The Book of Matt (2 page)

Minutes later he faced his son’s murderer:

Mr. McKinney, your agreement to life without parole has taken yourself [sic] out of the spotlight … No years of publicity, no chance of commutation, no nothing. Just a miserable future and a more miserable end. It works [for] me.

My son was taught to look at all sides of an issue before … taking a stand … Such a stand cost him his life when he quietly let it be known that he was gay …

I would like nothing better than to see you die, Mr. McKinney … You robbed me of something very precious, and I will never forgive you for that …

That Matthew’s parents did not seek the death penalty for Aaron McKinney seemed to be a gesture of utmost compassion. Instead they were instrumental in forging an agreement that would allow McKinney to serve two consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole. Months earlier his accomplice, Russell Henderson, had already received the same sentence after agreeing to a last-minute plea bargain.

In exchange for life in prison, McKinney relinquished all his rights to appeal. He also agreed to refrain from talking to the media and was required to transfer any future earnings from his story to a foundation the Shepards had established in Matthew’s name. For media and public alike, the horrific story of Matthew’s murder came to its conclusion that day. As a screenwriter, I, too, saw a natural ending in McKinney’s imprisonment for life. Justice had been served, even triumphed, in a fair trial before a jury of his peers in his own hometown. Like many others, I experienced a somber catharsis when Dennis and Judy Shepard demonstrated mercy after McKinney had shown their son only hate.

On a cold February afternoon in 2000, I picked up a rental car at the Denver airport and made my way north on Interstate 25. I had only been to Wyoming once before, more than a decade earlier, under circumstances that I continued to savor despite my shaky arrival there. The night flight I had taken from Denver to Sheridan ended in an emergency landing after one of the two engines sputtered noisily, then stalled in mid-flight. As the plane jolted and rattled in the inky darkness over the prairie, a lone female flight attendant instructed us to tuck our heads between our legs and grab our ankles tightly because we would be descending fast. No one told us to pray but I could hear frightened murmurs throughout the cabin, including my own.

Somehow the pilots skillfully managed to bring us down on an airstrip in Cheyenne — a breathtaking landing that left no one injured but saw our plane surrounded by rescue crews.
Welcome to Wyoming
, I remember thinking as everyone on board broke into applause.

The next morning I flew on to Sheridan and began a five-week writing residency at a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the red-clay foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, home of the Ucross Foundation. Ucross, a speck of a town where a bullet-pocked highway sign still reads
POPULATION: 25
, has been unchanged for decades. Coming from my native Brooklyn, populated by more than 2 million, I immediately felt my senses being blown open by the boundless solitude and a quiet disrupted only by the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep or the occasional truck rumbling along Highway 14.

After several weeks there, an unusual inner tranquility merged with my sometimes-distracted yearning for social contact. Some nights, to offset the lonesome silence after hours at my typewriter, I walked over to Porky’s, a homey watering hole just across the blacktop from the ranch. Porky’s was also a single-pump gas station serving the local ranchers and people passing through. Along with a handful of other cowboy bars at the edge of the Big Horns, the place was bona fide Wyoming. Icy cold longnecks. An old jukebox stacked with Hank Williams, Vince Gill, and Loretta Lynn. Well-worn pool tables. And on Saturday nights a live musician or band cranking out pure honky-tonk. Fresh-faced cowboys and cowgirls barely old enough to drink
thought nothing of driving forty or fifty miles for what had to be the sexiest two-stepping in the world.

Even as an outsider it was easy to blend in. People were friendly and unassuming and didn’t hesitate to jump into small talk with no introductions. From my spot at the bar I’d watch the couples swaying and gliding across the floor, slowly getting tipsy, flirting coyly like teenagers at a high school dance. A perfectly timed mating ritual, I thought with envy. Most of the cowboys were beefy and well defined. In no time they’d be carrying good-sized guts over their big shiny belt buckles, but right now they were perfect specimens of ruddy virility.

Returning to Wyoming more than ten years later, with still-vivid recollections of its starkly beautiful landscape and bighearted locals, I struggled with the unspeakable brutality of Matthew Shepard’s murder. I tried to remember if I had felt safe during my earlier stay in Ucross when I was in my mid-thirties and single. Within the confines of the ranch and surrounding community, yes, I had felt blissfully protected. But I also recalled those nights when I wandered out alone to a few bars and one particular weekend at Porky’s when I’d come wildly close to tempting fate. It was my last Saturday night in Ucross, and everyone in the bar seemed to be suffering from a welcome case of spring fever. Brisk wintry smells had disappeared from the air overnight, replaced by something sweeter, more fragrant. I didn’t know if it was sagebrush or new grass, but I sucked in the delicious air in long gulps. In a few days I would be back in New York riding the subway.

A good-looking guy named Ron and his winsome girlfriend, Mary Lou, somewhere in their twenties, invited me back to their trailer for more drinking and partying after Porky’s closed. Before we left the bar, though, Ron asked me to hop on the back of his motorcycle for a quick spin, while Mary Lou waited. He wanted to show me what a hot bike he had.

Barreling down Highway 14 on that balmy, moonlit night, gripping Ron around the waist as he told me to, I felt exhilarated — all the more so when he pulled off the road onto a dirt trail and cut off the engine. To look at the stars, he said.

Only then, alone with him on the empty prairie, did I realize the danger. It was apparent that Ron was waiting for me to make the first
move. Had he ever been with a guy before? Did Mary Lou know this side of him? Maybe he was just shy? Or had he lured me out there to rob me — or worse — under the guise that I’d come on to him?

The two of us stood awkwardly alongside the bike. Even in my light-headed state, something told me to forgo my lust and get back to Porky’s as soon as I could. After a long silence I said, “It’s amazing out here, Ron—thanks.”

He nervously kicked the dirt a few times with the tip of his boot. “Gives you something to remember about Wyoming, huh?”

“We better get back,” I answered. “Mary Lou will be sending out a search party.”

With a shrug of resignation Ron fired up the bike. “She’s back there havin’ some fun, I guarantee it.”

As we turned onto Highway 14 heading south, the fear lodged in my gut began to dissipate. But there was no way I was going back to their trailer. I’d tell them that I had a lot of packing to do for my trip home.

Back at Porky’s the three of us exchanged good-byes with hugs all around. Ron made me promise to look them up the next time I was out that way, but I noticed he never offered a phone number or address.

On my last day in Ucross, I stopped by Porky’s to say my farewells to Buzzy, the world-weary bartender, who teased me about “the rollickin’ good time” I seemed to be having on Saturday night. I asked him about Ron and Mary Lou. From the way they had monopolized the pool table and dance floor I’d assumed they were regulars.

“Never seen them two before,” Buzzy shook his head. “Tell you this, they’re not from these parts. No way.”

Now as I drove on the outskirts of Cheyenne and veered west onto I-80 for Laramie — a wide-open, gently undulating terrain — I tried to hold those decade-old memories at bay. But with thoughts of Matthew Shepard’s beating still churning inside, I was sobered by the knowledge that it could have been me. I also could not shake off what I’d read about “the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future intruders.”

Several miles before Laramie, the highway curved and descended sharply from a peak I would soon come to know as the Summit, where tractor-trailer accidents are common in icy weather and a massive bronze bust of Abraham Lincoln sits on the top of a thirty-five-foot-tall granite base. As the road dropped, it wound through a rocky canyon, giving no hint of the flat, sprawling prairie that lay ahead until it almost reached the valley floor.

I took the first Laramie exit for Grand Avenue and the University of Wyoming, noticing the usual string of fast-food restaurants, an assortment of suburban-style houses in what looked like a new subdivision, and the ubiquitous Walmart. Sitting smack in the heart of the Rocky Mountain West, Laramie has long been dubbed “Wyoming’s hometown.” One magazine journalist who reported on Matthew’s murder wrote that the town “sits in a flat, treeless sweep of high plains bruised by bad weather,” yet she also described Laramie as “the friendliest place I have ever been in America.”

But as I drove down the Grand Avenue strip that afternoon, past Burger King, Wendy’s, Taco Bell, and Taco John’s, I could have been in Anywhere, USA.

Aaron McKinney’s highly publicized trial had ended three months before and the entire court record in the Shepard case had recently been unsealed, with the exception of McKinney’s and Henderson’s juvenile files and Matthew Shepard’s psychiatric and other personal records. A court-imposed gag order had also been lifted. Although trial witnesses and other principals in the case, other than McKinney, were finally free to talk, the army of journalists that had inundated the town for more than a year had long since departed.

The following morning, while looking through stacks of case documents in a busy reception area at the Albany County Courthouse, a stately limestone building in Laramie’s refurbished downtown, I recognized Cal Rerucha, the prosecutor who had won McKinney’s and Henderson’s convictions. A robust man with thinning hair, then in his late forties, Rerucha had come across in news reports as stern and uncompromising. He also had a reputation for remaining aloof from the media. But as I watched him move about the third floor of
the courthouse, making self-deprecating jokes to his staff and others stopping by on county business, he seemed warm and unaffected. Still somewhat intimidated, I asked if he had a few minutes to talk about the Shepard case.

Rerucha invited me into his spacious but plainly appointed corner office, ushering me past his secretary and others working at their desks, then shut the heavy oak door behind us.

It quickly became apparent during the conversation that he was sizing me up and trying to discern my motives for writing about Matthew’s murder. He coolly informed me that a slew of other writers and producers had already come to town with an interest in dramatizing the case. I detected an unmistakable note of scorn. Rerucha was clearly not interested in jumping on the Hollywood bandwagon and advised me that “the Shepard family has suffered enough” and he would have “nothing to do with exploiting their pain further.”

Despite these remarks, Rerucha spoke with me for nearly an hour. I was further surprised when he offered me his home number and said, “Call anytime.”

After a few days of research at the courthouse I left Laramie, laden with notes compiled from thousands of pages of court documents. But I soon turned to Rerucha for additional insight. Over the next several months, in a series of lengthy interviews by phone and in person, a feeling of trust developed. Rerucha described how taxing the Shepard prosecutions had been, including periodic death threats and constant worries for his family’s safety. In twelve years of elected office it was also his first death penalty case, with enormous pressure from government officials in Wyoming and Washington, and from the Clinton White House as well.

I knew the Shepard murder had been the focus of national attention, but I slowly realized how much I did not know. Cal Rerucha not only educated me about the legal aspects of the case but also hinted that I should look beneath the surface of what the media had reported.

Our phone interviews almost always began minutes after 5 pm Mountain Time, just after his staff shut down business for the day. Rerucha took his job as a public servant seriously. On principle he
would not expend county time chatting with a writer, even about a case that had left a lasting scar on his hometown and, I would come to see, on Rerucha himself.

In one interview he joked that the only reason he was talking to me was that “it’s soothing, like talking to a psychiatrist. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” he added drily.

On another occasion Rerucha chuckled, “You probably wouldn’t have made it into my office
period
if you weren’t wearing that jacket the day you arrived.” He was referring to my favorite jacket — a faded, well-worn tan Carhartt — which he said made me “fit right into Laramie” and didn’t mark me as “another media hound from back East.”

“Every time those people came to town it was like a swarm of locusts,” he scoffed, shaking his head.

Over time I discovered that Cal Rerucha did need to get some things off his chest, but it was not until months after our first encounter that I understood what they were. I made only one promise to him: I would write the story of Matthew’s murder truthfully. I also made the disclaimer that once my screenplay was in the hands of Hollywood I couldn’t offer any further guarantees.

Rerucha was adamant that he wasn’t looking for money or fame. “Lawyers aren’t supposed to be celebrities or movie stars, their job is in the courtroom,” he lectured me in his affable, yet prosecutorial tone. The one thing that concerned him, though, was accuracy.

“You people in the media say whatever you want, whether it’s true or not,” he complained. “Betray the public trust and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it.”

His reservations about the media notwithstanding, Rerucha continued to walk me through countless details of the previous year’s courtroom drama I had missed in person, including anecdotes of political maneuvers behind the scenes. A lifelong Democrat in a predominantly conservative, Republican state, he had been elected to his fourth consecutive term as county attorney just weeks after Matthew’s murder.