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Oct 13, 2015 · US news. This article is more than 8 years old. Multimillion-dollar photo of Billy the Kid playing croquet was $2 junk shop find. The image, unearthed in Fresno, California, is only the...
Oct 14, 2015 · Learn how an old photo purchased at a Fresno junk shop for $2 was authenticated as a picture of Billy the Kid and has been valued at $5 million. The only other photo of the outlaw sold to Bill ...
- Overview
- I hear that you bought the photo and a couple of others for $2 and a song.
- And what song did you sing?
- Did you think that it was a photo of Billy the Kid when you bought it?
- See Photos of Billy and His Gang
- Tell me about that moment.
- Four of those people were members of the Regulators. Tell us about that gang.
- When did you start to investigate whether it could be a photo of Billy the Kid?
- The only other authenticated photo of Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million. What kind of effect did this have on you and your investigation?
- There are experts who dispute the authenticity of the photo.
Randy Guijarro spent years trying to prove that his $2 picture shows the famous outlaw. Now, an auction house has insured it for $5 million.
Randy Guijarro bought three old photographs from a Fresno County, California, memorabilia shop because he liked the way they looked. But when he examined them more closely, he realized that one could be a rare photo of Billy the Kid, along with four of his gang members and his girlfriend.
Guijarro and his wife, Linda, spent the next five years researching and collecting evidence to prove it. Now it seems like their work is about to pay off. This month, an auction house authenticated it as one of only two known photos of the infamous American outlaw and insured it for $5 million.
Some experts claim that the photo isn’t really a picture of the infamous outlaw. To date, only one authenticated picture of Billy the Kid has ever been sold. That was in 2011, when billionaire businessman William Koch bought it for $2.3 million at a Denver auction.
That’s pretty much true. Two dollars and a song, I got three old photographs.
[Laughs] You know King Julian from Madagascar, where he goes, “I like to move it move it, move it”? I have a grandchild, and I know that song.
No. I really just liked the looks of [it]. It’s 4 x 5 inches, it’s a tintype, and it’s a country scene. It’s not till [I] put it under a magnifying glass [that I thought], “Oh my, what have we got going on here?”
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The first authenticated photo of Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million in 2011, to billionaire businessman William Koch. Billy posed for this picture a year before he died.
The first authenticated photo of Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million in 2011, to billionaire businessman William Koch. Billy posed for this picture a year before he died.
When I got to the guy wearing the hat, I went, “Wow, he’s really familiar, what’s up?” I’m familiar with Billy the Kid, so I knew who he was and what he looked like. I really looked hard and said, “Man, this is Billy the Kid, I can’t believe it!” To me it was striking—the way he was standing, the hat, everything.
And I told my wife, and she said, “Well, there’s a lot of people [in the photo]. Who were his buddies?” And then we were off to the races.
The Regulators were the hired hands of John Tunstall. It was a very large gang of cowmen. [Members of rival gangs] murdered Tunstall, their boss, and that set off the Lincoln County War. Billy was made a lawman to go find the murderers of his boss, and that group of people who were deputized were known as the Regulators.
It was a very lawless [time]. It’s nothing like we could imagine today. If you wanted to go and escape the horrors of the Civil War, everybody was migrating West. You could make it, you could get lost. The law was corrupt. Everything was.
We got this five years ago. It took us a year [of] initial research, reading up and getting up to speed. Linda and I became authenticators and historians by default. We spent the next four years solid going at this, traveling throughout the Southwest, calling people, going to western shows, talking to experts. A lot of people dismissed it out of hand, because it’s too unbelievable.
Finally, we found a research team. Once you start putting the pieces together, everything really falls into place. It fills in a dark hole in history about what was going on at that time.
You don’t see that coming. And to be honest, I’m thinking, “Oh, my, every Billy the Kid photograph in the world is going to be now coming out.” And I looked at my wife, and I said “Well, we’ve got work to do.”
There are a few of these so-called experts, and I’ve actually talked to them. I said, you’ve asked me to do these things, [I] went out and did them, and they are now chronicled in a video coming up this Sunday on Nat Geo.
I lay out physical proof, I get nothing back. So, I don’t even like to give credence to their names anymore. They’re going to become people that will just have just faded off into history.
- Becky Little
Brigit Katz. Correspondent. November 17, 2017. The image depicts the outlaw Billy the Kid, posing alongside the sheriff who later killed him. Frank Abrams. Back in 2011, a North Carolina...
Nov 17, 2017 · A portrait of Billy the Kid taken in Fort Sumner, in 1880, sold for $2.3 million in 2011. In that photo, Billy the Kid is packing a Colt revolver and 1873 Winchester Carbine rifle....
- 1 min
Nov 16, 2017 · By Jacey Fortin. Nov. 16, 2017. At a flea market six years ago, a North Carolina lawyer named Frank Abrams unknowingly bought a rare photograph that experts say shows Billy the Kid relaxing...
Jan 23, 2017 · A lucky $2 junk shop purchase including a photo of infamous Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid and the Regulators gang could now fetch up to $5 million. In 2010, Randy Guijarro happened across an...
