The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

But rumors notwithstanding, no one dared to question the evident conflict of interest in allowing a Fritzen family member to investigate Bug Robinson’s brother for murder. According to Cal Rerucha, he was unaware at the time of any personal connections and therefore had no reason to question Ben Fritzen’s role in the investigation. Other locals said, “We’ve got people in this town a lot more powerful than the Fritzens,” and “There are plenty of secrets to go around [in Laramie],” though they also pointed to a decades-old drug scandal that allegedly involved Brian Fritzen. They claimed that Brian, while a police officer, had stolen “a large amount of cocaine” from an evidence locker, “but he got off with a slap on the wrist … Instead of charging him, they sent him somewhere for treatment” and allowed him to quietly resign.

  THREE

  The Little Dude

  In mid-summer 1998, as Rerucha prepared the Robinson case for trial, he had another smaller case that had yet to reach the sentencing phase: the burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken the previous December. Three young men had broken into the fast-food restaurant on the south side of town and had stolen twenty-five hundred dollars and — somewhat ludicrously — a few desserts.

  Among the three known burglars was a twenty-year-old “local troublemaker” with a long juvenile record, Aaron McKinney. In April 1998, Detective Rob DeBree had arrested McKinney in Pensacola, Florida, and brought him back to Laramie to face charges. McKinney had been hiding out on the Gulf Coast for several months with his pregnant seventeen-year-old girlfriend, Kristen Price, living in the home of her mother and working sporadically as a pipe fitter.

  Aaron McKinney had been on Rerucha’s watch list for years as “someone who showed clear signs of bigger problems to come.” DeBree, Ben Fritzen, and other cops had kept an eye on McKinney, too, since they knew that he and his band of friends were using and selling hard drugs. The whole bunch, plus a few of their girlfriends.

  Unbeknownst to McKinney, Laramie police had been tipped off to his whereabouts by Kristen Price’s mother, Kim Kelly, who reported that he had been physically abusive toward her daughter. Kelly told police she was “afraid of Aaron’s violent temper” and was worried for Kristen’s safety as well as the soon-to-arrive newborn’s.

  According to Kelly, while McKinney was living in her Florida home she casually mentioned that she was having a problem with her ex-husband. McKinney advised her on the spot that “he knew people who could straighten it out.”

  “All I have to do is make a call,” he said.

  Kelly was dumbfounded by McKinney’s barely masked offer to “put out a contract on my ex,” but at the time she dismissed his posturing as “a little guy talking like a big shot.” He also bragged to Price and her mother of his exploits in California the previous year. He said he had gotten in good with an organized crime family and dropped hints that he had done “jobs” for them, including murder for hire.

  “One way to get rid of a body,” he told Kelly, “is to burn it, take the teeth out, then bury the body.”

  Standing five feet, four inches tall, with a skinny build, Aaron McKinney fancied himself a thug and a “gangsta,” modeling his words and sometimes his actions after the in-your-face rhymes of his rap-star heroes. Several of his friends would later recall that he was also the brunt of frequent teasing; they called him “shrimp,” “pipsqueak,” “the little dude,” and other terms of endearment.

  But despite McKinney’s well-honed talent for exaggeration, he had not lied about living in California for a while. He was first invited there by Jay Pinney, a teenage offender whom he befriended while Pinney was in mandatory residence at the Cathedral Home for Children in Laramie. Pinney liked some of the same drugs McKinney did — weed, acid, crack, and methamphetamine — and both liked to party. McKinney also liked to shock people with tales of his friend’s childhood in Riverton, Wyoming. But it was Cal Rerucha who first told me about Pinney’s history.

  At age twelve, Pinney shot and killed a middle-aged neighbor, Delbert Dilts, with a .300 Winchester Magnum. Dilts, a maintenance manager at the town library, had gotten into a minor altercation with Pinney’s younger brother, nicknamed “Buggers,” while chasing a dog belonging to the Pinney family off his property.

  According to Pinney, whom I interviewed two decades later, Buggers came home crying because Dilts “screamed and yelled at him.” Without a moment’s shilly-shallying, Pinney went and got his father’s rifle, trained its scope on his neighbor a hundred yards away, and shot him in the neck, blowing part of his head off. When Dilts’s wife, an editor at the Riverton newspaper, returned home after work, she found his bloody remains in a flower patch out front.

  Pinney said he would never forgive himself for the man’s death, “but I’ve done everything I can to be a better person.”

  Since Pinney was not yet thirteen at the time of the murder, he could not be charged as an adult in Wyoming and was sent instead to a juvenile facility for a few years, and eventually to Laramie’s Cathedral Home. It was there that he first encountered Aaron McKinney and where the two discovered that “another thing we both liked a lot was guns.” Their friendship would later turn sour in California, but before their falling-out Pinney stayed for a while in a crowded trailer in West Laramie where McKinney lived with a couple of his buddies.

  “Aaron always had guns,” Pinney remembered. “[When] I’d go to [his] place there was usually a pistol on the table.”

  Pinney, who currently builds supercharger auto engines for an Oklahoma manufacturer, agreed to be interviewed “on the chance it could help other messed-up kids avoid the choices me and Aaron made.”

  Years before I located Pinney, a confidential source in Wyoming law enforcement had informed me that another person who shared Aaron McKinney’s trailer for a period was a convicted felon named Dennis Leroy Menefee Jr. In 1999 Menefee, then twenty-eight, pled guilty to manslaughter for the rape and death of Russell Henderson’s forty-year-old mother, Cindy Dixon, while Russell was awaiting trial for Matthew Shepard’s murder. The investigation of Dixon’s killing, which was led by Detective Rob DeBree, was conducted quickly and quietly, without media coverage, and resulted in a plea bargain that gave Menefee a four-to-nine-year prison sentence. Four years later, he was released.

  The lurid tales I was beginning to hear about “Wyoming’s hometown” startled me. They made me wonder what kind of netherworld I had stumbled into and how it might have looked to Matthew — a petite, twenty-one-year-old freshman who had attended a Swiss boarding school.

  Nonetheless, I followed Cal Rerucha’s advice and took a closer look at the 1997 Daphne Sulk homicide, while continuing my research into Matthew’s murder. As I examined both cases, I couldn’t escape the feeling of being a total outsider in this friendly but frightening college town. Without Rerucha as a guide, I would have been smart to pack up and fly home.

  FOUR

  Spider’s Web

  Everyone who worked in the Albany County Courthouse in the late 1990s knew that when Cal Rerucha was nervous he paced. He strode pensively up and down the polished granite corridor outside his third-floor office, his routine interrupted only for stops in the men’s room or another refill at the coffee table behind his secretary’s desk. It wasn’t that he was unfriendly when he was agitated about something; he would still nod hello or mumble a few words of small talk. But you knew to leave it at that.

  Rerucha would say he did his best thinking before dawn when much of Laramie, especially its ten thousand university students, had yet to wake up. Hours before his staff set foot in the building, he would arrive and turn on the overhead lights. The office was a sanctuary at that hour.

  In summer and early fall it was less gloomy than during the bitter winter months, when coming to the courthouse before sunrise could feel like a form of penance. The long halls, devoid of human activity, felt ghostly, yet he still found comfort in the solitude and focused on the tasks ahead.

  This day, September 9, 1998, was different. No amount of pacing could take the
edge off waiting for a jury to return a verdict.

  Rerucha never liked to “rehearse” his opening and closing statements. No, he’d never call it that, as it implied something theatrical or contrived and therefore less real.

  But just before six that morning he had begun walking the hallways of the courthouse, methodically reviewing every point of his case in State of Wyoming vs. Kevin Robinson. Cal Rerucha’s discipline as a prosecutor was repetition. Go over your case time after time till none of it feels like a performance. Make it feel like you’re breathing the law through the pores of your skin.

  Around ten thirty that morning, in Judge Donnell’s courtroom on the second floor, he had delivered one of his vintage closing arguments. His chief investigator, Rob DeBree of the sheriff’s office, whose low bullshit quotient, Rerucha believed, was roughly equivalent to his own, assured him he had nailed it.

  Still, Rerucha made it a rule to “never underestimate a jury.” While he felt certain that Kevin Robinson was guilty of the most heinous kind of murder — killing a fifteen-year-old child who was helpless to defend herself — the physical evidence had only been strong enough to prosecute Robinson for manslaughter and assorted lesser charges. To Rerucha, a devout Catholic, the “lesser” crime of soliciting sexual relations with a minor was not far behind taking another’s life. In this case two lives were taken, he argued, since the victim, Daphne Sulk, was pregnant.

  By 3 PM the jury still hadn’t come back and Rerucha was on the march again. He mentally replayed every point in his closing argument, struggling to satisfy himself that he’d left nothing out that could plant even the tiniest seed of doubt in a single juror’s mind.

  On this particular afternoon he paced restlessly in the cluster of inner offices off the main corridor. His staffers liked to joke about the hundreds of miles he would log while a trial was going on.

  Rerucha had also stopped drinking coffee an hour before. The last thing he needed was to go back in front of District Court Judge Jeffrey Donnell and the jury and be overcome by a need to visit the john again.

  He and Donnell had gone to law school together at the University of Wyoming and generally got on well inside the courtroom and out, but, like many of Rerucha’s professional colleagues, Donnell often felt his patience wear thin when Rerucha was trying a case. A bearded, old-school conservative known to carry a loaded pistol under his judicial robe while hearing cases, Donnell had no problem ordering his former classmate to sit down and shut up when he got bad-tempered or argumentative.

  As Rerucha reviewed the morning’s events, he remembered that as he approached the jury box he had nodded courteously to Robinson’s attorney, Buddy Carroll, careful not to diminish the gravity of what was before them. Also at the defense table was Carroll’s co-counsel, Jason Tangeman, a smart young lawyer with the Laramie firm of Anthony, Nicholas & Sharpe. “Buddy and the Boy Wonder” was the nickname Rerucha and DeBree had coined for Robinson’s defenders.

  For a few moments Rerucha stopped pacing. He leaned against a file cabinet in the county clerk’s office and stared at the passing traffic out on Grand Avenue. Was there anything he’d forgotten in his summation?

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we end this case in the same place we began it,” he’d told the jury calmly. “With a fifteen-year-old girl whose naked body was found buried in the snow one year ago …”

  After making eye contact with each juror, he’d pointed to enlarged crime-scene photos on the evidence display he had used during the trial. The most gruesome one showed the pale, frozen corpse of Daphne Sulk.

  “The victim was infatuated with an older man whom witnesses have identified as the defendant, Kevin Robinson, thirty-seven years old,” Rerucha said, pointing to the defense table. “Daphne was a very fragile girl. She was confused and easily led. You have heard witnesses testify that Mr. Robinson would ask Daphne to take articles of her clothing off and dance for his pleasure and amusement. He treated her like a pet, snapping his fingers to get what he wanted.”

  Kevin Robinson, solidly built and sporting a neatly trimmed beard, seemed to be listening closely, yet he never flinched or looked away.

  “You also heard that Daphne was very upset that she was pregnant,” Rerucha continued. “She wanted to keep the baby, Mr. Robinson wanted it aborted. Daphne Sulk had seventeen stab wounds in the chest. What was this child thinking at the time of her first blow? Did she have time to beg for her life? Dr. Allen, who performed the autopsy, told you it might have been thirty seconds, or it might have been minutes. How long is thirty seconds, ladies and gentlemen? If we would take a look at our watches, let’s see how long thirty seconds is.”

  Most of the jurors obliged, glancing down at their watches. As if counting the seconds was not sufficiently dramatic, Rerucha startled them when he hit the flat oak railing of the jury box with his clenched fist. Again and again he brought his fist down, driving the point home with percussive force.

  “Blow after blow after blow after blow. In and out the piercing of a knife. Piercing that stops —”

  Rerucha paused and looked at his watch, counting the last seconds in silence. Then he faced the jury again.

  “— right now. How long is thirty seconds? Is it an eternity? I believe we’ve proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant purposely, with premeditated malice, killed Daphne Sulk. Some people have said that Daphne was not afraid of Mr. Robinson. Well, a fly is never afraid of the spider’s web until it’s too late.”

  In his reverie at the courthouse window, Rerucha wondered if he had overdone it with the spider business. A timid-looking juror in the front row, probably in her sixties, had turned away when he began slamming his fist down. He recognized her from his son Luke’s elementary school, where she was a social studies teacher.

  Outside on Grand Avenue a few college students rode by on their bikes. Rerucha mused that once the trial was over he’d finally take his mountain bike out again, maybe with the boys. Nothing took his mind off work like hitting the dirt trails on the Warren Livestock property at the east end of town. The sight of wild antelope sprinting across the sage-covered prairie tended to quiet any turbulence still rumbling in him. Even if Robinson appealed, the attorney general’s office would handle it. Order would be restored and his family life could go back to normal.

  “Cal, you ready?” a gravelly male voice asked.

  Rerucha turned to face DeBree. The two had spent long hours building their case and had joined forces on another demanding homicide the year before. DeBree was the best cop in the county, Rerucha thought, but everything about his rugged physical presence said rancher. A hankering for the vast emptiness of the high plains seemed to emanate from him head-to-toe. If DeBree were to mosey in one morning and say he was leaving law enforcement to spend the rest of his days herding cattle, Rerucha would not have blinked.

  “They’re back,” DeBree announced with his usual lack of fanfare. “Got a verdict for us.”

  “They’re a good jury, Rob, I just can’t read ’em. You think they understood the blood evidence?”

  “You spelled it out like the A-B-Cs, Cal, too late to sweat it now,” DeBree smiled. “C’mon, let’s go face the music.”

  A restive mood came over the courtroom as the jury foreman prepared to read the verdict. Judge Donnell, who had a mixed reputation for fairness and meting out unforgiving sentences to repeat offenders, scanned the room before signaling him to begin.

  As a prosecutor Cal Rerucha lived for charged moments like these, even if they elicited his worst fears. Before giving his full attention to the foreman, he glanced over his shoulder at Daphne’s mother, who waited expectantly but seemed bereft of hope. The depth of her loss was still incomprehensible to him, despite his awareness of the most excruciating details of her daughter’s suffering. He could barely imagine the rage that would overtake him if someone murdered one of his sons with such hateful abandon.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant, Kevin Robinson, guilty of voluntary manslaughter in th
e death of Daphne Sulk,” the foreman stated with a trace of quiver in his voice. “We also find the defendant guilty of soliciting a child to engage in illicit sexual activity, and guilty of taking indecent liberties with a minor …”

  As Rerucha listened to the verdicts on the remaining charges, he felt a long-awaited rush of vindication and relief. He had always believed more fervently in justice than revenge, but at that instant he couldn’t deny his shameless pleasure knowing that Robinson would be locked away for a long, long time. Part of him wished the bastard would rot in hell.

  Afterward he quietly exited the courtroom with DeBree, which was as close to a victory parade as the two were likely to see. While Rerucha had won three consecutive terms as county attorney and was poised to win a fourth in several weeks’ time, he saw his political career hitting a ceiling. There was always the chance of throwing his hat into the ring for Congress or governor, but he seriously doubted he was up to the fund-raising demands.

  Once again Rerucha had driven himself just short of burnout. He desperately needed to catch his breath away from the office; away from thoughts of Daphne and her inconsolable mother, and ten months of dissecting the rage that drove a grown man, a father no less, to inflict seventeen stab wounds on a pregnant teenager.

  FIVE

  The Letter

  Eight months after my first conversation with Cal Rerucha in his office and two years almost to the day of Matthew Shepard’s death, I returned to Laramie with the first draft of a screenplay. I wanted Rerucha to double-check my facts before I sent the script to a Los Angeles producer with whom I hoped to make a television movie. Since this was my final research trip, I planned to spend a few hours at the courthouse reviewing a file of news clippings on the case that had been faithfully collected by Rerucha’s mother. I also wanted to be sure I had copies of all the documents I needed so I wouldn’t have to trouble him further.