The Book of Matt (33 page)

It’s almost like he mouthed off … I went back and hit him one more time. But I hit him real hard that time — in the truck it wasn’t so hard. The last time I hit him I held [the] gun like a baseball bat. It had a really long barrel on it. And a full swing.

… He was [talking] until I hit him, but once I hit him that was it. He went out.

Aaron’s threat that “certain people” would have Matthew’s IDs almost slipped by me unnoticed. Aaron had always been deliberately evasive about naming those people, yet his words implied that Matthew knew who they were. His statement also seemed to belie his persistent claims that he hadn’t known Matthew before that night.

According to Aaron, after he inflicted that final crushing blow, “In the back of my mind there was some concern with the last hit [because] he made some kind of a weird noise, and the way he slumped over … I still … hoped that he would come out of it. That was the … original plan … I never meant to kill him. But you get kind of a — a feeling in the pit of my stomach the last time I got him.”

Looking back, he said, “The thing that’s the most eerie to me is … that he wasn’t scared. You know, I wondered what was going through his mind. What was going through mine … It was kind of surreal, really … A lot of it’s a blur.”

But Aaron did remember getting back into his father’s truck and telling Russell to drive back into town.

“So they drove away in silence, retracing the steps,” Cal would tell the jury. “The silence in the car was probably deafening.”

Russell felt numb as he tried to stanch the blood over his upper lip with his sleeve. “I didn’t really say anything,” he recalled. “I was scared partially. And then partially I was in denial of what had just happened … I didn’t know how to accept it.”

Next to him Aaron stared listlessly out the passenger window at neon signs along the strip.

“Mr. McKinney’s purpose at this time was to burglarize Mr. Shepard’s home, get that $150, and get rid of the .357 Magnum pistol,” Cal continued.

Aaron more or less agreed. “I had his ID’s and I was looking to find his house,” he said.

“Take a right on 7th,” he mumbled to Russell, “just go up there a ways.”

Russell followed Aaron’s instructions once more. He drove them past several blocks of university buildings, then turned north onto a darkened residential street. As they moved slowly up North 7th Street, Aaron rifled through Matthew’s wallet. When he came upon an ATM card, he swore angrily and tossed it on the dash.

At the intersection of 7th and Harney Streets, Aaron pointed to a large empty parking space on the northeast corner of 7th Street and told Russell to park there. Russell pulled into the space but kept the engine running, while Aaron continued to look over the contents of Matthew’s wallet.

Later, there would a good deal of speculation as to why Aaron and Russell ended up parking on the 800 block of North 7th Street. It was even suggested that Aaron wanted to dispose of his gun in a nearby lake.

In fact, Matthew had often stayed with his friend Walt Boulden at 807
South
7th Street before getting his own apartment that summer and had used Boulden’s address on his driver’s license. It was also the same address that Matthew had given to police officer Flint Waters at the site of the unsolved arson incident the previous May.

But Aaron offered his own reasons for ending up at the wrong end of 7th Street:

I had his I.D. and I was on the right street but … I remember I couldn’t read the numbers. I had a spotlight and everything. But when you’re hallucinating that bad and you look at the numbers … they just change right on you. Your vision is just gone.

… Mostly, stuff is real out of focus at this point … you see things move that aren’t there. You see people that aren’t there. Shadow people. You know, I try to look at the numbers on the house. I couldn’t read them. They’d go in and out of focus. It’s almost like they — they melt around.

His plan to rob Matthew’s apartment notwithstanding, the notion that what was foremost in Aaron’s mind was stealing $150 is highly improbable. All day long, Aaron had been thinking about the six ounces of meth that Ken Haselhuhn’s dealer friend was supposed to have that night. With a value of more than ten thousand dollars, Aaron saw the six ounces as a solution to his problems.

Aaron also had good reason to believe that Matt was one of the two couriers from Denver and Fort Collins that night. Or at the very least, Matt would know who had done the pickup and where the meth was.

(If you take into account Aaron’s KFC burglary the previous December, which yielded twenty-five hundred dollars, the idea that he was driven to murderous rage over a small fraction of that amount becomes even more implausible.)

Considering how threatened Matthew had felt for several days and the apprehension he’d expressed to Tina Labrie about being “sucked … back into [the drug scene],” it seems very likely that he found himself caught between rival operators. As she and others surmised, he may also have known too much.

At the last minute on Tuesday evening, something or someone persuaded Matthew not to take Doc’s limo out and to steer clear of the six ounces scheduled for delivery to Laramie that night. How clued in was Aaron about the delivery? Was it Matthew’s sudden change in
plans that Aaron discussed privately with him in the bathroom at the Fireside?

Typically, the two people who made a meth run to Denver would each receive a quarter of an ounce as compensation, worth around four hundred dollars. But the “top dog” in Denver, whom Matthew knew well from his time living there, usually advanced a total amount of twelve ounces, with a street value of over twenty thousand. Six ounces were delivered first to Fort Collins, and then the remaining six ounces were distributed in Laramie.

“Matt would be getting the quarter ounce … he’d be getting the two eight balls,” one of his friends from the Denver circle confirmed.

While there’s no doubt that Aaron was hell-bent on robbing the entire six ounces, it’s also possible that his cohorts led him to believe that Matthew had gone ahead and made the run to Denver that evening, as planned. The two had taken limo rides together previously and Aaron knew what the routine was when it came to moving drugs. It would also help explain why Aaron went to the Library with Russell and waited there for more than an hour; and then to the Fireside, where Aaron continued to wait for news about the six ounces — allegedly from Ken Haselhuhn. Not only had Aaron and Matthew met at the Library for a previous drug exchange, but both men were also known to do drop-offs and pickups there and at the Fireside.

After Matthew was fatally beaten and the national media descended on Laramie, both Aaron’s drug associates and Matthew’s scurried for cover. But a few of them say they still don’t know what happened to the six ounces of meth that night. They have reason to believe that the total delivery of twelve ounces made it as far as Fort Collins, where it was customary to drop off half the load. But did the other six ounces ever arrive in Laramie? If so, who delivered it — and perhaps more important, to whom?

“This is the one time Matt didn’t go to Denver,” a key source told me. “He was supposed to go but didn’t.”

After extensive interviews with former members of the Denver circle and a few of their associates, some of whom expressed bitterness as well as a sense of guilt and remorse over the murder, I found no evidence that the six ounces actually passed through Matthew’s
hands that night — or through Aaron’s. One key player stated that the two men were pawns who were manipulated by two co-captains in Laramie.

Sources from the Denver circle also believe an unforgivable betrayal occurred: that “someone set Matt up” by passing on misleading information to individuals close to Aaron — people to whom Aaron owed money. This only served to intensify an existing rivalry, they said.

One thing is certain, however: Aaron was not the only person who was angry with Matthew or felt he had “moved too quickly” after he arrived in Laramie that summer. However, the same source who characterized Aaron and Matthew as pawns said that if Aaron had snitched on his suppliers to law enforcement, he would’ve been killed “in a flash.”

“A very interesting thing happens at this time that has nothing to do with the Sherman Hills incident,” Cal later informed the jury. (Sherman Hills was the actual location of the fence where Matthew was beaten.)

“… At 12:43 in the approximate location of 660½ North 6th Street, a vandalism was called in … Two individuals, Mr. Morales and Mr. Herrera, were on the streets … What they were doing was petty vandalism … They had taken a sharp object and punctured an individual’s tire.

“… Flint Waters will tell you that in such a location … what [police] do is try to surround a general area and work in, and that is what they did … As the police were looking for vandals, Mr. Morales and Mr. Herrera are walking … and who should they come upon? Mr. Henderson and Mr. McKinney.”

According to Aaron and Russell, they had just gotten out of the truck and walked to the corner. As they turned west on Harney Street, they began searching for a street address. But right after they made the turn, they surprised two young Mexican men puncturing a tire.

“What the hell are you doin’ that for?” Russell apparently challenged them.

One of the men, Emiliano Morales, then nineteen, was wielding a knife. The other, Jeremy Herrera, eighteen, attempted to conceal a small wooden club up his sleeve.

“For shits and giggles,” Morales replied. “You got a problem?”

Aaron was already in his face. “Yeah, we got a problem. I guess you wetbacks don’t have nothin’ better to do.”

“Go to hell, man!” Herrera said, closing ranks with his friend.

Russell looked Aaron’s way for some signal.

“Real bitches, these two,” Aaron snickered.

Herrera defiantly showed his weapon. A whittled-down piece of wood, maybe sixteen inches long, rounded like a miniature baseball bat.

As Aaron ran to the pickup, Morales shot back at him, “Who are you, calling us bitches now?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Herrera saw Aaron racing back toward Morales with the .357 pointed at him.

“Emiliano! He’s got a gun, man, let’s go!” Herrera shouted.

The warning was too late. Aaron attacked Morales from behind, slamming the gun into the top of his head. Morales staggered across the pavement, hunched over in pain.

With nothing to lose, Herrera charged Aaron, swinging the club into the side of his head. Aaron fell back, dazed by the blow.

Herrera quickly grabbed Morales, whose head was spitting blood, and dragged him down the street. (Cal Rerucha would tell the jury that Morales’s wound looked “like a zipper on a bad sleeping bag.”)

Cussing from the pain, Aaron stumbled back to the truck with Russell at his side.

Moments later Flint Waters pulled up behind the truck in his Laramie Police Department vehicle. Once again, Russell was at the wheel and Aaron was on the passenger side.

“The [police] have no idea what has happened in … Sherman Hills,” Cal explained. “What they think is that they have the people who have committed the vandalism … [Mr. Waters] tries not to get too close to the vehicle until help and back-up can arrive, but he watches the individuals …

“There is a rearview mirror on the truck. He can see that the driver … can see him in the rearview mirror. At the same time, both doors fly open. In one direction flies Mr. Henderson, running as fast as he
can. And on the other side … Mr. McKinney exits as fast as he can … and they go in opposite directions.”

Immediately Flint Waters jumped out of his vehicle and took off after the driver.

“He turned south through a yard,” Waters recalled. “Fortunately for me there was a bit of a shrub in the back of the yard, and he slowed down. That gave me the chance to catch up … I caught him [and] took him to the ground.

“I cuffed him up; told him why I was there; said I wanted to make sure I understood what was going on … and he told me that I knew who he was. And I stood him up and turned him around, and sure enough I did — it was Russell Henderson … I saw that he had a pretty good cut on his face … it was a gash and it was open [and] there was a lot of blood … Soon as I saw that … I called for an EMS unit.”

Waters escorted Russell back to his police vehicle and, minutes later, turned him over to the EMS crew, who had arrived with an ambulance. As they began treating Russell, Waters walked over to the passenger side of the black Ford truck.

“I saw something laying on the ground,” he said. “I looked at it, and it was a large gun rug … for a large target pistol. I looked in the back of the truck and laying [sic] in the back … was a large frame revolver. The thing was huge. Like an 8-inch barrel that had blood all over it … Seeing that gun covered in blood, I assumed that there was a lot more going on than what we’d stumbled onto so far.”

TWENTY-EIGHT

Witnesses

Kristen Price would later tell police she was curled up on the sofa watching late-night TV when Aaron burst into their apartment, clutching a wound on the side of his head.

“Shut the door!” he yelled.

Kristen was shocked by the blood on his clothes. “What the hell happened to you, Aaron?”

“Just turn off the lights,” he instructed her. “Everything —”

As she quickly switched off the lamp and TV, he grabbed a towel in the bathroom to soak up the blood.

According to Aaron,

I couldn’t really talk. I was trying to tell her what happened … I knew what I wanted to say but it wouldn’t come out. It was just a bunch of mumbling. But she was obviously real concerned. My head’s bleeding — I’m covered in blood. Babbling on … You know, I was scared to death at that point.

But when Cal Rerucha sketched out that part of the crime to the jury, he stuck to the facts; he wasn’t buying the proposition that Aaron was a victim that night.

“[Mr. McKinney] is hurt from the blow on the head,” he stated bluntly. “He talks about the incident to his girlfriend … Kristen realizes there is a man either dead or badly hurt on the plains of Laramie, Wyoming. They do nothing.”