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Joe Lefors (February 20, 1865 - October 1, 1940) was a lawman in the closing years of the Old West. He is best known for the arrest of gunman Tom Horn in 1903 for the alleged murder of 14‑year-old sheepherder Willie Nickell, which has since come into question, and it has long been believed that Lefors falsified evidence helping to convict the wrong man for the murder. Lefors was featured as a character in the 1969 film ''Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid''. ==Early life== Lefors was born in Paris, Texas, and first arrived in Wyoming in 1885 after working on a cattle drive that ended there. Lefors played a minor role in the 1887 recovery of a large herd of cattle rustled by the "Hole in the Wall Gang". He later worked as a Contract Livestock Inspector for Wyoming, where his job was to recover stolen livestock and apprehend cattle thieves. Lefors married his first wife, 16‑year‑old Bessie M. Hannum, in Newcastle, Wyoming on August 5, 1896. In 1899, Lefors took part in a posse to capture those responsible for what would become known as the "Wilcox Train Robbery", committed by the "Hole in the Wall Gang" led by outlaw Butch Cassidy. The robbers eventually escaped into the Big Horn Mountains. Famed lawman and Pinkerton Agent Charlie Siringo worked heavily on that case, and would years later come into contact with Lefors in the process of working other cases, and would later indicate that Lefors was incompetent, at best, as a lawman. However, US Marshal Frank Hadsell appointed Lefors to a Deputy US Marshal's position in October, 1899. Lefors always claimed that Hadsell approached him to take that job based on his hard work on the Wilcox Robbery case. However, Lefors contributed to that case very little, if anything, and is not mentioned as a contributor at all in the official records of that investigation. It is more likely that Lefors asked Hadsell to give him the appointment, and eventually he asked often enough to get it.〔(Tom Horn's Story - A Confession? ) at www.tom-horn.com〕 Train robbers again robbed another Union Pacific train on August 29, 1900, near Tipton, Wyoming about fifty miles west of Rawlins, and this time Lefors led the posse. However, they again had no success, and the robbers escaped. That same year, former lawman, scout, tracker and longtime ''killer for hire'' Tom Horn began his investigation on the Wilcox robbery case, working on contract with the Pinkerton Detective Agency to solve the case, and with whom he had been employed many years before. He generated productive information which was later passed to Charlie Siringo via the agency, obtained from explosives expert Bill Speck. Through that information the investigators were able to identify who had killed Sheriff (Josiah Hazen ), who had been killed during a chase of the train robbery suspects. Horn and Siringo identified Hazen's killers as being Wild Bunch gang members George Curry and Kid Curry. Horn also killed rustlers Matt Rash and Isom Dart that same month, in his other job as a ''killer for hire'' to fight cattle rustling for large cattle companies.〔〔(Tom Horn's Story - The Wilcox Train Robbery ) at www.tom-horn.com〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Joe Lefors」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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