PRESCOTT — More than 100 years after his death, Billy the Kid can still stir up a heap of trouble.
Two men on a quest to find where the outlaw-turned-American-legend is buried could face time in the pokey for unearthing remains last May in this Arizona community.
Tom Sullivan, former sheriff of Lincoln County, N.M., and Steve Sederwall, former mayor of Capitan, N.M., exhumed a man who was buried in Prescott nearly 70 years ago. John Miller had claimed to be William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.
Authorities currently are considering whether to charge Sullivan and Sederwall with a felony for removing some remains of Miller and of another man buried in an unmarked grave next to him.
"This is a simple, straightforward, open-and-shut grave-robbing case," said David Snell, a Billy the Kid junkie from Tucson.
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In March, Snell wrote a letter to Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Polk that sparked a police investigation into the exhumation. In the letter, he called unearthing the graves a "sordid and reprehensible affair."
He argued that Sullivan and Sederwall acted inappropriately because they didn't have a permit or court order to dig up the remains or permission to take samples from the second grave.
Sullivan and Sederwall disagree.
"I'm confident we didn't do anything wrong in Arizona," Sullivan said. "When you commit a crime, you have to have intent. There's certainly no intent to be grave-robbers."
Sullivan and Sederwall have been hunting for the Kid's bones since 2003.
They began their very public quest in Fort Sumner, N.M., where history says the Kid was buried after then-Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett gunned him down in 1881.
But at least two men — Miller and Ollie "Brushy Bill" Roberts of Texas — claimed prior to their deaths that they were Billy the Kid. Their stories presuppose that Garrett killed the wrong man in Fort Sumner and lied about it.
After more than a year of fighting to get permission to unearth the Fort Sumner grave, Sullivan and Sederwall dropped their request and decided to begin the process of elimination in Arizona. They now have a Dallas lab comparing DNA from the bones they dug up to blood found on a bench on which Sullivan believes the Kid's body lay.
Sullivan expects the results in the next couple of months.
Sullivan said there are also plans to unearth the grave of "Brushy Bill."
Historians have called the quest to unearth Billy's remains ludicrous and say it's an impossibility that Miller will turn out to be the Kid.
"The guy in Prescott wasn't Billy the Kid," said Bob Stahl, a professor at Arizona State University who has for five years researched the Kid's death and burial to write a book about him.
He said the DNA won't be a match, calling the possibility "one of the most ridiculously far-fetched notions in this world."
"I'd bet my reputation on that," Stahl added.
He said, however, that analyzing the DNA found in the grave is valid research and will at least eliminate Arizona as a possible burial ground.
Such exhumations have been conducted before in the name of historical research.
In 1995, an exhumation of Jesse James' body proved he was buried in Missouri. In 1991, 19th century President Zachary Taylor's body was exhumed to determine if he had been killed by arsenic poisoning. Testing proved he hadn't.
In Prescott, a team that included a DNA expert and a forensic anthropologist dug up Miller's unmarked grave with a backhoe. They came across two skeletons; Miller's and that of William Hudspeth, a cattleman who died three days before Miller.
Because both graves were unmarked and the bones scattered after their caskets had collapsed, the team cleaned and reassembled both skeletons, and Sullivan and Sederwall took samples from both, just in case they had the wrong man.
The two had received permission to dig up Miller's grave from Jeanine Dike, former superintendent of Arizona Pioneers' Home, the state-owned assisted-living facility where Miller is buried.
But Sullivan and Sederwall did not obtain a permit to take the bones from the grave, nor did they have permission from Dike to take any of Hudspeth's remains.
Sullivan said that by consulting a lawyer before organizing the exhumation and getting Dike's permission to unearth Miller, he "did it all legally."
Miller, buried in Prescott in 1937, was born in 1850 and died a widower, according to the Pioneers' Home records.
Records also show that Miller was adopted by the Kiowa tribe as an infant after his parents were killed.
His history differs greatly from what's known about the Kid.
Stahl said Billy's mother died when he was a teenager and his stepfather kicked him out of the house soon after.
Records show the Kid killed four people by the time he died at age 21. But some legends say he killed 21 people, while others described him as pure evil, said Stahl.
"He became this mythic figure, but he was basically a young kid who got himself into trouble early on and couldn't get away from it," Stahl said.
Sederwall said he won't rest until he knows beyond a doubt when, where and how Billy the Kid died, saying he's just seeking the truth.
"To the living we owe respect; to the dead we owe the truth," he said. "We're going to find the truth. We're cops — that's what we do. We get into a case, and man, I'm going to finish it."
