The Book of Matt (24 page)

“We began with meth and ended up with some cocaine,” Aaron stated.

In testimony Joe Lemus later gave at Aaron’s trial, he confirmed that he had seen Aaron smoke meth on Monday the fifth and snort it the following day, Tuesday the sixth.

Another source, Adrian “Bear” McKinney, a cousin of Aaron, acknowledged to me that he had given Aaron meth on that Monday and also verified that Aaron had been on an extended binge.

But along with his extreme drug use and the compulsive urge to keep feeding his addiction, Aaron was also feeling besieged by other mounting pressures. Sources said that he owed a substantial amount of money to at least two of his regular drug suppliers, who were described to me as co-captains of the local trade. In the meantime his own dealing activities and cash flow were constantly up and down. He was also still awaiting sentencing for his December 1997 burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.

Aaron’s worst fears, however, may have concerned his ability to financially support his girlfriend Kristen and their four-month-old son. According to Kristen, she had told Aaron in no uncertain terms, “We need formula … we need diapers … we need these things, and you have to pay the rent.”

Looking back, she added, “I think he was really torn because it’s the desperation of getting your fix or taking care of your family” — a struggle Kristen would come to know even more acutely after the case was over, when she had a second child on the way but was also grappling with her own addiction.

On that same Monday night, October 5, Russell Henderson stopped by to visit his grandmother Lucy Thompson at her home on Laramie’s south side. Although Russell had done his share of drinking and using drugs since his birthday on September 24, he was not caught up in the tumult of a nonstop meth binge like Aaron was.

According to Lucy, “Russell showed no signs at all” of being under
the influence that evening. Lucy was well practiced at detecting those signs after struggling for years with the alcoholism and drug abuse of her daughter — Russell’s mother — Cindy Dixon.

Russell would later say he “didn’t even like how [he] felt on meth.” His drugs of choice had been “beer and weed,” he confessed awkwardly. But he said he began using meth with his girlfriend, Chasity, while they were dating and then “got into it a lot more” when he and Aaron became friends in the summer of 1998.

During that spring and early summer while Aaron was being held in the Albany County Detention Center pending trial on burglary charges, Russell had been spending time with a half brother he’d just gotten to know that year — David Farris. Russell and David shared the same biological father, Gerry Farris, and had been born on the same day one year apart. David, the younger of the two, also happened to be Aaron McKinney’s “best friend.”

On June 11, after spending two months in jail and pleading no contest, Aaron was released.

“I first met Aaron when David brought him over to my house [and] he mentioned that he needed a job,” Russell explained in a letter. “I talked to Arsenio [Lemus] and that’s when Aaron started working [at Laramie Valley Roofing].”

Russell had been a close friend of Arsenio’s younger brother, Joe Lemus, since high school.

But the friendship between Aaron and Russell did not actually begin until early July, a few weeks after Aaron got out of jail. By early October the two had been friends and co-workers for about three months.

As Russell sat in his grandmother’s living room on Monday evening, everything seemed normal, Lucy said. Russell told her that he’d been busy at work but they talked “as openly as we usually did.” He spoke of his plans to marry Chasity and mentioned that he was still making installments on a ring for her at Alexander’s, a local jewelry store. They also talked about the Christmas party they would have that year.

But Russell was not as forthright with his grandmother as she may have thought, not only about his drug and alcohol use but also about
Chasity and other things. His relationship with Chasity had recently been on shakier ground; both of them were trying to sort out their feelings and decide if they were going to stay together.

Russell had grown more confused in May when he and David Farris dropped by Taco Bell, where Russell had worked while he was in high school. He ran into his old girlfriend and former supervisor, Shaundra Arcuby, with whom he hadn’t been in contact since she broke up with him nearly four years earlier. There was still a strong connection between them and Russell promised to give her a call — “but he made it clear it was just a friendship sort of thing because of [his relationship with] Chasity,” Shaundra would later recall.

By the end of May there had also been other indications that Russell’s life was not quite on track. Whatever it was that was bothering him, he apparently didn’t feel comfortable discussing it with Chasity or his grandmother — or anyone else.

Along with his work as a roofer, Russell held a job as an assistant manager at a Conoco gas station in town. According to his boss at the time, Gina Cookson, he also did “a lot of maintenance work … on apartment units” on the side, for the former station owner, Dale Poledna. In yet another small-town coincidence, Poledna became Matthew Shepard’s landlord that summer.

Cookson, who knew Russell for about four years, described him as “a very kindhearted person” — dependable, ambitious, and someone who always came to work on time, usually opening the station at 6:30
AM
. He would even bring her lunch when he was off-duty.

But in early spring Cookson noticed some changes.

“Russell started hanging out with a wild bunch of guys from LVR [Laramie Valley Roofing],” she later told a defense investigator. “They would come to Conoco. David Farris also would come hang around.”

On Memorial Day weekend Russell was scheduled to work at the station on Saturday morning. He never showed up for work and didn’t call Cookson until late Sunday night. Evidently Russell had gone out drinking with his roofing buddies for the holiday. Although Cookson believed he was afraid to come in and talk with her and that he was “avoiding a confrontation,” there was no choice but to fire him.

Later, Cookson would characterize Russell as “a follower” who was
easily influenced by others. She also felt “he went downhill” after he stopped working for Conoco.

But almost as a footnote, Cookson mentioned that she had first met Russell through Chasity’s mother, Linda Larson. Cookson said he “got along very well” with Linda and her girlfriend Candy Roberts and that he was “okay” with their lesbian relationship.

After he was fired at Conoco, Russell began putting in more hours at Laramie Valley Roofing.

Two weeks later when Aaron was out of jail and desperate for a job, his “homeboy” David Farris knew just the person to turn to: his “new” half brother, Russ Henderson, who would be happy to help out.

In the early-morning hours of Tuesday, October 6, wired from his high-speed cocktails of meth and cocaine but out of money and almost out of drugs, Aaron broke into the Laramie home of his cousin Dean McKinney.

His target wasn’t Dean, however. Aaron had heard that a mutual friend, Monty Durand, was staying at Dean’s place. Aaron claimed Durand owed him money for drugs. This wasn’t the first time Aaron said Durand had cheated him, nor was it the first time Aaron attacked him in a fit of rage. Less than three months before — around July 10 when Laramie held its annual “Jubilee Days” celebrating Wyoming statehood — Aaron had beaten Durand severely while Russell Henderson and Chasity Pasley were present. According to Chasity, the dispute was over “bunk meth” that Durand had given Kristen.

Durand had worked with Russell at Taco Bell a few years earlier — “before Russell was into drugs,” Durand told me grudgingly before cutting an interview short in July 2004. I’d been told that Durand’s family had a good reputation in town; his grandparents had owned Laramie’s roller rink and a mini golf attraction. More important, in the six years since Matthew’s murder, Durand had changed his life for the better.

“I just don’t want to talk about those things,” he said.

But before he warned me to get off his property — a freshly painted, territorial-style bungalow on South 3rd Street, with a tiny front lawn
— he acknowledged that, yes, Aaron McKinney had beaten him up “pretty badly,” and “yeah, it was over drugs.”

Hours after breaking into his cousin’s home and attacking Monty Durand, Aaron went back to work on a roofing job at Bethesda Care Center, a local nursing home. Joining him on the crew with Russell was a thirty-seven-year-old engineering student named Ken Haselhuhn, a native of Rock Springs, Wyoming. Haselhuhn, who had been working alongside them at Laramie Valley Roofing for about a month, was also enrolled at WyoTech, a trade school with several campuses around the United States.

According to Aaron — and subsequently confirmed by other sources — he had used the last of his meth before work that morning. He said he hoped to “score more at a Laramie park” later in the day.

When Aaron first recounted his plan to buy more meth at a town park, I felt sure he was lying again. I knew by then who his key suppliers had been in the summer and early fall of 1998, so I assumed he was protecting them. But the more I spoke with sources close to Aaron, the more I realized how strung out he’d gotten while attempting to keep up with his drug debts. His regular suppliers weren’t interested in fronting more meth. What they wanted — and what they were pressing him for — was the money he already owed.

TWENTY-FOUR

Honor Camp

The first time I interviewed Ken Haselhuhn, he was incarcerated at the “Honor Conservation Camp,” a minimum-security detention facility in Newcastle, Wyoming. I was interested in Haselhuhn because of the mysterious role he had played as an intermediary in an alleged gun trade on the night Matthew was robbed and beaten. I was also aware that Haselhuhn had been a sequestered witness for the prosecution during Aaron’s 1999 trial.

Ultimately, Cal Rerucha had never called Haselhuhn to testify, so it wasn’t totally clear what his testimony might have involved. But the fact that officials saw the need to protect Haselhuhn as a witness caught my attention. The only other witness they had guarded that conscientiously was Kristen Price.

When I asked Cal why he hadn’t put Haselhuhn on the stand, he said he’d been able “to build a strong case against McKinney without him.” That seemed true enough, but I also had a hunch that questioning Haselhuhn might have opened a line of inquiry that a few police officials — if not Cal himself — hoped to avoid.

As I sat at a picnic table in a fenced-in yard with Haselhuhn, a solidly built man then in his early forties, with wavy brown hair and a mustache, I indulged in a little amateur mind reading. It wasn’t hard to detect that beneath his courteous, helpful demeanor, Haselhuhn wanted to find out exactly what I knew about Matthew’s murder and how I’d gotten the information. I could also see he was being very careful not to tell me much of anything. But if he had nothing to hide, why was he being so cagey?

According to the official story, Haselhuhn’s involvement on the night of the crime had been minimal. He had essentially agreed to
help Aaron sell his gun, a .357 Magnum, to a friend or neighbor in exchange for cash, drugs, or both. What Haselhuhn would have gotten in return — his cut of the deal — was never specified, however. Was he just doing Aaron a favor?

By the time I left Haselhuhn and started the four-hour drive back to Laramie, I realized I had gotten few, if any, answers to my questions. Yet almost by accident I had picked up a couple of new leads I hadn’t been looking for. Whether that had been intentional on Haselhuhn’s part or he had deliberately misled me was difficult to know.

But the things he’d conveyed seemed to fit neatly — perhaps too neatly — with other pieces of the puzzle.

In passing, Haselhuhn let me know that Aaron had
definitely
fallen behind in payments to his main drug supplier. I didn’t have the gumption to ask how he knew this; I just took it at face value, afraid that he would find me pushy and stop talking. But I had a pretty good idea who that supplier was, without any help from Haselhuhn.

Haselhuhn also agreed with my theory that Aaron’s real purpose in trading the gun — if he had intended to trade it at all, which was still a big “if” in my mind — was to get more meth, not to sell the gun for cash. I’d come to that conclusion long before, after Bill McKinney mentioned that he had been interested in buying his son’s gun and that he’d offered him two payments of $150, “but Aaron didn’t want to do it.” Bill had made the offer the weekend before the crime, out of a concern that “Aaron wasn’t legally allowed to carry firearms after the KFC felony.”

According to Haselhuhn, “Aaron said the gun had belonged to his grandfather,” which I knew to be a lie. Was it Aaron’s lie or something Haselhuhn had made up for my benefit? In actual fact Aaron had gotten the gun from his friend Ryan Bopp in a trade for meth a few days before he showed the gun to Haselhuhn. (Bopp and Haselhuhn were also acquainted with each other.)

“I had run out of meth myself,” Bopp recalled. “I didn’t have any. I called Aaron and he said, yeah, I have some. Well I had this gun. I was out of money. So I traded it to him. And he gave me a gram. I did a little bit with him before I left. And I just went on my way.”

Bopp’s wife, Katie, who accompanied him to Aaron’s apartment, and Kristen Price were both present during the exchange of the .357 Magnum for a gram of meth.

During my drive back to Laramie I began to think that the most helpful fragment I’d picked up from Haselhuhn had nothing to do with drugs or with the gun, at least not directly. It had to do with Doc O’Connor. Haselhuhn said he knew Doc fairly well and that Doc had revealed to him, soon after the murder, that “Aaron took a trip in one of the limos with Matt.” Haselhuhn went on to say that Kristen, Aaron’s girlfriend, “also knew about it.”

While I didn’t want to push Haselhuhn on how he had come to know so much, I had heard similar things from Matthew’s friend Ted Henson. Along with his allegations about Doc, Ted had insisted Kristen “knows a lot more than she’s let on.”