The Book of Matt (3 page)

Increasingly, I came to appreciate the immense challenges Rerucha had faced leading Laramie through some of its darkest days. He had
a sizable number of detractors and political adversaries, and a reputation for being difficult and sometimes intransigent — a side of him I would come to know personally. But overall I admired his ethics and integrity. As I studied the murder over months and eventually years, he became both my ally and my guide.

I also searched for other Laramie residents who could provide insight into how things worked in the town. When I asked about violent crime, the answers I got were often contradictory. The local chamber of commerce boasted of a “0%” homicide rate, yet I learned from Rerucha of other grisly murders in the years immediately prior to the attack on Matthew. He mentioned — as others had — the 1997 killing of a teenage girl named Daphne Sulk, which had made only the local news and was quickly forgotten. Rerucha said the Sulk murder was “the nastiest homicide” he had seen in four terms as county prosecutor. He strongly encouraged me to take a look at the case as background to what followed with Matthew Shepard, if only to compare two ruthless, back-to-back homicides in Albany County, Wyoming.

TWO

Daphne

An hour or so before noon on November 11, 1997, Mark and Michelle Johnson were hunting for pinecones in the snowy woods of Wyoming’s Medicine Bow National Forest. The morning was chilly, with a gust of fresh snow blowing through the sun-streaked trees east of Laramie. The Johnsons’ mission was to collect enough cones to make Christmas wreaths for family and friends.

Something caught Michelle’s eye at the edge of the forest. Jutting from a shallow snowdrift, it looked at first like an outcropping of rock. Moving closer, she recognized the shape of a girl’s naked body, partially frozen in the hardpacked earth. The girl’s skin was pale blue and appeared to be punctured with bruises. Michelle staggered and turned to her husband. The ruddy glow in her cheeks was gone, and she could hardly get a word out.

In the days before Thanksgiving, news that fifteen-year-old Daphne Sulk had been savagely bludgeoned, stabbed more than seventeen times, and discarded in the wilderness sent a tremor of fear through her nearby junior high school and hometown. The Laramie community also learned that Daphne was pregnant. For a college town of twenty-seven thousand, 93 percent of whom were Caucasian, it came as a still-greater shock when police arrested a thirty-seven-year-old black man, Kevin Robinson, for her murder. Daphne, who was white, had allegedly been his lover. As the story was told in court documents and local newspapers, Robinson wanted her to have an abortion but she refused. Anxious he would lose custody of his two children if word got out that he was the father, he beat and knifed her to death, then dumped her body in a remote wooded area where she was not likely to be found until spring — if ever.

Hideous stab wounds covered Daphne’s chest and neck area. Her body was scarred with defensive bruises, indicating she had fought for
her life. A forensic pathologist would later testify in Robinson’s trial that the number of wounds was consistent with an explosion of rage. Although an autopsy showed that Daphne was barely one month pregnant, no DNA tests were performed on the embryo to determine whether the sperm had, in fact, come from Kevin Robinson. It was an omission over which prosecutor Cal Rerucha and police wouldn’t lose any sleep, since they had abundant evidence incriminating Robinson.

Those who knew Daphne described her infectious enthusiasm, but recalled that she was also fragile and troubled. The youngest of five children, she had just started ninth grade at Laramie Junior High. Roberta Sulk, her mother, surmised that Daphne might have first met Robinson on the street “on her way to her teen support group.”

Before Daphne’s body was discovered in the woods, she had been missing from home as a runaway for eleven days. Police later determined she had spent a few of those nights at an abandoned trailer in town with another female runaway.

At Kevin Robinson’s trial the following year, witnesses would testify that Daphne boasted of a “secret friend.” She had revealed that she was in a sexual relationship with “Kevin,” they stated, and that he frequently made her perform pregnancy tests in his presence. One of Daphne’s classmates named Miranda, who said she had accompanied Daphne on a visit to Robinson’s home, described his eyes as “glazed over” in a manner that frightened her — as if he were high on drugs. Daphne told Miranda that if she ever wanted drugs, alcohol, or tobacco, Kevin was the man to see.

For Cal Rerucha the question of motive was answered when other friends of Daphne, as well as a few of her teachers, said she had confided in them that she was pregnant. She allegedly had told several individuals that Kevin Robinson was the father, and that he was very upset about the pregnancy and wanted it aborted. But what most convinced Rerucha of Robinson’s guilt were the spots of Daphne’s blood on the door and inside the trunk of Robinson’s gold Honda found by detectives from the Laramie Police Department and the Albany County Sheriff’s Office.

Of all the officers and deputies in both departments, Rerucha relied first and foremost on Detective Sergeant Rob DeBree of the
sheriff’s office, whose instincts he trusted “above all other cops in the county.” The two had teamed up on case after case.

A sturdily built man in his forties with a mustache and a curt disposition, DeBree spent most of his off-duty waking hours tending to his ranch on the Wyoming-Colorado border. In local law enforcement circles it was well known that the two men argued incessantly while preparing for a trial, driven in no small part by Rerucha’s belabored, if not compulsive, insistence that “not a single witness or piece of evidence get away from us.” But as teammates, they shared an aggressive determination to win in the courtroom. Rerucha would be first to admit that he could push DeBree’s patience to the limit, not to mention the rest of his staff’s.

“You’re paranoid, Cal,” DeBree groused to him on many an occasion, “and you’re driving both of us nuts.”

Usually Rerucha got up from his banker’s-style oak desk, already damp under the collar of his oxford shirt, and began pacing the floor of his office.

“God-darn-it, Rob, the defense is going to hang us out to dry,” he’d snap back peevishly. “I want to go back over every witness statement, a hundred times if we have to.”

These routine jousts with DeBree “had nothing to do with second-guessing his judgment,” Rerucha recalled in an early interview. “If Rob said something was so, you could pretty much go to the bank with it.”

By early summer 1998, seven months of legal wrangling and delays had elapsed since Kevin Robinson had been charged with Daphne’s murder, but there was still no trial date. As Rerucha sized up his crowded court schedule and slate of civic duties, he was hopeful he could finish the case by the time his sons went back to school in the fall. Luke, his lanky and athletic older boy, would be in seventh grade, while Max, who stood taller and was more bookish, was a grade behind him.

The atmosphere around the Sulk case had also become progressively more acrimonious. Among Rerucha’s political foes there were allegations that he was showing racial bias; there were even those who said Kevin Robinson was innocent.

“Some of the evidence against Robinson was circumstantial, absolutely, but all of it pointed to him as Daphne’s killer,” Rerucha stated confidently long after the trial was over. Yet other Laramie sources, including several respected attorneys, strongly disputed that view. Even today, they remain convinced that Robinson was “framed” or “set up” while the real killer was protected, presumably by someone with clout. Some found it strange that after Robinson was arrested for Sulk’s murder, he was allowed to leave the county jail each day to continue working at his job. He was even permitted to attend his company’s Christmas party, returning to his jail cell after the festivities ended.

But behind the town rumors were lesser-known facts regarding Daphne Sulk’s history — aspects I only became aware of after I’d been investigating Matthew Shepard’s murder for a few years. By the age of fifteen and before Kevin Robinson’s name was ever linked to hers, Daphne had made claims to the police that she’d had sexual relations with three different adult males, each of whom served jail time for having sex with her as a minor. Yet her status as a juvenile prevented those records from being made public. Authorities also had credible information that Daphne had been involved with drugs, including methamphetamine. For a time two of the men whom she identified as sex offenders, reputedly meth users themselves, were suspects in her killing; the third offender was in jail when she disappeared.

One story I heard about the Robinson case was said to be too scandalous — or too dangerous — to repeat around town because it involved a prominent family, the Fritzens, who had worked in local law enforcement. Don Fritzen had been a popular county sheriff, while his two sons, Brian and Ben, had served respectively as a sheriff’s deputy and a detective in the Laramie Police Department. Don Fritzen’s brother-in-law, John Fanning, was also the county under-sheriff for several terms and, according to some, a powerful cop who allegedly controlled the town and its surroundings — “just like a sheriff in the Old West, someone you don’t want to mess with,” one insider cautioned.

Ben Fritzen, Don’s younger son, a short, handsome man with a tight, muscular frame, was a lead investigator in the Sulk homicide.
Respected among peers for his keen forensic skills and his network of sources on the street, Ben personally interviewed more than a hundred individuals during the investigation; he was also responsible for discovering drops of Daphne’s blood in Kevin Robinson’s car.

But seldom mentioned until long after Robinson’s conviction was an alleged affair between Brian Fritzen’s wife and Kevin Robinson’s brother, Royal Robinson, known around town by the nickname “Bug.” The affair was apparently a well-kept secret until Brian’s wife gave birth to a child fathered by Bug Robinson.

A few Laramie residents who insisted on anonymity contended, “at that point the fix was in.” One said the Fritzens, in an old-fashioned vendetta, “promised to get even with the Robinsons if it was the last thing they did.”

But rumors notwithstanding, no one dared to question the evident conflict of interest in allowing a Fritzen family member to investigate Bug Robinson’s brother for murder. According to Cal Rerucha, he was unaware at the time of any personal connections and therefore had no reason to question Ben Fritzen’s role in the investigation. Other locals said, “We’ve got people in this town a lot more powerful than the Fritzens,” and “There are plenty of secrets to go around [in Laramie],” though they also pointed to a decades-old drug scandal that allegedly involved Brian Fritzen. They claimed that Brian, while a police officer, had stolen “a large amount of cocaine” from an evidence locker, “but he got off with a slap on the wrist … Instead of charging him, they sent him somewhere for treatment” and allowed him to quietly resign.

THREE

The Little Dude

In mid-summer 1998, as Rerucha prepared the Robinson case for trial, he had another smaller case that had yet to reach the sentencing phase: the burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken the previous December. Three young men had broken into the fast-food restaurant on the south side of town and had stolen twenty-five hundred dollars and — somewhat ludicrously — a few desserts.

Among the three known burglars was a twenty-year-old “local troublemaker” with a long juvenile record, Aaron McKinney. In April 1998, Detective Rob DeBree had arrested McKinney in Pensacola, Florida, and brought him back to Laramie to face charges. McKinney had been hiding out on the Gulf Coast for several months with his pregnant seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Kristen Price, living in the home of her mother and working sporadically as a pipe fitter.

Aaron McKinney had been on Rerucha’s watch list for years as “someone who showed clear signs of bigger problems to come.” DeBree, Ben Fritzen, and other cops had kept an eye on McKinney, too, since they knew that he and his band of friends were using and selling hard drugs. The whole bunch, plus a few of their girlfriends.

Unbeknownst to McKinney, Laramie police had been tipped off to his whereabouts by Kristen Price’s mother, Kim Kelly, who reported that he had been physically abusive toward her daughter. Kelly told police she was “afraid of Aaron’s violent temper” and was worried for Kristen’s safety as well as the soon-to-arrive newborn’s.

According to Kelly, while McKinney was living in her Florida home she casually mentioned that she was having a problem with her ex-husband. McKinney advised her on the spot that “he knew people who could straighten it out.”

“All I have to do is make a call,” he said.

Kelly was dumbfounded by McKinney’s barely masked offer to “put
out a contract on my ex,” but at the time she dismissed his posturing as “a little guy talking like a big shot.” He also bragged to Price and her mother of his exploits in California the previous year. He said he had gotten in good with an organized crime family and dropped hints that he had done “jobs” for them, including murder for hire.

“One way to get rid of a body,” he told Kelly, “is to burn it, take the teeth out, then bury the body.”

Standing five feet, four inches tall, with a skinny build, Aaron McKinney fancied himself a thug and a “gangsta,” modeling his words and sometimes his actions after the in-your-face rhymes of his rap-star heroes. Several of his friends would later recall that he was also the brunt of frequent teasing; they called him “shrimp,” “pipsqueak,” “the little dude,” and other terms of endearment.

But despite McKinney’s well-honed talent for exaggeration, he had not lied about living in California for a while. He was first invited there by Jay Pinney, a teenage offender whom he befriended while Pinney was in mandatory residence at the Cathedral Home for Children in Laramie. Pinney liked some of the same drugs McKinney did — weed, acid, crack, and methamphetamine — and both liked to party. McKinney also liked to shock people with tales of his friend’s childhood in Riverton, Wyoming. But it was Cal Rerucha who first told me about Pinney’s history.