Digging up Butch and Sundance

Lawyer-turned-writer Anne Meadows and her husband, Dan Buck, set out to solve the mystery of what really happened to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. With the tenacity of Pinkerton agents, the couple tracks the outlaws and the enigmatic Etta Place through South America, where they fled in 1901. Meadows and Buck rove Argentinian pampas, Chilean deserts, and Bolivian sierras; pore over faded newspapers and musty documents; exhume skeletons with the aid of forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow; unearth eyewitness accounts of Butch and Sundance’s final holdup and the Bolivian shootout; and examine letters by the bandits and interviews by the Argentine police who investigated their activities. Information about William T. Phillips, who claimed to be Butch Cassidy, is also included.

 

While filling in the blanks in the Wild Bunch saga, Meadows explores the nature of truth and discovers how myths are made. She updates the search with a new afterword to this edition.