Pardon Billy the Kid? As If!

Poor Billy the Kid? Perhaps.

The suddenly popular outlaw had a chance of being pardoned more than a century after his death, but the outgoing governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson, couldn't find it in his heart — or, most likely, his jurisdiction — to do it, despite the pardon papers having been drawn up.

The story is that William Bonney, better known as Billy the Kid, made a deal with Lew Wallace, the territorial governor of New Mexico at the time, to testify in court about killings he witnessed, presumably to help convict other outlaws. The operative word there is story, since no papers proving this agreement have ever been found.

The recent exposure of what has been a long-dead issue is thanks in part to the diligence of an attorney, Randi McGinn, who has no doubt made a name for herself arguing on behalf of someone long dead and unable to provide evidence in his own behalf.

What is a fact is that Bonney was a killer. He was in jail awaiting hanging for the killing of a sheriff when escaped, killing two deputies along the way. New Mexico government officials say that Bonney killed at least nine people. Popular lore puts the figure at more than 20. The final killing belonged to Sheriff Pat Garrett, who killed Bonney himself in 1881.

The issue has caught on with a small segment of the world population. The governor's office set up a website asking for public comment and received 809 emails from all round the world. The final tally was 430 in favor of a pardon and 379 against.

So who has the last word? Apparently, it's Richardson, because the incoming governor, Susana Martinez, has gone on record as saying that the State of New Mexico has more pressing matters to attend to in these tough economic times.

Enough said.

Message Decoded 147 Years Too Late

They found out the hard way, turns out, possibly without ever receiving the message.

They in this case would be the Confederate forces at Vicksburg, the famed one of the one-two punch, along with Gettysburg, that finally set the Union on course to ultimate victory. With the victory at Gettysburg, the advance of the Army of Northern Virginia was stopped, never to return. With the victory Vicksburg, the Confederacy was split in two and, possibly more importantly, the vital waterway the Mississippi River was firmly in the hands of David Farragut and the Union Navy.

But Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton had no way of knowing all that as he hunkered down behind his defenses, trying desperately to hold out until reinforcements arrived to raise the siege of the Confederate positions at Vicksburg. All Pemberton knew was that he was running out of everything — food, medicine, men, munitions, and time. Ringing his position with a smug sort of aplomb was Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, who would later end the war by accepting the surrender of Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Pemberton was waiting, in particular, for word from one of his fellow commanders who was stationed just to the west of Vicksburg. This was the promise of reinforcement that Pemberton was seeking. If he could just hold out until …

But the day of reinforcement never came, instead turning into a day of reckoning, as on July 4, 1863, Pemberton surrendered to Grant both his men and his position.

But that is all old hat. The new hat is on the recently unencrypted message intended for Pemberton from this mysterious fellow commander who mysteriously never turned up. The message was found in a tiny bottle given over by a Confederate captain who somehow ended up with the message. Pemberton, it runs out, never got the message — not that it would have cheered him up any.

The bottle had sat in the Museum of the Confederacy for some time, since 1896, in fact. The bottle was recently re-examined and found to contain a message that didn't initially make sense. That's when the code-breaking began.

A retired CIA code-breaker cracked the code, utilizing the Vigenere cipher, a common enough code during the Civil War but not used in quite awhile. In this code, letters are shifted to create different letter combinations. The code cracked, the museum released the details.

In the end, it mattered little whether Pemberton got his reinforcements or not. They would most likely have been too late anyway, if they had come. Vicksburg was soon in Union hands, as was much of the rest of the Confederate lands. The Union's overwhelming advantage in money and manpower proved too much for the Confederacy to withstand. The nation was whole again.

Nuns Get Their Baseball Card Money After All

The School Sisters of Notre Dame, an order in Baltimore, have turned over their rare Honus Wagner T206 baseball card and received $220,000. From their point of view, the deal is done. However, the deal almost didn't get done at all.

The original bidder didn't come through, apparently. Stepping into the breach at the end of the 30-day payment period was another bidder who was initially scared away by the amount of the bid but later decided to pay the full amount when he was approached by the auction house. The fact that he was Catholic probably didn't hurt his chances, either of being approached or being willing to pay a few tens of thousands of dollars more than he was originally intended to pay.

That's all water under the bridge now, as the card now belongs to Nicholas DePace, a doctor from Philadelphia who plans to display one of just a few known representations of "The Flying Dutchman" in a sports memorabilia museum to be built outside Philadelphia, in Collingswood, N.J. DePace, a longtime collector, has amassed some impressive items in his collection over the years, including uniforms belonging to Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, and Babe Ruth. His interests extend past baseball to include a uniform worn by NBA legend Wilt Chamberlain.

To that he will be able to add one of the rarest baseball cards of them all. The Wagner card was part of the T206 series, a group of cards produced between 1909 and 1911. This particular card is so rare because so few of the original issue exist — and that is because they were made for just a few years, at the insistence of Wagner, one of the game's great all-around players, excelling hitting, fielding, and leadership for 21 seasons, mostly with the Pittsburgh Pirates. Two theories about why Wagner wanted production of the card to stop abound, the more favorable being that he didn't want children, then the main collectors of the cards, buying the other product made by the card-makers, the American Tobacco Company.

The card came to the nuns in the first place by way of a brother of a nun, who recently died and who had kept the card since he acquired it in 1936. The top price paid for a mint condition Honus Wagner card is $2.8 million, back in 2007. The card that DePace got this time round is in poorer condition but it still one of only 60 of its kind.

Found Amelia Earhart at Last?

Here's where DNA testing can really do something worthwhile.

Amelia Earhart is once again in the news, long after her disappearance. This time, researchers have found a few bones on a deserted atoll in the Pacific that, along with a few other clues, would seem to paint the picture of Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, spending the ends of their lives on land, alone, slowly running out of food and fresh water, undiscovered by the massive search team sent to look for them.

The other clues are perhaps more intriguing than mere bones: Among the findings are the mirror from a woman's compact, a pocket knife of the kind that was listed on Earhart's plane's inventory, and small travel-worthy bottles made in New Jersey (which, incidentally, is a long way from Nikumaroro, the atoll on which these things were found).

Earhart and Noonan went missing in 1937, so it's conceivable that the remains of small fires found on the atoll point as well to the missing pair's presence there. Also among the findings was a group of empty oyster shells laid out in a row, as if they had been cast down as water collection devices.

The findings were released by the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery, which has long been looking for clues to Earhart's fate.

Among the more outlandish theories were that she was captured by Japanese soldiers and executed as a spy or that she returned to the U.S. under a new identity and lived in secret the rest of her life. (Born in 1897, she would be very old if still alive.)

Finding the plane underwater would put to rest those outlandish theories, to a certain extent. But if the DNA testing on the bones that is now planned matches that of Earhart, then it's moreso an open-and-shut case of what happened on that grim July day in 1937.

JFK Photos Sell for $151,100 at Auction

The old saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. In some cases, pictures are worth thousands (perhaps hundred of thousands) of dollars. Such is the case with a recent group of images snapped by famed White House photographer Cecil Stoughton.

Stoughton is probably best known for his photo of Lyndon B. Johnson being sworn in aboard Air Force Once hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. That photograph, showcasing the steely calm of Johnson and the still-in-shock Jacqueline Kennedy, is one of the most famous in American history. The circumstances surrounding the taking of the photo are known, of course: the shooting, the aftermath, the constitutional carry-on. What was known previously only to some was the fact that Stoughton almost didn't live long enough to snap that shot. After hearing that Johnson would be sworn in aboard the plane, Stoughton rushed over in a car and literally ran across the tarmac to get on the plane to capture the moment. Secret Service agents, already frazzled from the horrific events that they had endured in the previous few hours, nearly gunned Stoughton down as a potential assassin. Fortunately, he was recognized.

That photo sold at a recent auction for $13,420, nearly twice the presale price estimated by Bonhams, the auction house in charge of the sale. The photo was one of 12,000 photographs taken by Stoughton of both public and private events involving Kennedy and his family. Among the headlines from the auction was the $9,150 paid for a rare photo showing Kennedy, his brother Robert, and Marilyn Monroe in the same public place at the same time.

Perhaps fittingly, a photo of JFK in the Oval Office with young Carolina and John-John dancing around, sold for $18,300.

Bonhams reported a total sale amount of $151,000.

Unabomber Land (Minus Cabin) for Sale - Any Takers?

If you had an extra $69,500 lying around and didn't care whether you even broke even on the investment, you might want to get in touch with the John Pistelak Realty of Lincoln, Mont. That's the company selling the land once owned by the Unabomber.


Yes, Theodore Kaczynski, the great opponent of advanced technology who is now serving a life sentence for his mad nationwide bombing spree, is still making the news, this time for 1.4 acres of land in western Montana — far from the ravages of such hallmarks of civilization as electricity and running water. It's basically a big bunch of trees and surrounding lands, no doubt by now teeming with wildlife.

The land is listed as "Very Secluded."

Kaczynski himself isn't far away: he's in a maximum security prison in nearby Colorado. Whether he profits from the sale isn't clear, and the realty company hasn't commented much other than to post the particulars of the sale, which include photos that show a very technological chain-link fence and barb-wire apparatus surrounding the property. (Guess they didn't want looters busting in and setting off their own bombs.)

One photo also shows FBI carved into a tree. Whether Kaczynski himself made the alteration in true Croatoan fashion isn't known.


One thing you won't find on the property is the Unabomber Cabin. No, that startling piece of back-to-nature living space is on display in the nation's capital, at the Newseum. Still, if you're looking to get away from it all, you could spend a lot more money and get a lot less land than this option.

Lee Harvey Oswald's Coffin - Cheap!

You have to wonder about the spending power of some folks in these dreary economic times.

One of the items being given away to the highest bidder by a Los Angeles auction house is the original coffin of Lee Harvey Oswald.

Remember him? The guy who shot JFK? Or was he merely the guy who was killed because he was believed to have shot JFK? Either way, he's still long dead.

Now, the coffin he was buried in is up for sale, and the current high bid is $1,000.

This all might be a bit on the really weird side if you didn't know that the coffin is, at the moment, quite empty. That's right — this isn't the box that currently holds the body. No, this is the box that originally held the body.

Seems that conspiracy theorists had had enough and, not waiting even 20 years, had Oswald dug up in 1981, to prove once and for all that it really was him in the coffin and not some Soviet agent who happened to look just like him. (That might have been the only thing they proved, but that's a story for another day.)

So after Oswald was identified as himself, he was placed back in the ground — in a different casket this time — and that's the one in which his body still resides.

The coffin on auction is that original box and is much the worse for wear, having suffered water damage over the years. In fact, what you'll get if you win the auction isn't even the box as a whole, since the water damage has done the deed and created more than one piece. Still, as the auction house is quick to point, you do get all the pieces, and you could certainly have the pieces put together.

What you do with it is up to you. Why, you could even use it to store "magic bullets."

Act quickly, though: The Auction ends on December 18. Maybe by then we'll know everything about the Kennedy Assassination.