Billy the Kid: Trial and Death Sentence at Mesilla

In the spring of eighteen eighty-one, the most wanted man in New Mexico Territory sat in a makeshift courtroom in the Mesilla plaza and listened to a judge pronounce his doom. William H. Bonney, known to history as Billy the Kid, was twenty-one years old.

Billy had arrived in the Mesilla Valley under guard after Sheriff Pat Garrett captured him at Stinking Springs in December eighteen eighty. The Lincoln County War, a bloody range conflict between competing merchant factions that had consumed southeastern New Mexico for three years, had made Billy famous. He had ridden with John Tunstall's faction, witnessed Tunstall's murder in February eighteen seventy-eight, and spent the following years as a fugitive, rustler, and outlaw celebrity.

His trial at Mesilla ran from March thirtieth to April thirteenth, eighteen eighty-one. The charge was the murder of Sheriff William Brady, shot in the back during an ambush in Lincoln in April eighteen seventy-eight. The evidence was substantial. The jury deliberated a short time and returned a guilty verdict. Judge Warren Bristol sentenced Billy to hang on May thirteenth, eighteen eighty-one, and courtroom legend holds the judge delivered it with the words, until you are dead, dead, dead, and that Billy shot back, and you can go to hell, hell, hell. Historians caution the exchange is likely apocryphal, since courtroom records indicate Billy made no reply after the sentence was read.

He was transferred north to Lincoln to await execution. On April twenty-eighth, eighteen eighty-one, he escaped from the Lincoln County courthouse, killing two deputies in the process. He fled south toward Fort Sumner, where he had friends and a girlfriend. Pat Garrett tracked him there and shot him dead on the night of July fourteenth, eighteen eighty-one, in the dark bedroom of Pete Maxwell's house.

Billy had been in New Mexico Territory for barely four years. He became a legend almost immediately. The courthouse in Mesilla where he was sentenced still stands on the plaza, now a restaurant and bar.