Johnny Ringo was a proud member of the Cowboy gang and a business partner of its outlaw leader, Ike Clanton. In March 1882, five months after the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Wyatt Earp's younger brother Morgan was murdered in Tombstone, and Wyatt determined that Ringo was one of the assassins. Four months later, on July 14, 1882, Ringo was found propped in the crotch of a tree with a bullet hole in his right temple. Unable to examine the body in person, the coroner ruled Ringo's death a suicide, but speculation raged that he was actually murdered by Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, or someone else. The Tombstone Epitaph observed that many people who had been intimately acquainted with Ringo in life seriously doubted that he had taken his own life. For years Wyatt Earp denied killing Ringo, but late in life he confided to his wife Josephine and his biographer John Flood that he had tracked Ringo into the mountains and shot him. On September 15, 1926, Wyatt drew a crude map of the incident for Flood showing Ringo's location and local landmarks including Tombstone, the Hooker Ranch where Wyatt and Doc Holliday took refuge while eluding Sheriff Johnny Behan, and the McLaury Brothers' Ranch near Soldier's Hole. By 1926 it was too late to verify Wyatt's claim, and Johnny Ringo's death remained shrouded in mystery.