Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 17, 1992 TAG: 9201170250
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
SCIENTISTS THINK THEY HAVE CASSIDY, `SUNDANCE KID'
A team of forensic experts and historians has exhumed a pair of skeletons in Bolivia that may be those of two famous American outlaws, Butch Cassidy and "the Sundance Kid."One of the expedition's members, Dan Buck of Washington, said a trail of documentary clues discovered in various parts of South America led the group last month to a cemetery in San Vicente, Bolivia, a remote mining village where the outlaws supposedly died in a 1907 gun battle.
The scientific leader of the expedition, Dr. Clyde Collins Snow, a forensic anthropologist, has taken the skeletons to his laboratory in Norman, Okla., where he plans to subject them to the same analytical techniques that he and other scientists used in identifying the skull of the Nazi concentration camp doctor, Josef Mengele.
The lives of Butch Cassidy and "the Sundance Kid" were romantically portrayed in a movie starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, but the real careers of the outlaws are shrouded in mystery.
The bandits, whose real names were Robert LeRoy Parker and Harry Longbaugh, carried out so many successful bank and railroad robberies in the late 1800s that large rewards were offered for their capture. Hotly pursued by Pinkerton agents, they fled the United States in 1901 with Longbaugh's mistress, Etta Place.
After arriving in Buenos Aires, the trio began robbing banks and trains all across South America, but at some point, their documented histories faded into romantic legend. According to one theory, they returned to the United States.
But other evidence suggests that Parker and Longbaugh fought a final battle in 1907 with Bolivian police at San Vicente near Tupiza and were buried in unmarked graves in a mining cemetery, the one visited last month by Snow and his colleagues.
The historians of the group, Dan Buck and his wife, Anne Meadows, combed through documents of an old mining company, consulates and police departments in Bolivia, Chile and other countries, and the clues pointed to the cemetery in San Vicente, Buck said.
Buck, who is administrative assistant to Rep. Patricia Schroeder, D-Colo., formerly served with the Peace Corps in Bolivia, where he began to gather information about the outlaws.
Buck said that witnesses to the 1907 gun battle have died, but that the son of one of them was able to identify not only the house where the two Americans died but the graves where they were buried. The team dug 9 feet deep at the first of these sites and found a coffin containing the remains of the larger man, a man Snow believes to be the Sundance Kid. To avoid disturbing graves at shallower depths, the group then tunneled at the 9-foot depth in several directions and found the other set of bones.
Both skeletons, Snow has determined, are those of Caucasians, not Indians. The cemetery contains mostly the bodies of Indian silver- and lead-mine workers, with a few European mine administrators interred among them.
Snow has determined that one of the skulls he disinterred has entry and exit holes from a bullet that passed through the temples, and the other has a smashed forehead, consistent with the head-on impact of a projectile. This evidence, he said, would tally with an account that both outlaws were badly wounded in a shootout after their robbery of the mine payroll, and that realizing they were lost, Cassidy shot the Kid and committed suicide.
Members of the expedition said in interviews that positive identification of the bodies, if at all possible, would take months.