The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  He nervously kicked the dirt a few times with the tip of his boot. “Gives you something to remember about Wyoming, huh?”

  “We better get back,” I answered. “Mary Lou will be sending out a search party.”

  With a shrug of resignation Ron fired up the bike. “She’s back there havin’ some fun, I guarantee it.”

  As we turned onto Highway 14 heading south, the fear lodged in my gut began to dissipate. But there was no way I was going back to their trailer. I’d tell them that I had a lot of packing to do for my trip home.

  Back at Porky’s the three of us exchanged good-byes with hugs all around. Ron made me promise to look them up the next time I was out that way, but I noticed he never offered a phone number or address.

  On my last day in Ucross, I stopped by Porky’s to say my farewells to Buzzy, the world-weary bartender, who teased me about “the rollickin’ good time” I seemed to be having on Saturday night. I asked him about Ron and Mary Lou. From the way they had monopolized the pool table and dance floor I’d assumed they were regulars.

  “Never seen them two before,” Buzzy shook his head. “Tell you this, they’re not from these parts. No way.”

  Now as I drove on the outskirts of Cheyenne and veered west onto I-80 for Laramie — a wide-open, gently undulating terrain — I tried to hold those decade-old memories at bay. But with thoughts of Matthew Shepard’s beating still churning inside, I was sobered by the knowledge that it could have been me. I also could not shake off what I’d read about “the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future intruders.”

  Several miles before Laramie, the highway curved and descended sharply from a peak I would soon come to know as the Summit, where tractor-trailer accidents are common in icy weather and a massive bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln sits on the top of a thirty-five-foot-tall granite base. As the road dropped, it wound through a rocky canyon, giving no hint of the flat, sprawling prairie that lay ahead until it almost reached the valley floor.

  I took the first Laramie exit for Grand Avenue and the University of Wyoming, noticing the usual string of fast-food restaurants, an assortment of suburban-style houses in what looked like a new subdivision, and the ubiquitous Walmart. Sitting smack in the heart of the Rocky Mountain West, Laramie has long been dubbed “Wyoming’s hometown.” One magazine journalist who reported on Matthew’s murder wrote that the town “sits in a flat, treeless sweep of high plains bruised by bad weather,” yet she also described Laramie as “the friendliest place I have ever been in America.”

  But as I drove down the Grand Avenue strip that afternoon, past Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Taco John’s, I could have been in Anywhere, USA.

  Aaron McKinney’s highly publicized trial had ended three months before and the entire court record in the Shepard case had recently been unsealed, with the exception of McKinney’s and Henderson’s juvenile files and Matthew Shepard’s psychiatric and other personal records. A court-imposed gag order had also been lifted. Although trial witnesses and other principals in the case, other than McKinney, were finally free to talk, the army of journalists that had inundated the town for more than a year had long since departed.

  The following morning, while looking through stacks of case documents in a busy reception area at the Albany County Courthouse, a stately limestone building in Laramie’s refurbished downtown, I recognized Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had won McKinney’s and Henderson’s convictions. A robust man with thinning hair, then in his late forties, Rerucha had come across in news reports as stern and uncompromising. He also had a reputation for remaining aloof from the media. But as I watched him move about the third floor of the courthouse, making self-deprecating jokes to his staff and others stopping by on county business, he seemed warm and unaffected. Still somewhat intimidated, I asked if he had a few minutes to talk about the Shepard case.

  Rerucha invited me into his spacious but plainly appointed corner office, ushering me past his secretary and others working at their desks, then shut the heavy oak door behind us.

  It quickly became apparent during the conversation that he was sizing me up and trying to discern my motives for writing about Matthew’s murder. He coolly informed me that a slew of other writers and producers had already come to town with an interest in dramatizing the case. I detected an unmistakable note of scorn. Rerucha was clearly not interested in jumping on the Hollywood bandwagon and advised me that “the Shepard family has suffered enough” and he would have “nothing to do with exploiting their pain further.”

  Despite these remarks, Rerucha spoke with me for nearly an hour. I was further surprised when he offered me his home number and said, “Call anytime.”

  After a few days of research at the courthouse I left Laramie, laden with notes compiled from thousands of pages of court documents. But I soon turned to Rerucha for additional insight. Over the next several months, in a series of lengthy interviews by phone and in person, a feeling of trust developed. Rerucha described how taxing the Shepard prosecutions had been, including periodic death threats and constant worries for his family’s safety. In twelve years of elected office it was also his first death penalty case, with enormous pressure from government officials in Wyoming and Washington, and from the Clinton White House as well.

  I knew the Shepard murder had been the focus of national attention, but I slowly realized how much I did not know. Cal Rerucha not only educated me about the legal aspects of the case but also hinted that I should look beneath the surface of what the media had reported.

  Our phone interviews almost always began minutes after 5 pm Mountain Time, just after his staff shut down business for the day. Rerucha took his job as a public servant seriously. On principle he would not expend county time chatting with a writer, even about a case that had left a lasting scar on his hometown and, I would come to see, on Rerucha himself.

  In one interview he joked that the only reason he was talking to me was that “it’s soothing, like talking to a psychiatrist. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he added drily.

  On another occasion Rerucha chuckled, “You probably wouldn’t have made it into my office period if you weren’t wearing that jacket the day you arrived.” He was referring to my favorite jacket — a faded, well-worn tan Carhartt — which he said made me “fit right into Laramie” and didn’t mark me as “another media hound from back East.”

  “Every time those people came to town it was like a swarm of locusts,” he scoffed, shaking his head.

  Over time I discovered that Cal Rerucha did need to get some things off his chest, but it was not until months after our first encounter that I understood what they were. I made only one promise to him: I would write the story of Matthew’s murder truthfully. I also made the disclaimer that once my screenplay was in the hands of Hollywood I couldn’t offer any further guarantees.

  Rerucha was adamant that he wasn’t looking for money or fame. “Lawyers aren’t supposed to be celebrities or movie stars, their job is in the courtroom,” he lectured me in his affable, yet prosecutorial tone. The one thing that concerned him, though, was accuracy.

  “You people in the media say whatever you want, whether it’s true or not,” he complained. “Betray the public trust and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

  His reservations about the media notwithstanding, Rerucha continued to walk me through countless details of the previous year’s courtroom drama I had missed in person, including anecdotes of political maneuvers behind the scenes. A lifelong Democrat in a predominantly conservative, Republican state, he had been elected to his fourth consecutive term as county attorney just weeks after Matthew’s murder.

  Increasingly, I came to appreciate the immense challenges Rerucha had faced leading Laramie through some of its darkest days. He had a sizable number of detractors and political adversaries, and a reputation for being difficult and sometimes intransigent — a side of him I would come to know personall
y. But overall I admired his ethics and integrity. As I studied the murder over months and eventually years, he became both my ally and my guide.

  I also searched for other Laramie residents who could provide insight into how things worked in the town. When I asked about violent crime, the answers I got were often contradictory. The local chamber of commerce boasted of a “0%” homicide rate, yet I learned from Rerucha of other grisly murders in the years immediately prior to the attack on Matthew. He mentioned — as others had — the 1997 killing of a teenage girl named Daphne Sulk, which had made only the local news and was quickly forgotten. Rerucha said the Sulk murder was “the nastiest homicide” he had seen in four terms as county prosecutor. He strongly encouraged me to take a look at the case as background to what followed with Matthew Shepard, if only to compare two ruthless, back-to-back homicides in Albany County, Wyoming.

  TWO

  Daphne

  An hour or so before noon on November 11, 1997, Mark and Michelle Johnson were hunting for pinecones in the snowy woods of Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest. The morning was chilly, with a gust of fresh snow blowing through the sun-streaked trees east of Laramie. The Johnsons’ mission was to collect enough cones to make Christmas wreaths for family and friends.

  Something caught Michelle’s eye at the edge of the forest. Jutting from a shallow snowdrift, it looked at first like an outcropping of rock. Moving closer, she recognized the shape of a girl’s naked body, partially frozen in the hardpacked earth. The girl’s skin was pale blue and appeared to be punctured with bruises. Michelle staggered and turned to her husband. The ruddy glow in her cheeks was gone, and she could hardly get a word out.

  In the days before Thanksgiving, news that fifteen-year-old Daphne Sulk had been savagely bludgeoned, stabbed more than seventeen times, and discarded in the wilderness sent a tremor of fear through her nearby junior high school and hometown. The Laramie community also learned that Daphne was pregnant. For a college town of twenty-seven thousand, 93 percent of whom were Caucasian, it came as a still-greater shock when police arrested a thirty-seven-year-old black man, Kevin Robinson, for her murder. Daphne, who was white, had allegedly been his lover. As the story was told in court documents and local newspapers, Robinson wanted her to have an abortion but she refused. Anxious he would lose custody of his two children if word got out that he was the father, he beat and knifed her to death, then dumped her body in a remote wooded area where she was not likely to be found until spring — if ever.

  Hideous stab wounds covered Daphne’s chest and neck area. Her body was scarred with defensive bruises, indicating she had fought for her life. A forensic pathologist would later testify in Robinson’s trial that the number of wounds was consistent with an explosion of rage. Although an autopsy showed that Daphne was barely one month pregnant, no DNA tests were performed on the embryo to determine whether the sperm had, in fact, come from Kevin Robinson. It was an omission over which prosecutor Cal Rerucha and police wouldn’t lose any sleep, since they had abundant evidence incriminating Robinson.

  Those who knew Daphne described her infectious enthusiasm, but recalled that she was also fragile and troubled. The youngest of five children, she had just started ninth grade at Laramie Junior High. Roberta Sulk, her mother, surmised that Daphne might have first met Robinson on the street “on her way to her teen support group.”

  Before Daphne’s body was discovered in the woods, she had been missing from home as a runaway for eleven days. Police later determined she had spent a few of those nights at an abandoned trailer in town with another female runaway.

  At Kevin Robinson’s trial the following year, witnesses would testify that Daphne boasted of a “secret friend.” She had revealed that she was in a sexual relationship with “Kevin,” they stated, and that he frequently made her perform pregnancy tests in his presence. One of Daphne’s classmates named Miranda, who said she had accompanied Daphne on a visit to Robinson’s home, described his eyes as “glazed over” in a manner that frightened her — as if he were high on drugs. Daphne told Miranda that if she ever wanted drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, Kevin was the man to see.

  For Cal Rerucha the question of motive was answered when other friends of Daphne, as well as a few of her teachers, said she had confided in them that she was pregnant. She allegedly had told several individuals that Kevin Robinson was the father, and that he was very upset about the pregnancy and wanted it aborted. But what most convinced Rerucha of Robinson’s guilt were the spots of Daphne’s blood on the door and inside the trunk of Robinson’s gold Honda found by detectives from the Laramie Police Department and the Albany County Sheriff’s Office.

  Of all the officers and deputies in both departments, Rerucha relied first and foremost on Detective Sergeant Rob DeBree of the sheriff’s office, whose instincts he trusted “above all other cops in the county.” The two had teamed up on case after case.

  A sturdily built man in his forties with a mustache and a curt disposition, DeBree spent most of his off-duty waking hours tending to his ranch on the Wyoming-Colorado border. In local law enforcement circles it was well known that the two men argued incessantly while preparing for a trial, driven in no small part by Rerucha’s belabored, if not compulsive, insistence that “not a single witness or piece of evidence get away from us.” But as teammates, they shared an aggressive determination to win in the courtroom. Rerucha would be first to admit that he could push DeBree’s patience to the limit, not to mention the rest of his staff’s.

  “You’re paranoid, Cal,” DeBree groused to him on many an occasion, “and you’re driving both of us nuts.”

  Usually Rerucha got up from his banker’s-style oak desk, already damp under the collar of his oxford shirt, and began pacing the floor of his office.

  “God-darn-it, Rob, the defense is going to hang us out to dry,” he’d snap back peevishly. “I want to go back over every witness statement, a hundred times if we have to.”

  These routine jousts with DeBree “had nothing to do with second-guessing his judgment,” Rerucha recalled in an early interview. “If Rob said something was so, you could pretty much go to the bank with it.”

  By early summer 1998, seven months of legal wrangling and delays had elapsed since Kevin Robinson had been charged with Daphne’s murder, but there was still no trial date. As Rerucha sized up his crowded court schedule and slate of civic duties, he was hopeful he could finish the case by the time his sons went back to school in the fall. Luke, his lanky and athletic older boy, would be in seventh grade, while Max, who stood taller and was more bookish, was a grade behind him.

  The atmosphere around the Sulk case had also become progressively more acrimonious. Among Rerucha’s political foes there were allegations that he was showing racial bias; there were even those who said Kevin Robinson was innocent.

  “Some of the evidence against Robinson was circumstantial, absolutely, but all of it pointed to him as Daphne’s killer,” Rerucha stated confidently long after the trial was over. Yet other Laramie sources, including several respected attorneys, strongly disputed that view. Even today, they remain convinced that Robinson was “framed” or “set up” while the real killer was protected, presumably by someone with clout. Some found it strange that after Robinson was arrested for Sulk’s murder, he was allowed to leave the county jail each day to continue working at his job. He was even permitted to attend his company’s Christmas party, returning to his jail cell after the festivities ended.

  But behind the town rumors were lesser-known facts regarding Daphne Sulk’s history — aspects I only became aware of after I’d been investigating Matthew Shepard’s murder for a few years. By the age of fifteen and before Kevin Robinson’s name was ever linked to hers, Daphne had made claims to the police that she’d had sexual relations with three different adult males, each of whom served jail time for having sex with her as a minor. Yet her status as a juvenile prevented those records from being made public. Authorities also had credible information th
at Daphne had been involved with drugs, including methamphetamine. For a time two of the men whom she identified as sex offenders, reputedly meth users themselves, were suspects in her killing; the third offender was in jail when she disappeared.

  One story I heard about the Robinson case was said to be too scandalous — or too dangerous — to repeat around town because it involved a prominent family, the Fritzens, who had worked in local law enforcement. Don Fritzen had been a popular county sheriff, while his two sons, Brian and Ben, had served respectively as a sheriff’s deputy and a detective in the Laramie Police Department. Don Fritzen’s brother-in-law, John Fanning, was also the county undersheriff for several terms and, according to some, a powerful cop who allegedly controlled the town and its surroundings — “just like a sheriff in the Old West, someone you don’t want to mess with,” one insider cautioned.

  Ben Fritzen, Don’s younger son, a short, handsome man with a tight, muscular frame, was a lead investigator in the Sulk homicide. Respected among peers for his keen forensic skills and his network of sources on the street, Ben personally interviewed more than a hundred individuals during the investigation; he was also responsible for discovering drops of Daphne’s blood in Kevin Robinson’s car.

  But seldom mentioned until long after Robinson’s conviction was an alleged affair between Brian Fritzen’s wife and Kevin Robinson’s brother, Royal Robinson, known around town by the nickname “Bug.” The affair was apparently a well-kept secret until Brian’s wife gave birth to a child fathered by Bug Robinson.

  A few Laramie residents who insisted on anonymity contended, “at that point the fix was in.” One said the Fritzens, in an old-fashioned vendetta, “promised to get even with the Robinsons if it was the last thing they did.”