SANTA FE, N.M. —A retired Arizona State University professor is taking his pursuit of a death certificate for Billy the Kid to New Mexico’s highest court.

Historian Robert J. Stahl filed a petition Friday with the New Mexico Supreme Court to order the state’s medical examiner to create the document for the legendary outlaw, the Santa Fe New Mexican reported.

Stahl said he hopes the court will order the Office of the Medical Investigator to consider the evidence and determine whether William H. Bonney’s death can be certified.

According to most accounts, the Kid was fatally shot by Lincoln County Sheriff Pat Garrett in Fort Sumner in 1881. But some claim Garrett shot someone else and the Kid took up ranching or escaped to Texas under an alias.

Stahl is a member of the nonprofit Billy the Kid Outlaw Gang, an organization formed to protect the “true” history of the Kid. He wants to silence rumors that Bonney escaped the sheriff’s bullet.

An official death certificate would end the attention that has been given to impostors claiming they were the Kid, like Ollie “Brushy Brill” Roberts of Hico, Texas, Stahl said.

No one in Fort Sumner ever denied that the Kid was shot by Garrett, said Stahl, and six members of the jury appointed to investigate the case knew the Kid and saw his body.

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