John Peters Ringo (May 3, 1850 – July 13, 1882) was an American Old West outlaw loosely associated with the Cochise County Cowboys in frontier boomtown Tombstone, Arizona Territory.

Modern writers have advanced various theories attributing his death to Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Frank Leslie or Michael O'Rourke.

[3] In 1858, his family moved from Liberty to Gallatin, where they rented property from the father of John W. Sheets, who became the first "official" victim of the James–Younger Gang when they robbed the Daviess County Savings & Loan Association in 1869.

[4] Ringo left his mother, brother, and sisters in San Jose, California, in 1869 and moved to Mason County, Texas.

Trouble started when two American rustlers, Elijah and Pete Backus, were dragged from the Mason jail and lynched by a predominantly German mob.

Full-blown war began on May 13, 1875, when Tim Williamson was arrested by a hostile posse and murdered by a German farmer named Peter "Bad Man" Bader.

[6] Cooley retaliated by killing local German ex-deputy sheriff John Worley, then taking his scalp and tossing his body down a well on August 10, 1875.

After Cooley supporter Moses Baird was killed, Ringo murdered James Cheyney on September 25, 1875, with a friend named Bill Williams.

Cheyney (who had led Baird into the ambush) greeted them unarmed, invited them in, and began washing his face on the porch.

Some time later, Scott Cooley and Johnny Ringo mistook Charley Bader for his brother Pete and killed him.

He may have participated in robberies and killings with the Cochise County Cowboys, a loosely associated group of outlaws.

Both men were arrested by Tombstone's chief of police, James Flynn, and hauled before a judge for carrying weapons in town.

After the shooting, the Earps and a federal posse set out on a vendetta to find and kill the others they held responsible for ambushing Virgil and Morgan.

Cochise County Sheriff Johnny Behan received warrants from a Tucson judge for arrest of the Earps and Holliday.

Earp told his biographer, Stuart Lake, that a man named Florentino Cruz confessed to being the lookout at Morgan's murder and identified Ringo, Stilwell, Swilling, and Brocius as Morgan's killers,[12] The local posse pursued and came close to the federal posse at Henry C. Hooker's ranch, but never faced the Earp lawmen.

[11][13][14] Former Pima County Sheriff Bob Paul, who had been in Tombstone at the time and volunteered to ride with the Behan posse, wrote a letter to the Tucson Citizen on March 3, 1898 in response to an earlier story he said was full of errors.

[7] Teamster James Yoast was hauling wood when he found Ringo's body on July 14 seated in "a bunch of five large black jack oaks growing up in a semicircle from one root, and in the center of them was a large flat rock which made a comfortable seat."

He was "not more than 700 feet from Smith's house" in West Turkey Creek Valley, near Chiricahua Peak in Arizona Territory.

[7] Robert Boller, a member of the coroner's jury, wrote in 1934, "I showed [James Yoast] where the bullet had entered the tree on the left side.

[21] Earp was interviewed in 1888 by an agent of California historian Hubert H. Bancroft, and in 1932, Frank Lockwood, who authored Pioneer Days in Arizona, wrote that Earp told both of them that he killed Ringo as he left Arizona in March 1882 – almost four months before Ringo died.

[24] A variant, popularized in the movie Tombstone, asserts that Holliday stepped in for Earp in response to a gunfight challenge from Ringo and shot him.

[24]: 295 Some accounts attribute Ringo's death to Michael O'Rourke, an itinerant gambler who was arrested in Tucson in January 1881 on suspicion of murdering a mining engineer named Henry Schneider.

[7][31] Few believed his story, and some thought he was simply claiming credit for it to curry favor with Earp's inner circle, or for whatever notoriety it might bring him.

Ringo is depicted as a bookish and introspective observer of his era whose sweetheart is killed by Union troops during the Civil War.