Billy the Kid, Brushy Bill, & the NYPD

Billy the Kid, Brushy Bill, & the NYPD

From The Wild West Extravaganza by The Wild West Extravaganza

June 4, 2026 · 23 min

About this episode

This episode discusses the claims surrounding Brushy Bill Roberts being Billy the Kid and the lack of forensic evidence supporting it.

Did the NYPD prove that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid using forensic technology? Short answer: no. Not the NYPD, not the FBI, not the CIA, and not Interpol. No official agency has ever conducted a forensic photo comparison or any kind of investigation into whether Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid. So where does the claim come from? Most of the time, it traces back to the documentary "Billy the Kid: The Silver City Photo," produced by Dan Edwards, and featuring an NYPD detective named Michael Furia. That’s what we’ll be discussing today, taking a look at what Detective Furia actually did, what he did not do, and why a confident opinion about an old photograph is not the same thing as a forensic identification. Along the way, we get into why facial recognition software doesn’t work on 19th-century tintypes, what the NYPD's own policy says about photo matches (spoiler: a match is only an investigative lead), and how a tool like Civil War Photo Sleuth really operates. We also identify one of the six photographs for who it actually is, a Rough Rider named William Dibrell Wood, a real and well-documented man who was most definitely NOT Brushy Bill Roberts. Wild West Quiz…

People in this episode

Host: The Wild West Extravaganza

Topics covered

  • forensic technology
  • historical investigation
  • photographic analysis
  • Billy the Kid
  • NYPD
  • facial recognition
  • 19th-century photography

Keywords

  • Billy the Kid
  • Brushy Bill Roberts
  • NYPD
  • forensic technology
  • photographic comparison
  • facial recognition
  • historical accuracy

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: NYPD, FBI, CIA, Interpol

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