The mystery began simply enough with her identity. Who was she? As a young woman, she took the name, Place, from the maiden name of the mother of her lover, Harry Longabaugh (the Sundance Kid), and combined it with several first names, including Mrs. Ethel Place. The Pinkertons knew her as Ethel,
Ethal,
Eva, and Rita before finally settling on Etta for their wanted posters. After Sundance introduced her to Robert Parker (Butch Cassidy), the three joined the rest of their Wild Bunch gang and set off on a spree of bank, stagecoach, and train robberies. With the law hot on their heels, they rode up to Robber’s Roost in southwestern Utah where they laid low until word reached local authorities of their whereabouts. On the run again, Place accompanied Longabaugh to New York City where they purchased a lapel watch and stickpin at Tiffany’s before pausing to pose for the famed DeYoung portrait at a Union Square photo studio on Broadway. On February 20, 1901, she sailed with Butch and Sundance, posing as Etta’s fictional brother James Ryan, aboard the British ship, Herminius, for Buenos Aires. Settling there with the two outlaws on a ranch they purchased jointly near Cholila in the Chubut Province of west-central Argentina, they were granted 15,000 acres of adjacent land to develop, 2,500 of which belonged to Place, who had the distinction of being the first woman in Argentina to own real estate there. On March 3, 1902, she and Longabaugh returned to New York City on the SS Soldier Prince to visit her family and friends. On April 2, they registered at a New York City rooming house before touring Coney Island and visiting his family. They traveled to Dr. Pierce’s Invalid Hotel in Buffalo where she underwent an unspecified medical treatment. They sought additional treatment in Denver before returning to Buenos Aires from New York on July 10, 1902, aboard the steamer, Honorius, where they posed as stewards. On August 9, she registered herself and Sundance at the Hotel Europa in Buenos Aires and six days later sailed with him aboard the steamer SS Chubut to return to their Cholila ranch. She made another visit to the states with Longabaugh in the summer of 1904 where the Pinkertons traced them to Fort Worth, Texas, and to the St. Louis World Fair but failed to arrest them before they returned to Argentina.
In early 1905, the trio sold their Cholila ranch as the law closed in on them. The Pinkertons had known their whereabouts for several months, but the rainy season had prevented their agents from traveling there to make an arrest. Governor Julio Lezana issued a warrant, but before it could be executed, Sheriff Edward Humphreys, a Welsh Argentine who was friends with Parker and enamored of Place, tipped them off. The trio fled north to San Carlos de Bariloche where they embarked on the steamer Condor across Lake Nahuel Huapi into Chile. By the end of that year, they were back in Argentina. On December 19, 1904, Place, Longabaugh, Parker, and an unknown male robbed the Banco de la Nacion in Villa Mercedes, four hundred miles west of Buenos Aires. Pursued by armed federales, they crossed the Pampas and the Andes and returned to Chile. But Place had grown tired of life on the run and deeply lamented the loss of their ranch and the promise of stability it had held for her. In June 1906, Longabaugh accompanied her from Valparaiso, Chile, to San Francisco, where she sought medical aid and kissed him goodbye for the last time before he returned to South America and infamy. As for Etta Place, her mystery had only begun. And it would continue for another forty-six years before finally being resolved.