For over a century, comic books, dime novels, and movies depicted Billy the Kid as left-handed, all because the one surviving photograph of him was a ferrotype, a process that produces a mirror image. That reversed picture is the perfect metaphor for a man whose real story has been paved over by legend. In this episode we strip away the Hollywood veneer and follow the documented life of Henry McCarty, also known as William H. Bonney.

We start with his bleak beginnings as the child of Irish immigrants who died of tuberculosis in Silver City, leaving him orphaned at 14 with no safety net. We follow his first arrest for stealing food, his escape up a jailhouse chimney, the saloon shooting of the bully Windy Cahill, and his arrival in Lincoln County, where the English rancher John Tunstall became a father figure. Then we unpack the Lincoln County War, the Murphy-Dolan monopoly, the Regulators, the burning of the McSween house, and the secret deal with Governor Lew Wallace that was never honored. We finish with the Joe Grant saloon trick, the audacious Lincoln courthouse escape, Pat Garrett’s shots in a dark bedroom, and the myth machine that followed.

• How frontier survival with no foster care or social services pushed a hungry teenager toward violence
• Why the line between lawmen and organized crime in Lincoln County was almost nonexistent
• Why Bonney was the only combatant in the entire war ever convicted of a crime
• The rotated revolver cylinder that let him survive a point-blank attempt on his life
• The ghostwritten book by Garrett, the decades of survival claims, and the $2.3 million sale of the famous tintype in 2011