Author: Not much is known about Etta

The image of a laughing Etta Place riding on the handlebars of a bicycle is burned into our national psyche.

It was 40 years ago that Katharine Ross portrayed the mysterious Wild Bunch woman in the popular outlaw flick "Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid" with Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

"If anyone thinks of Etta, that's what they think of," says Gerald Kolpan, a Philadelphia journalist and the author of "Etta: A Novel" (Ballantine Books, $25), released in March.

After he saw the movie, Kolpan says he was surprised to discover how little was known about Place.

Seemed like a great opportunity for a novel, which is what Kolpan created. His fictional account turns Place into a Philadelphia debutante who goes West after her father dies and leaves her penniless and homeless.

Kolpan says he used the historical timeline of Butch and Sundance's lives as the framework for his book. Etta goes West as a "Harvey Girl," a waitress working in restaurants along the railroad, before she meets the outlaws. Throughout the novel, she crosses paths with assorted historical characters ranging from Buffalo Bill Cody to Eleanor Roosevelt.

"It's a tall tale and I thought it was fun and I thought it was interesting," Kolpan says in a phone interview from Philadelphia.

The author, who lives near the Sundance Kid's birthplace in Phoenixville, Pa., says he hasn't visited any of the Wild Bunch haunts in Utah or the West, but "I didn't let it stop me from writing the story I wanted to write."

Although some contend Etta Place was a prostitute, Kolpan doubts that. Place was very attractive and would have been a "celebrated" prostitute, he says, yet there is no evidence of her in that occupation.

There is also no record of any marriage to Sundance, or even any letters or notes that prove her involvement with him, Kolpan adds.

"We don't even know the exact nature of her relationship with Butch or Sundance or anybody in the Wild Bunch," he says.

One reason Etta's life is a mystery is because she was apparently never caught by lawmen, Kolpan says: "That's why there was so much accurate information about Butch and Sundance, because they spent a lot of time in jail."