![]() ![]() Kagin’s Inc, a California-based numismatic firm, has insured it for $5m and is seeking a private sale. The photo, it turned out, was taken in 1878 after a wedding, just a month after the gang took part in the brutal Lincoln County war. With the help of scholars, collectors, facial recognition experts and other specialists they eventually identified all 18 people in the photo, plus the schoolhouse in Chavez county, New Mexico, whose remains they excavated. She found online images of Tom O’Folliard and Charlie Bowdre which matched two of the other croquet players. He summoned Linda – “a wonderful, pragmatic woman”, he says – and she researched other members of the Regulators. It was the hat, the stance, him leaning on a croquet stick. “You could put a Winchester rifle in his hands. He liked the composition of the croquet shot but it was a week before he examined it under a microscope and recognised the notorious bandit. Guijarro does not remember much about them. He picked three photos – the croquet players, plus other 19th-century scenes – and offered $2, all he had in his pocket. ![]() They told Guijarro they were cleaning out a storage space and needed to get rid of it. The dealer directed him to two men with “boxes of junk”. In late summer of 2010, he was driving home alone from work and stopped by Fulton’s Folly Antique Collective in Fresno’s Tower district. Guijarro has been a life-long collector of coins, sports cards, comic books and other memorabilia, often teaming up with his wife, who likes old photographs. The only other confirmed photo of him, a portrait of him posing with a gun taken in 1880, sold for $2.3m (£1.5m) in 2011. Some historians estimate he killed just nine people. Too good to be true.”īilly the Kid is synonymous with the Wild West, a New Yorker who forged a brief, bloody career as an outlaw, reputedly killing 21 men before being gunned down by Lincoln County sheriff Pat Garrett in 1881, at the age of 21. This picture was almost Twilight Zone-ish. Scepticism and false leads dogged the detective work and at times left the couple tense and anxious, unsure whom to trust, he said. “We’ve laid it out, told the truth, and we hope you’ve enjoyed the ride.” We were very emotional watching it,” said Guijarro, 54. A National Geographic documentary narrated by Kevin Costner detailed the five-year effort to authenticate it – a forensic and historical odyssey - in a broadcast on Sunday. The discovery, only the second authenticated photograph of the outlaw, has been valued at $5m. Studying the image under a microscope at home he recognised Henry McCarty, known in Wild West lore as Billy the Kid, as the man leaning on a croquet mallet, along with members of his gang, the Regulators, playing the sport in New Mexico in 1878. We’d really like to look for lost pieces of history be it US or worldwide. ![]() The telecommunications technician said he and his wife, Linda, plan to use some of the money from his startling discovery to fund more expeditions. It is estimated now to be worth millions of dollars. Guijarro paid $2 for the four-by-five-inch tintype, plus two other photographs, which he plucked from a cardboard box in an antique shop in Fresno, California, in 2010. ![]()
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