The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  According to town gossip, Cindy drank profusely in her hospital bed before being wheeled to the delivery room. For days after giving birth she refused to see the baby, and she neglected to visit his crib in intensive care before checking out of the hospital.

  Cindy’s temperamental, equally hard-drinking spouse, Gerry Farris, who couldn’t give a damn about having a newborn son — or worse, becoming a parent — shared her indifference.

  Exactly one year later to the day, another son fathered by Gerry — David Farris — was born to a different woman named Melinda. David Farris would later become inseparable friends with Aaron McKinney. A brawny, tough-talking amateur boxer and a hard drinker who has been in and out of jail in recent years, David, now thirty-four, prides himself on having been part of Aaron’s tight inner circle and takes credit for introducing Aaron to his half brother, Russell.

  For a brief time following Russell’s birth, Gerry Farris seemed to have a change of heart. He promised Cindy he would give fatherhood his best shot; both of them, in fact, vowed to make big changes. Cindy had decided she wanted to raise Russell and swore off alcohol and drugs. The first big step after getting custody from her parents, Bill and Lucy Thompson, was changing Russell’s last name. He was now Russell Arthur Farris.

  Like other men in Cindy’s life, Gerry soon departed in a hail of rage amid her renewed threats that she would flush the little bastard. Russell, who had yet to speak his first word, would be an adult before he learned who his father was.

  The full measure of Gerry’s alcoholic desolation would not manifest until years later when he committed suicide in Arizona. He and Cindy had gone their separate ways by then, after a tumultuous three-year marriage.

  Over Cindy’s bitter objections, her parents, Bill and Lucy, a couple well respected around town as devoted, hardworking members of the Church of Latter Day Saints, assumed legal responsibility for Russell’s care once more. Bill had a job at the post office downtown and Lucy ran a popular daycare center from their ranch home on South 26th Street.

  When Russell turned five, Cindy was still in the throes of upheaval but buoyed by hopes of another fresh start. She convinced Bill and Lucy she was ready to be a mother and that her new husband, Bob Henderson — a long-haul truck driver — would be the father and family man Gerry Farris never wanted to be. Within two years Russell had two new half sisters, Carla and Stacey, and another new name. He was now Russell Henderson.

  To the surprise of few, Cindy had another relapse; she also wanted a divorce. This time the court awarded her custody of her two daughters, while Russell was given to Bob, his now-adoptive father.

  Later, when Cindy married a fourth man, she changed her name again. She became Cindy Dixon, taking the family name of her carpenter spouse, Charlie, whose repeated crimes of domestic violence would eventually land him in the state penitentiary. But Charlie wasn’t the only man to act out his frustration on Cindy with his fists. Nor was she the only victim. One of her roughneck boyfriends hurled Russell headfirst through a plate-glass window. Another time Russell showed up at school badly bruised and assured his second-grade teacher that he’d been playing with his sister’s boyfriend — though no boyfriend existed.

  Those who followed Cindy Dixon’s long, nearly unbroken path of decline, including a few in law enforcement, had a more mundane and pitiless explanation: They described her in the plainest of terms as “a hopeless alcoholic.”

  Born in 1955 as a “breech baby” with birth defects that limited her use of both feet, Cindy had surgery ten times before the age of fourteen. By high school, despite being a good student who talked about becoming a teacher, she was already addicted to prescription painkillers and soon turned to alcohol to numb herself more. Family members and friends would later say there was no kinder person than Cindy when she was sober. But when she was on a drinking binge, “someone else took over.”

  Long before Cindy was killed in January 1999 at age forty, and her body discarded by the side of a road in the subzero chill of a lonely Wyoming canyon, her girlfriend Michelle would think about the emotional turmoil Cindy battled during her teens. A sometimes-complacent witness to her friend’s slow unraveling — one of many — Michelle would later wonder whether her “sweet friend” had come under siege by the devil. Maybe Cindy, a motel maid, had been prey to some ravenous ghost that would not rest until her soul was sucked dry.

  But beyond the curse of alcoholism, another “ghost” had taken hold of Cindy, as well as untold others in her hometown: methamphetamine. Not only was Cindy a chronic meth user herself, but her confessed killer — much like Matthew’s — was an addict and a dealer. In late 1998 and early 1999 when these killings occurred, however, meth was still a dirty secret in Wyoming and a taboo topic in other parts of the nation — including urban gay enclaves, where an epidemic of crystal meth addiction had already begun.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Shadow People

  My schooling in the grim realities of methamphetamine began more than a decade ago when a trusted source in Wyoming encouraged me to contact Diane Galloway, the former director of a statewide substance abuse program. At the time of our first phone conversation in May 2003, I was still investigating Matthew’s murder for The New York Times Magazine.

  Galloway quickly explained that in 1998 when Matthew was killed, the state had not yet established a substance division.

  “When that murder was committed, Wyoming was just becoming aware of the size of the meth problem,” she said. “We were just getting that wake-up call.”

  Galloway’s words echoed what Cal had been saying — and also what Dave O’Malley, the current Albany County sheriff, would tell 20/20 the following year.

  “We’re educating on … methamphetamine use ten years after we should have started doing that,” according to O’Malley. “… I wish we’d have started reacting to it before it got here.”

  I could tell that Galloway was surprised and relieved that someone from the national media was interested in Wyoming’s burgeoning meth crisis. Along with briefing me on some alarming statistics, notably that the state had the highest rate of meth abuse per capita in the nation, she suggested I contact a circuit court judge in the western part of the state, Judge Tom Mealey of Evanston, whom she praised as an expert on meth.

  A smart, plainspoken man, Judge Mealey was passionate about continuing to sound the wake-up call, not just in Wyoming but also to the country at large. In a phone interview he spoke of the unexpected changes that had taken place in his own thinking as the number of meth cases piled up in his courtroom, causing him to shift from harsh punitive measures to more of a treatment-based approach — to the extent the law would allow.

  With gentle prodding from Cal, Judge Mealey, Diane Galloway, and others whose understanding of the intractable relationship between meth and crime far exceeded my own, I began to take a closer look at meth-related violence. More than anything, my curiosity was driven by my hunger to understand Aaron McKinney. I kept wondering if his statements about paranoia, hallucinations, uncontrollable meth rage, and “shadow people” were remotely plausible.

  Aaron had already admitted to me that he had, indeed, hit Russell across the face with his .357 Magnum, spattered with Matthew’s blood. At first Aaron tried to minimize his assault on Russell at the fence, calling it “a mistake,” but eventually he was more forthcoming about the unstoppable rage that drove him to attack the man he considered his best friend.

  Asked to describe the specific sensations he experienced when he was coming down from a meth binge, Aaron replied, “You hallucinate a lot, you’re tired, you feel sick, you can’t sleep.”

  Though I was skeptical and thought Aaron had been using his drug habit as another pitiful excuse for his murderous behavior — much as he’d used gay panic — his responses fit with something his father had told me. According to Bill McKinney, he had spent time with Aaron on Saturday evening, October 3, and Sunday, October 4, 1998 — the weekend before Matthew was attacked. On Saturday
they had driven with Aaron’s four-month-old son to Guernsey, Wyoming — a little over a hundred miles from Laramie — and arrived back at home by midnight. Bill said Aaron had slept on his couch that night and explained, “Kristen was out with the girls.” (“The girls” were celebrating Chasity’s twentieth birthday, which was the following day, Sunday the fourth.)

  But Bill added, “On Sunday and Monday, [Aaron] couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.”

  His recollections seemed to back up the claims of Aaron, his co-worker Joe Lemus, and others that Aaron had to tweak meth on Monday morning before he could pull himself together for work.

  In a recorded interview with Aaron in 2004, he talked openly about the recurring sensations he associated with his meth addiction:

  You start getting paranoid. You start hearing things. Everywhere … like I’d walk out of my house and everybody was calling my name. You start to hallucinate after you’ve been up for a while. Pretty graphically, too … I’ve seen all kinds of things. Roofs blowing off the houses. All kinds of colors. Things melting.

  Aaron’s descriptions were somewhat reminiscent of his confession to police six years before.

  “I don’t know what happened,” he told Detectives DeBree and Fritzen. “I blacked out. It was like I was possessed or something. It was like I left my body. I was furious.”

  Aaron’s words were also consistent with Kristen’s statement to police, a full day before he confessed:

  [Aaron] said that [Matthew] was talking stupid. And I said, “Well, what did he say to you? Was he flirting with you or what?” and he said, “I don’t know.” (Emphasis mine.)

  He said, “Something just took over me” and he said, “I wasn’t myself.” He just kept on telling me that it was like he was possessed or something ’cause he was not himself. He could not imagine himself doing that in his right mind. ’Cause I kept on asking him, “Why did you do that?” and he kept on telling me, “I don’t know. I wasn’t myself” …

  Six years after the murder Aaron’s description of his mental state while he was assaulting Matthew at the fence, and shortly afterward, had changed little:

  It was almost like an out-of-body experience … [I] felt more like I was watching the whole thing … Stuff is real out of focus … You see things move that aren’t there. You see people that aren’t there … shadow people.

  But Aaron also said that in the days immediately prior to the attack, he’d been overcome with fatigue:

  It’s like your mind’s awake, but you can feel your body is really tired, and that you want to sleep, but you can’t. You want to stop doing [meth], [yet] you want more … That causes a lot of anger.

  As I spoke with experts fighting on the front lines of the meth crisis in the Rocky Mountain West, I kept hearing of Dr. Rick Rawson, a research psychologist and professor in the department of psychiatry at UCLA. An internationally recognized authority on substance abuse, Dr. Rawson was said to have a commanding knowledge of the impact of prolonged meth use on individuals as well as its social impact. He and his staff had also been training other professionals throughout the region in how to deal with the growing epidemic.

  Minutes into my first phone interview with Dr. Rawson, I understood why he had gained a reputation as something of a guru in his field. Apart from a keen scientific mind and an impressive ability to communicate complex ideas simply, it was evident that he cared deeply about the devastating impact of substance abuse on all sectors of society, including the gay community. He said he’d be happy to help educate me about meth, “[since] it’s a very serious public health and criminal justice problem that’s getting an insufficient amount of attention and resources nationally.”

  At intervals over the next year, I conducted several interviews with Dr. Rawson by phone and in person at his Los Angeles office, and then on camera for 20/20. Although he had no personal knowledge of the Shepard case and therefore wouldn’t address its specifics, he agreed to discuss in broad strokes Aaron’s drug history and the possible influence of chronic meth use on his extremely violent behavior. Dr. Rawson’s opinions are based on his clinical observations and extensive studies of meth addiction:

  When someone’s been addicted to methamphetamine for three years, particularly if they’ve been a dealer … it completely takes over their life …

  One of the most important effects … is that [it] can make you psychotic … Over time, the drug changes the way the brain works. The psychosis becomes more severe; the paranoia becomes intensified.

  Dr. Rawson also said that he has frequently encountered descriptions like those given by Aaron, but he was quick to point out that they cannot be easily defined.

  To try to analyze what was underlying [Aaron McKinney’s] rage is impossible to do. You really don’t know, because … the brain manufactures these hallucinations and delusions. They may have something to do with some kind of reality that was underlying it, or they may be completely manufactured … You’ll see people, literally, strike out at other people, thinking that they’re monsters …

  The violence … is … not a logically laid out plan of being angry with someone, it’s a complete loss of control … where people just act out without … any awareness of the consequences …

  Going through a meth binge … the propensity to violence gets much higher, because … it’s sort of a building situation. And if they’re in a situation where something important is going to happen, a drug deal, a robbery, or something like that, they become extraordinarily emotionally volatile … Not only is [paranoia] not unusual … it’s normally what we see, and the paranoia gets very severe.

  If what Dr. Rawson stated is true, that trying “to analyze … [Aaron’s] rage is impossible to do,” I was at a loss about how to reconcile that insight with the popular belief that Aaron’s rage was an unmistakable manifestation of anti-gay hate. As a journalist and gay man, I was also unable to reconcile that belief with the added complications of Aaron and Matthew’s personal relationship.

  In the years immediately following the murder, methamphetamine was still something of a taboo subject not only in Wyoming but also in the nation’s gay community. Within Matthew’s circle of friends, several had struggled with meth addiction themselves. Jason Marsden, the former journalist who now serves as executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation (and also a friend of Matthew), told me in a 2004 interview:

  The quick and easy description of Matt Shepard gay bashed … is about as far from the actual nuanced truth of what happened as it can get … It’s offensive to see the truth boiled down so much … that it’s no longer the truth …

  The horrible irony … was that his death had an enormous amount to offer us in lessons and that many of those were missed opportunities because of the shorthand of the media …

  You see the icon and how it differs from the real person, but there’s been such tremendous value in that icon having been created … Even if all you know is the barest misrepresentation of what took place, if it’s important for you to know that, I’m glad that you do.

  Later in the same interview when I asked Marsden about the possible role of drugs in Matthew’s killing, he replied,

  Methamphetamine was a very big problem [and] very seldom discussed in Wyoming at that time … I remember thinking … especially when it started to come out that McKinney was surrounded by people who were deep into the methamphetamine problem, that this was perhaps the most spectacular methamphetamine related crime that had ever happened in Wyoming …

  It was very clear ten years ago … to those who were watching this problem emerge, that it was going to become a scourge in Middle America, in our rural communities … It dominates life for a lot of people in our state … We’ve got needles on the side of the road in Wyoming … drug lab materials that are thrown out the window of someone’s car on the interstate …

  I remember thinking at the time that the Matt Shepard case would forever go down in history as, you know, one of the saddest examples of gay bashin
g, but what it also was, was one of the saddest examples of the desperate lengths people on methamphetamine will go to.

  What Marsden and others may not have realized at the time was that Aaron was not the only figure in this tragedy “surrounded by people who were deep into the methamphetamine problem.” The ravages of meth, which helped destroy Matthew’s life — not to mention the lives of Aaron and Russell, and the shattering impact on the families of all three — were never adequately examined or brought to light, and in some cases were deliberately covered up.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Soldier Girl

  For a long time I’d been asking Joan, a friend of Matthew who belonged to the Denver circle, to tell me how she first became involved with methamphetamine. She was very reluctant at first, but eventually she agreed to fill in pieces of her personal story and how it related to her friendship with Matthew, whom she met in Denver in 1997. She also agreed to an on-camera interview, which I conducted with my producing partner Glenn Silber.

  In 1989, at the hopeful age of nineteen, Joan had already known what she wanted to do with her life. She saw two choices for herself and either one would have suited her well: join the Denver Police Department and move up through the ranks to a starring role in the war on crime, or scrape together the money to get to New York and train for a career in the performing arts — acting, singing, dancing.

  Eight years later when Joan met “Matty” Shepard and they got close enough to talk “about anything,” they confessed to each other how much they loved performing and their frustration at not being on stage.

  Leggy and attractive, with deep-set brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a mane of shiny black hair, Joan exuded optimism and self-confidence. She also thrived on competition with an intensity some may have considered “un-feminine.” To most, she was a natural leader.

  But Joan said her 1989 application to the police academy got stuck in limbo, where it remained. A qualified Latina candidate, she felt she was at an ironic disadvantage in a season when the department was apparently recruiting African Americans. With money tight in her large family, dreaming of Broadway seemed naive and utterly beyond her reach.