Lost photo of Jesse James, assassin Robert Ford is found, authenticated

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Lois Gibson, forensic artist and analyst for the Houston Police Department, claims Wednesday she'd identified an image of one of America's most notorious outlaws, Jesse James.

Now an undated tintype photo, purportedly of James seated beside his one-time partner and eventual killer Robert Ford, could bring some serious big bucks to the farming family who turned it in.

James is a legendary icon of Western folklore. For more than a decade he led a gang of rough-riding bandits that robbed banks, stagecoaches and trains around Missouri and beyond, until his 1882 death at the hand of Ford, a member of his gang looking to collect a reward.

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Gibson, who holds the Guinness world record for "most successful forensic artist," spends her days analyzing minute details of faces and skulls to recreate the portraits of criminal suspects in Houston. She said her latest work is the most exciting identification she's ever done.

"This is it, just huge, like finding a T-Rex leg bone," she said.

But ironically, the owners of the antique photo spent thirteen years in rural Washington trying unsuccessfully to convince collectors that the image was really of James.

"I'm just a farm girl, so nobody wanted to listen. We got no respect from anybody," said Sandy Mills, 40, who inherited the photo as a family heirloom. "Then we found Lois."

She recalled the many stories of her grandmother Isabell, born in 1918, who helped raise Mills on a family farm in a tiny Eastern Washington town—like about the time the family harbored James and his criminal gang in their Missouri farmhouse in the 1870s. And occasionally, she'd take out the old tintype, wrapped in a hanky in her dresser drawer, to show the children.

"This is Jesse James and the coward Robert Ford," she would tell them, Mills said.

Three years before Isabell died in 2006 at age 85, she gave the photo to Mills and told her to sell it and buy land. But there was a problem: for almost 13 years, no collector believed the men in the photo were who Mills claimed they were, mostly because they lacked any original paper documentation.

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No collector was prepared to try to validate the men's identity, so Mills reached out to someone who would. They emailed Gibson, who they'd found online, and after several days of back-and-forth scanned the image at an office supplies shop and emailed it to Houston.

"The feeling was wonderful because we finally had found somebody who had respected us enough and took the time to listen," said Mill's boyfriend, Tom Razo, a professional logger.

Gibson, 65, put the image in Photoshop, sized it up to other known pictures of James and tilted them all at the same angle. As a detective, she said, her mission was to prove the photo wasn't James. But no matter how hard she tried, should couldn't do it.

She used the techniques she uses for the Houston Police Department to create faces from skull fragments, to identify grainy images, reconstruct portraits from witness memory and draw children decades older. She inspected the hairline, the bone below the eyebrow, the distance between the nose and upper lip, the size of the eyes and the shape of the cheeks.

"I know faces inside and out, and I worked exhaustively on this," Gibson said. "I am positive it's Jesse James."

That photo could be worth a lot, said Bobby Livingston, executive vice president of RR Auction in Boston. One of the most valuable photos ever sold was a picture of Western outlaw Billy the Kid, sold to Charles Koch in 2011 for $2.3 million. Livingston estimated that the James photo, if authenticated, could fetch a comparable price.

"If it's authentic it's a real wow," he said. "It's compelling, but I would want to see much more analysis."

Mills says now she hopes to sell the photo like her grandma always urged. She'll use the money to buy land, build a greenhouse and grow good food for her family.