It would not be until six years after his murder, however, that sources close to Matthew began to acknowledge on the record that he had been struggling desperately with drug entanglements in the days before his October 6 attack. His friend and fellow college student Tina Labrie described what was troubling him:
[Matt] was saying that … he just didn’t feel safe anymore … I thought he was kind of afraid … he was in danger … I could tell he was really worried about it … He said everywhere I move, it seems like I get sucked into the drug scene … He just said he left … Denver to come up to Laramie to get away from the drugs … he sounded really frustrated.
After Labrie’s revelation, I learned from other sources that in the year leading up to Matthew’s murder the Denver family with whom he was associated was involved in trafficking methamphetamine between Colorado and Wyoming. Occasionally they handled other drugs, but meth was their main business.
A strategic distribution point along the route from Denver to Laramie was Fort Collins, Colorado, another scenic university town and the location of the Tornado dance club, which Matthew and several of his friends frequented. Two of his longtime male friends, Alex Trout and Ted Henson, have verified that crystal meth was becoming a big part of the Colorado club scene then — as well as the lives of all three young men.
Carl, a leader of the Denver dealing circle and someone to whom Matthew grew attached while living in the city, allegedly fled to Europe soon after the murder and hasn’t been heard from since. Friends said he was overcome with guilt for the things he’d introduced Matthew to, including heroin.
Two different male friends of Matthew, who were also from Laramie but not, to my knowledge, part of the Denver circle, spoke hesitantly about a party Matthew threw at his Laramie apartment early in the fall semester when both host and guests shot up heroin.
“Matty got hooked very fast” after he used heroin just a few times, I was told by Joan*, a Denver woman who said she developed a “very close” friendship with Matthew in August 1997, more than a year before the murder. According to Joan, who worked part-time as a hairdresser, she always called him “Matty” and “treated him like a little brother.” He, in turn, looked up to her as “an older sister” and liked to play with her young son, who was handicapped. Months before Matthew moved to Laramie to attend college, they began meeting for meals on Sunday afternoons at El Conquistador, a Mexican restaurant in town. During those times when he was visiting Laramie, Matthew often stayed at the home of his friend Walt Boulden, a forty-five-year-old lecturer in social work at the university.
With an edge of remorse in her voice, Joan went on to say that the mysterious male friend who had given Matthew heroin “took him back down to Denver and made him get off it.” But she also confessed, “I think if it weren’t for us taking Matty to Laramie, if it weren’t for us introducing him to meth, if it weren’t for the drugs — him being who he was … Matty would be alive today.”
(Since the 1990s, a growing number of meth addicts have turned to heroin in the belief that it will help them “come down” from the ruinous effects of long-term meth use. But the replacement of meth with heroin has also been the result of another development: As the government’s efforts to curb the availability of meth began to succeed, many addicts switched first to prescription drugs like Oxycontin, a synthetic opiate. Next they moved on to another opiate that was cheaper to buy: heroin.)
When I probed further into Doc O’Connor’s activities, several sources said he was an important figure on the fringes of the Denver family circle, but not a key player. They alleged that he ran an illegal escort service out of his limos, yet successfully concealed it beneath the facade of his legitimate business, “Doc’s Class Act Limousine Service.”
Two of Doc’s regular customers were Aaron McKinney and Matthew Shepard. Aaron began hiring Doc’s stretch limos in 1995 after he received a settlement of nearly a hundred thousand dollars for his mother’s wrongful death from a botched hysterectomy. Matthew, on the other hand, grew fond of limo rides while living in Denver, where “he had a couple of friends … who drove a limousine,” his friend Joan said. In the city’s Capitol Hill district, he also learned about gay escort services of the kind that proprietors like Doc allegedly offered to high-end customers.
According to other sources in Laramie, Doc negotiated for Aaron’s sexual services both locally and in Denver, took a cut of the action, and enjoyed a physical relationship with Aaron as part of the arrangement. Another piece of the bargain apparently allowed Aaron — as well as Matthew and others — to use the limos for transporting, peddling, and using drugs. But Aaron’s allegiance was to two or three Laramie suppliers — a different family, so to speak, from Matthew’s.
Meanwhile, Doc — much like politicians — could simply hide behind a veil of “plausible deniability.” Although he sometimes drove the limos himself, he has steadfastly maintained that he went out of his way to give his customers maximum privacy and “kept [his] eyes and ears out of their business.” Often, however, he hired other chauffeurs to drive the vehicles and demanded that they, too, follow his procedures to the letter.
Marge Bridges, a former driver for Doc who chauffeured Matthew on several occasions, stated in a phone interview that she had also driven Matthew and Aaron together on a round trip from Laramie to Denver and back, well before the murder.
Doc has repeatedly denied Bridges’s allegation, yet acknowledges that she worked for him. For Doc to admit otherwise would place him in serious legal jeopardy if it could be proven that his limos were used to transport drugs across state lines — a federal offense. Another source, a former roofer who worked with Aaron and Russell, stated that Doc had personally informed him about the limo trip Aaron and Matthew took to Denver.
In addition, two former meth dealers who were part of the Denver circle and well acquainted with Doc elaborated further.
“Doc was top guy when it came to the cars,” one said, while the kingpin of their own group — “who taught Matt how to deal” — was “top dog” where dealing was concerned.
On a humid, late-summer night in 1998 — weeks before the October 6 attack — the aforementioned dealers and five other friends and acquaintances of Matthew connected to the Denver circle were drinking at Laramie’s Library bar, a popular hangout on Grand Avenue across from the University of Wyoming campus. The Library was one of several bars in town where Aaron McKinney, by his own admission to me, sold drugs covertly.
One of the Denver dealers brought a delivery of meth to the bar that night and, according to a pre-arranged plan, left it for Matthew in a parked car behind the building.
“Me and Duke* went to the Library and dropped the stuff off at the vehicle and [Matt and Aaron] went outside [later] to smoke a bowl of meth,” the dealer recalled.
Matthew and Aaron’s encounter in the car, which was parked in a dimly lit area alongside an alley, lasted about forty minutes. Everyone in the group was surprised when Aaron stormed back into the bar alone, “all pissed off at Matt.” The purpose of the meeting, two of Matthew’s friends said, was for Aaron to sample the product. But he apparently grew angry when Matthew rebuffed a business proposal he had made.
Dealer friends of Aaron said his usual modus operandi was to persuade suppliers to front him drugs with a promise to pay later, after he made some sales. In this instance, Matthew refused to advance Aaron any of the meth without cash up front.
“Matt used his brain,” a friend who was present at the Library explained. “He didn’t deal with people that only did twenties and thirties” (0.20 or 0.30 of a gram of meth).
With regard to Aaron, however, the same friend stated, “A lot of times if you get too many fronts, you get too much stuff, [then] you end up way behind. And if you still have a habit, then it will get pretty desperate … to get more drugs, to get more money.”
Aaron McKinney was addicted to methamphetamine for the better part of three years (1995 through 1998), and he was also known to dabble
in crack and cocaine.
In 1998, the year Matthew was killed, a single kingpin whom many feared handled most of the cocaine sold in Laramie. The kingpin is now serving a long prison term with slim chances of parole, but to protect confidential sources he will not be named here. One source nonetheless confirmed that “Aaron worked for [the kingpin]” and recounted an instance when Aaron was driven in a stretch limousine to the kingpin’s home to make a pickup. Like many dealers’ homes, it bristled with surveillance devices.
While there was occasional overlap and even cooperation in the business activities of rival families — and a few members of each group had long-standing friendships — there was also stiff competition around selling meth and cocaine in local bars. The most lucrative sites for quick, clandestine sales were the Library, the Buckhorn, the Fireside, the Ranger, the Cowboy Saloon & Dance Hall, and a newly revamped place called Club Retro. According to numerous bar employees and patrons, as well as friends of Aaron and Matthew, each man regularly visited all of these bars, with the exception of the Cowboy, where Matthew seldom went. A different member of the Denver circle was responsible for moving product there.
Among Aaron’s friends who used and dealt meth, most of them in their twenties, the bulk of supply that passed through their hands came from California. Usually it was transported via “the Western route” — through Nevada, Utah, and across I-80 to Laramie and other destinations to the east. On occasion the meth they purchased came from Casper, Wyoming, a transshipment point about 150 miles northeast of Laramie. But in Matthew’s circle the flow of drugs ordinarily came from Denver and sometimes points farther south – Pueblo, Colorado; border towns and cities like El Paso, Texas; and ultimately Mexico.
Some in the Denver circle were not only involved in transporting and selling meth but also acquired the precursor chemicals to manufacture it. But at the time of Matthew’s murder and during the prosecutions of Aaron and Russell that followed, their names never surfaced in official investigations, at least in documents that were released publicly. A few of the dealers managed to evade apprehension for their interstate trafficking activities until three or more years after Matthew was killed. By then the drug underpinnings of the murder had long since been covered up, often with the help of an unwitting and credulous media, replaced by a politically expedient version of the murder and the motives behind it.
One central figure in the Denver circle was Mark Rohrbacher, known by his cohorts — including Matthew — as Mark K.
Rohrbacher was arrested in Laramie in 2001 for a variety of meth-trafficking offenses going back to 1997, the year before Matthew’s murder. Although Rohrbacher was incarcerated on the night Matthew was attacked, sources have identified him as one of the “top dogs” who taught Matthew how to deal in Denver and later showed him the ropes in Laramie. In a handwritten letter, a Rohrbacher associate who became a friend of Matthew recalled his first encounters with Matthew in Denver in 1997 — along with two other family members, Mason* and Carl:
I truly hope and pray that none of this falls into the wrong hands. It could make me a dead man …
That was my job, that’s what I did — deal … Almost anyone we came in contact with got sucked in — one way or another … I was very good at the violence which would later make me a very valuable asset to a certain [organization] …
By the end of [a twelve-day period] Matt [had come] around twice … Mason said [Matt] was cool and … had helped to find the somewhat large amount of stuff we had been looking for …
Mason, Carl and Matt all rode to [a Denver bar] … and were able to set a deal for two grand within the space of an hour and a half.
The same source also recounted a second Denver incident that involved himself, Mason, Carl, Matthew, and two other members of the circle — Tom* and Suzie*:
Mason said he had to go because this dude [Matt] needed to get to class which really struck me as odd considering all the shit I was standing in at the moment. [Matt] truly looked too innocent and totally out of place to me …
Mason had a shotgun of his dad’s and I had my automatic and we set out to find Tom and discovered Matt would know where to find the chic [sic] who had gotten the dope from Carl …
We go to these apartments and get Matt … I was very irritated at this point … so I just wanted to get the dope and finish our business …
[Later] I saw the chic [sic] we had been looking for and she bolted … down a hallway and I raised my pistol and fired into the wall …
We went back to Suzie’s in Lakewood [Colorado] and got high for a while and [I] remember Matt telling anyone who [would] listen that night about the incident.
At the time of Matthew’s October 1998 murder, sources said, Mark K’s girlfriend, Jeanne Keenan, then thirty-four, who has a sizable record of meth-related arrests of her own, continued to move the drug while he was in jail. But she did so with the help of other trusted family members. One was Matthew Shepard, who accompanied her to Denver and Fort Collins in the passenger seat — a secondary but critical role that dealers call a ride-along.
“Matt filled in for Mark K, doing the runs from Denver while Mark was away,” a former family member stated.
According to the same source, the drug runs were made on a regular biweekly basis. One of the routine runs was scheduled for Tuesday, October 6, the day Matthew was targeted for robbery by Aaron McKinney.
The trip was almost always the same: pickup of twelve ounces in Denver, a stop in Fort Collins for a drop-off of six ounces, then a final delivery to Laramie of the remaining six ounces. But for reasons that remain murky, it was decided at the last minute that Matthew would not go along this time. Whether Keenan or someone else made the trip alone, or with a different companion — or the run was canceled at the eleventh hour or its time changed — are a few of the questions still surrounding the murder.
Nonetheless, a number of previously hidden facts shed new light on the sequence of events leading up to the October 6 attack.
At a friendly sports bar in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Glenn and I interviewed another member of the Denver circle, Doug*, on the afternoon of October 19, 2004. A darkly handsome, long-haired army veteran who had served in the First Gulf War, Doug said he first met Matthew Shepard in Denver in 1997, but that he had known Aaron McKinney longer, “mainly in passing,” since they were both from Laramie.
Doug was not happy about talking to us and made no attempt to hide his displeasure. He had consented to meet with us in the bar’s quiet back room as “a favor” to a former girlfriend, yet he appeared just as anxious to find out what we knew as we were to hear anything he might be willing to tell us. Above all, he wanted to be sure that our conversation would not put him back in the penitentiary.
Clutching the neck of a beer bottle tightly in his right hand and slowly peeling away the label with his left fingernails, Doug confirmed much of what we had been told by others: that Matthew began dealing for the circle in Denver but then “got into it fairly quickly and successfully when he moved back to Wyoming.”
“Some people thought Matt moved too quickly, ‘like who the fuck is this guy to be moving into it so fast’ in Laramie,” he said. “But those people didn’t know he’d paid his dues getting into it down here in Denver.”
We told Doug that other sources had suggested that when Mark K was jailed in early fall 1998 and therefore “out of the picture in Laramie,” Matthew had moved up and helped to fill the void. Doug nodded, nervously tapping the bottom of his beer bottle on the thick wooden table. Once more, he repeated that “some people” didn’t take kindly to seeing that happen.
After a long silence, he glared at Glenn and me. “And what have some of these other people you’ve been talking to had to say about me?” he asked.
Worried we had maybe pushed the conversation — and Doug — too far, each of us muttered some pleasantries about the rules and ethics of journalism, and that we were bound to protect all our confidential sources, including him. He seemed to
accept what we had to say, but we knew it was time to end the interview. The combination of Doug’s bulging, bloodshot eyes and his twitchy mood indicated that he had probably been bingeing, and though he was smoothing the rough edges with beer, we thought it best not to ask more questions as he was starting to come down.
NINETEEN
Sleeping Dogs
On a Friday afternoon in late October 2004, a little more than six years after the murder, I drove two hundred miles to meet Kyle*, a former drug cohort of Aaron McKinney, alone at an isolated truck stop off I-80 in western Wyoming.
I had interviewed Kyle twice before in prison and he had been surprisingly cooperative, so I felt more or less safe. Still, I took precautions since he had earlier advised me, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” referring to his friends higher up on the drug-dealing food chain.
Kyle worked in the oil fields and had just gotten off a shift. He was still in company overalls, his face and hands stained with crude.
As we sat in the front seat of his parked car talking about Matthew Shepard, whom he had previously claimed to know only in passing, I suggested that Matthew might have gotten in over his head with drugs. Kyle snarled at me like I was an idiot, “Yeah, and he was taking stuff away from the rest of us!”
Without warning two other vehicles suddenly backed into spaces on both sides of us, wedging us in. When I saw what was happening I leapt from the car and ran into the middle of the parking lot, where there were more lights.
Kyle shouted for me to get back in the car but I refused. At that instant a friend of mine, who was planted in a nearby truck monitoring the meeting, called my cell phone. “Get out of there, Steve,” he yelled, “they’re setting you up!”
The Book of Matt Page 15