by Tim Slessor
Perhaps one can understand why Hollywood found the whole tale “too preposterous to be believable”.
***
So did Butch Cassidy come back to the United States?
First, let’s examine the evidence that he did return. First and foremost is the fact that there were at least a dozen people across Wyoming and Utah who, through the 1920s and 30s, claimed to have recognized the man they had known as Butch Cassidy two and three decades before. Concerning that surgery: it is worth remembering that “recognition” is not just about faces; it also depends on recalling and sharing old jokes, long-ago experiences and gossip about mutual friends and enemies. Additionally, there has come down to us some strong, written support about those old-timers. Consider, for example, two 1936 letters which reportedly rest in the Utah State Archives; they are from the State Treasurer of Wyoming who, presumably, was a responsible man in a responsible job. In Treasurer Christensen’s letter to a Utah historian, Charles Kelly, he respectfully suggests that Kelly’s recently published account of Cassidy’s death in a Bolivian shoot-out is ill-founded. He writes that as late as 1934, only two years earlier, Cassidy, while visiting one of his old Wyoming haunts, had spent time with “three old friends whom I know personally and whose veracity and memory I do not question for a moment. He [Cassidy] goes by the name of William Phillips... and resides in Spokane.” Those “three old friends” were, first, Ed Farlow who had been a mayor of Lander; second, Harry Baldwin who was a Lander store-keeper from whom Cassidy had often bought supplies; and third, Hank Boedeker who was the sheriff who had taken the young and hand-cuffed Cassidy to Wyoming’s State Penitentiary back in 1894. When historian Kelly dismissively rejected this information, Christensen got rather cross. He wrote a second time, “The men I have named are reputable, well-known and responsible citizens and not the type who would exploit any kind of story for publicity or for gossiping purposes. They knew Butch Cassidy well and are not mistaken in this whole matter.” If author Kelly now had second thoughts and decided to go to Spokane and seek out Cassidy/Phillips, he had left it too late; Cassidy/Phillips died in July 1937. Further, there is no record that Kelly took himself off to Wyoming to meet those acquaintances of Butch’s in Lander. Maybe he did not want to spoil his story.
And there were other Wyoming citizens who were sure that they recognized the man they had once known as Cassidy. In Rock Springs, a garage man, John Taylor, remembered the day in the mid 1920s when Cassidy pulled in to have some work done on his T-Model Ford; he was pulling a trailer loaded with camping gear. Similarly, an old-timer called Tom Welch remembered that same T-Model and trailer. And there was Boyd Charter who (in that BBC interview and elsewhere) told of his father’s warm greeting for the visitor who had unloaded his car and trailer to make camp on their ranch. It seems unlikely that Taylor, Welch and Charter decided to get together to cook up an agreed story that included the detail of that trailer. Why, and to what end, would they do so? Then, down near the Colorado line, the Mayor of Baggs (a one-time favorite haunt of the Wild Bunch) was also clear in his assertion that the man he once knew as Butch Cassidy had recently come by.
In parenthesis, one might ask, “Yes, but what was Cassidy/Phillips actually doing traveling around Wyoming? Why did he return, several times over the years, to his old haunts? He surely did not come back just to renew old acquaintances. At the time, he told anyone who asked that he had come to do a little recreational hunting. Then he would disappear for a week or two into the Wind River Mountains. Most likely he was trying to find some of the loot that he had buried more than 30 years before, but he must have been unsuccessful. At least one forest fire had destroyed some of his possible landmarks...
In a further parenthesis, one might also ask what Cassidy/Phillips was doing when he was “at home” between those trips to Wyoming. It seems that by the early 1920s, after perhaps trying his luck in Alaska, he had come to rest in Spokane. There he set up a small machine shop. He did engineering work for an outfit called the Riblet Tramway Company. For a few years he prospered, but with the Depression, Riblet lost money until it went under. Cassidy/Phillip’s machine shop followed - which is when he started writing The Bandit Invincible.
But to return to another of those old Wyoming acquaintances... What about Mary Boyd, Cassidy’s girlfriend back in the days when they were both in their mid 20s? More than 30 years later, now a widow, she met Cassidy again. Later, she was to say that she had never been in any doubt who William Phillips really was. When he got back home to Spokane, they exchanged letters; he even sent her, as a memento of their time together in those early days, a ring he had worn for many years. The ring was inscribed “Geo C to Mary B”. Of course, like all the other “evidence”, none of this can be taken as a guarantee that William Phillips and Butch Cassidy were the same person. Maybe Mary Boyd was making it up. But if so, why? Perhaps we get closer when examples of handwriting are compared. Larry Pointer, in chasing every possible lead for his remarkable book, In Search of Butch Cassidy, had the idea of engaging a graphologist to determine if there were similarities between the writing that was known to be Cassidy’s when he was in South America, and Phillips’ writing 25 years later. A letter that Butch was known to have written from Argentina was found in the Utah State Archives; it was compared with one that the man who called himself Phillips wrote (30 years later) in Spokane to Mary Boyd. Graphology is not an exact science, but the verdict was that, in this case, the similarities were too many to be merely coincidental; and, perhaps more revealing, there were also likenesses in the style, grammar and misspellings. Larry Pointer explored another possibility: did the photographs of Cassidy and Phillips show any facial similarities? It has to be said that if one compares the prison mugshot of Butch (1894) and a good photo of Phillips more than 20 years later (c.1916), no obvious similarity leaps off the page. But might that plastic surgery in Paris have made a difference?
Is this Butch Cassidy as William Phillips, residing in Spokane?
Lastly, there is at least one other witness to Butch’s return whom one cannot ignore: his youngest sister. Being born just after Butch left home, Lula Betenson (her married name) did not meet her brother until 1925 when, she says, he came for two weeks to be with his father and those other members of the family (including herself) who still lived in Circleville. (Butch’s mother had died in 1905.) In 1977, when Mrs. Betenson was 92 and the last sibling still alive, she gave a long filmed interview to Britain’s best-known traveling TV reporter, Alan Whicker. (The finished film, in the series Whicker’s World, is available from Amazon.) In that interview, the old lady was impressively articulate and firm in her recollections; at no point did she give the impression that she might be dissembling. Yes, it is true that she had not long finished co-authoring a book, Butch Cassidy - My Brother, and some skeptics have suggested that, in the interests of boosting sales, she may have colored some details of the story. We will never know. But on one thing, she was very specific: Butch came back and stayed with the family in 1925. Unfortunately and uncharacteristically, Alan Whicker did not ask her why he made no subsequent visits to his ageing father, brothers and sisters, given that he lived for another 12 years. Surely it is what one might expect of a dutiful son? But there is a possible reason why Butch never revisited his family: several of his brothers and sisters were devout and law-abiding Mormons, and it is said that they found Butch’s outlaw life-style (even in its past tense) an embarrassment. Maybe, after that one reunion, being sensitive to their discomfort, he deliberately spared them any further shame by keeping his distance. One might argue that was the decision of a truly thoughtful son.
So let’s now look at other points made by those skeptics. What is the evidence the other way, that Butch Cassidy did not come back, that he was killed in Bolivia? And what about the Sundance Kid and Etta Place?
In any examination of the “killed-in-Bolivia” thesis, one must start with a husband-and-wife team, Anne Meadows and Dan Buck
. Their book, Digging Up Butch and Sundance, is essential reading. Over the years they have traveled to Argentina and Bolivia at least three times; they have combed the archives from La Paz to London, from Salt Lake City to Dublin; they have spent thousands of hours in research; in their book, they acknowledge the help of nearly 400 organizations and individuals. At one point, they even remortgaged their house to fund their work. So, obviously, they have left no pebble unturned. In the end they conclude, without any significant doubts, that Sundance and Butch were both killed and then buried at San Vicente. Many of the arguments they advance are straightforward contradictions of the opinions of the “Butch-came-back” lobby. Some of those rebuttals seem wholly reasonable, others less so. They reject that graphologist’s conclusion about the handwriting, and cite in their support the opposing findings of another graphologist. They suggest that the “identification” of Butch by those Wyoming old-timers was mistaken; after all, they say, he would have aged so much in the intervening 25-30 years that those later assertions must be unreliable. But one might have thought that the time gap would make the old-timers more careful, not less, in affirming that their unexpected visitor was indeed the same person they had known in the old days. And certainly identification depends on mutual reminiscences as much as it does on facial recognition.
Anne Meadows and Dan Buck further maintain that the “Geo C ring” sent to Mary Boyd was an imposter’s forgery. They point to undoubted inaccuracies in some of the names, places and events in The Bandit Invincible. This may be unfair: the writer of that biography (autobiography?) claims right at the beginning that his “mistakes” are deliberate, in order to shield outlaws as well as law-abiding friends, some of whom were still alive at the time of his writing. On the other hand, yes, those inaccuracies could be due to the fact that the writer was nowhere near some of the events he describes and therefore has to rely on his imagination. Again, these two arch-skeptics are unconvinced (reasonably) by any alleged similarities in those photographs. They are critical of Lula Betenson, and seem to suggest that she was suffering from a mild form of age-related wishful thinking. But watching and listening to the old lady in that long TV interview, one doubts that she is suffering from age-related anything; she positively sparkles with matter-of-fact normality.
Meadows and Buck, the leading skeptics, also point to the fact that William Phillips’ wife, after his death, denied that her husband was Butch Cassidy. But the “he-did-return” lobby make the counter-point that the marriage had long come apart, and additionally the estranged wife probably feared that, although many years had gone by, the Pinkerton Agency and/or the UP Railroad might still be interested enough in Butch Cassidy to try to extract some monetary redress from his widow. In short, it might have been in her interests not to acknowledge that Phillips and Cassidy were one and the same person.
It soon becomes obvious that for every argument supporting the contention that Butch came back, there is an equal and opposite one that he did not. Impasse. Then, in the early 1990s, there came a possible breakthrough: Meadows and Buck were contacted by an unusually experienced forensic anthropologist, Dr. Clyde Snow. Over the years, having spent time in both Argentina and Chile investigating “the disappeared”, he too had become fascinated by the riddle of Butch Cassidy and Sundance. His proposal was simple: if the Bolivian authorities would allow it, why not exhume the bodies of the two bandido yanquis that were known to have been buried at San Vicente? Who could tell what might by revealed by bones, scraps of clothing and even DNA? Dr. Snow - “I’ve been in the bone business thirty years” - was persuasive. Further, given that his plan might have the makings of an intriguing documentary film, it soon attracted funding from one of the US’s leading public (i.e. non-commercial) TV stations, WGBH of Boston.
Within a few months, a team of archaeologists, led by Dr. Snow with Anne Meadows, Dan Buck and a film crew close behind, was on its way to San Vicente, 14,500 feet up in the Andes.
***
I had read about the involvement of WGBH-TV in one of the several books that I have about the Wild Bunch. Then I remembered that, more than 30 years earlier, I had worked alongside an American TV producer who was on a 12-month attachment with the BBC. I knew that, when he had returned to his “home” TV station in Boston, WGBH, he had started a science-based series called Nova. Now, it seemed a fair bet that if WGBH had commissioned a film involving exhumation by a forensic anthropologist, it would have been produced under the Nova banner. Although we had not met for over 20 years, I still had the phone number of my friend. Within minutes we were talking to each other. Yes indeed, Nova had funded that film. Although he had long since retired, he immediately gave me the number of the right person at WGBH. Within four days of those two phone calls, I was viewing a DVD of that film at home in Wimbledon. Marvelous. (Thank you, Mike Ambrosino and Melanie Wallace.) Now I was virtually transported to Bolivia, to the alto plano, to the cemetery; I could watch Clyde Snow directing operations; I could hear and see the pick-and-shovel men; I could listen to Dan Buck; I could sense the excitement when the team found a skull and some bones that might be relevant; I could follow the subsequent analysis of the forensic problems. Then, on the film’s end-credits, I saw that the man who had made the film was an old BBC colleague who had been working with WGBH at the time. I phoned him. We had a long, interesting and informative discussion. Small world.
***
The cemetery at San Vicente is crammed, higgledy-piggledy, with hundreds of graves. Many are unmarked. With a shortage of properly consecrated ground, the dead are often crowded in, one on top of another. So the first problem was to find the right graves or, at least, the most likely ones. The task was complicated by the fact that, at about the same time as the burial of the two bandidos yanqui, two other gringos had also been interred: a Swede who had apparently shot himself getting off his mule, and a German mining engineer who had carelessly blown himself up. But even though the identifying gravestone has disappeared, the keeper of the cemetery - the job had been in his family for two generations - thought he knew where the yanquis were. They started digging.
By the second day, the local pick-and-shovel men had opened up a sizeable trench and were down to what, in prospecting terms, would be called “the pay dirt”. Now it was the turn of the archaeologists to go down with trowels and brushes. It is not surprising that Clyde Snow, given his long experience in this kind of thing, was the top honcho. Under an ancient trilby and with a cigarillo permanently clenched between his teeth, he gave encouragement from above. “What have you got down there? A mandible! Well, take it out real gentle... Hey, I reckon we have a male mandible here...at the age range of the two fellows we are looking for. And, say, this is quality dental work...gold fillings...this isn’t curb-side dentistry. Whoever this is, he could afford real good dental work.” Then, turning to the camera, “Bones and teeth make good witnesses: they don’t lie, they don’t forget.”
By the fourth day, they had extracted most of the rest of that skeleton. The skull was that of a Caucasian, and the skeleton itself was about the right height and build to “fit” Sundance. But these remains could also have been those of the Swede or the German, about neither of whom had the team any information on height and build. They would have to take the bones back to the US for detailed tests. Now they started to look for Butch Cassidy. Presumably he was lying alongside the bones that they thought just might be those of Sundance. But there was a problem. Only recently, a baby had been buried right over the spot where they reckoned that Butch might be. They found the mother and asked if she would allow the re-burying of her child, so that the diggers could have clear access to the ground underneath. She refused. So now the team tried tunneling under the baby. It was very slow work because they had to shore up the over-burden as they went. As Dr. Snow put it, “We’ve had to turn an archaeological dig into a mining operation.” But by now time and money were running out; it was a four-hour drive down to the railhead and, from th
ere, the once-a-week train took 14 hours for the 400 miles back to La Paz. From La Paz - a flight home. They suddenly realized that the weekly train came and went the next day. So they worked all through the night. The haul was disappointing; they found only a jumble of bones and five non-Caucasian skulls. The best that could be said was, as Dr. Snow succinctly put it, “With four gringos buried around here, we’ve definitely got one of them.” But which one?
Not surprisingly, this narrative (and Nova’s documentary) now switches to Dr. Snow’s laboratory in Oklahoma. Part of that Caucasian skull was missing; is that because it was blown away by gunshot? They take X-rays to see if there are any tiny metal particles embedded in the skull, left by a bullet as it passed through the bone. Yes, there are some metallic specks. That ruled out the German who did not die of a gunshot wound. They commissioned some complex comparisons of the skull shape with a photograph of Sundance; the match is a reasonable one. What about a rumor that Sundance had once had a gunshot wound in the leg? Reassuringly, a consultant podiatrist identifies a minute nick in the skeleton’s left shinbone. Those gold fillings are identified by a dental expert as having probably been made around the turn of the century, maybe in Chicago; that would seem to eliminate the Swede. Then they try to get a DNA match with a known relative; they get Sundance’s nearest present-day relatives to agree to an exhumation of a long-dead uncle, buried in Pennsylvania. When, eventually, they get a usable specimen, it does not match the DNA from San Vicente. But this, it is optimistically suggested, may be due to some contamination(s) picked up during the exhumation or in the acidic soil of Pennsylvania. In any case and at that time, DNA matching was most reliable via the female line; it seems that the female Longabough “line” had long died out. Nevertheless, the height and build of the skeleton both seem to coincide with those of Sundance. Second, the skull “fits” with the photo of Sundance and, lastly, the nick in the shinbone seems to point to the probability that the skeleton was that of Sundance. But the word “probability” seems about as far as one can go. And even then one is left with those actions before and during the Vicente shoot-out which seem so uncharacteristic of our duo.