involved in a gunfight with Officer Frank West. Both men were killed, and Belle's life as an outlaw queen abruptly ended.

In the last years of her life Belle was the subject of rumor and gossip. She is said to have been romantically involved with the Cherokee outlaw Blue Duck, doing everything she could to get him released on appeal from life imprisonment for murder – unsuccessfully.

Belle with Blue Duck

On February 3,
1889, two days before her 41st birthday, Belle was killed. She died from
shotgun wounds to the back and face. The crime was never solved, although there
are many theories as to who did it.

Such are the
facts of the life of Belle Starr. In popular legend, though, she was to live
on. Her story was immediately picked up by the dimenovel, and National
Police Gazette publisher Richard K Fox made her name famous with his sensational Bella
Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James, published in the year
of her murder. She appeared early in movies: Betty Compson played her in a 1928
silent and ten years later Natalie Moorhead was Belle in Heart of Arizona. Belle would go on to appear a lot in Westerns,
Isabel Jewell playing her twice, in Badman’s Territory (1946) and Belle Starr’s Daughter(1948), Jane Russell taking over in Montana Belle, and then various TV shows featuring her too.

Louise Beavers does her usual Mammy act

In 1941, though, Fox chose Gene Tierney
to be Belle (it was to have been Barbara Stanwyck but Tierney was Darryl Zanuck’s
choice). Ms. Tierney had a well-to-do Eastern family and a posh education,