Butch Cassidy, My Brother by Lula Parker Betenson as told to Dora Flack

No Mailing Fee

INSCRIBED AND SIGNED BY BARBARA BETENSON CARSON (appears to be daughter of Lula) AND JOHN MATTHEW BETENSON (Butch’ nephew)

New hardcover with a dust jacket(nicked along top and bottom of spine), a 1975 first edition third printing by Brigham Young University Press, 265 pages including an Index and a Bibliography,

During the filming of the Robert Redford and Paul Newman motion picture Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,  Butch’s sister who had not spoken of her outlaw brother for forty years opened up to Dora Flack. Here is the Parker family’s vision of Robert Leroy and his exploits including a conflict with his supposed death in South America.

Though Butch Cassidy, outlaw, lives on in legend, no psychiatrist’s couch will ever lull him, no psychoanalyst ever probe from him the reasons why the man Robert LeRoy Parker became a fugitive from law and justice. Butch Cassidy is dead, and writers now theorize about the reasons for his disregard of the law. The question may forever remain unanswered.

But to no other account will come nearer to revealing the truth about him than this one, told by his sister, Lula Parker Betenson.  From her we learn about Butch’s hardy forbears, his childhood and young manhood, his leave-taking of his family, his poignant homecoming after many years of outlawry- and after as many years of penance.

Lula, concerned about conflicting and distorted accounts about Butch, tells us in  her preface: “The stories become wilder and wilder. My brother was given credit for robberies which were committed at almost the same time but many hundreds of miles apart….He would certainly have needed wings- and we know he was no angel.” She reveals that her decision to break forty years ‘ sworn silence came after she read articles about Butch containing many distorted quotes from her.

“If I don’t preserve my story in print, as only our family knew it and not as others have frequently misquoted me, the facts will remain garbled and obscure.”

Here, then, from the last survivor of Butch Cassidy’s immediate family- Lula Parker Betenson- is his story: Butch Cassidy, My Brother.