The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  Over many cups of coffee at Shari’s twenty-four-hour restaurant on Laramie’s North 3rd Street — and despite my initial skepticism — I slowly warmed to Bill’s no-nonsense disposition. Never once did he suggest his son was anything less than fully culpable for his explosive violence against Matthew Shepard. On the contrary, he volunteered, “Aaron has always had a terrible temper, going way, way back.”

  But like others, Bill McKinney was unconvinced that hatred of gays was behind the attack. He reminded me of something I had heard from others in Laramie: that at the time of the murder both Kristen Price’s mother and the mother of Russell Henderson’s twenty-year-old girlfriend, Chasity Pasley, were in lesbian relationships and “there was no evidence whatsoever of Aaron or Russell expressing anti-gay feelings.”

  “Aaron lived in the same house with Kristen’s mother for months and they never had a problem,” Bill recalled.

  When I asked him if it was possible that Aaron had been sexually involved with other males, he said he had “no knowledge of it” but appeared to shrug my question off as dumb or irrelevant.

  “Come on, Steve, we’ve all experimented one way or another,” he added without the slightest diffidence. “Most people that tell you they haven’t are full of it.”

  Had Bill McKinney not screened me and given his okay, Aaron would not have agreed to an interview. He made that clear in our first phone conversation on August 1, 2002. Both of us began talking with some trepidation, as we knew the call was being recorded by the Wyoming Department of Corrections. This was also the first time Aaron violated the oath of silence that was part of his 1999 sentencing agreement. Immediately following his conviction, he spared himself the possibility of a death sentence by agreeing, among other conditions, to refrain from discussing the case with the media.

  By the time of our first interview, I had been commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write an article reexamining the murder. Any moral reservations I had about persuading Aaron McKinney to talk with me were overshadowed by the host of troubling questions that his trial had left unanswered and the media never bothered to probe. A few renowned legal scholars even argued that the suppression of his right to free speech was unconstitutional.

  As I began communicating with both Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson that summer, my foremost challenge was convincing each of them to talk openly when they had nothing to gain, beyond helping to set the record straight. And could I depend on anything they told me when each had lied often in the past?

  During many hours of phone interviews with Aaron in August and September 2002, he was mostly cooperative, yet blunt and unintimidated — as if he had no time to waste on formalities. He acknowledged in short order that he’d been a drug dealer for three years prior to the murder and that he’d done “some fucked-up things.” But what he regretted most, he said, “is that I’ll never be able to be there for my son,” who was then four.

  When I eventually brought up Matthew Shepard and asked how they first met, Aaron’s tone changed. He grew more sullen and cautious. He said that on the night of the crime “Matt came over first” at the Fireside bar.

  “Matt was just tryin’ to buddy up,” he stated offhandedly, without elaborating further.

  I was surprised to hear Aaron use the more personal Matt. Among his family and friends Matthew Shepard went by Matt, but in court documents and media accounts he was consistently referred to as Matthew.

  “I’d been up for about a week,” Aaron mentioned out of the blue. “I didn’t know I was doin’ it. I thought I was beating the dude up.” Then, with barely a pause, he asked me for a second or third time, “So what else can I help you with? Is that all your questions for me?”

  Aaron liked to abruptly change subjects on me like that, stopping his remarks midstream to ask if I had “any other questions” or “what else do you need to know?” Sometimes a long silence would follow, or I’d hear him talking cheerfully to other inmates in the background.

  Aaron had already informed me there were “certain things” he wouldn’t talk about, including the names of people with whom he had dealt drugs. “No talking out of school” was how he put it.

  But when I finally grew comfortable enough to confront him about his conflicting stories — and some outright lies — he brushed me off by switching subjects again, or telling me another inmate needed to use the phone. In nearly every conversation, there was the unstated threat that he’d hang up on me and that would be it.

  Yet the longer we spoke, the better I got at knowing when to press Aaron and when to back off.

  I asked him several times if he had known Matthew Shepard before the crime and his answer was always “No.” But it was obvious that the question more than irritated him; it put him on edge. He had a similar reaction when I asked about Doc O’Connor. Although he admitted knowing Doc, he was vague at first about whether we were referring to the same person.

  “You mean the old dude who lives up there in that weird little town, what’s it called again?” he asked unconvincingly.

  “Bosler,” I answered.

  “That’s it,” Aaron said with feigned surprise. “Yeah, I know who you mean. What about him?”

  Why was he being evasive about Doc O’Connor? Several weeks before the murder, Aaron, Kristen, and their newborn son had moved into a makeshift apartment on Doc’s property. They only lasted a short time at Doc’s before they moved back into town to the Ranger Motel, where the manager was a friend of Bill McKinney. But soon they relocated once more, this time to an apartment owned by Aaron’s boss — roofing contractor Arsenio Lemus. Oddly, though, when they were arrested a few weeks later, both Aaron and Kristen gave the police Doc’s phone number as their own.

  I had been told by friends of Aaron that he often hired Doc’s limos for parties, going back years before the murder. It was no secret that Matthew also liked to hire Doc’s limos, but I couldn’t find any solid information linking the three men — just scattered rumors.

  There was, however, a small item in a police report that connected Matthew to the Ranger Motel. His close friend Alex Trout told police that the last time he had seen Matthew alive was at the Ranger bar the night before the attack. Yet a few days later in a TV interview, Trout changed his story and said that the two had only talked of getting together.

  My attempts to question Aaron about sex put me in even more volatile terrain than asking about his drug activities. During a phone interview I read him the anonymous letter I had found, which identified Doc and stated that Aaron acted the part of “straight trade” but “[he] really did like doing it with other guys.”

  Aaron was furious about the letter. “Total fucking bullshit, all of it,” he said. “None of it’s true.”

  But the first thing he wanted to know was whether I had shared the letter with his father. When I assured him I hadn’t, his relief was palpable. He insisted that I not get into “any of this sex stuff” with his father.

  According to Aaron, the only “messing around” he’d ever done with other males was when he was a boy growing up on Palomino Drive in Laramie — “the usual kids’ stuff,” he said more than once.

  On one of my early visits to the town, I drove through the quiet, nondescript subdivision where Aaron had grown up, only to realize its proximity to the fence area where Matthew was beaten. As a boy, Aaron had frequently played with his friends on the same stretch of prairie bordering the subdivision. A strange coincidence, I thought, that this was where he told Russell Henderson to drive the truck during Matthew’s abduction. The truck belonged to Aaron’s father, but Aaron couldn’t drive it because his license had been revoked.

  I recalled from conversations with Bill McKinney that he and Aaron’s mother had divorced when Aaron was five. I had also read in articles that Aaron’s mother locked him in the basement when he misbehaved. Bill McKinney nonetheless placed the blame for Aaron’s juvenile troubles jointly with himself and his ex-wife.

  “I was always on the road when
he was a boy, hardly ever there,” he said. “His mother was physically at home, but she wasn’t really there either. She didn’t know how to raise him.”

  As I continued to think about the location of Matthew’s beating, I reexamined a letter Aaron had smuggled to Russell in jail after their arrest, advising him of a scenario they should use to explain the attack:

  Hey Homeboy … When we go to court, if they try us together or seperate [sic] … they should hear you say what I said so this is what I told them, me and you was gettin fucked up at the bar and when we was fixin to leave Matt Sheppard [sic] asked us for a ride home, so we gave him a ride … and when we got out there he tried to get on me and I started kicking his ass … At no time did we know he was gay until he tried to get on me … The reason Matt told us he lived in imperial heights is because He wanted to get me in a dark place so we could get funky. That’s all I got for now I’m sure I’ll think of more later …

  Ironically, Imperial Heights was the subdivision where Aaron grew up. Matthew lived in a different part of town, close to the university.

  Aaron’s letter also revealed other inconsistencies in both his version of events and the one put forward by his girlfriend, Kristen Price — unsubstantiated alibis that became the basis of official accounts of the murder.

  According to Price’s statements after the crime, Aaron told her that Matthew had made a sexual advance in the Fireside bar, embarrassing him and Russell in front of their friends. Yet in his jailhouse letter Aaron instructed Russell, “At no time did we know he was gay until he tried to get on me [when we got out there in the truck] …” (italics mine).

  In light of Aaron’s claim that he had not known Matthew previously, his use of the more familiar Matt in the letter also caught my attention again.

  Trying to untangle Aaron’s contradictory statements was exasperating at times, especially as I began to gather information from other sources suggesting that he and Matthew were, indeed, well acquainted. In both his recorded confession to police and my many interviews with him, Aaron offered up multiple versions of his motives, the events that led up to the crime, and the murder itself. He seemed to enjoy playing a game of cat and mouse with me, pretending not to see the many discrepancies in his story.

  I asked him if he could explain the portion of his recorded confession when he told police that Matthew had offered drugs in exchange for sex. Aaron said he “never made that statement.” When I asked if I should send him the official transcript of his confession so he could have a look, he responded blankly, “No, you don’t need to send it.”

  In my frustration I turned to Bill McKinney a few times, hoping he could convince Aaron to be more truthful. Bill was sympathetic but had no solution to offer.

  “Aaron’s been lying since he was a kid,” he said. “Believe me, you’re not the only one. He lies to me, too … One thing I always tried to teach him, and I think I failed miserably, is the difference between honor and loyalty. Aaron still confuses the two. He would rather be loyal to something or someone, to anything really, even if it’s a lie. Then he convinces himself it’s honor.”

  After a thoughtful pause, Bill McKinney added, “When I ask him about that night [of the murder], he tells me he doesn’t remember.”

  NINE

  Wildfire

  In my search for the truth of Matthew’s murder, I tracked down a number of his friends, especially those who had spent significant time with him in the summer and early fall of 1998. Some had moved from Laramie and were reluctant to talk. A few said they had spoken to the media previously but were angry at being misrepresented. And nearly everyone I contacted seemed skeptical — if not fearful — of my attempts to uncover hidden aspects of the killing.

  One of Matthew’s close friends whom I was eager to meet was Alex Trout. According to Cal Rerucha, the earliest reports of an anti-gay hate crime had originated with Trout, then twenty-one, and another longtime friend of Matthew named Walt Boulden, a college instructor in social work who had turned forty-six on the day of the attack. According to The Denver Post, Boulden described himself as a sort of big-brother figure to Matthew.

  Trout and Boulden apparently had no firsthand knowledge of the crime, but in their shock at Matthew’s near-fatal beating they began to spread the word immediately, before police had fully launched an investigation.

  I interviewed Trout the first time on June 12, 2002, at a family-style restaurant in Rochester, New York, where he was working as an assistant manager. Beyond what Rerucha had told me, my interest in speaking with Trout came from reading police reports in which he’d claimed that Matthew had been involved with methamphetamine.

  A report by Detective Sergeant Jeff Bury, which was sealed by the court until after Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were convicted, noted: “[Trout and Boulden] stated that … when [Matthew] was in Denver, that he had gotten into some cocaine use and had also participated in some methamphetamine use.” Trout and Boulden’s mention of cocaine and methamphetamine couldn’t help but remind me of Aaron’s later statement to police that Matthew had offered “some cocaine or … some methamphetamines … for sex.” Yet from everything I had examined in the case record, it appeared that some police investigators — for unknown reasons — had chosen to ignore evidence of a possible drug component.

  Short and boyish, with wide eyes and a moist handshake, Trout picked me up at the Rochester airport in his car and drove us into town. Almost as soon as we began talking, he said he would have “nothing to do with” my investigative efforts if I intended to write that “Matt’s murder was [about] anything but anti-gay hate.” I told Trout I was interested above all in who Matthew was as a person, which had been missing from most of the media coverage. He agreed, but I could see I was going to have to tread very lightly.

  Another friend of Matthew had already informed me that the Shepard family had excluded Trout and Boulden from Matthew’s highly publicized memorial service at the family’s hometown church in Casper, Wyoming. That, too, stirred my curiosity since both men had been close to Matthew for several years and had first learned of the attack when Matthew’s father phoned Boulden from Saudi Arabia. Trout had also helped Matthew move from Denver to Laramie the previous summer, driving a U-Haul along with a third friend, Ronnie Gustafson.

  According to Trout, one of the first things he and Boulden did after hearing that Matthew had been severely beaten was call Jason Marsden, a gay reporter friend at the Casper Star-Tribune. They also contacted gay organizations in Wyoming and Colorado. Very quickly the Associated Press and other national media picked up the news of a presumed anti-gay attack.

  “Once it started, it took off like a wildfire,” Cal Rerucha recalled, “nothing was going to stop it.” Rerucha said the story of a hate crime was also fueled, in part, by a couple of Laramie law enforcement officers “who couldn’t resist being in front of the [TV] cameras.”

  When I later interviewed Jason Marsden, the reporter friend, he gave a slightly different account than Trout had given.

  “I was sitting in the newsroom at my desk and there was a little bit of commotion around the fax machine,” Marsden told me in July 2004. “I saw a couple of the senior editors conferring over something … [They] … laid this press release from the Albany County Sheriff’s Office on the desk and said, ‘We’ve received this press release recently about a young man having been attacked in Laramie and the tipster who alerted us … tells me that he is a friend of yours. His name is Matt Shepard. Do you know Matt Shepard? ’ ”

  Marsden, who had just seen Matthew “about four or five weeks before that in Laramie,” said he was stunned.

  I asked Marsden, “When … there was mention … that the attack could have been motivated at least in part by Matt being gay, was that something that was part of that initial press release?”

  “It was not in the initial press release, just the bare details that he had been found and [was injured] … and left overnight,” he responded. “But some of those friends in Lara
mie … had begun calling reporters, trying to talk to the detectives … and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that there was a likelihood that he had been targeted for being gay … I did talk to [Trout and Boulden] that day. I can’t — I wish I could remember better the exact chain of events … But it happened very quickly in there; the press release, phone calls … They were very worried that the police might not take it seriously … that [Matt’s] credibility as a victim … would be in some way diminished because he was gay and they were very concerned to make sure that that didn’t happen.”

  Despite a few small discrepancies, Marsden’s account of how the story of a hate crime got started confirmed Boulden and Trout’s versions — and also Cal Rerucha’s. According to Rerucha, “[Trout and Boulden] were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating … we don’t want the fact that [Matthew Shepard] is gay to go unnoticed.”

  In an ABC News interview a few days after the attack, Boulden, whom Matthew had allegedly befriended as a fifteen-year-old teenager looking for a mentor, stated simply, “I know in the core of my heart it happened because [Matt] revealed he was gay. They targeted him because he was gay.” Similarly, Boulden told the University of Wyoming student newspaper, the Branding Iron, that he was convinced the crime was clearly motivated by hate. “There is no maybe,” he said.

  Yet Cal Rerucha, who had met with Boulden and Trout shortly after the crime, later stated unequivocally, “I don’t think the proof [of a hate crime] was there … That was something they had decided.”

  As Alex Trout drove me back to the Rochester airport on the afternoon of June 12, 2002, he admitted — after several hours of conversation — that he had personally struggled with addiction to crystal meth, but at the same time he refused to talk on the record about Matthew’s drug use. Trout also acknowledged that he had dabbled in prostitution and the pornography business. His revelations that day only provoked more questions, which I raised with him in several follow-up phone interviews in 2002 and 2003.