The Book of Matt (5 page)

On a Saturday morning in October 2000, Rerucha took my screenplay and retreated to his office, leaving me in the law library down the hall — a tranquil, wood-paneled study where he had often conferred with Matthew’s parents during trial recesses.

As I leafed through articles in a carton of manila folders, I noticed a handwritten letter that appeared to be misplaced. The two-page correspondence was neatly penned on notebook paper and addressed to “Mr. Rerucha.” On the bottom of the second page, the letter was signed “Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.” Its anonymous origin immediately seized my interest, but I worried that I had stumbled on something I wasn’t supposed to see.

Although the letter had no date, I quickly realized it had been written during Aaron McKinney’s trial the previous year. McKinney’s lawyers had tried to present a so-called gay panic defense, arguing that an unwanted sexual advance by Matthew Shepard triggered memories of homosexual abuse McKinney had suffered at the age of seven, causing him to react violently. Like others who followed the case I was infuriated by that legal strategy, which sought to place the blame on the victim.

The letter began:

Dear Mr. Rerucha,

I was shocked to hear that Aaron McKinney’s attorneys claim gay panic in their defense … Aaron and Russ were quite familiar with gay guys and have frequented gay bars. They became aware of the fact that they had a valuable asset in their pants and that gay guys would give them shelter, food and money in return for a few minutes pleasure … Even though [Aaron] was acting the part of “straight trade,” he was appalled that he really did like doing it with other guys. Aaron always felt guilty that he let another guy do him. His excuse was: he was only doing it for the money to spend on his girlfriend. Aaron always questioned his own truthfulness as to why he was really doing it. Deep down inside, a small part of him really liked some homosexual action …

I was aware by then that one of the alleged “gay guys,” whom the author identified as Thomas O’Connor, was a Laramie chauffeur that everyone knew as “Doc,” and that Doc O’Connor had also been a friend of Matthew Shepard. Doc was portrayed in several magazine stories as a folksy, somewhat eccentric, cowboylike character who had befriended Matthew a few days before the attack, when Matthew hired a limo to take him to a Colorado dance club.

Yet according to every news account I had read, Matthew had never met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson before — they were “strangers.”

Could the letter’s claims that “Aaron and Russ were quite familiar with gay guys” and that Aaron “really did like doing it with other guys” be some kind of perverse joke? However, if there was any truth to the letter, I had to assume there were other hidden facts around the case. Its author seemed to know Aaron McKinney intimately but felt safer remaining anonymous. Why? What else did he or she know? And where did Doc O’Connor fit? Was he the link between Matthew and his killers, despite his repeated public statements to the contrary?

I was also concerned that I had betrayed Cal Rerucha’s trust by reading a confidential communication. Although we had become friends, I wasn’t ready to discuss the letter with him yet. I needed time to consider its contents and decide what they meant for the screenplay I had just completed. An anonymous letter is hardly reliable as evidence, but the allegations it contained — and its mention of Doc — deserved further investigation.

Pushing aside my anxious thoughts, I quietly photocopied the letter and returned the original to its folder.

That afternoon I had lunch with Rerucha at the Overland restaurant in Laramie’s downtown historic district, alongside the once-bustling Union Pacific rail yard. I was puzzled when he commended my screenplay.

“Most of it rings very true,” he said, “especially the trial scenes.”

He assured me that I was “on the right track,” which only confused me more. But I also appreciated that just as I had chosen to remain silent about the letter, his duty as a prosecutor obliged him to be prudent in the extreme.

Two days later as I was preparing to leave town, I asked Rerucha for directions to the secluded fence where Matthew’s fatal beating had taken place. For reasons I could not explain I had never wanted to visit the site before. Perhaps I was superstitious about returning to the scene of such a hopelessly brutal crime. But I felt drawn there on the day of my departure and was surprised when Rerucha offered to drive me himself.

I had spent a good deal of time in Laramie by then, yet could not remember a day when the town’s pristine high-desert surroundings looked more inviting. The cloudless sky was a luminous azure, and the air crisp and dry with a light autumn gust. Even the dull, brush-covered hills had an almost otherworldly radiance in the noonday sun.

As Rerucha steered his Oldsmobile sedan onto a rutted trail at the edge of the prairie, he waved to a state trooper who was parking his patrol car in the driveway of an adjacent ranch home. Rerucha’s attention drifted for several seconds. Gazing into the distance, he shook his head and muttered something, then explained that on the night
Matthew was attacked the same trooper, Dan Dyer, had just arrived home in his vehicle, parking in exactly the same spot, when he noticed a pickup with its taillights out heading into town. It would turn out to be Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson fleeing the crime scene, while Matthew was left behind, bleeding profusely in the bitter cold, slumped against a fence post.

The road in front of us suddenly gave way to rockier terrain. Rerucha parked there, and we got out to walk the rest of the way. Cresting a low embankment a few steps ahead of me, Rerucha looked into the gully below and discovered that the fence was no longer in its place — it had been moved.

He wasn’t surprised, he said, as the owner of the property had grown weary of a steady stream of visitors trudging across his land. The pine fence where Matthew had been found pistol-whipped and unconscious was now something of a shrine for travelers passing through town on the interstate and more committed pilgrims who trekked from farther away.

Within minutes Rerucha and I found the fence in a nearby ravine: a simple, crosshatched log barrier with a spray of dried roses dangling from one of its beams, their color bleached pink by the sun.

As we stood there silently for several long minutes, I thought of the college freshman who had fallen off his mountain bike on an October evening two years earlier, believing at first that he’d come upon a Halloween scarecrow. But then he saw blood shining on Matthew’s face and ran to get help.

I also remembered fragments of Dennis Shepard’s bittersweet words as he faced Aaron McKinney in court.

“You left [Matt] out there by himself but he wasn’t alone,” Dennis had said. “There were his lifelong friends. The beautiful night sky with the stars and the moon … and the sun to shine on him one more time. One more cool, wonderful, autumn day. And through it all, the smell of sagebrush and the scent of pine trees from the Snowy Range. And the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind.”

Standing in that place, I felt as if I were being challenged to take a second look at the whole case; to somehow pick up where Cal Rerucha had left off. Rerucha’s mission as prosecutor had been the pursuit
of justice, but if there were more complex truths behind Matthew’s murder — as I now suspected — was it a justice that was lacking or incomplete?

What I thought would be the end of a journey, the completion of my screenplay, was only a prologue. With the letter unearthed at the courthouse, a multitude of new questions surfaced. If Aaron McKinney, who reportedly targeted Matthew because he was gay, was not “straight” himself, what else was going on that October night when he unleashed his rage?

Robbery was well established as a motive during McKinney’s trial, yet according to the accepted version of events he and Russell Henderson had not known Matthew previously. But given the casual ease with which the three young men were seen leaving the Fireside Lounge together, there had to be something missing from this picture.

After returning home, I delved once more into the hefty archive of research material I had assembled. I was intrigued by portions of McKinney’s transcribed confession to police on October 9, 1998, which had been under seal for more than a year along with hundreds of other case documents.

Asked by Detective Rob DeBree about his conversation with Matthew at the Fireside bar shortly before the attack, McKinney stated, “He said he could turn us on to some cocaine or something, some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex.”

Media coverage at the time made little mention of drugs as a possible factor and did not report that an exchange of drugs for sex had allegedly been discussed that night. McKinney also told DeBree and Detective Ben Fritzen, to whom he confessed, that he hadn’t used methamphetamine in more than two months. Yet both officers were aware from previous investigations that he was a longtime meth user and dealer. Why was the subject of meth raised only briefly with McKinney and then dropped for the remainder of his confession?

I was further baffled by Cal Rerucha’s admission to me shortly before I left Laramie that he had declined an invitation from the Clinton administration to go to Washington, including a visit to the White House. In his usual terse fashion all Rerucha would say was that a couple of his law enforcement colleagues, who had teamed
up with Judy Shepard to lobby for a federal hate crime bill, were “upset” with him for not joining them in the capital. For an elected Democratic official to rebuff the Clinton administration seemed like political suicide to me, but evidently Rerucha had his reasons. What were they?

With questions like these mounting, I decided to reexamine Matthew Shepard’s murder with the eye of a journalist, a decision that unwittingly grew into a decadelong investigation.

SIX

“Life Training”

During my first year attempting to research Matthew’s murder as a journalist, I worked independently and only part-time while continuing to teach. But each time I returned to Laramie, I became more troubled by the things I was hearing — and more confused.

One Wyoming law enforcement official with intimate knowledge of the murder case agreed to talk with me, but only on condition of anonymity because he said he feared for his family’s safety. In a strained voice he told me of two individuals who might harm his wife or kids while he was away from Laramie working. One of the named individuals, who had suspected criminal ties, “might put a hit on them,” he said. The second individual, whose name I recognized, held a high-ranking position at the county courthouse.

But despite his fear, the official stated unflinchingly, “Shepard’s murder had nothing to do with his sexual preferences” — an assertion I would come to hear often during interviews.

I was stunned by his claims. Threats of mob-style violence for talking openly about the murder? If Matthew’s killing had “nothing to do with his sexual preferences,” what was behind it then?

Until I interviewed this official, it had never occurred to me that organized crime or local corruption might have helped conceal vital truths around the murder. But very quickly I realized that I’d better proceed with extreme caution.

As I asked around Laramie for information on Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, I found a number of their peers also unwilling to talk on the record. A few became hostile when I inquired about their drug activities. Many of my early phone calls and letters to potential sources went unanswered; doors were sometimes shut in my face; and a few who agreed to meet with me never showed up. But on
the irregular occasions when I got lucky, a single interview could lead to several new sources. Some were willing to go on the record, or at least allow me to use their name to enlist the cooperation of others.

The aforementioned law enforcement official who requested anonymity tipped me off that I should contact a Laramie attorney named Glenn Duncan. Duncan had been disbarred from practicing law due to an alleged misuse of client funds, but before his fall from grace he had worked for a time in the firm of Wyoming legal powerhouse Gerry Spence. Skeptical of Duncan’s credibility yet also intrigued, I arranged to meet him in his relaxed office near the University of Wyoming campus.

A husky, middle-aged man with a forceful handshake, Duncan began the conversation by telling me that he was only consenting to an interview “on the slim hope that someone in the media finally tells the truth about Shepard’s murder.” Although he would prove to be a reliable source of information on Aaron McKinney, he warned that I had my work cut out for me “because of all the misinformation out there.”

Two and a half years before the murder, Duncan had tried to help McKinney break his addiction to drugs — mainly methamphetamine — and had nearly succeeded, he said.

In their private conversations, McKinney had confided to Duncan that “he felt [like] a worthless piece of shit” and was “full of resentment” for the local surgeon who had botched his mother’s hysterectomy, causing her death when McKinney was sixteen.

I had already heard from Cal Rerucha and others about the wrongful death settlement of nearly one hundred thousand dollars that McKinney had received in 1995, and how fast he had blown through the money.

But regarding McKinney’s low self-esteem, Duncan added, “Aaron would pick fights that he couldn’t win.”

Before meeting Duncan, I’d been told by another McKinney friend about a night when a group of their cohorts were hanging out at “The Buck,” a popular downtown saloon near the railroad tracks.
McKinney had spotted the surgeon’s son, Richie Shine, in the bar and attacked him in a rage. McKinney’s friends quickly jumped in and pulled him off Shine, who fled. Seething with profanity, McKinney promised to catch up with the whole Shine family.

According to Duncan, in April 1996 he invited McKinney to a “Life Training” workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado. During a weekend of intensive group sessions, “Aaron started seeing the lies your mind [can tell] you,” Duncan said. But by Sunday, McKinney failed to show up for the morning meeting. Duncan went looking for him and “encouraged him to face his shame,” then drove him back to Fort Collins for more “Life Training.” For a brief period afterward, “Aaron seemed determined to change,” but the weekend intervention didn’t last and he was soon back on drugs.