Henry McCarty (September 17, 1859 – July 14, 1881), better known as Billy the Kid, and also as William H. Bonney, was a 19th-century gunman who participated in the Lincoln County War and became a frontier outlaw in the American Old West. According to legend, he killed twenty-one men, but it is now generally believed that he killed eight.[1] He killed his first man on August 17, 1877.[2]