Utah filmmaker says DNA will prove relative was Butch Cassidy’s legendary sidekick
FOLKLORE
DAVID ZIZZO
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Published: July 14, 2009
Think Elvis. Only instead of "Jailhouse Rock” and a drug overdose, you have holdups and a shoot-out in Bolivia.
Just as with the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, death couldn’t stop
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
"You’re dealing with folklore; you’re dealing with fantasy; you’re dealing with aspirations,” said
Dan Buck, a former congressional staffer living in
Washington, D.C., who has written about the infamous outlaws.
The latest reincarnation of Butch and the Kid, or their legend anyway, is playing out in
Utah and involves wide-ranging family lore, exhumations and a documentary film. Some people there claim a relative,
William Henry Long, who died in Utah in 1936, decades after the outlaws were said to have been killed, was actually
Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, aka the Sundance Kid.
It’s all for naught, said
Clyde Snow, a forensic anthropologist from
Norman. In the early 1990s as part of a "NOVA” documentary, Snow supervised exhumation of remains believed to be those of the outlaws from a cemetery in San Vicente, Bolivia. DNA analysis showed the remains to be from a German prospector. However, other research on old news accounts, government documents and
Pinkerton Detective Agency records showed the outlaws died there in 1908, Snow said.
"All the circumstantial evidence and the documentary evidence conclusively points to the fact that they’re buried in San Vicente,” Snow said.
Still, stories persist that the duo lived on. One tale said Cassidy fought with Mexican revolutionary hero
Poncho Villa and died in
Spokane, Wash., in 1937. Among the more enduring alternative endings for Sundance is the William Henry Long scenario, which,
Marilyn Grace promises, soon will be proven.
"We found the real Sundance Kid,” said Grace, a documentary filmmaker in
St. George, Utah.
Grace said a DNA sample from an apparent relative of Longabaugh will be compared to DNA from Long’s remains, which had been exhumed for the purpose. Grace said she had not yet received results of the tests, which she said are being handled by Sorenson Forensics of
Salt Lake City, but she will keep them secret until the documentary is released.
She said the "definitive” evidence so far consists of photographic comparisons by
John McCullough,
University of Utah anthropologist, who concluded there was a 99 percent chance the photos of Longabaugh and Long were of the same person. If the DNA is not a match, Grace said, it might be because the living donor is not really a Longabaugh descendant, Grace said. If it’s positive, it proves Long was the Kid.
"Either way, we win,” she said.
Buck said the filmmakers are "playing hide and seek” with their research, and without strict, independent "chain of custody” controls of DNA tests, results cannot be considered valid. Grace said Buck has tried to thwart her research, but "we’re just trying to find the truth.”
Gerald Kolpan, author of "Etta,” a fictional account of Sundance’s girl-friend, the mysterious Etta Place, said the photo of Long used in the comparison raises serious doubts over the theory. While the Kid is dapper in every known photo, Long is wearing a wrinkled suit and a hat "that looks like it’s been crushed and put back on his head.”
"I’m not sure the Sundance Kid would allow himself to be photographed like that,” Kolpan said.
One relative is so convinced Long was the Sundance Kid he has spent $200,000 trying to prove it, said
Geoff Liesik, editor of the Uintah Basin Standard newspaper in Utah. "That’s what sparked all this.”
Buck said Grace previously was focused on exhuming the body of another guy,
Hiram Bebee, to prove he was the Kid. Bebee, a convicted murderer who died in a Utah prison in 1955, was 5-foot-3. The Sundance Kid was around 6 feet tall.
"This is really a bizarre exercise, this whole thing,” Buck said.
The timing’s right, though. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the movie starring
Paul Newman and
Robert Redford that brought the legend into the national consciousness. Besides, Kolpan said, "People really are crazy about their Old West outlaws.”
For them, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had it all.
"It’s a great mystery,” Buck said. "They were an interesting couple of guys.”
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