Copyright © 2013 Stephen Jimenez
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce
selections from this book, write to:
Steerforth Press L.L.C., 45 Lyme Road, Suite 208,
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eISBN: 978-1-58642-215-8
v3.1
This book is dedicated to my mother,
ROSE LEE JIMENEZ,
who paved the way with love and generosity
and to the memory of my grandmother,
JUSTINE GOMEZ,
who taught me to believe.
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Author’s Note
PART ONE: Darkness on the Edge of Town One: Father and Son
Two: Daphne
Three: The Little Dude
Four: Spider’s Web
Five: The Letter
Six: “Life Training”
Seven: Doc’s Frontier Village
Eight: Palomino Drive
Nine: Wildfire
Ten: The Bad Karma Kid
Eleven: The Blue Masque
Twelve: Indian Springs
Thirteen: Alibi
Fourteen: The Mile High City
Fifteen: Tristen
Sixteen: The Buck
Seventeen: Memphis
Eighteen: Family Circle
Nineteen: Sleeping Dogs
PART TWO: The Book Of Matt Twenty: One Spring Night
Twenty-one: The Tornado
Twenty-two: Friends
Twenty-three: The Ranger
Twenty-four: Honor Camp
Photo Inserts
Twenty-five: The Library
Twenty-six: The Fireside Lounge
Twenty-seven: Sounds of Silence
Twenty-eight: Witnesses
Twenty-nine: The Consensus
Thirty: ACDC
PART THREE: Rogers Canyon Thirty-one: The Little Bastard
Thirty-two: Shadow People
Thirty-three: Soldier Girl
Thirty-four: The Angel of Death
PART FOUR: The Circle Unbroken Thirty-five: Closet Case
Thirty-six: An Easy Mark
Thirty-seven: Big Stone Gap
Thirty-eight: Missing Pieces
Epilogue
List of Sources
Acknowledgments
AUTHOR’S NOTE
All the material in this book is based on research and investigation that I began more than thirteen years ago in Laramie, Wyoming. My search for sources that could help illuminate the truth behind Matthew Shepard’s 1998 murder eventually took me to twenty states and Washington, DC. Portions of this material first appeared in an abbreviated form in a one-hour report I produced for ABC News 20/20 with my colleague Glenn Silber (“The Matthew Shepard Story: Secrets of a Murder,” 2004). Following that broadcast, I continued the investigation on my own.
Nearly fifteen years after Matthew’s gruesome beating on a lonely, windswept prairie, the story of his murder is not over, despite the fact that two perpetrators — Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson — were apprehended, convicted, and sent away for life. Tangled secrets of this landmark crime persist. Like hungry ghosts, they gnaw quietly and invisibly at facets of our collective soul that cling to a mythic innocence; to a morally simple world of blacks and whites that is, at best, ephemeral. Together we have enshrined Matthew’s tragedy as passion play and folktale, but hardly ever for the truth of what it was, or who he was — much to our own diminishment. As journalist Ellen Goodman observed about the false mythologizing of Private Jessica Lynch’s heroic exploits in the Iraq War, “There is something terrible about the alchemy that tries to turn a human into a symbol … To turn a human into a symbol, you have to take away the humanity.”
While writing this book, I have utilized voluminous public records and media accounts of the Shepard case, including the complete ABC News archive compiled during our investigation. I have also relied extensively on my own interviews with more than a hundred individuals who have firsthand knowledge of the case and/or its principals. These include McKinney and Henderson, the prosecutor, defense attorneys, law enforcement officers from several departments and agencies, judges and other officials, and an array of friends, family members, co-workers, and other associates of both Matthew and his assailants. The prosecutor alone was interviewed for more than 150 hours.
In some instances I have had privileged access to documents and information that were unavailable to journalists who reported on the 1998 crime and the trials that followed, as well as new sources that have emerged in the years since. I have also examined the records of several other state and federal criminal cases whose relevance will become clear in the story that follows.
Pseudonyms are sometimes used when a source would only agree to talk with me on condition of anonymity, either for the protection of privacy or out of legitimate fear of retaliation. In those instances an asterisk follows the pseudonym* the first time it appears in the text. All material not based on my personal observation has been carefully reconstructed from the statements, reminiscences, testimonies, communications, and/or notes of sources. A complete list of those sources is included in the appendix.
Though this is a work of nonfiction journalism, I have occasionally employed methods that are slightly less stringent to re-create the dialogue of characters — words I did not personally hear; nor could the characters themselves recall every word exactly from memory. But my intention throughout has been to remain faithful to the actual characters and events as they really happened.
At the end of the aforementioned ABC News report, 20/20 co-anchor Elizabeth Vargas acknowledged, “There is still a lot about the Matthew Shepard murder that we don’t know.” Even then, in 2004, there was a good deal more that we, the investigative team, did know but were not yet prepared — or permitted — to report. My additional investigation in the ensuing years picked up where that story left off, but the responsibility for all new material and any inadvertent mistakes or omissions is strictly my own.
— PART ONE —
Darkness on the Edge of Town
ONE
Father and Son
In February 2000 I went to Laramie, Wyoming, to begin work on a story whose essence I thought I knew before boarding the plane in New York. What I expected to find in the infamous college town was an abundance of detail to flesh out a narrative I had already accepted as fact. I went to research a screenplay about the October 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard — a crime widely perceived as the worst anti-gay attack in US history.
At the time I was teaching screenwriting at New York University and producing documentary films. Like millions of others who followed the news of Matthew’s beating and the subsequent trials of his assailants, I was appalled by the grotesque violence inflicted on this young man. According to some media reports, Matthew was burned with cigarettes and tortured while he begged for his life. As journalist Andrew Sullivan later recalled, “A lot of gay people, when they first heard of that horrifying event, felt punched in the stomach. It kind of encapsulated all our fears of being victimized … at the hands of people who hate us.”
By the time I arrived in Laramie I was a Johnny-come-lately. For more than a year the story of Matthew Shepard’s savage beating and “crucifixion” on a remote prairie fence had been told again and again in the national media. The murder trials had ended by early November 1999 and Matthew’s killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both twenty-two, had been sentenced to two consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. As fa
r as the media was concerned, the story was finally over.
From the very first reports of the October 6, 1998, attack, major news organizations provided a generally uniform account of the crime and the motives behind it. A sampling of newspaper and magazine stories painted a harrowing picture:
Shepard, 22, a first-year student at the University of Wyoming, paid dearly … allegedly for trusting two strangers enough at the Fireside Lounge to tell them he is gay. What followed was an atrocity that … forced the stunned community [of Laramie] to painfully confront the festering evil of anti-gay hatred, as the nation and its lawmakers watched.
— The Boston Globe
[Police] investigators turned up the following sequence of alleged events … Sometime Tuesday night, Shepard met Henderson and McKinney while at the Fireside Bar and Lounge. Shepard told them he was gay. They invited him to leave with them. All three got into McKinney’s father’s pickup, and the attack began.
— The Denver Post
Hungry for cash, perhaps riled by Shepard’s trusting admission that he was gay, they drove to the edge of town, police say, pistol-whipped him until his skull collapsed, and then left him tied like a fallen scarecrow — or a savior — to the bottom of a crosshatched fence.
— Newsweek
Albany County Sheriff Gary Puls, who suggested … that the beating was being investigated as a hate crime, said … the investigation … is “aggressively continuing” … Laramie Police Commander Dave O’Malley told the Associated Press that while robbery was the main motive, Shepard was targeted because he was gay …
— The Washington Post
What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard’s murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point … So he was stretched along a Wyoming fence not just as a dying young man but as a signpost. “When push comes to shove,” it says, “this is what we have in mind for gays.”
— Time magazine
While some gay leaders saw crucifixion imagery in Mr. Shepard’s death, others saw a different symbolism: the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future intruders.
— The New York Times
The chilling ordinariness of McKinney’s and Henderson’s small-town backgrounds reminded me of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. In glaring contrast, Matthew Shepard was characterized as “well educated” and “well traveled.” He was “a slight, unassuming young homosexual,” Newsweek said, “shy and gentle in a place where it wasn’t common for a young man to be either … [he was] sweet-tempered and boyishly idealistic.”
I was curious about who Matthew was as a person, just as I was bewildered by the warped motives of his killers. But what compelled me as a writer and a gay man to go to Wyoming was neither the brutality of the murder nor its suddenly iconic place in the national landscape. I first began to feel a visceral pull to Matthew’s story when I read the words of his father in a New York Times report on Aaron McKinney’s sentencing.
In a hushed Laramie courtroom on November 4, 1999, Dennis Shepard delivered a wrenching soliloquy that brought the tragedy home with fresh impact. His words made it clear that his life had been shattered; that nothing could undo the magnitude of his family’s loss. With TV satellite trucks and throngs of journalists lining the streets outside the county courthouse, and a SWAT team with high-powered rifles standing guard on nearby rooftops, Matthew’s father searched his soul for clues:
How do I talk about the loss I feel every time I think about Matt? How do I describe the empty pit in my heart and mind …
Why wasn’t I there when he needed me most? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? … What could I have done to be a better father and friend? How do I get an answer to those questions now?
Minutes later he faced his son’s murderer:
Mr. McKinney, your agreement to life without parole has taken yourself [sic] out of the spotlight … No years of publicity, no chance of commutation, no nothing. Just a miserable future and a more miserable end. It works [for] me.
My son was taught to look at all sides of an issue before … taking a stand … Such a stand cost him his life when he quietly let it be known that he was gay …
I would like nothing better than to see you die, Mr. McKinney … You robbed me of something very precious, and I will never forgive you for that …
That Matthew’s parents did not seek the death penalty for Aaron McKinney seemed to be a gesture of utmost compassion. Instead they were instrumental in forging an agreement that would allow McKinney to serve two consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole. Months earlier his accomplice, Russell Henderson, had already received the same sentence after agreeing to a last-minute plea bargain.
In exchange for life in prison, McKinney relinquished all his rights to appeal. He also agreed to refrain from talking to the media and was required to transfer any future earnings from his story to a foundation the Shepards had established in Matthew’s name. For media and public alike, the horrific story of Matthew’s murder came to its conclusion that day. As a screenwriter, I, too, saw a natural ending in McKinney’s imprisonment for life. Justice had been served, even triumphed, in a fair trial before a jury of his peers in his own hometown. Like many others, I experienced a somber catharsis when Dennis and Judy Shepard demonstrated mercy after McKinney had shown their son only hate.
On a cold February afternoon in 2000, I picked up a rental car at the Denver airport and made my way north on Interstate 25. I had only been to Wyoming once before, more than a decade earlier, under circumstances that I continued to savor despite my shaky arrival there. The night flight I had taken from Denver to Sheridan ended in an emergency landing after one of the two engines sputtered noisily, then stalled in mid-flight. As the plane jolted and rattled in the inky darkness over the prairie, a lone female flight attendant instructed us to tuck our heads between our legs and grab our ankles tightly because we would be descending fast. No one told us to pray but I could hear frightened murmurs throughout the cabin, including my own.
Somehow the pilots skillfully managed to bring us down on an airstrip in Cheyenne — a breathtaking landing that left no one injured but saw our plane surrounded by rescue crews. Welcome to Wyoming, I remember thinking as everyone on board broke into applause.
The next morning I flew on to Sheridan and began a five-week writing residency at a twenty-thousand-acre cattle ranch in the red-clay foothills of the Big Horn Mountains, home of the Ucross Foundation. Ucross, a speck of a town where a bullet-pocked highway sign still reads POPULATION: 25, has been unchanged for decades. Coming from my native Brooklyn, populated by more than 2 million, I immediately felt my senses being blown open by the boundless solitude and a quiet disrupted only by the lowing of cattle and the bleating of sheep or the occasional truck rumbling along Highway 14.
After several weeks there, an unusual inner tranquility merged with my sometimes-distracted yearning for social contact. Some nights, to offset the lonesome silence after hours at my typewriter, I walked over to Porky’s, a homey watering hole just across the blacktop from the ranch. Porky’s was also a single-pump gas station serving the local ranchers and people passing through. Along with a handful of other cowboy bars at the edge of the Big Horns, the place was bona fide Wyoming. Icy cold longnecks. An old jukebox stacked with Hank Williams, Vince Gill, and Loretta Lynn. Well-worn pool tables. And on Saturday nights a live musician or band cranking out pure honky-tonk. Fresh-faced cowboys and cowgirls barely old enough to drink thought nothing of driving forty or fifty miles for what had to be the sexiest two-stepping in the world.
Even as an outsider it was easy to blend in. People were friendly and unassuming and didn’t hesitate to jump into small talk with no introductions. From my spot at the bar I’d watch the couples swaying and gliding across the floor, slowly getting tipsy, flirting coyly like teenagers at a high school dance. A perfectly timed mating ritual, I thought with envy. Most of the cowboys were be
efy and well defined. In no time they’d be carrying good-sized guts over their big shiny belt buckles, but right now they were perfect specimens of ruddy virility.
Returning to Wyoming more than ten years later, with still-vivid recollections of its starkly beautiful landscape and bighearted locals, I struggled with the unspeakable brutality of Matthew Shepard’s murder. I tried to remember if I had felt safe during my earlier stay in Ucross when I was in my mid-thirties and single. Within the confines of the ranch and surrounding community, yes, I had felt blissfully protected. But I also recalled those nights when I wandered out alone to a few bars and one particular weekend at Porky’s when I’d come wildly close to tempting fate. It was my last Saturday night in Ucross, and everyone in the bar seemed to be suffering from a welcome case of spring fever. Brisk wintry smells had disappeared from the air overnight, replaced by something sweeter, more fragrant. I didn’t know if it was sagebrush or new grass, but I sucked in the delicious air in long gulps. In a few days I would be back in New York riding the subway.
A good-looking guy named Ron and his winsome girlfriend, Mary Lou, somewhere in their twenties, invited me back to their trailer for more drinking and partying after Porky’s closed. Before we left the bar, though, Ron asked me to hop on the back of his motorcycle for a quick spin, while Mary Lou waited. He wanted to show me what a hot bike he had.
Barreling down Highway 14 on that balmy, moonlit night, gripping Ron around the waist as he told me to, I felt exhilarated — all the more so when he pulled off the road onto a dirt trail and cut off the engine. To look at the stars, he said.
Only then, alone with him on the empty prairie, did I realize the danger. It was apparent that Ron was waiting for me to make the first move. Had he ever been with a guy before? Did Mary Lou know this side of him? Maybe he was just shy? Or had he lured me out there to rob me — or worse — under the guise that I’d come on to him?
The two of us stood awkwardly alongside the bike. Even in my light-headed state, something told me to forgo my lust and get back to Porky’s as soon as I could. After a long silence I said, “It’s amazing out here, Ron—thanks.”
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