Tom Horn

Tom Horn worked as an Army scout during the Apache campaigns, later as a Pinkerton detective, and eventually as a hired gun for Wyoming cattle barons hunting rustlers on the open range — work that blurred, by design, the line between law enforcement and assassination. He was convicted in 1902 of killing fourteen-year-old Willie Nickell, a killing widely believed at the time and since to have been a case of mistaken identity, based largely on a coerced, alcohol-fueled confession of dubious reliability. He was hanged in Cheyenne in 1903, and the fairness of his trial and conviction remain disputed by historians to this day, with many concluding the evidence was too thin to support the sentence carried out.