Wyatt Earp's Mother & Justice Served

It’s so nice to be home again among my own things. Travel is tiring. But the trip was necessary. On the plane ride back from Norborne, Missouri I was thinking how we don’t hear much about the childhood homes of legendary Old West figures or the mothers that raised them. My brother Barry and I are working on a book to remedy this very subject by the way. As the plane took off from the Kansas City airport I considered the life and hard times of Wyatt Earp’s mother, Virginia Ann Cooksey. Virginia Ann had eight children – Wyatt, Morgan and Virgil being the most famous. She died in 1893, living long enough to see one of her sons gunned down and killed, another crippled by gunfire, and a third wrongly accused and tried for a crime he didn’t commit. I’m sure she was devastated by the events that followed the gunfight at the OK Corral. All this led to thoughts of my own mother. She has been through a hundred kinds of hell on earth since my brother was falsely accused of a crime, convinced to take a plea, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. She sat in a courtroom and listened to poisonous lies about her son from the true criminals in this matter. She’s been the subject of ridicule and abuse at the hand of the ignorant in the small Missouri town where she lives – just this past week she was informed that a resident near her hoped her son would be put to death. I wish I could ease her pain. Erase the toll this has taken on her, the years of worry and torment she has endured. I think Wyatt Earp helped do that for his mother with his vendetta ride. I’m sure Virginia was concerned for her son but I’m sure she was also rooting for Wyatt to track down the bastards that cost her so much. I’m on a legal vendetta ride for my brother, mother and every other mother of a person falsely accused of the things my brother was accused. I won’t stop until I see them pay for what they’ve done. And even when I’m gone I’ll leave someone from the next generation to carry on the mission. It will never be over – not for the accuser or her mother or the next generation of people they bring into the ugly scene. I live to hear the words the attorney played by Paul Newman in The Verdict issued. “You know, so much of the time we’re lost. We say, ‘Please, God, tell us what is right. Tell us what’s true. There is no justice. The liars win, those that don’t know the system are powerless…. We become tired of hearing people lie. After a time we become dead. A little dead. We start thinking of ourselves as victims. And we become victims. And we become weak…and doubt ourselves, and doubt our institutions…and doubt our beliefs…we say for example, `The law is a sham…there is no law…I was a fool for having believed there was.’ But today you are the law. You are the law…And not some book and not the lawyers, or the marble statues and the trappings of the court…all that they are is symbols of our desire to be just… All that they are, in effect, is a prayer – a fervent, and a frightened prayer. In my religion we say, `Act as if you had faith, and faith will be given to you.’ If. If we would have faith in justice, we must only believe in ourselves. And act with justice. And I believe that there is justice in our hearts.” Hold on, mom, justice is not far off.