![]() It sounds sad but being just Billy wasn’t scary enough.” “This made me feel important, feared and respected. ![]() “Years ago in British prisons, I would be called mad, nuts, lunatic and other names associated with psychopaths,” he recalls. Growing up amongst the endless poverty of 70s council estates rigidly divided into ganglands’, Liverpool raised amateur boxer turned Thai kickboxer Billy Moore embraced his environment’s brutality ending up ‘in and out of jail since I was seventeen: dangerous driving, burglary, robbery, violence, drugs.’ĭetailing his life bluntly in his gripping recent autobiography ‘ A Prayer Before Dawn- A Nightmare in Thailand’ he’s candid about how dangerous he was an an out-of-control drug addicted criminal with nothing (or so he suspected) left to lose. Not many people were aware of my lifestyle. I never carried drugs on my person, was never involved in selling them to the public and kept a low profile. I thought I was too clever for the police. I began to believe I was bullet-proof, one of the untouchables. Fortunately I was able to shake these feelings off, and I convinced myself that it had to be the ya ba. As my paranoia increased, I had strong feelings of being watched, or followed. (But) I was careful and changed my phone and sim card once a week. On July 14, 1881, Garrett surprised Billy in a darkened room not far from Lincoln and shot him dead.“I knew that being involved in drugs was a dangerous game. Upon his return to Lincoln, Garrett immediately formed a posse and set off to recapture the outlaw. He armed himself with two pistols and, according to one account, “danced about the balcony, laughed and shouted as though he had not a care on earth.” Apparently, the people of Lincoln were either too fearful or too admiring of the young outlaw to act. Reportedly, Billy then smashed the gun and threw it down on the dead guard, yelling, “You won’t follow me any more with that gun!”Īfter murdering the guards, Billy seemed in no hurry to flee. Hearing the shot, the second guard ran back to the jail, and Billy killed him with a blast from a shotgun he found in Garrett’s office. He slugged the guard and shot him with a pistol either that he took from the guard or that a friend had hidden in the outhouse for him. As the guard escorted him back to his cell, Billy somehow managed to slip a wrist through his handcuffs. While one of the jail’s two guards was escorting a group of prisoners across the street to dinner, Billy asked the remaining guard to take him to the jail outhouse. On April 28, while Garrett was out of town, Billy managed to escape. Sentenced to hang, Billy was imprisoned in Lincoln’s county jail while Sheriff Garrett gathered the technical information and supplies needed to build an effective gallows. ![]() ![]() On this day in 1881, a court took only one day to convict Billy of the murder of Sheriff Brady. Garrett, a one-time friend, was the new sheriff of Lincoln County. When Billy and his partners murdered the sheriff several months later, they became outlaws, regardless of how corrupt Brady may have been.Īfter three years on the run and several other murders, Pat Garrett finally arrested Billy in early 1881. Unfortunately, the leader of the men who murdered Tunstall was the sheriff of Lincoln County, William Brady. When his boss, rancher John Tunstall, was murdered before his eyes in February 1878, the hotheaded young Billy swore vengeance. ![]() There is no doubt that Billy the Kid did indeed shoot the sheriff, though he had done so in the context of the bloody Lincoln County War, a battle between two powerful groups of ranchers and businessmen fighting for economic control of Lincoln County. After a one-day trial, Billy the Kid is found guilty of murdering the Lincoln County, New Mexico, sheriff and is sentenced to hang. ![]()
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