The wind in San Vicente comes down off the Andes with nothing to break it. It carries dust and creosote and something like burnt stone, and it doesn’t stop for the living or the dead. The town itself is little more than adobe walls holding the cold out, a scatter of roofs on a slope so bare it looks skinned to the bone.
At the edge of it sits a cemetery, unmarked graves under a sky too wide for the story that supposedly ended there. A sign at the town’s entrance reads, misspelled and unbothered by its own certainty: Here death’s Butch Kassidy and Sundance Kid.
Whether that sign tells the truth is a question that has outlived everyone who might have settled it.
The Night in San Vicente
On November 3, 1908, a mine courier named Carlos Pero led his mule up a mountain trail near Tupiza, carrying the payroll for the Aramayo, Francke and Cia mining company. Two men came up on him fast, bandanas over their faces, rifles already cocked. They’re said to have spoken English. They took the payroll and rode back into the scrub the way men do who have done this before, more than once, and know the ground.
Days later, two Americans checked into a boarding house in San Vicente. Tired, unremarkable. They asked for a room and a meal, and got beer, sardines, and a bed for the night. They did not get the night.
Local authorities and Bolivian soldiers surrounded the house before dawn. A soldier who approached the door was shot dead. Gunfire went on for hours, by one account. Then it stopped. The town’s magistrate or corregidor, a man named Cleto Bellot, said afterward that he heard three cries from inside the house, then a shot, then another.
When the soldiers finally went in the next morning, they found two dead men. One slumped against the wall, a bullet through his forehead. The local police concluded that the fitter of the two had shot his dying partner to end it, then turned the gun on himself.
No one photographed the bodies. No one who could say for certain ever looked at those two faces and named them.
A Name Nobody Could Prove
Carlos Pero had only ever seen a pair of eyes above a bandana on the trail; he could not say who lay in that house. The corregidor could not say. The soldiers who dug the grave near a German miner’s plot could not say. The name that stuck, the one that reached the newspapers and then the history books, came from a Bolivian mining engineer named Percy Seibert, a friend of the outlaws from their years in the country. Seibert looked at what remained and believed he was looking at Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Everything that followed has hung on that one identification.
Robert LeRoy Parker was born in Beaver, Utah, in 1866 and raised in Circleville. He was a rancher’s son who turned to crime with an ease that unsettled those who remembered him as a boy. As an outlaw, he was easygoing, unhurried, more likely to talk his way out of a posse than shoot through one. As Butch Cassidy, he ran with the Wild Bunch through more than a decade of train and bank robberies across Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Eventually, the Pinkertons made the country too small to hide in. In 1901, he fled south with Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, and Longabaugh’s companion Etta Place. First to Argentina, then, when the law found their trail again, into Bolivia.
That is the case for San Vicente being the end of the story. What follows is the case against it.
What the Grave Didn’t Confirm
In 1991, researchers Anne Meadows and Daniel Buck, who had spent years working through Bolivian archives, brought in forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow — the man who had helped identify the remains of Josef Mengele — and received permission to excavate a grave believed to contain one of the San Vicente outlaws.
They found human remains. But DNA testing brought another surprise.
The skeleton didn’t belong to Cassidy or Longabaugh. Evidence instead pointed to Gustav Zimmer, a German miner who had also been buried in the cemetery.
The discovery solved nothing. It didn’t prove Cassidy and Sundance escaped San Vicente. Nor did it prove they died there. It established only that the grave researchers had been led to was not theirs.
More than eighty years after the gunfight, the earth beneath San Vicente had given up a body. Just not an answer.
“More than eighty years after the gunfight, the earth beneath San Vicente had given up a body. Just not an answer.”
A Sister’s Account
Lula Parker Betenson outlived her brother’s legend by decades. Near the end of her life, she wrote a book that said the shootout was theater. In her telling, Percy Seibert knew he was looking at two strangers and named them Cassidy and Sundance anyway. Turns out, Cassidy had once saved his life. This was the only repayment left to make: let the world believe the outlaw was dead, so the outlaw could finally stop running from it.
If she was right, San Vicente was never an ending. It was a door somebody left standing open on the way out.
According to Betenson, her brother visited the family in Utah more than once between 1908 and 1925, unrecognized by all but a few. She further claims he died quietly in the Pacific Northwest in the fall of 1937.
Betenson would not say where he was buried. She said only that a man who had spent his whole life being chased had earned the right to rest without being found.
The Manuscript in Spokane
A second thread runs alongside hers, stranger for being so specific. In Spokane, a machinist named William T. Phillips wrote a manuscript called Bandit Invincible: The Story of Butch Cassidy. It was framed as a biography, though friends who knew him said he’d let it slip in confidence that he was writing about himself. The documented trail commonly cited by proponents of the theory becomes clearer in 1908. Phillips married a woman named Gertrude Livesay in Michigan, within months of Cassidy’s last confirmed letter from Bolivia. He died in Spokane in 1937.
The same year. The same corner of the country that Betenson names for her brother’s death. Two families, two separate stories, arriving at the same year by different roads. That kind of overlap is either a coincidental nothing or it’s the whole answer. No one has yet found a way to prove which.
What Remains
What’s certain is only this: two men died in a shootout in San Vicente in November 1908, and whoever they were, they are not the ones lying in the grave the sign points to. Past that, everything is inference. Inference of family loyalty, half-kept letters, and the particular hunger people carry for outlaws who get away clean.
Cassidy sightings kept coming for decades afterward, in Utah, Wyoming, Nevada, towns that would rather claim him alive than let him go.
The American West was never much interested in tidy endings. Its outlaws tend to ride past the last page, and the not-knowing isn’t a failure of the record so much as its most honest feature. Cassidy, wherever he lies, would probably have approved of the confusion. He spent his life staying one step ahead of a sure answer. There’s no particular reason to think death was where he finally let himself get caught. —☆
Further Reading
The mystery surrounding Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid has inspired decades of research, family accounts, and competing theories. For readers interested in exploring the further, the books below offer a place to continue exploring the story. Follow the titles to learn more.
Digging Up Butch and Sundance by Anne Meadows
A detailed account of the historical and forensic investigation into the fate of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, including the search for their graves in Bolivia.
Butch Cassidy: My Brother by Lula Parker Betenson
Written by Cassidy’s youngest sister, this personal account offers a distinctly different version of his final years—including the family’s belief that he survived the San Vicente shootout and returned to the United States.
Butch Cassidy: Beyond the Grave by W.C. Jameson
An examination of the evidence and theories surrounding Cassidy’s possible survival, including reported sightings and claims that his life continued long after 1908.
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