The Book of Matt (7 page)

The windows of the single-story building nearest me were covered with wrinkled shades; some were torn and yellowed with age. No sign of life inside or anywhere else.

I got out of the car slowly. Just then a thick metal door on the side of the house opened and Doc O’Connor’s surly voice bellowed from within, “What’s the matter, can’t you boys from back east follow instructions?”

Seconds later I stood with Doc, a craggy-looking man with a graying mustache and short ponytail, in a corner of his ranch-style bedroom where we faced a bank of video monitors and computer screens. Staring back at us were black-and-white surveillance pictures of my parked car outside, from every possible angle. I tried to maintain a friendly composure, pretending not to be intimidated or even surprised.

“Don’t worry, you’re safe here,” Doc teased. “If anyone tries to get past these cameras, I’ve got my rifles.”

Studying his face and eyes I could see that he must have been a knockout as a young man. During another visit with Doc months later, as he nursed a rum and Coke at his kitchen table, he confirmed as much when he pulled out a dusty leather-bound album with photos taken in his twenties.

Slowly, over several long, meandering conversations, he loosened up and spoke of things in his past he had long kept hidden: from his adventures performing in porn films and the glories of being paid “big bucks” for sex with Hollywood movie stars and a married bank president to encounters with the infamous gangster “Chauncey” Smaldone and the Denver mob.

“I was a hustler,” Doc confessed unabashedly.

According to Doc, he first met Aaron McKinney when Aaron was sixteen or seventeen — one of several local young men with problems whom Doc took under his wing, though some in Laramie allege that his motives have not always been altruistic.

In mid-summer 1998, several weeks before Matthew’s attack, Aaron, his girlfriend Kristen, and their infant son lived in an apartment on Doc’s property in Bosler “rent-free.” The arrangement they had was that Aaron would do “odd jobs” for him, Doc explained as he gave me a tour of the dim, windowless apartment, situated in a huge warehouse across the road from his home.

Many of my early interviews with Doc occurred in out-of-the-way places. Sometimes he would offer to take me out in one of his stretch
limos “for a drive out to the mountains,” but I politely declined. He said he wanted to show me Centennial, Wyoming, a rustic town about thirty miles from Laramie, and Woods Landing, another remote spot where he had driven Aaron and a few of his friends for parties in the limo.

For a long time Doc continued to say that he had just met Matthew a few days before the attack and that he “never saw Aaron and Matthew together.” But as new sources began to tell me a different story, Doc’s story began to change, too. He acknowledged that Matthew had, indeed, visited him in Bosler with his friend Alex Trout months before the murder, although Doc was quick to add, “Matt didn’t say very much, so I didn’t really remember him.”

Doc also described a rowdy incident in the limo with Aaron and two unidentified male friends — long before Matthew was killed.

“They dropped a couple of girls off at home first and told me to take them to Woods Landing,” he recalled. “I got paid to be the driver and mind my own business, which I always did, until I heard someone break a champagne glass in the back. I slid the window open and told Aaron he’d have to pay me for the glass.”

Doc stared at me, pausing for effect. “The three guys were buck naked back there, playing around together. Aaron said, ‘No problem, Doc, I’ll take care of it.’ I just shut my window and didn’t say another word.”

Only after I questioned Doc intermittently over months did he concede, “Matt may have been one of the guys in back [of the limo] with Aaron … I can’t say for sure.”

I also asked Doc numerous times about one of the many businesses he owned, called Lincoln Escort Service. He answered with a straight face that it was “a service to escort big trucks with heavy loads on the interstate.” I told him that an “escort service” means something altogether different where I come from.

But Doc stuck to that story, even after boasting that he had arranged to bring Denver-based female strippers to Wyoming to perform in a bar there.

“They call ’em ‘exotic dancers’ now, but they do the same thing they’ve always done,” he said with a cool shrug.

I was reminded again of the anonymous letter I found at the courthouse long before, stating that Aaron “was acting the part of ‘straight trade’ ” and “his excuse was: he was only doing it for the money to spend on his girlfriend.” Did Doc run an escort service that employed young males like Aaron and perhaps Russell, too? And where did Matthew fit in Doc’s schemes, if at all?

What I thought was just an innocuous suggestion by Doc in an early interview would later lead me to a seedy hustler bar in Denver called Mr. Bill’s, as well as a few other gay bars along the city’s Broadway strip. Those late-night excursions prompted me, in turn, to go back to Doc with more questions — and more confusion.

For reasons I did not understand, Doc had also divulged that shortly after Matthew’s attack he had hired a prominent defense attorney to represent him. If Doc had nothing to do with the murder and Cal Rerucha had never brought charges against him, why did he need a lawyer? Each time I broached the subject, Doc deflected my questions by shifting to something else.

“There are some things you’ll never get me to talk about,” he swore.

Doc made no attempt to hide his fear that “someone might put a bullet in my back some night when I’m driving home from the Eagles,” a Laramie fraternal club in which he’d been an active member and trustee for decades. He always drove into town and back home again on Highway 30, the same deserted, two-lane county road that first took me to Bosler to meet him in 2002.

EIGHT

Palomino Drive

During the summer of 2002 I also began a series of extensive phone interviews with Aaron McKinney, who was then incarcerated at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. It would not be until 2004, however, after he was transferred to a prison in Nevada, that correctional authorities allowed us to meet face-to-face. Aaron’s father, Bill McKinney, a long-haul truck driver whom I first met in June 2002 in the snack bar of an Arizona golf course, facilitated my introduction to him.

Initially the elder McKinney was gruff. He told me he was still bitter over the media’s treatment of his son, which he felt had compromised the fairness of his 1999 trial. He also complained that reporters had taken his own remarks out of context, in order to cast him “as an anti-gay redneck, just like Aaron.”

According to an article in
The Denver Post
a few days after the attack on Matthew Shepard, Bill McKinney stated, “The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual. Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news.”

Bill McKinney’s words — along with a televised interview that week in which Aaron’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, claimed that “[Aaron and Russ] just wanted to beat [Matthew] up bad enough to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people” — amounted to pouring gasoline on a blazing fire. Within days more than fifty vigils, marches, and demonstrations protesting the attack on Matthew took place around the nation. After such blatant statements by Aaron McKinney’s father and girlfriend, was there any reason to doubt anti-gay hate as the motive?

Whatever other traits Bill McKinney and his son may share, their sharp facial features and eyes bear an uncanny resemblance, right down to their tight, slightly upturned lips when they’re pissed off
about something. After meeting Aaron in person, I could never be in his father’s presence without having the discomfiting sense that Aaron was there, too.

Bill McKinney only agreed to talk with me, he said, “because you seem to have an open mind on the case, with more questions than answers.” I couldn’t help but wonder just the same: Would he have given me the time of day had I disclosed up front that I’m gay? One personal paradox of revisiting Matthew’s murder was my decision to remain closeted with several sources, at least early on. I was concerned that my investigation might be perceived as having a gay agenda and that sources in Wyoming might hesitate to open up. But it later became apparent that Bill McKinney knew I was gay from the start and was unfazed.

Over many cups of coffee at Shari’s twenty-four-hour restaurant on Laramie’s North 3rd Street — and despite my initial skepticism — I slowly warmed to Bill’s no-nonsense disposition. Never once did he suggest his son was anything less than fully culpable for his explosive violence against Matthew Shepard. On the contrary, he volunteered, “Aaron has always had a terrible temper, going way, way back.”

But like others, Bill McKinney was unconvinced that hatred of gays was behind the attack. He reminded me of something I had heard from others in Laramie: that at the time of the murder both Kristen Price’s mother and the mother of Russell Henderson’s twenty-year-old girlfriend, Chasity Pasley, were in lesbian relationships and “there was no evidence whatsoever of Aaron or Russell expressing anti-gay feelings.”

“Aaron lived in the same house with Kristen’s mother for months and they never had a problem,” Bill recalled.

When I asked him if it was possible that Aaron had been sexually involved with other males, he said he had “no knowledge of it” but appeared to shrug my question off as dumb or irrelevant.

“Come on, Steve, we’ve all experimented one way or another,” he added without the slightest diffidence. “Most people that tell you they haven’t are full of it.”

Had Bill McKinney not screened me and given his okay, Aaron would not have agreed to an interview. He made that clear in our first phone conversation on August 1, 2002. Both of us began talking
with some trepidation, as we knew the call was being recorded by the Wyoming Department of Corrections. This was also the first time Aaron violated the oath of silence that was part of his 1999 sentencing agreement. Immediately following his conviction, he spared himself the possibility of a death sentence by agreeing, among other conditions, to refrain from discussing the case with the media.

By the time of our first interview, I had been commissioned by
The New York Times Magazine
to write an article reexamining the murder. Any moral reservations I had about persuading Aaron McKinney to talk with me were overshadowed by the host of troubling questions that his trial had left unanswered and the media never bothered to probe. A few renowned legal scholars even argued that the suppression of his right to free speech was unconstitutional.

As I began communicating with both Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson that summer, my foremost challenge was convincing each of them to talk openly when they had nothing to gain, beyond helping to set the record straight. And could I depend on anything they told me when each had lied often in the past?

During many hours of phone interviews with Aaron in August and September 2002, he was mostly cooperative, yet blunt and unintimidated — as if he had no time to waste on formalities. He acknowledged in short order that he’d been a drug dealer for three years prior to the murder and that he’d done “some fucked-up things.” But what he regretted most, he said, “is that I’ll never be able to be there for my son,” who was then four.

When I eventually brought up Matthew Shepard and asked how they first met, Aaron’s tone changed. He grew more sullen and cautious. He said that on the night of the crime “Matt came over first” at the Fireside bar.

“Matt was just tryin’ to buddy up,” he stated offhandedly, without elaborating further.

I was surprised to hear Aaron use the more personal
Matt
. Among his family and friends Matthew Shepard went by Matt, but in court documents and media accounts he was consistently referred to as Matthew.

“I’d been up for about a week,” Aaron mentioned out of the blue. “I didn’t know I was doin’ it. I thought I was beating the dude up.” Then, with barely a pause, he asked me for a second or third time, “So what else can I help you with? Is that all your questions for me?”

Aaron liked to abruptly change subjects on me like that, stopping his remarks midstream to ask if I had “any other questions” or “what else do you need to know?” Sometimes a long silence would follow, or I’d hear him talking cheerfully to other inmates in the background.

Aaron had already informed me there were “certain things” he wouldn’t talk about, including the names of people with whom he had dealt drugs. “No talking out of school” was how he put it.

But when I finally grew comfortable enough to confront him about his conflicting stories — and some outright lies — he brushed me off by switching subjects again, or telling me another inmate needed to use the phone. In nearly every conversation, there was the unstated threat that he’d hang up on me and that would be it.

Yet the longer we spoke, the better I got at knowing when to press Aaron and when to back off.

I asked him several times if he had known Matthew Shepard before the crime and his answer was always “No.” But it was obvious that the question more than irritated him; it put him on edge. He had a similar reaction when I asked about Doc O’Connor. Although he admitted knowing Doc, he was vague at first about whether we were referring to the same person.

“You mean the old dude who lives up there in that weird little town, what’s it called again?” he asked unconvincingly.

“Bosler,” I answered.

“That’s it,” Aaron said with feigned surprise. “Yeah, I know who you mean. What about him?”

Why was he being evasive about Doc O’Connor? Several weeks before the murder, Aaron, Kristen, and their newborn son had moved into a makeshift apartment on Doc’s property. They only lasted a short time at Doc’s before they moved back into town to the Ranger Motel, where the manager was a friend of Bill McKinney. But soon they relocated once more, this time to an apartment owned by Aaron’s
boss — roofing contractor Arsenio Lemus. Oddly, though, when they were arrested a few weeks later, both Aaron and Kristen gave the police Doc’s phone number as their own.