Dillon also recalled seeing Aaron and Russell at the Fireside “the week prior,” which appeared to be the same evening on which a female friend of Russell claimed she had waited in the truck while Aaron and Russell went inside so Aaron could conduct “some business.” Dillon thought he had seen both men in the bar “10 to 15 times,” with more frequent visits in the weeks preceding the attack. Later, Aaron himself confirmed to me that he had dealt drugs at the Fireside and other bars but denied any involvement by Russell in his dealing activities.
Before we finished breakfast, I told Dillon I was investigating the role sex and drugs may have played in the murder. He urged me to “look into Doc O’Connor in Bosler,” but he cautioned me to “be very careful cause Doc can get nasty.”
“He’s into all kinds of things up there,” Dillon said. “Trust me, he can be violent when he wants to.”
Dillon himself had been brutally assaulted outside the Fireside one evening after Matthew’s murder, though he declined to say who his attacker was.
In a more subdued tone he confided that the reason the whole truth of the murder never came out was, “there are some cops in town who want it that way.” I was baffled, but before I could probe further he revealed that several members of his family had been respected police officers in Laramie, “so I know what I’m talking about.” I could see Dillon wanted to leave it at that, so I didn’t press him.
I also didn’t tell him that I already had an interview scheduled with Doc O’Connor for that afternoon. Doc and I had spoken several times on the phone but he’d let me know right off that he would only talk openly in person. After hearing Dillon’s warning, I thought about canceling the interview. I was conflicted. It was obvious that Doc knew more than he told the media, though his reasons for withholding information were a mystery. In any case, it seemed impossible to write a more accurate account of the murder without hearing his story. But there was no one I could ask to go along with me; nor would Doc be pleased if I showed up with a companion. He had already insisted I come alone.
After breakfast, as I shook Dillon’s hand outside Reenie’s, he told me to let him know if there was anything else he could do. I got into my compact rental car, dwarfed in the parking lot by several heavy-duty trucks, and turned onto Snowy Range Road, heading back to the Holiday Inn where I was staying to collect my thoughts about Doc O’Connor. I had asked Doc the day before if we could meet in town but he was firm; if I wanted to see him I had to drive out to his place in Bosler.
Moments after leaving Dillon, I noticed a police car in my rearview mirror, close enough to see the young male cop who was driving. Our eyes met briefly but I was sure I hadn’t been speeding. I assumed he would turn in another direction once we got to the intersection of I-25 and 3rd Street, which led downtown. Instead he continued to tailgate me until we pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. I felt my heart begin to race. The cop made no attempt to hide that he was following me.
As a precaution when I checked into the motel, I had asked that my name and room number not be given out. But I was suddenly nervous about going to my room alone, even in broad daylight. Instead I parked quickly, hurried into the lobby and past the front desk to a restroom in an adjacent corridor, and tried to calm myself.
Was the cop someone Dillon knew? Maybe checking me out to be sure I was the journalist I claimed to be?
I hadn’t bothered to look more closely at the car to see if it bore the insignia of the Laramie Police Department or the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. Or maybe the cop was a state trooper? Did Cal Rerucha ask him to keep an eye out, knowing I was looking into things that had caused the community a lot of distress? Or was something else going on? Was I being warned to stop what I was doing, pack up, and leave town?
I stood anxiously in front of the restroom mirror and soaked a paper towel in cold water to wipe the sweat from my forehead. I saw how scruffy I looked, with a week or more of beard growth, an appearance I had deliberately cultivated for return trips to Laramie. It wasn’t much of a disguise — hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, old Timberlands, a University of Wyoming Cowboys ball cap, and the faded Carhartt — but the last thing I wanted to do was announce the arrival of a reporter from New York.
When minutes passed and the cop didn’t walk in behind me, my body temperature began to cool. The worst of my panic was over, but I still reached into the zippered pocket of my jacket for a little white pill, a five-milligram Ativan, and swallowed it with a palmful of water from the faucet. For a few seconds I thought of the debilitating panic attacks Matthew had experienced and his sardonic shorthand for pills just like this one. “Mother’s Little Helpers” he called them, borrowing from the Rolling Stones song of the same name.
I still couldn’t make up my mind about Doc but I composed myself and returned to the lobby, hoping to find the police car gone. Instead the young cop was hunched over the front desk talking to a female clerk and looking over a sheet of paper. As I walked past, they seemed a little flummoxed but gave me a friendly nod. Was that my registration form he was reviewing, or was my paranoia spinning out of control?
I left the Holiday Inn and drove north on 3rd Street into the heart of Laramie’s downtown. When I finally convinced myself that I was no longer being watched or followed, I felt enormous relief. The last thing I wanted to do was trouble Cal Rerucha in the middle of a busy workday, least of all to expose my fear. But the sense of being an unwelcome stranger didn’t go away.
Driving past rows of charming little storefronts and historic brick facades — the very picture of a western, all-American college town — felt surreal, as if I had drifted into the dreamlike landscape of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Blue Velvet.
I thought of Matthew again and how Laramie might have looked to him as a smart and worldly yet confused twenty-one-year-old. I also speculated about some of the dangers he might have succumbed to before his encounter with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at the Fireside bar.
Any suggestions that their meeting that night could have been planned around drugs, or some combination of drugs and sex, had been dismissed by the media, based largely on the opinions of a couple of Matthew’s friends.
“There was some speculation that [Matthew] was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible,” an article in Vanity Fair stated. “Matthew’s friends also find it hard to picture him being sexually drawn to Aaron or Russell. Nor do they think that Matthew was interested in a threesome.”
And I continued to wonder where Doc O’Connor fit.
Before driving to the tiny town of Bosler to meet Doc, I decided to call Cal Rerucha for a word of advice. I was sitting in my car outside the county courthouse on Grand Avenue, still struggling with the anxiety that had taken hold of me that morning. I was about to leave town on a lonely two-lane road, headed eighteen miles north to a place I’d been told resembled a ghost town from the Old West, replete with ramshackle cabins, a former saloon, and a whorehouse. Doc, who owned most of Bosler, had renamed the property “Doc’s Western Village,” hoping, as he later told me, to attract visitors there as a tourist destination. Central to the site’s appeal would be showcasing the twenty-five-foot white stretch limousine “that Matt Shepard used to ride in.”
For his part, Doc contributed significantly to the mythologized view of Matthew that the media quickly adopted as its own.
“Matthew knew he was going to … get beaten or strangled — he wasn’t sure which,” Doc told one reporter. “He said, ‘When I get done in because I’m gay, if one gay person and one straight person come together and stop to think that we’re both people, that would be something’ … And then, four days later [after the attack], the whole country comes together. He’s bigger than kings and queens. One person told me he wanted to look it up in the Book of Revelation.”
But in other interviews Doc seemed to contradict himself. He told a different reporter that he didn’t think the murder had anything to do with Matthew being gay, and
said he was still fond of Aaron and Russell.
In the years before and after the murder, while he waited for prospective investors in his “Western Village,” Doc ran assorted other businesses on the main street — dealing in antiques, used cars, furniture, and, according to some sources, illicit items as well.
But talking with Cal Rerucha for a few minutes allayed my fears. He assured me that “a visit to Tom O’Connor’s won’t be life-threatening,” yet he also indicated in a roundabout way that Doc had been involved in marginal activities for decades and that his rambling pronouncements shouldn’t be taken at face value.
I told Rerucha I would call him as soon as I got back to town. “If you don’t hear from me, I hope you’ll send some deputies out,” I said half joking.
I couldn’t find the courage to mention the cop who had tailed me to the Holiday Inn.
“Tom’s an interesting fellow,” Rerucha added with some hesitation. “Who knows, maybe he’ll have something to say.”
Later I learned that Cal Rerucha had been Doc’s attorney back in the 1980s when he’d been in private practice. Doc had sold him the antique oak desk in his courthouse office — where we often sat for interviews — “at a bargain price.” According to Doc, it was an heirloom that had belonged to his great-grandfather. Rerucha seemed certain that his former client had no part in Matthew’s murder, yet he also intimated that if anyone knew what was really behind it, Doc did.
Following the directions to Bosler that Doc had given, I pulled off Highway 30 into a scrubby driveway that led to several outbuildings and trailers. Uncertain about where to go next, I dialed him on my cell phone.
“Just pull in where I told you,” a raspy male voice answered at the other end. “Park there on the left and come to the door right in front of you.” Before I could respond, the connection went dead.
The windows of the single-story building nearest me were covered with wrinkled shades; some were torn and yellowed with age. No sign of life inside or anywhere else.
I got out of the car slowly. Just then a thick metal door on the side of the house opened and Doc O’Connor’s surly voice bellowed from within, “What’s the matter, can’t you boys from back east follow instructions?”
Seconds later I stood with Doc, a craggy-looking man with a graying mustache and short ponytail, in a corner of his ranch-style bedroom where we faced a bank of video monitors and computer screens. Staring back at us were black-and-white surveillance pictures of my parked car outside, from every possible angle. I tried to maintain a friendly composure, pretending not to be intimidated or even surprised.
“Don’t worry, you’re safe here,” Doc teased. “If anyone tries to get past these cameras, I’ve got my rifles.”
Studying his face and eyes I could see that he must have been a knockout as a young man. During another visit with Doc months later, as he nursed a rum and Coke at his kitchen table, he confirmed as much when he pulled out a dusty leather-bound album with photos taken in his twenties.
Slowly, over several long, meandering conversations, he loosened up and spoke of things in his past he had long kept hidden: from his adventures performing in porn films and the glories of being paid “big bucks” for sex with Hollywood movie stars and a married bank president to encounters with the infamous gangster “Chauncey” Smaldone and the Denver mob.
“I was a hustler,” Doc confessed unabashedly.
According to Doc, he first met Aaron McKinney when Aaron was sixteen or seventeen — one of several local young men with problems whom Doc took under his wing, though some in Laramie allege that his motives have not always been altruistic.
In mid-summer 1998, several weeks before Matthew’s attack, Aaron, his girlfriend Kristen, and their infant son lived in an apartment on Doc’s property in Bosler “rent-free.” The arrangement they had was that Aaron would do “odd jobs” for him, Doc explained as he gave me a tour of the dim, windowless apartment, situated in a huge warehouse across the road from his home.
Many of my early interviews with Doc occurred in out-of-the-way places. Sometimes he would offer to take me out in one of his stretch limos “for a drive out to the mountains,” but I politely declined. He said he wanted to show me Centennial, Wyoming, a rustic town about thirty miles from Laramie, and Woods Landing, another remote spot where he had driven Aaron and a few of his friends for parties in the limo.
For a long time Doc continued to say that he had just met Matthew a few days before the attack and that he “never saw Aaron and Matthew together.” But as new sources began to tell me a different story, Doc’s story began to change, too. He acknowledged that Matthew had, indeed, visited him in Bosler with his friend Alex Trout months before the murder, although Doc was quick to add, “Matt didn’t say very much, so I didn’t really remember him.”
Doc also described a rowdy incident in the limo with Aaron and two unidentified male friends — long before Matthew was killed.
“They dropped a couple of girls off at home first and told me to take them to Woods Landing,” he recalled. “I got paid to be the driver and mind my own business, which I always did, until I heard someone break a champagne glass in the back. I slid the window open and told Aaron he’d have to pay me for the glass.”
Doc stared at me, pausing for effect. “The three guys were buck naked back there, playing around together. Aaron said, ‘No problem, Doc, I’ll take care of it.’ I just shut my window and didn’t say another word.”
Only after I questioned Doc intermittently over months did he concede, “Matt may have been one of the guys in back [of the limo] with Aaron … I can’t say for sure.”
I also asked Doc numerous times about one of the many businesses he owned, called Lincoln Escort Service. He answered with a straight face that it was “a service to escort big trucks with heavy loads on the interstate.” I told him that an “escort service” means something altogether different where I come from.
But Doc stuck to that story, even after boasting that he had arranged to bring Denver-based female strippers to Wyoming to perform in a bar there.
“They call ’em ‘exotic dancers’ now, but they do the same thing they’ve always done,” he said with a cool shrug.
I was reminded again of the anonymous letter I found at the courthouse long before, stating that Aaron “was acting the part of ‘straight trade’ ” and “his excuse was: he was only doing it for the money to spend on his girlfriend.” Did Doc run an escort service that employed young males like Aaron and perhaps Russell, too? And where did Matthew fit in Doc’s schemes, if at all?
What I thought was just an innocuous suggestion by Doc in an early interview would later lead me to a seedy hustler bar in Denver called Mr. Bill’s, as well as a few other gay bars along the city’s Broadway strip. Those late-night excursions prompted me, in turn, to go back to Doc with more questions — and more confusion.
For reasons I did not understand, Doc had also divulged that shortly after Matthew’s attack he had hired a prominent defense attorney to represent him. If Doc had nothing to do with the murder and Cal Rerucha had never brought charges against him, why did he need a lawyer? Each time I broached the subject, Doc deflected my questions by shifting to something else.
“There are some things you’ll never get me to talk about,” he swore.
Doc made no attempt to hide his fear that “someone might put a bullet in my back some night when I’m driving home from the Eagles,” a Laramie fraternal club in which he’d been an active member and trustee for decades. He always drove into town and back home again on Highway 30, the same deserted, two-lane county road that first took me to Bosler to meet him in 2002.
EIGHT
Palomino Drive
During the summer of 2002 I also began a series of extensive phone interviews with Aaron McKinney, who was then incarcerated at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. It would not be until 2004, however, after he was transferred to a prison in Nevada, that correctional authorities allowed us to meet face-t
o-face. Aaron’s father, Bill McKinney, a long-haul truck driver whom I first met in June 2002 in the snack bar of an Arizona golf course, facilitated my introduction to him.
Initially the elder McKinney was gruff. He told me he was still bitter over the media’s treatment of his son, which he felt had compromised the fairness of his 1999 trial. He also complained that reporters had taken his own remarks out of context, in order to cast him “as an anti-gay redneck, just like Aaron.”
According to an article in The Denver Post a few days after the attack on Matthew Shepard, Bill McKinney stated, “The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual. Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news.”
Bill McKinney’s words — along with a televised interview that week in which Aaron’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, claimed that “[Aaron and Russ] just wanted to beat [Matthew] up bad enough to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people” — amounted to pouring gasoline on a blazing fire. Within days more than fifty vigils, marches, and demonstrations protesting the attack on Matthew took place around the nation. After such blatant statements by Aaron McKinney’s father and girlfriend, was there any reason to doubt anti-gay hate as the motive?
Whatever other traits Bill McKinney and his son may share, their sharp facial features and eyes bear an uncanny resemblance, right down to their tight, slightly upturned lips when they’re pissed off about something. After meeting Aaron in person, I could never be in his father’s presence without having the discomfiting sense that Aaron was there, too.
Bill McKinney only agreed to talk with me, he said, “because you seem to have an open mind on the case, with more questions than answers.” I couldn’t help but wonder just the same: Would he have given me the time of day had I disclosed up front that I’m gay? One personal paradox of revisiting Matthew’s murder was my decision to remain closeted with several sources, at least early on. I was concerned that my investigation might be perceived as having a gay agenda and that sources in Wyoming might hesitate to open up. But it later became apparent that Bill McKinney knew I was gay from the start and was unfazed.
The Book of Matt Page 5