You know you must be a divisive figure when someone still has it in for you 131 years after your death. There's no denying that infamous outlaw Billy the Kid was certainly somewhat of a character in his lifetime, but you'd have thought people might let him be now that he's pushing up daisies. Not so, however, and Don Sweet, owner of the Billy The Kid Museum in Fort Sumner, New Mexico, has told the Huffington Post that his grave was found vandalized on June 16th, the 2000lb tombstone somehow managing to have been toppled over.
"They turned the headstone over and it broke some of the concrete," Sweet explained. He added, "The cemetery has never been bothered before." Admittedly the grave of The Kid does have a history of trouble, even before Sweet arrived, although we're talking decades ago, his original marker having been shot up or stolen well before the current slab was placed there more than 80 years ago.
"It was bought in 1930, after Mgm did a movie on Billy the Kid," Sweet said. "The director (King Vidor) and Johnny MACk Brown, the actor who played Billy, donated $150 for the headstone." There were also other graves vandalised at Fort Summer, with the vandals also suspected of being the criminals who broke into Sweet's museum and stole three antique Winchester rifles and a single-shot shotgun.