned down himself.

But Billy took others with him into the mists of myth, including J.W. Bell, who is forever painted as a nice guy. But his past included an act of violence, and who knows what events additional research might turn up.