Valuable Photo of Billy the Kid Bought for $10 at Flea Market

A photo of a store selling Billy the kid merchandise in Lincoln, New Mexico on October 21, 2010. Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

A photo of famed outlaw Billy the Kid was purchased for $10.

Experts said that the photo—bought at a flea market—shows the outlaw standing near a lawman who would eventually shoot him.

The image was taken in August 1880 and shows him with a gang of men, including Sheriff Pat Garrett, Billy the Kid’s former friend who later killed him, MailOnline reported.

The rare picture was bought by history buff Frank Abrams, of North Carolina, according to WNCN.

“I said, ‘Oh my gosh, he looks like Pat Garrett,’” Abrams said after he started researching the image.

“It’s incredible. … Five trips across the country, forensic experts, professors have looked at it, others have looked at it. … It’s … I’m ecstatic. I feel like one of the luckiest people in the world. To find this is a privilege,” Abrams said.

He said that the picture includes another outlaw, Dirty Dave Rudabaugh, who was captured alongside Billy the Kid.

“People ask me all the time, what do you think it’s worth, what do you think it’s worth. I won’t put a price on it, quite frankly it’s priceless,” Abrams said.

But the photo could be worth millions, based on a prior sale of a Billy the Kid photo.

In 2015, a photo of Billy the Kid, whose real name is William Bonney, playing croquet sold for millions.

It had been originally purchased for $2. “I had just a couple of bucks left, and I found three photographs I liked, and of the three, the oldest tintype, I actually kind of chucked it back in the box,” collector Randy Guijarro said at the time.

But Abrams’s photo might be worth quite a bit more than even that because it shows the outlaw with the man who shot him.

Another Photo: More Valuable?

A $2 photo that was bought at a flea market could be even more valuable, according to Wyoming Public Media.

In a statement, Kagin’s senior numismatist, David McCarthy, stated that it took a year of inspection to confirm the authenticity of the photo.

“When we first saw the photograph, we were understandably skeptical — an original Billy the Kid photo is the Holy Grail of Western Americana. ... ”We had to be certain that we could answer and verify where, when, how and why this photograph was taken. Simple resemblance is not enough in a case like this — a team of experts had to be assembled to address each and every detail in the photo to insure that nothing was out of place. “After more than a year of methodical study including my own inspection of the site, there is now overwhelming evidence of the image’s authenticity,” the statement reads.

According to MentalFloss, this photo could fetch $5 million at an auction.

Randy Guijarro found it at a flea market in Fresno, California.

He said, “It’s almost a Twilight Zone photograph. That’s why it’s caught so much attention, skepticism, and pushback. You have the most famous and iconic American around the world, posing on a croquet stick with the Regulators, along with his girlfriend. This is a story. It’s not just a portrait of him. This tells a day in the life.”