the overwhelming weight of the documented evidence suggests (contrary to Buckskin Frank's claim) that a besotted and morose John Peters committed suicide in early July of 1882 in the Dragoons not far from Galeyville, AZ. It also suggests that Wyatt and John Henry shagtailed it from Arizona in March of 1882, some four months earlier, and that they both were in Colorado, Doc in Pueblo and Wyatt in Gunnison, at the time of Ringo's self-murder. (This notion that one or both of them somehow returned to AZ undetected to place the final cherry on the Vendetta Ride's whipped cream sundae and then clandestinely skedaddled from the territory again undetected once the deed was done, smacks of sheer fantasy.)

The overwhelming weight of the documented evidence likewise suggests that Wyatt (and John Henry?) had, to be charitable, a rather curious relationship to the facts of certain matters. In Wyatt's case, one might even call it a lifelong pattern of dissembling (or, as some less harshly prefer, Big Windy-ism).

Question. Why, then, some 40 years later, when he was in his 70s and long after Doc had relinquished the ghost, would Wyatt claim to any number of people, including Bechdolt, Lockwood and Florentine Hooker among others, that he was the one who had killed John Peters, even going so far as to draw a map of the event? What was to be gained, particularly at that point in his life, by making such an outlandish, demonstrably false assertion?

What, exactly, was his motivation in doing so? Did he feel he needed to further "bolster" his reputation for the sake of his "legacy," a reputation that he formerly was at great pains to dodge and downplay? Had he suffered some dimunition of that reputation that he felt he could recoup by pretending to be The Killer of Johnny Ringo? Was he so senile by that time that he actually believed, or had convinced himself, that he really was Ringo's assassin? Had he dissembled so often in the past that doing so had by that time become so habitual, so chronic, that he did so unthinkingly? Did he so deeply regret the Vendetta Ride having "missed out" on Stilwelling Ringo at the time, so to say, that he reckoned that claiming to have gun-notched him after the fact, tying that slippery loose end, was just too "neat" to pass up? I'm trying to give the guy the benefit of the doubt here, but I frankly always have had difficulty understanding why Wyatt would give voice, and do so repeatedly, to such an easily disprovable claim.

Anyone? Any ideas?