Paul Newman & Katharine Ross.

Judging by the amount of radio interviews I’ve been doing, people really care about the Sundance Kid.

Ever since news got out that Utah filmmaker Marilyn Grace and physical anthropologist John McCullough had unearthed the remains of one William Henry Long, wireless hosts from coast to coast have been asking me for my opinion. I guess they figure it’s worth something because of all the research I did for ETTA.

Do I think, they ask, that this Bill Long could actually be the Kid? What do I think of the photo comparisons between the two men? Can DNA evidence prove that they’re one and the same?

I answer the questions as well as I can – after all I’ve got a novel to sell – but I don’t flatter myself that all this interest is a tribute to me or ETTA or even the intrepid souls digging up that body in Duchesne, Utah.

It’s actually a tribute to George Roy Hill, William Goldman, Paul Newman and Robert Redford: the team responsible for the great film, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid.

Does anyone really think that there would be enough interest in Sundance for radio guys to call me if it hadn’t been for this classic movie? Believe me, nobody outside of western nuts would care if Grace and McCullough had found Marion Hedgepeth (who?).

It was Hill’s direction, Goldman’s script and the star power of Redford and Newman that made the two outlaws real to us. For most people Paul and Bob are Butch and Sundance and will be forever more. Photos of the real guy or not, most people will picture Redford when the DNA results are finally announced.

Truth may be stranger than fiction, but it’s nowhere near as powerful. Two screen legends were responsible for creating a western legend so strong that it’s lasted 40 years…and can still get radio types from Minneapolis to Portland to call an author in Philadelphia just to see if he’s got anything new to say about it.

Harry Longbaugh in 1902 & William Long-when?

Legend says that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were both killed by Bolivian federales in 1908; and up until now there’s been plenty of evidence to back that upBut now, documentary film maker Marilyn Grace and  forensic anthropologist Dr. John McCullough, say they may have found the body of Harry Longbaugh, the Sundance Kid, in a grave in Duchesne, Utah.Three months ago, they dug up a grave in the Duchesne City Cemetery.

According to the headstone, the remains are those of William Henry Long, a rancher long dead. Local people claim Long had a shady past and was rumored to have been an outlaw. He lived with a woman with six kids from around 1894 until he died in 1936. If he wasHarry, that would have made him 69 years old when he headed for the last roundup. Because of all the research I had to do for my novel, Etta (Ballantine Books), I was skeptical. All of the evidence seemed to point to Bolivia as the place of death for both of my heroes.But the photo above made me wonder. I’ve been looking at the gent on the left for the past decade (it’s a detail of the double portrait with Etta Place that serves as the frontispiece for Etta), and I think the two shots are remarkably similar, down to the cleft on the chin. And the name, William Henry Long, is similar enough to Harry Longbaugh so that that Sundance couldn’t easily get tripped up.

My biggest problem is that from what I know about old photos, the pictures seem to have been taken around the same period of time – the early 1900’s. Grace and McCullough say they will be trying a DNA match with one of Harry Longbaugh’s descendants to prove their theory.

It’ll be interesting to see what comes up, especially since the last page of my book leaves Harry’s fate open to question.

Maybe I was right.