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"The child who would become Butch Cassidy was born as Robert Leroy Parker on April 13, 1866 in Beaver, Utah.....
"There has been controversy for nearly a century as to whether or not the two outlaws did, in fact, die in 1908 in Bolivia. Reports began to circulate after a few years that the pair had returned to the States. From there they are reported to have taken on various aliases. The most notable and, ostensibly, reputable account has Butch taking on the life of a machine shop owner in Spokane, Washington by the name of William Thaddeus Phillips. This man produced a manuscript during the Depression, while his adding machine business was failing, called 'The Bandit Invincible - the story of Butch Cassidy.' It included details which have since been corroborated by history. He owned a pistol with Cassidy's brand carved into the grip, as well as a ring which Cassidy had been known to have once possessed. Besides this Phillips and Cassidy had remarkably similar facial features, as can be seen by a comparison of photographs. William Thaddeus Phillips died in a nursing home in 1937. Was he really Butch Cassidy? Many people are convinced that he was, while others are highly sceptical. We will probably never know for sure"

It is said that most of Phillips' intimate friends in Spokane knew him to be the Butch Cassidy. It is known that he made three trips to Wyoming and other Western states where his robberies had taken place and his cronies were still living. It was reported that he was eventually recognized as "George Cassidy", the name he was known by in those days, who had come back, in all likelihood, to look for his caches of loot

"In his book, In Search of Butch Cassidy, researcher Larry Pointer offers strong evidence that Cassidy remained in South America until 1908. He then returned to the U.S. as William T. Phillips, married, adopted a son, and settled down as a machinist in Spokane, Washington. Phillips unpublished, handwritten "biography" of Butch Cassidy contains inside information about Cassidys outlaw career, and even offers an explanation for their reported deaths in 1909. The mine manager who identified the bodies was a personal friend of Cassidy and Sundance whose life they had saved on several occasions. He had talked with Cassidy and Sundance about the impossibility of escaping their criminal past and in Phillips opinion, had deliberately misidentified the dead outlaws in an effort to give them a clean start."