But four years had elapsed since Matthew’s murder. How likely was it that current bar patrons would remember if they had ever seen Doc or one of his limos around? Or Aaron and Russell for that matter? Doc volunteered that several other chauffeurs had worked for him the year Matthew was killed, so he had “no way of knowing what went on in the limos when I wasn’t driving.”
Doc’s knack for anticipating my questions and even reading my thoughts irritated me. He made me feel like the inexperienced, amateur investigator I actually was. He, on the other hand, was a crafty salesman and an expert at sticking to his version of things, whether true or not. Yet I had the persistent sense that Doc wanted me to get to the deeper truths behind Matthew’s murder, for reasons that eluded me. He openly acknowledged his affection for Matthew as well as Aaron and Russell, but what else was he hiding, and why?
I spent my first night in Denver barhopping on Broadway, just south of the state capitol and the popular gay neighborhood of Montrose. By the time I ordered a beer at the third establishment on my list, which featured scantily clad go-go boys dancing on the bar, I was convinced that I had succumbed to a very stupid idea. How could I possibly get information this way? Surely this wasn’t real reporting. Who the hell was I trying to fool? Only myself, I assumed.
As part of their sweaty routine, the dancers jumped off the bar and mingled with customers, grinding their hips before us with dollar bills poking out of their jockstraps and briefs. I tried talking with two of the young men, shouting in their ears over the pounding house music. I said I was a journalist and mentioned the name Matthew Shepard. Both of them stared at me seductively, but their eyes also chastised me for being a middle-aged party pooper. It was apparent that as far as they were concerned I was talking about ancient history. Embarrassed, I slipped each of them the obligatory dollar bills they were waiting for, to which one responded with a peck on my cheek and the other a pinch on my rear end.
I was desperate by then to call it a night and go back to my hotel room. Rummaging through the downtown bar scene felt like a dead end or, at best, a waste of time. But since I probably wouldn’t return there, I decided to stop briefly at the last place on my list — the accurately but blandly named Broadway. A source had advised me that the bar had changed owners in recent years, though its regular crowd of mostly hustlers and johns had remained the same. At the time of Matthew’s murder, it was known as Mr. Bill’s.
Once inside the packed, smoky bar, I began to feel just as I had trying to solicit information from go-go boys down the street. What the f—k was I doing there? What was I trying to prove? Clearly it was time to go home. Instead I bought a beer to silence the clamor of critical voices. But I was also single then and had taken notice of the bearded, well-built bouncer straddling a stool near the entrance. Maybe that’s what really drew me to Broadway, to feed my own lust. I wasn’t attracted to most of the guys wandering around the bar, but the bouncer was another story. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt, snug jeans with a gash of ripped denim across one thigh, and a studded western belt, he also had a warm, inviting smile.
As it turned out, there was no quandary to confront. Minutes after I began talking to the bouncer, he confided that he was happily committed to a lover who would be waiting for him at home when the bar closed. He wanted to know where I was from and what brought me to Denver. I said I was a journalist doing undercover reporting for a possible story on gay hustlers — which was partly true. I also asked if he had worked there back in 1998 when the bar was called Mr. Bill’s.
No, he’d only been employed there for a year, the bouncer said. He suggested that I try to find a former manager named Duane who had worked at Mr. Bill’s for more than fifteen years. “He and his partner run a kitchen at a veterans post somewhere in town,” he added. “A VFW, I think. Duane’s the guy you want to talk to.”
The next morning in my hotel room, I was still full of doubt. Searching the Denver bar scene at random seemed to be a gratuitous detour, especially when Matthew’s murder had occurred in Wyoming. But something else had crept into my mind the night before. As I lay in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the murder of another gay man from Laramie that I had come across in my research — a 1993 killing that had never been solved. The victim, a forty-seven-year-old psychology professor at the University of Wyoming named Steve Heyman, had apparently come to Denver on a recreational trip and was murdered with extreme brutality. His body was thrown into speeding traffic from a bridge that crossed Interstate 70. What little was known about the crime was that Heyman had visited a few gay bars in the same Broadway vicinity where I had just been. There was brief speculation that he was the victim of anti-gay hate, but when police turned up no leads the case was essentially forgotten.
Along with many gay males of my generation whose coming out was made possible by the urban bar environment that began to flourish in the 1970s, I feared the kind of violence that killed Heyman. The nightmare of meeting a new acquaintance in a bar or disco and ending up robbed or beaten, or worse, occurred with numbing regularity among gays. But I also had a vague hunch that Steve Heyman’s murder in November 1993 and Matthew Shepard’s five years later had more in common than their shared gay identity and being from the same Wyoming college town. At the moment, I felt ill equipped to contemplate those parallels further, or the more daunting prospect of investigating another grotesquely violent crime. Like the murders of Matthew Shepard and fifteen-year-old Daphne Sulk, however, Heyman’s killing was plagued by mysteries and unanswered questions.
I phoned three veterans posts in Denver that morning — all Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) — and found out that none had kitchen facilities. On my final call, I had a surprise when I asked if Duane or Rob was working in the kitchen. Seconds later, a raspy, smoker’s voice picked up the phone. “This is Duane,” he announced politely.
Almost as soon as I introduced myself and asked if he remembered seeing photos of Matthew Shepard’s attackers in the news four years earlier, he interrupted me. “Yes, absolutely,” he said. Duane quickly confided that he had “recognized them” from Mr. Bill’s bar. His first reaction, he recalled, was “shock” at the realization that “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”
I was momentarily speechless.
“Mr. Bill’s was all about hustling,” Duane went on. “They’d hang around the pool table between turning tricks. They were doing the twenty dollar jobs” — which he called “the low end” of the trade.
Already my mind was flooded with questions. I had gotten the strong impression from Doc O’Connor that Aaron McKinney had dabbled in hustling, yet Doc said nothing about Russell Henderson, only that Russell had been in the limo a few times partying with Aaron and a couple of their friends.
Duane wanted to check with his partner Rob first but said he didn’t see any problem with both of them sitting down for an interview. He told me to phone him back in a few hours. Instead of asking Duane more questions I decided to end the call, as I was worried he might change his mind.
Late that afternoon, I met Duane Powers and Rob Surratt at VFW Post #1 on Bannock Street in Denver, just blocks from the bar formerly known as Mr. Bill’s. When I arrived, they were tidying up the kitchen at the end of their workday. Both men were lean and of medium height and had the worn look of old-time cowboys — or old bartenders who had worked too many all-nighters. As soon as the pair started talking, one could have mistaken them for brothers. They had a rough, easy banter, bossing each other around with good humor and finishing each other’s sentences.
Over a round of beers at a table in the bar area, where there were just a handful of patrons, Rob, a former bartender at Mr. Bill’s, confirmed in broad terms what Duane had told me on the phone. He pointed out that the only reason they had taken notice of Aaron and Russell was “they stood out from other hustlers cruising tricks” in the bar. “We knew they weren’t locals,” Rob said.
As I probed further, Rob and Duane admitted they had no per
sonal knowledge of the activities Aaron or Russell engaged in once they left Mr. Bill’s. But Duane, who claimed to have tended bar and managed there for eighteen years, said he had little doubt about what the two men had come there for. He repeated what he had stated previously about “the twenty dollar jobs” and added, “[They were] getting a blowjob in some guy’s car, then coming back again to have a few beers and shoot more pool, then do it all over again. They just had a different routine than the pros who’d been around a long time.”
Duane surprised me once more when he offered to call “the real Mr. Bill,” the bar’s former owner, to see if he’d be willing to talk to me. Since I was leaving the next morning for Laramie, I thanked him but suggested we wait until my return. There were other questions I wanted to ask Duane and Rob but thought it best to postpone them. Did they know Doc? Had they seen his limos around Mr. Bill’s? I also wanted to ask about drugs, a subject that could make them, and “Mr. Bill,” uneasy. I had no reason to doubt their allegations of hustling — which gave credence to other discoveries I had made—yet it seemed equally plausible that Aaron had gone to Mr. Bill’s to sell drugs, as he was known to do at bars in Laramie. Away from his hometown, where he was already on the radar of local cops, he was less likely to be apprehended.
In phone interviews, Aaron seemed insulted when I asked if he had ever hustled guys. But as I listened to Duane and Rob, I recalled again what Aaron had stated in his confession about a possible exchange with Matthew of “some cocaine or … some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex.”
I wanted to ask Duane and Rob specifically about crystal meth and how prevalent it was at Mr. Bill’s and other bars in the area. I decided that could wait, too, but before we parted I turned to Duane, who had worked at Mr. Bill’s longer, and asked if he had ever heard of Steve Heyman, the murdered professor from Laramie. Duane shrugged; the name didn’t seem to register.
Then I mentioned how Heyman died, his body bludgeoned and dumped on the highway. Immediately Duane nodded and said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about.” Heyman had been a regular at Mr. Bill’s when he was in Denver and apparently liked hustlers.
Homicide detectives had long believed that Heyman met his killer in a local gay bar and that there may have been more than one assailant, but nine years had passed and no suspect had been charged.
Murders like this were not uncommon: A gay man meets a hustler; the hustler promises sex in exchange for money but his real plan is robbery; and the robbery turns deadly.
I was reminded once more of something that had been said about Aaron in the anonymous letter: “he was acting the part of ‘straight trade.’ ”
Had Steve Heyman gotten tangled up with straight trade? Had he perhaps known his assailant(s) previously?
Some suggested Heyman’s murder was a hate crime, but in light of things I’d been learning in Laramie it also seemed reasonable to ask: Was there a possibility drugs had been involved?
FIFTEEN
Tristen
My reexamination of the circumstances surrounding Matthew’s murder was a frustrating series of fits and starts. There were many dead ends and many occasions when I thought I should simply abandon the effort. Perhaps the most discouraging moment came in spring 2004 when The New York Times Magazine killed the article that I’d been working on for two years. Wasn’t that telling me something? If the world’s newspaper of record no longer wanted to publish the story, why should a novice journalist like me keep on?
Several friends had also urged me to “get on” with my life and career, subtly inferring that a self-respecting gay man and liberal shouldn’t be tampering with the accepted version of Matthew’s murder anyway.
But if I try to discern a rationale for my persistence with Matthew’s story, I can see in retrospect that a new lead would invariably appear or a break would occur just as I was on the verge of giving up. I was also constantly surprised by the source of these new leads, as they often came from the most unexpected places.
Tristen was a case in point.
In early April 2004 Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson sent me copies of an unexpected letter each of them had received from a “T. Henson” of Gulfport, Mississippi. Both men, still incarcerated at High Desert State Prison in Nevada, claimed they did not know anyone by that name, though Aaron hinted in his roundabout way that maybe the correspondence “could help” my investigation. The letters, dated March 24, 2004, were similar but not identical; they were typed, single-spaced, and less than a page long.
“Dear Mr. McKinney,” the letter to Aaron began. “It has taken me many years to finally decide to write to you. I have so many questions and I really don’t know where to start … I was dating Matthew Shepard when you did what you did to him. If you just needed money you could have asked him and he would have called me and I would have gave [sic] you the money so you wouldn’t have hurt him. I wish you could have seen him in the hospital and what it has done to many of us … I even tried taking my own life. For the loss of missing him so much.”
The letter to Russell Henderson began similarly, yet the writer immediately asked the question, “Why Matt?”
“He would not have done anything to hurt anyone,” Henson continued. “And if it was for money all you had to do was ask and he would have gave [sic] it without any problems. My doctor says it is time I at least write to you and Aaron. So I can try to overcome this. You both took my life when you took Matt away from me.”
When the letters were forwarded to me, I had already been researching Matthew’s murder on and off for four years. But I had never come across the name T. Henson before or any reference to their dating relationship. If Henson was the person he professed to be, it seemed strange that none of Matthew’s friends I had interviewed ever mentioned him. There had also been no mention of him in the yearlong media coverage or in any of the court documents.
As I compared the two letters more carefully, I noticed a few subtle differences. In his letter to Aaron, Henson stated, “you could have asked [Matt] and he would have called me and I would have gave you the money so you wouldn’t have hurt him” (italics mine). Yet to Russell he wrote, “If it was for money all you had to do was ask and [Matt] would have gave it without any problems.”
Henson’s statement to Aaron implied that Matthew didn’t have “the money,” but that he, Henson, would have provided it had Aaron only asked. Why, on the other hand, did Henson tell Russell that Matthew “would have gave [the money] without any problems”? (Italics mine.)
My curiosity stemmed from knowing that Matthew had been very anxious about money on the weekend before the October 1998 attack. Yet incongruously, he had also spent about eleven hundred dollars in cash on the night of Friday, October 2, hiring Doc O’Connor to drive him in a stretch limo with his friend, Tina Labrie, to a Colorado dance club. According to Tina, Matthew became increasingly preoccupied and depressed as the evening went on.
“He mentioned on the way down … ‘Do you think this is selfish of me?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I’m spending all this money [on a limo service] and … I could be giving this to … poor starving children somewhere.”
But during a later interview, Tina spoke more candidly about Matthew’s state of mind that evening. “He was really worried …” she explained. “It just seemed like there was something bugging him, something on his mind … kind of those fears of who do I trust and who don’t I trust.”
Concerned about Matthew, Tina slept over at his Laramie apartment that night. The following morning, she overheard an upsetting phone conversation he was having with his mother, who was in Saudi Arabia. The subject was money.
The fact that Henson raised the issue of money in his letters to Aaron and Russell more than five years later made me reconsider what it was that Matthew was so worried about. What was behind his “fears of who do I trust and who don’t I trust”?
After the call with his mother ended abruptly, “Matt began to cry uncontrollably and panic,” Tina said, th
en went into the bathroom and “took a lot of his anti-anxiety medication.”
I asked him, how much did you take. And at first, he didn’t want to tell me. And then finally he told me how much he took … I said this would kill most people, you know. I don’t remember the milligram dosage but he took up around fifteen [pills] … I was like, do I need to take you to the emergency room. He said, no, no, no, just monitor me. And I was like okay. I took his cell phone and nothing happened … He was fine. It amazed me.
… He said he was having a harder and harder time being able to relax, being able to sleep, being troubled by nightmares … One of those pills would have probably put me out for two days. And here he is, eating them like candy. Like [he] can’t survive without them.
Tina also reminded me again of Matthew’s size; that he weighed only 105 pounds.
The first time Tina described his near-suicide-attempt, I was doubtful that such extreme despair had resulted from a parental phone call over money. But I still couldn’t make sense of the discrepancy between Matthew appearing to be flush with cash on that Friday night — he had even treated a group of friends to a meal at Denny’s — and Henson’s letters to Aaron and Russell suggesting that Matthew didn’t have money when he met them at the Fireside a few nights later.
I also kept wondering why Henson focused on money yet he never brought up their reputed hatred of Matthew for being gay.
I questioned Aaron and Russell about Henson again, only to have them repeat that they had no idea who he was. Their response prompted me to write to him myself at the Mississippi post office box he had given as a return address, with a simple explanation of how I had learned about him.
The Book of Matt Page 11