He was six feet (183 cm) tall with a thin build, jet black hair, and was just reaching adulthood when the American Civil War ended in 1865.

Around this time, Longley dropped out of school and began living a wild life, drinking, and running in the company of others of a similar disposition.

[2] In 1867 the Longley family farm was just one mile from the Camino Real, an old Spanish royal highway that joined San Antonio and Nacogdoches, Texas.

Longley's account of this murder differs from that of his later killings, where he was more inclined to brag about shooting men than to try to divert blame to others.

Together they robbed settlers, and in one instance killed a freed slave named Paul Brice in Bastrop County, Texas, after which they stole his horses.

Longley left Texas and moved north to avoid the authorities and by May 1870, he had joined a gold-hunting party in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Longley's travels for the rest of 1872 are unknown, but by February 1873 he had returned to Texas, where he was accused of murdering another freedman in Bastrop County.

In the summer of that year, Mason County Sheriff, J. J. Finney, arrested Longley for murder and took him to Austin to collect a reward.

He briefly found work on a cotton farm, but he was forced to run again in November 1875, after murdering a hunting buddy named George Thomas with whom he had had a fistfight.

Longley committed another killing in Uvalde County, Texas in January 1876, when his attempted ambush of fellow outlaw, Lou Shroyer, turned into a gunfight.

On June 6, 1877, Longley was surrounded and arrested without incident by Nacogdoches County Sheriff Milt Mast and two deputies while he was residing in De Soto Parish, Louisiana under the alias "Bill Jackson."

Longley's lies appear to have been motivated partly by his desire to rival John Wesley Hardin's reputation as a killer.

As Baker was dead and his band dispersed at the time Longley claimed this happened, the story cannot be true.

True or false, the stories are consistent with Longley's well-established racist character; in his own words he "...was taught to believe it was right to kill sassy negroes..."[8] Longley's account of killing a trail boss named Rector while en route to Wyoming in 1870 is similarly of unknown veracity.

Longley figures prominently in Louis L'Amour's 1959 novel The First Fast Draw, a highly fictionalized version of Cullen Baker's life.

In 1954, the actor Douglas Kennedy played Longley in an episode of the syndicated western television series Stories of the Century.