![]() “I know faces inside and out, and I worked exhaustively on this,” Gibson told the Houston Chronicle. The forensic artist, however, has no doubt about the identity of the man in the tintype. “It’s compelling,” he said of Gibson’s findings, “but I would want to see much more analysis.” The only authenticated photograph of Billy the Kid sold for $2.3 million at a 2011 auction, and Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction, told the Houston Chronicle that the tintype could fetch a similar price if authenticated. It may take more than Gibson’s declaration, however, to convince collectors that this tintype is the real deal, and a great deal of money could be at stake. “This is it, just huge, like finding a T-Rex leg bone,” she said. Gibson told the Houston Chronicle that the project was the most exciting identification that she had ever done. “Greatly enhancing the claim that this tintype is truly Jesse James is the fact the man sitting next to him looks remarkably like a known companion in crime, Robert Ford,” she wrote. The clincher for Gibson was the resemblance between the man sitting on the left in the photograph to the outlaw’s betrayer. Portrait of American assassin Robert Ford showing off the revolver he used to kill outlaw Jesse James in 1882. “This natural body position had to be a comfortable one that Jesse James would repeat should he need to hold still so long again.” “These photos show a remarkably similar hand, arm and leg positioning,” she wrote, noting that photographic subjects in the 1870s and 1880s needed to hold a pose for a full minute. Gibson also saw a correlation between the tintype and other full-body photographs of James sitting in a chair that went beyond identical shirt and pants styles. ![]() “The nose, eyes, lips, forehead and chin are the same size, shape and positioning relative to the other features.” “All the features line up nearly perfectly,” Gibson wrote on her Facebook page. Gibson even noted that photographs of James show that his left eye is bigger and his left eyebrow is longer than those on his right, and the man in the tintype exhibits the same slight anomalies. When the forensic artist transposed four photographs of James on top of the man in the tintype, she found that all of the facial features-from hairline to nostril shape to the distance between the nose and upper lip-were a match. Mills e-mailed a scan of the tintype to Gibson, who spent a week analyzing the minute details of the two men depicted and comparing them to verified photographs of both James and Ford. The certified forensic artist has also delved into the realm of history by identifying the sailor who kissed a nurse in Times Square in an iconic photograph at the close of World War II as well as authenticating a rare photograph of another famed outlaw-Billy the Kid. Over her 33-year career, Gibson has worked on more than 4,500 cases, and her sketches based on witness testimonies has resulted in the identification of more than 1,200 individuals. “We got no respect from anybody.”Įarlier this year, Mills turned to Lois Gibson, one of the country’s top forensic artists and an analyst for the Houston Police Department, for help. “I’m just a farm girl, so nobody wanted to listen,” she told the Houston Chronicle. ![]() However, Mills found collectors were skeptical of the photograph’s authenticity. ![]() “This is Jesse James and the coward Robert Ford,” Klemann told Mills of the photograph, which she bequeathed to her granddaughter three years before her 2006 death.Īccording to Mills, Klemann hoped that her granddaughter could sell the family heirloom and purchase land with the earnings. In an interview with the Houston Chronicle, Mills said her grandmother, Isabelle Klemann, told her stories about their ancestors’ connection to the James Gang and kept the tintype wrapped in a handkerchief in her dresser drawer. The photograph was handed down through five generations of the family until it came into the possession of 40-year-old Sandra Mills, who lives in rural Washington. The undated tintype photograph was reportedly once in the possession of John and Pauline Higgins, a couple who harbored members of the James Gang in their Cedar County, Missouri, farmhouse during the 1870s. Now, more than 130 years after Ford betrayed his fellow gang member for the reward money and a gubernatorial pardon, a full-body photograph purported to show James sitting side-by-side with his eventual killer has been authenticated by a renowned forensic artist. The room in which Jesse James was shot and killed in his own home. ![]()
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