Billy the Kid, Brushy Bill, & the NYPD

Did the NYPD prove that Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid using forensic technology? Short answer: no. Not the NYPD, not the FBI, not the CIA, and not Interpol. No official agency has ever conducted a forensic photo comparison or any kind of investigation into whether Brushy Bill Roberts was Billy the Kid. So where does the claim come from? Most of the time, it traces back to the documentary "Billy the Kid: The Silver City Photo," produced by Dan Edwards, and featuring an NYPD detective named Michael Furia. That’s what we’ll be discussing today, taking a look at what Detective Furia actually did, what he did not do, and why a confident opinion about an old photograph is not the same thing as a forensic identification. Along the way, we get into why facial recognition software doesn’t work on 19th-century tintypes, what the NYPD's own policy says about photo matches (spoiler: a match is only an investigative lead), and how a tool like Civil War Photo Sleuth really operates. We also identify one of the six photographs for who it actually is, a Rough Rider named William Dibrell Wood, a real and well-documented man who was most definitely NOT Brushy Bill Roberts.

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Silver City Photo Documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4A1OMB238s&t=1398s

 

Detective Furia Billy the Kid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-m-AJ5G0Tg

 

Forever West YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ForeverWestPodcast

 

Corey Recko: http://www.coreyrecko.com/

 

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