The Book of Matt (6 page)

Duncan said he knew nothing specific about McKinney’s dealing activities, yet he was convinced that aspects of the Shepard murder had been “covered up.” When I asked why he felt so strongly, he cited his unrelated experiences as a lawyer in the railroad industry, where he had “witnessed” corporate cover-ups of accidents and deaths involving railway workers.

The more time I spent in Laramie, however, the more frequently I heard rumors of a cover-up around the murder. Many, like Duncan, questioned the real motives behind the crime and whether Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were the only participants in the plan to rob Matthew.

The mother of one of McKinney’s male friends, who said she had known Aaron “since he was a teenager,” stated that she’d watched both young men and several others in their circle succumb to methamphetamine addiction and eventually to dealing to support their habit.

“Aaron ended up getting into meth and his whole personality started changing,” she recalled. “He was more narcissistic … in that he had to have those drugs … He had to have money and he had to have drugs … [They] just basically took control of his life. And if you tried to talk to Aaron about it he would just get angry and tell you to mind your own fucking business.”

These frequent allegations that McKinney was involved with drugs — and that Laramie itself was rife with corruption — seemed to be more than local gossip. But at the same time, none of the sources I had spoken with claimed to have direct knowledge of a drug component to Matthew’s murder nor did they offer hard evidence to support the theory of a cover-up.

SEVEN

Doc’s Frontier Village

A few months before I met Glenn Duncan and heard about Aaron McKinney’s abortive “Life Training,” I’d located a former employee of the Fireside Lounge who had worked on the night Matthew left the bar with Aaron and Russell. The employee, Dillon
^*
, whose name I found in a court file, had been questioned at length by police but had avoided contact with the media. At first he was taken aback when I called his mother’s listed number in Laramie and left a message for him. Luckily she hadn’t asked who I was or why I was calling.

Had he known it was a journalist writing about the Shepard murder he “never would’ve returned the call,” Dillon told me later. But after repeated assurances that I would not use his name in print, he agreed to meet for an early breakfast at Reenie’s Beanery, a friendly, home-style restaurant in West Laramie. He said the place was a little out of the way, and we weren’t likely to draw attention there.

Reenie’s was crowded on the snowy morning I arrived, mostly men in thick flannels and work clothes packing in a big breakfast to start the day. It was easy to pick out Dillon because he was the only person sitting at a table alone. Tall and clean-cut, then in his late twenties, he could have been another local about to brave the frigid weather working on a highway crew or plowing the town streets.

Dillon got friendlier once I explained that I was looking into aspects of the Shepard murder that had perhaps been neglected or overlooked. But I was also aware that he was speaking in a very low voice, as if he was worried that someone might be listening to our conversation. Slowly he recounted his memories of seeing Aaron, Russell, and Matthew at the Fireside that October night — from the time Matthew arrived “between 10 and 10:30
PM
,” to Aaron and Russell’s arrival about an hour later, and the uneventful departure of the three sometime after midnight.

According to Dillon, Matthew was “sitting next to the wait-station, next to an older woman, but for the most part [he] sat by himself.” He said the woman, who had blond shoulder-length hair and looked like she was in her mid-thirties, never moved until the bar closed, long after the three men had left together. It was the first time I had heard of a blond woman at the bar. As far as I knew, she hadn’t been mentioned in police reports; nor had I come across anyone fitting her description on the official witness list.

Dillon also recalled seeing Aaron and Russell at the Fireside “the week prior,” which appeared to be the same evening on which a female friend of Russell claimed she had waited in the truck while Aaron and Russell went inside so Aaron could conduct “some business.” Dillon thought he had seen both men in the bar “10 to 15 times,” with more frequent visits in the weeks preceding the attack. Later, Aaron himself confirmed to me that he had dealt drugs at the Fireside and other bars but denied any involvement by Russell in his dealing activities.

Before we finished breakfast, I told Dillon I was investigating the role sex and drugs may have played in the murder. He urged me to “look into Doc O’Connor in Bosler,” but he cautioned me to “be very careful cause Doc can get nasty.”

“He’s into all kinds of things up there,” Dillon said. “Trust me, he can be violent when he wants to.”

Dillon himself had been brutally assaulted outside the Fireside one evening after Matthew’s murder, though he declined to say who his attacker was.

In a more subdued tone he confided that the reason the whole truth of the murder never came out was, “there are some cops in town who want it that way.” I was baffled, but before I could probe further he revealed that several members of his family had been respected police officers in Laramie, “so I know what I’m talking about.” I could see Dillon wanted to leave it at that, so I didn’t press him.

I also didn’t tell him that I already had an interview scheduled with Doc O’Connor for that afternoon. Doc and I had spoken several times on the phone but he’d let me know right off that he would only talk openly in person. After hearing Dillon’s warning, I thought about canceling the interview. I was conflicted. It was obvious that
Doc knew more than he told the media, though his reasons for withholding information were a mystery. In any case, it seemed impossible to write a more accurate account of the murder without hearing his story. But there was no one I could ask to go along with me; nor would Doc be pleased if I showed up with a companion. He had already insisted I come alone.

After breakfast, as I shook Dillon’s hand outside Reenie’s, he told me to let him know if there was anything else he could do. I got into my compact rental car, dwarfed in the parking lot by several heavy-duty trucks, and turned onto Snowy Range Road, heading back to the Holiday Inn where I was staying to collect my thoughts about Doc O’Connor. I had asked Doc the day before if we could meet in town but he was firm; if I wanted to see him I had to drive out to his place in Bosler.

Moments after leaving Dillon, I noticed a police car in my rearview mirror, close enough to see the young male cop who was driving. Our eyes met briefly but I was sure I hadn’t been speeding. I assumed he would turn in another direction once we got to the intersection of I-25 and 3rd Street, which led downtown. Instead he continued to tailgate me until we pulled into the parking lot of the Holiday Inn. I felt my heart begin to race. The cop made no attempt to hide that he was following me.

As a precaution when I checked into the motel, I had asked that my name and room number not be given out. But I was suddenly nervous about going to my room alone, even in broad daylight. Instead I parked quickly, hurried into the lobby and past the front desk to a restroom in an adjacent corridor, and tried to calm myself.

Was the cop someone Dillon knew? Maybe checking me out to be sure I was the journalist I claimed to be?

I hadn’t bothered to look more closely at the car to see if it bore the insignia of the Laramie Police Department or the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. Or maybe the cop was a state trooper? Did Cal Rerucha ask him to keep an eye out, knowing I was looking into things that had caused the community a lot of distress? Or was something else going on? Was I being warned to stop what I was doing, pack up, and leave town?

I stood anxiously in front of the restroom mirror and soaked a paper towel in cold water to wipe the sweat from my forehead. I saw how scruffy I looked, with a week or more of beard growth, an appearance I had deliberately cultivated for return trips to Laramie. It wasn’t much of a disguise — hooded gray sweatshirt, jeans, old Timberlands, a University of Wyoming Cowboys ball cap, and the faded Carhartt — but the last thing I wanted to do was announce the arrival of a reporter from New York.

When minutes passed and the cop didn’t walk in behind me, my body temperature began to cool. The worst of my panic was over, but I still reached into the zippered pocket of my jacket for a little white pill, a five-milligram Ativan, and swallowed it with a palmful of water from the faucet. For a few seconds I thought of the debilitating panic attacks Matthew had experienced and his sardonic shorthand for pills just like this one. “Mother’s Little Helpers” he called them, borrowing from the Rolling Stones song of the same name.

I still couldn’t make up my mind about Doc but I composed myself and returned to the lobby, hoping to find the police car gone. Instead the young cop was hunched over the front desk talking to a female clerk and looking over a sheet of paper. As I walked past, they seemed a little flummoxed but gave me a friendly nod. Was that my registration form he was reviewing, or was my paranoia spinning out of control?

I left the Holiday Inn and drove north on 3rd Street into the heart of Laramie’s downtown. When I finally convinced myself that I was no longer being watched or followed, I felt enormous relief. The last thing I wanted to do was trouble Cal Rerucha in the middle of a busy workday, least of all to expose my fear. But the sense of being an unwelcome stranger didn’t go away.

Driving past rows of charming little storefronts and historic brick facades — the very picture of a western, all-American college town — felt surreal, as if I had drifted into the dreamlike landscape of David Lynch’s
Twin Peaks
or
Blue Velvet
.

I thought of Matthew again and how Laramie might have looked to him as a smart and worldly yet confused twenty-one-year-old. I also speculated about some of the dangers he might have succumbed
to before his encounter with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson at the Fireside bar.

Any suggestions that their meeting that night could have been planned around drugs, or some combination of drugs and sex, had been dismissed by the media, based largely on the opinions of a couple of Matthew’s friends.

“There was some speculation that [Matthew] was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible,” an article in
Vanity Fair
stated. “Matthew’s friends also find it hard to picture him being sexually drawn to Aaron or Russell. Nor do they think that Matthew was interested in a threesome.”

And I continued to wonder where Doc O’Connor fit.

Before driving to the tiny town of Bosler to meet Doc, I decided to call Cal Rerucha for a word of advice. I was sitting in my car outside the county courthouse on Grand Avenue, still struggling with the anxiety that had taken hold of me that morning. I was about to leave town on a lonely two-lane road, headed eighteen miles north to a place I’d been told resembled a ghost town from the Old West, replete with ramshackle cabins, a former saloon, and a whorehouse. Doc, who owned most of Bosler, had renamed the property “Doc’s Western Village,” hoping, as he later told me, to attract visitors there as a tourist destination. Central to the site’s appeal would be showcasing the twenty-five-foot white stretch limousine “that Matt Shepard used to ride in.”

For his part, Doc contributed significantly to the mythologized view of Matthew that the media quickly adopted as its own.

“Matthew knew he was going to … get beaten or strangled — he wasn’t sure which,” Doc told one reporter. “He said, ‘When I get done in because I’m gay, if one gay person and one straight person come together and stop to think that we’re both people, that would be something’ … And then, four days later [after the attack], the whole country comes together. He’s bigger than kings and queens. One person told me he wanted to look it up in the Book of Revelation.”

But in other interviews Doc seemed to contradict himself. He told a different reporter that he didn’t think the murder had anything to
do with Matthew being gay, and said he was still fond of Aaron and Russell.

In the years before and after the murder, while he waited for prospective investors in his “Western Village,” Doc ran assorted other businesses on the main street — dealing in antiques, used cars, furniture, and, according to some sources, illicit items as well.

But talking with Cal Rerucha for a few minutes allayed my fears. He assured me that “a visit to Tom O’Connor’s won’t be life-threatening,” yet he also indicated in a roundabout way that Doc had been involved in marginal activities for decades and that his rambling pronouncements shouldn’t be taken at face value.

I told Rerucha I would call him as soon as I got back to town. “If you don’t hear from me, I hope you’ll send some deputies out,” I said half joking.

I couldn’t find the courage to mention the cop who had tailed me to the Holiday Inn.

“Tom’s an interesting fellow,” Rerucha added with some hesitation. “Who knows, maybe he’ll have something to say.”

Later I learned that Cal Rerucha had been Doc’s attorney back in the 1980s when he’d been in private practice. Doc had sold him the antique oak desk in his courthouse office — where we often sat for interviews — “at a bargain price.” According to Doc, it was an heirloom that had belonged to his great-grandfather. Rerucha seemed certain that his former client had no part in Matthew’s murder, yet he also intimated that if anyone knew what was really behind it, Doc did.

Following the directions to Bosler that Doc had given, I pulled off Highway 30 into a scrubby driveway that led to several outbuildings and trailers. Uncertain about where to go next, I dialed him on my cell phone.

“Just pull in where I told you,” a raspy male voice answered at the other end. “Park there on the left and come to the door right in front of you.” Before I could respond, the connection went dead.