Etta Place: The Sundance Kid's Companion Who Vanished Without a Trace

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She rode with Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch as the companion of Harry Longabaugh, the Sundance Kid, and was hunted by the Pinkerton Detective Agency across two continents. Yet almost nothing about Etta Place can be proven. A Pinkerton description from 1906 gives her age as 27 or 28, her height as about five foot four, her weight as 110 to 115 pounds, and her hair as brown. There is no birth certificate and no family record, and even the name is doubtful, since Place was the maiden name of Longabaugh's mother.

This episode tests the three best known attempts to give her an identity. Ethel Bishop lived in a San Antonio brothel around the corner from a Wild Bunch hangout and was listed in the 1900 census as an unemployed music teacher. Cattle rustler Ann Bassett was declared a match by a Los Alamos scientist in 1992. Fort Worth hotel keeper Eunice Gray once said she had fled to South America. Each theory fails, and the trail runs from a ranch at Cholila, Argentina, to San Francisco in 1907 and a last strange sighting in Chile before Hollywood wrote the ending for her.

• Dr. Thomas G. Kyle overlaid photographs and cited a matching cowlick, but records show Ann Bassett was arrested and married in Utah in 1903 while Etta Place was in South America.
• The Eunice Gray theory lasted until 2007, when genealogist Donna Donnell found Gray's niece and photographs that plainly showed a different woman.
• In 1909 a woman matching her description asked the U.S. vice consul in Antofagasta, Chile, for help obtaining a death certificate for the Sundance Kid. It was never issued.
• Later rumors placed her in Paraguay, dead in a 1922 shootout in Chubut, Argentina, a suicide in 1924, or living quietly until 1966.
• Screenwriter William Goldman made her a schoolteacher for the 1969 film because he thought her too attractive to have worked in a brothel, and Katharine Ross fixed that image in public memory.