Wrote a replay to your post below, but it appears that it posted to your archived seven-year-old reply to Kenny and does not show up here au courant, so here is the gist of it as best I can recoup and recompose.

Bob, do you really believe that "Boyer had it right"? Certainly your prerogative, but difficult to understand how a person of your self-evident perspicacity and fair-mindedness conceivably could "think" that. I mean, Boyer after all. Need more be said? ("Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown.")

I suppose I get the impulse on the part of certain folks (who shall remain nameless) to, I won't say worship, but twist themselves into Gordian Knots to explain the inexplicable or defend the indefensible or ignore or rationalize his documented history of dissembling or even his criminal record with respect to Wyatt Earp, but vis-a-vis his claim to have premeditatively murdered Ringo? And as head of a posse no less? No, that one, sorry, is not only difficult to swallow, it is rancidly unpalatable, and the points you cite in your argument suggesting otherwise are in my estimation, particularly when considered in the context of all the evidence to the contrary, not only unpersuasive, but extraordinarily flimsy, the thinnest of thin reeds. (This is not to suggest that all equal, Wyatt was not capable of such an act, he unquestionably was, only that in this instance it never happened. Both logistics and logic preclude and foreclose the possibility.)

Anyway, you are not wrong to suggest that I am someone of "little faith." In fact I would go further. I would insist that I am someone of no faith whatever. I know that you were being tongue-in-cheek in when you wrote that, but the truth is that faith has no place in trying to get at the historical facts of any matter. Logic, reason, analytical and interpretive skill, common sense, on occasion even informed intuition do, but not faith. I have no more faith in the word of Wyatt Earrp than I do in that of his detractors. In these matters I am Switzerland, and Switzerland is not only not buying for a second Earp's claim, it is wondering why in heaven's name he made it in the first place.

I think that, if less eloquently, is pretty much what I wrote the first time.