The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  I was intrigued by Henson’s straightforwardness but was also puzzled as to why he had waited more than five years to talk openly about his relationship with Matthew. If the two had been as close as Henson said, what else might he know?

  In the remainder of his letter to Aaron, he seemed tormented by questions for which he had no answers:

  I am not understanding why you did it. [Matt] was so giving all the time … I can tell you that I … wanted to see you die … But [now] I want you to live and live with what you did to him …

  I also believe that you don’t have that much hate in you … I don’t think that you intended to kill Matt. But … you left him out there in the cold, hurt and bleeding. You could have … called someone and told us where he was at. Matt never hurt you and you know it …

  If you can find it in your heart somewhere please everyday that your [sic] alive, please say to Matt in a prayer that you’re sorry …

  I know what was said in court and I am asking for you to please tell me the truth, please. There is nothing else that anyone can do to hurt me as much as you have done … I just want to know why. Please tell me. I need to know why my Matt? Why him? Thanks for taking the time to read this. T. Henson

  Each time I re-read the letters, I was aware of Henson’s intense need to understand the murder. But his persistent questions about motive contrasted sharply with the clear-cut logic of media accounts as well as the statements of a couple of key law enforcement officers. Instead Henson offered his own convictions, while giving no clue what they were based on: “you don’t have that much hate in you … I don’t think that you intended to kill Matt … Matt never hurt you and you know it.”

  Henson’s words had a surprisingly personal tone considering that he was unacquainted with Aaron McKinney, and that, according to all media reports Henson might have seen, Aaron and Matthew had never met prior to their encounter at the Fireside bar on Tuesday, October 6.

  Within days I received an email response from a “Ted” Henson, who said his real name was Tristen but he preferred I call him Ted.

  Ted’s first few emails were short and guarded. Despite his tentativeness, though, I got the sense that he was relieved to unburden more of his feelings about Matthew and the murder. It also became clear from the abundance of personal details that gradually poured forth that he and Matthew had, indeed, enjoyed a close relationship.

  According to Ted, he met Matthew in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in the mid-1990s while visiting relatives who lived in the American compound there. Matthew, then sixteen, was attending a boarding school in Switzerland but was home on vacation. Although Ted was twenty-three at the time, he said they grew close quickly and maintained an intimate bond as friends and lovers until the first weekend of October 1998, a few days before Matthew was attacked.

  On Friday, October 2 — the same night that Matthew took Tina to the Tornado dance club in a limo — he and Matthew had “a little spat” in Fort Collins. Ted had been “staying with a friend” in the Colorado town, he said, but he declined to elaborate on what his quarrel with Matthew had been about. As soon as he got word of Matthew’s near-fatal beating, however, he rushed to nearby Poudre Valley Hospital, where he spent time at Matthew’s bedside until Matthew’s parents arrived from Saudi Arabia. Ted later recounted that he had been in such severe shock that a hospital physician prescribed heavy doses of sedatives and anti-depressants for him.

  When I began communicating with Ted in spring 2004, I was also in discussions with ABC News 20/20 about producing a story that would reexamine the murder. As our investigation got under way at the network that summer, Ted appeared to grow more trusting and cooperative. He was still reluctant to meet in person but he began to open up about his personal life. He revealed that he was the adoptive father of a three-year-old son and said that he and Matthew had “talked about raising a family together.” On several occasions Ted also spoke of the anger and bitterness he felt toward Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson — “I still am hoping that something happens to them like they did to Matt” — and he repeated more urgently the central question he had posed in his letters to them: “All I am after … is the answer to WHY?… One way or the other I am going to get it!!!”

  Ted offhandedly mentioned “a guy named Bear in Laramie,” hinting that he might know more about the murder than he had previously let on. I was aware that “Bear” was the nickname of Aaron’s first cousin Adrian McKinney; I had already interviewed him, in fact, but for the moment I kept that to myself. Like Aaron, Bear had acknowledged that he’d been deeply involved with methamphetamine at the time of the murder, both using the drug and selling it.

  I found it curious that Ted had brought up Bear’s name in three consecutive emails he had written to me in early July. I wondered, of course, what the connection was — if any — between the two men, but I also realized I had to proceed slowly.

  When I pushed Ted to tell me more about Bear, he was vague and said he was “a friend of a friend.” Yet he was unequivocal regarding any involvement with methamphetamine on Matthew’s part, or for that matter his own.

  “As for Matt using meth I would have to say no,” he wrote, “he never did around me and I am more than sure he would not.”

  But in his emails that July, Ted passed on other scraps of provocative information that could only mean one thing: He, too, knew a lot more about the personal circumstances surrounding Matthew’s murder than he had acknowledged.

  “[Aaron] McKinney would sell [himself] to other guys,” he stated bluntly, “but I do not believe that Matt would have ever done anything with him like that.”

  Two days later Ted was more explicit: “McKinney slept with other guys for money to get his drug. There is a guy there in Laramie that was one of McKinney’s main guys … Matt had told me a while before the murder took place that a guy named Aaron had offered [him] sex for money. But Matt said he did not do it.”

  I was astonished by Ted’s claims. Not only did they lend some credence to what Aaron had told police in his long-sealed confession about a possible drugs-for-sex deal with Matthew, but they also fit with the anonymous letter that had launched my investigation; with Doc’s intimations about hustling in Laramie and beyond; and with what I had learned during my underground search in Denver.

  Still, I was left with a web of convoluted questions that Ted — and presumably others — would be unwilling, unable, or simply not ready to answer.

  For one, how did Ted know so much about Aaron’s alleged sex-and-drug activities?

  And given his longtime intimacy with Matthew, why had Ted’s name never appeared in the public record?

  In late June 2004 at ABC News headquarters in New York, Glenn Silber and I made final preparations for filming Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson’s 20/20 interviews at High Desert State Prison in Nevada. All of us involved in producing the report were on edge. At the last minute Wyoming prison officials were trying to prevent us from going forward with the interviews, citing state regulations that prohibit face-to-face interviews with inmates. But the more liberal Nevada Department of Corrections, which was housing a large group of Wyoming prisoners under special contract, insisted the decision on whether to grant interviews was theirs alone.

  Elizabeth Vargas, a rising star in TV news who had recently inherited her 20/20 co-anchor chair from Barbara Walters, was stretched thin that summer. Vargas was eager to do the McKinney and Henderson interviews as they represented the kind of exclusive “get” that Walters and other anchors had built their careers on, but she was also nervous that I had been investigating Matthew’s murder mostly on my own as an independent journalist. With her reputation on the line and her sights already trained on anchoring the evening news, she was understandably concerned about taking chances with a reporter she didn’t know.

  Until just a few months before, I had been writing an investigative article about the murder as a freelancer for The New York Times Magazine. With the departure of head editor Adam Moss from the m
agazine, the story had been killed without explanation. Moss, who had commissioned the piece, is widely regarded as a brilliant and somewhat fearless editor; he also happens to be gay. Although his successors at the magazine commended my strong reporting and said they’d like to work with me on “something else,” I surmised that the story’s politically sensitive content was the problem.

  Fortunately for the story, another prominent, openly gay news executive, David Sloan, the executive producer of ABC News 20/20, was willing to take it on. Sloan, a trusted adviser and friend of Barbara Walters and one of the network’s influential gatekeepers, convinced Elizabeth Vargas it was worth a full hour on 20/20.

  Vargas, a savvy, statuesque correspondent with the glamorous presence and sometimes-fussy personality of a movie star, had been filling in frequently that summer for Peter Jennings in the anchor chair on the evening news. Publicly, Jennings was said to be on an extended vacation, but ABC insiders knew he was already ailing with terminal cancer.

  The more Glenn Silber and I continued to investigate Matthew’s murder on the ground in Wyoming and Colorado — reporting our findings back to Vargas, Sloan, and other network executives — the more aware all of us became of the story’s volatility. To his credit, Sloan believed our investigation was journalistically important and was willing to engage whatever controversy it stirred up. But he would also eventually draw the line at some chilling new information Glenn and I had uncovered about the sinister world of methamphetamine dealing into which Matthew had gotten swept up. No one at ABC News questioned its veracity; they just felt it was too incendiary to put on the air.

  During several meetings with Elizabeth Vargas in Jennings’s handsomely appointed office, I noticed mementos from Jennings’s impressive career as a newsman, amazed that my investigation had found a home in such hallowed surroundings. But I was also walking a tightrope since I had promised 20/20 the interviews with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, but prison authorities had yet to give us a green light.

  In the end Nevada prison officials overruled the Wyoming Department of Corrections and cooperated with us fully. Wyoming officials, for their part, settled on having an observer in the room while the interviews were filmed. Were it not for that single turn of events, I would have departed hastily from ABC News in embarrassment. I was certain I would never get another chance with the Wyoming authorities, who would have been content to silence Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson forever had it been in their legal power to do so. As “the killers” in the most highly publicized murder case in the state’s history, Aaron and Russell have the kind of notoriety that prison bureaucrats can live without.

  But dealing with state officials was only one of our near-mishaps while producing the report. In July 2004, after shooting an interview at the home of a former Laramie police commander, Dave O’Malley — whom we suspected of concealing or at least ignoring important facts about the murder — Elizabeth Vargas had mistakenly left a confidential memo along with her makeup case in O’Malley’s bedroom, where she had been waiting while we set up the cameras. Glenn and I had prepared the memo as background for her interview with O’Malley.

  When O’Malley later discovered the items he was livid. He complained vociferously that we at 20/20 had decided prior to the interview that his version of what motivated the crime was not credible. And to some degree he was right. By then we had examined the entire case record — including his police reports and those of his fellow officers — and had already conducted interviews with dozens of other sources. O’Malley’s version simply did not add up. Nor did it add up in his lengthy interview with Vargas, during which he seemed to contradict himself.

  Nonetheless, I stood by horrified as O’Malley threatened to distribute our confidential memo on the Internet, hoping to discredit and embarrass us. Vargas’s careless mistake had put the whole story in jeopardy and with it almost five years of my work. I was furious but did my best to contain myself.

  During the 20/20 interview Vargas questioned O’Malley about Aaron’s criminal history, beyond his 1997 burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

  “What other kinds of crimes?” Vargas asked him.

  “You know, just a lot of the petty kind of stuff, and I really haven’t looked at [Aaron’s] background in so long I don’t remember,” O’Malley responded, “he was a suspect in a lot of incidents. He was, uh, one of the people that we, uh, quite frankly, uh, frequently, uh, received drug-related information about, and, uh, were looking into at different times, uh, regarding those kinds of issues.”

  “We keep hearing in this town that methamphetamine use is pretty common,” Vargas stated.

  “It’s increasing,” O’Malley said.

  “Why is that?”

  “We’re playing catch-up, basically, right now. We’re educating on the issue of methamphetamine use ten years after we should have started doing that [italics mine]. We knew in law enforcement it was going to become an issue and … it was going to cause a lot of problems for us. But it really has started I think in the last few years … to escalate a little bit more. It’s cheaper, the high is longer, [and] we’re on Interstate 80 so access coming in off of the interstate makes [Laramie] a little more liable to have that kind of traffic coming in here. And they were right — the experts were talking about what kind of an impact methamphetamine was going to have on our country, and I wish we’d have started reacting to it before it got here.”

  Later in the interview, Vargas asked O’Malley, “At what point did you first learn that Matthew Shepard was gay?”

  “Pretty early in the investigation I received a call from one of his friends [who] was at Poudre Valley [Hospital],” O’Malley answered, “and how they got the information early on [that Matthew had been beaten], I don’t really know, I don’t really recall …”

  “And did he [Alex Trout] — is he the one who first suggested perhaps that was the motive for this beating?”

  “Uh, as I recall, he’d indicated that uh that he thought Matt had used crank uh, or whatever terminology uh —”

  “Does that mean methamphetamines?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, I think so. But uh you know, we talked to I don’t know how many people during the investigation, that never came up again. We searched Matt’s apartment, there was no indication of methamphetamine use there, um, you know, I just, I, I thought [Trout] was a flake.”

  “But while you thought he was a flake,” Vargas continued, “you still believed when he said that Matthew was openly gay and that might have something to do with the attack?”

  “Yeah, I, I certainly did, yeah.”

  “Why, if you didn’t believe the rest of what he was saying —”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t believe the rest of what he was saying, we couldn’t corroborate anything that he said.”

  Yet later in the interview, O’Malley stated, “I had no indication that Matt was a [drug] user. Is anything possible, you know, certainly. But I don’t have any indication of that, and there was nothing that came forward that would make me believe that was the case.”

  Was O’Malley really ignorant of the information that was present in official police reports, including his own? Trout had been Matthew’s friend for four years and Walt Boulden for about six. According to a report by Sergeant Jeff Bury:

  Myself, Commander O’MALLEY and Sergeant DEBREE conducted an interview with Alexander TROUT AND Walter BOULDEN …

  When asked about Matthew SHEPARD’S alcohol and possible drug use, they stated that he smoked marijuana occasionally, however, when he was in Denver, that he had gotten into some cocaine use and had also participated in methamphetamine use.

  As I stood in the kitchen of O’Malley’s home watching a video monitor of the live interview in the next room, I was aware that there was a substantial amount of evidence — beyond Trout’s and Boulden’s statements — to indicate that Matthew had struggled with a serious drug problem. As journalists, we were determined to understand the real chain of event
s behind Matthew’s murder.

  Surely O’Malley had also seen the same autopsy report I had? Performed five days after the attack, it documents the presence of numerous substances, including phenylpropanolamine, one of the precursor ingredients used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. (In her 2009 memoir Judy Shepard acknowledged candidly that Matthew “self-medicated.”)

  During the same interview O’Malley said he was “not going to change” his view that Aaron and Russell “did what they did to Matt because [of] hatred towards him for being gay.” But O’Malley also admitted, “There’s other investigators that worked this case, really good cops, really good investigators, that won’t go along with that. [They believe] that there was some other motivation; I don’t believe that’s true … There’s some difference of opinion.”

  If you look back at the massive media coverage of the case, however, you find virtually no suggestion of a difference of opinion among law enforcement officers about the motives behind the attack — until 2004 when we interviewed Cal Rerucha, O’Malley, Ben Fritzen, Flint Waters (a former officer in the Laramie Police Department), and others.

  Moreover, when Vargas asked O’Malley if he’d been “surprised at the national reaction” to the crime, he recalled, “The phone kept ringing and it was the media, and I thought, what is going on here? And one person called early [on] and they said, well, do you know the motivation for what happened here? And we said, we’re still working on it, we’re right in the middle of it, can [you] please just leave us alone? And they said, could this have been a hate crime? And I said, yeah, it could have been a hate crime. And he said, thank you and hung up, and then the phones really started ringing and the human rights groups … started calling.”

  O’Malley added: “Laramie kind of got a bad rap … of being a redneck town and I think the people that spent the time to come here and really spend some time … found out that that’s not the case. We’re a pretty tolerant group of individuals … and I think we’re good people.”