The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  “Stay in your car, don’t let them see you,” I snapped back. Trying not to panic but worried I would get run over or shot, I spun around several times to keep Kyle’s car in view as I hustled across the parking lot to a truck stop restaurant. Before I reached the entrance, Kyle’s vehicle and the other two tore out of the lot, tires screeching, heading for the ramp to the interstate.

  Seconds later my friend picked me up in front of the truck stop, his face a sickly shade of white. In a halting voice he told me how close he thought he had come to losing me there. I knew he was right. With his help I had narrowly managed to escape, but clearly I had been given a message.

  Driving away from the truck stop I took my friend’s advice and crouched down on the floor of his truck, out of sight. Evidently someone more powerful than Kyle had set me up.

  I hardly slept that night in Laramie. Waves of anxiety surged through me till late the next morning. Why had I put myself in danger like that?

  The next day, still agitated, I related my roadside experience to Cal Rerucha. He shook his head in disgust. “The methamphetamine trade has made Wyoming revert to the lawless anarchy of the Old West,” he remarked pungently. “It’s deadly.” By then, Cal had been voted out of office in Albany County, after four elected terms. He was now prosecuting state and federal drug cases in the twin cities of Rock Springs and Green River — the epicenter of methamphetamine traffic for the Rocky Mountain West.

  After hearing my story Cal told me about a colleague, a Wyoming judge who had recently been surprised by an armed male intruder in the bathroom of his home one morning while shaving. The man was there to relay a message regarding a drug case in which he was awaiting sentencing by the judge. After a few curt words the man quietly slipped away.

  I saw no point in asking what the judge decided with a gun staring him in the face. But Cal’s reference to the Old West brought back a conversation I’d recently had about Matthew’s murder with a veteran cop in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. Friendly, with a studied good-old-boy charm, the cop leaned over his desk toward me, his chiseled, windburned face inches from mine.

  “You sure you’re not quoting me on this?” he asked.

  “It’s for background, I won’t be using your name,” I answered, trying to sound reassuring.

  “What happened to Matthew Shepard wasn’t a hate crime, not at all,” he confided in a low voice. “But why do you want to go digging into all that again? Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”

  I wasn’t inclined to answer his question candidly. Instead of laying out my suspicions about the involvement of other parties beyond Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson in events surrounding Matthew’s murder, I reminded him that the killing was “a seminal national event, a lot like the civil rights killings of the 1960s,” as if he were somehow unfamiliar with the stigma that continued to tarnish his hometown. “The public has a right to know whether the murder was really a hate crime,” I said with conviction, “and if not, what was it?”

  The cop stared at me as he sank back from his desk, shrugging doubtfully. Almost as an afterthought he flashed me another knowing grin, but again his eyes told me to let sleeping dogs lie.

  — PART TWO —

  The Book Of Matt

  TWENTY

  One Spring Night

  Nearly six years after Matthew’s murder Glenn Silber and I interviewed Flint Waters, a former officer in the Laramie Police Department. We were interested in talking with Waters because he was the first law enforcement officer to have contact with Aaron and Russell late on the night of October 6, 1998 — only minutes after they’d left Matthew tied to the fence, savagely beaten. Waters was responding to an unrelated report of someone slashing tires when he came upon the two men in Bill McKinney’s truck, parked on a quiet residential street. Although Aaron and Russell quickly fled from the scene, Waters chased Russell on foot and caught him.

  During the recorded interview in summer 2004, Waters, who had left the police department and gone on to become a leading drug enforcement agent for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, made a statement that caught our attention.

  “Looking back at … how this crime impacted Laramie, I think that there was a lot of media attention drawn to this town that was unrelated to anything that happened that night,” he said. “What’s bothered me about the ‘hate crime’ title is that I was involved in this the night [it] happened, and I was working security for the court house when all that excitement was going on [during the trials], and none of it appeared to be related.”

  It was not until several years after that interview, however, that another law enforcement source told me about a separate investigation that Waters had been involved with — an apparently unsolved arson incident five months before Matthew was attacked. The source discreetly handed me a Laramie police record number and told me I’d have to request the report myself, which he indicated had been “buried” with other previously sealed documents. He surmised that Waters had probably not mentioned it earlier because he was still working in law enforcement at the time. (Today Waters is the chief information officer for the state of Wyoming, appointed by the governor.)

  A minute or two before 4 AM on May 9, 1998, Flint steered his patrol car onto Park Avenue in Laramie’s handsome, tree-lined university neighborhood. Someone in the vicinity had phoned in a report of a car on fire. Heading east, Flint saw a pillar of orange-and-gray smoke billowing into the darkness above the street.

  Later that morning, as early sunlight flickered across the prairie, he typed a routine report about the incident near 1115 Park Avenue.

  Upon arrival I saw a station wagon parked in front of the residence … fully engulfed in flames. The flames reached … about 30 feet in height. I observed an individual who was later found to be the owner of the car, Daniel BALL, standing in the yard with a garden hose spraying water on a nearby pine tree.

  … While I was talking to BALL one of the tires exploded and shot pieces of the bumper out across the ground … I remained in the area awaiting the fire units. I watched … for individuals who were wandering through or watching since this is the third fire of this type in a month.

  Officer THOMPSON … also watched for suspicious individuals … I did note that BALL was employed at Mountain Woods [and] I pointed this out also [to] the fire investigator since Mountain Woods has had at least one suspicious fire recently.

  I saw individuals standing in a driveway across the street watching the fire department and I walked over and identified one of them …

  The one that I spoke with was Matthew SHEPARD. SHEPARD said that he was just in the area because he was walking home. I asked SHEPARD where he had been and he said he was leaving the Cowboy Bar. It was 4:06 A.M., this didn’t appear consistent since the bar normally would have all the occupants out by 2:30. I asked SHEPARD if he had come straight to this area and then he paused for a moment and said no, he had been at a party at 14th and Grand on his way home. Since SHEPARD was currently living in the 800 block of south 7th Street this also appeared inconsistent since 14th and Grand is not on the way from the Cowboy Bar to south 7th.

  While speaking with SHEPARD I noted that he was very excited. He appeared to be speaking rapidly, his eyes were wide and even when he was talking to me he was watching the firemen and the fire. SHEPARD told me that while walking towards the area he had run into another person who … had told him about the fire so he walked over to watch it …

  I passed this information on to the arson investigator as well. We received a stolen vehicle report [then] and units started searching the area for a vehicle that had just been stolen ten minutes prior so I ended up clearing without further on scene investigation …

  Nothing further.

  Waters later confirmed the story I’d been told by my source as well as his own report. While the arson incident had no discernible connection to Matthew’s murder the following October, it seemed curious that the police report had never surfaced before. I only learned of i
t in 2010, almost a dozen years after the killing.

  What continued to perplex me was the concealment and misrepresentation of information about the main participants in one of the most widely reported crimes of the late twentieth century — information about several key figures, Matthew included. Over time I’d come to see a disturbing pattern in how important facts and truths in the murder case were mediated for public consumption, not only by reporters, but also by law enforcement and government officials, and a variety of others with a special interest in how Matthew’s story was perceived.

  The weathered sheriff’s deputy who had advised me to “let sleeping dogs lie” was clearly not alone in his conviction.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The Tornado

  On the first Friday in October 1998, Matthew decided to live it up. He hired Doc that evening to take him in his twenty-five-foot white stretch limo to the Tornado dance club in Fort Collins — a ninety-minute drive from Laramie.

  Matthew’s moods had recently been up and down, but he hoped that getting out of town for a night would lift his spirits. He also asked his friend Tina to join him. At first she was reluctant.

  “I was having a rough week [with] midterms and papers,” she later explained. “It was a very stressful week for me with school … I was so tired. And [Matt] wanted to go out so bad and he didn’t want to go by himself … He wanted to take me and I came up with every excuse … [but] eventually he exhausted all my excuses.”

  Before she’d agreed to make the trip, however, “[Matt] called me from his cellphone [while I was still] coming up with all these excuses … And he was like, ‘Well, I’m right outside your door.’ Doc was also outside, waiting in the limo.

  “[Matt went] in my closet saying, ‘Okay, wear this … this will look good.’ And so he picks out my outfit. I go and get dressed … and I’m still kind of stalling and not sure.”

  At that point, Doc, whom Tina said she had never met before, knocked on the door — “because he’s out there waiting and he’s wondering, okay, what’s taking so long.”

  Tina’s initial impression of Doc O’Connor as he stood in her doorway reminded me of my first encounter with Doc at his home in Bosler, though he was dressed very differently on this Friday night.

  “He didn’t look like the type that would be a limo driver,” Tina said. “The first thing that came to my mind — even [for her husband] Phil, because later the next day we [wondered], is Doc ‘Cowboy Mafia’? He had a pinstriped suit … kind of … like Al Capone … and a cowboy hat and cowboy boots. And a beard.”

  I found Tina’s phrase Cowboy Mafia interesting, as one rumor I’d heard frequently around Laramie related to “the godfathers of Albany County,” a group allegedly comprising a few local businessmen and bar owners. I’d even been told that Doc was one of the alleged godfathers, though he laughed dismissively when I asked if it was true.

  As soon as the sleek white limo reached the outskirts of Laramie and began coasting down Highway 287 South, Doc and his two passengers in back were surrounded by dark, rugged hills and rolling plains.

  Tina was beginning to relax. Doc had already served them cocktails and Brie, and was playing a CD Matthew had brought along — the Squirrel Nut Zippers, one of his favorite bands. Doc had never heard of them before, but he liked the upbeat, swing-style music filling the limo.

  “It’s neo-swing, Doc,” Matthew had corrected him earlier with a grin. “That’s what I love about it, it’s not like regular swing at all.”

  Stretched out in the back of the limo, Matthew inhaled deeply on a cigarette and turned to Tina. “I don’t know what’s bothering me tonight,” he confided broodingly. “Maybe it’s midterms coming up. I’m just feeling all this pressure not to fuck up again.”

  Tina, who was usually good at consoling her best friend, if not cheering him up completely, squeezed his hand.

  “You’re always so hard on yourself, Matt,” she replied. “You wanted to treat yourself to something special tonight — and me, too — so try to be nice to yourself, please? Once you get on the dance floor, you’re going to feel a lot better, I promise.”

  In Tina’s opinion, “Matt had everything going for him”; he was smart, handsome, well traveled, and had a terrific fashion sense.

  “Oh yeah, right” — he would roll his eyes at her — “the dates are just lining up. I’m a midget, I wear braces, I’ve got a great build … and wait, I almost forgot, I’m amazing in bed.”

  But Tina was right. When Matthew began dancing at the Tornado, he seemed instantly transformed. Not only was he a good dancer, but his boyish exuberance magnetically drew the attention of others around him.

  “Matt liked to show off his own style of trance dancing,” Tina recalled with a smile.

  Caught in gyrating pools of colored light on the dance floor, he looked like a specter of young Dionysus, surrendering to the ecstasy of the moment.

  Later, as Matthew and Tina sat in an outdoor courtyard at the club, they had “another heart-to-heart,” something they did often according to Tina.

  “I had him over for dinner probably more nights in a week than not,” she said. “We saw each other almost every day.”

  One of her fondest memories was “watching Matt read Shel Silverstein to my kids … After dinner he’d be pulling those books off the shelves … because he just loved Shel Silverstein.”

  Tina continued:

  There was a few times we met during the day, like during classes and stuff, when the kids were at daycare. And [we] hung out.

  Ironically … we had our classes at the same time and our breaks between classes at the same time. So were able to do lunch … We were able to catch each other between class for coffee … I would stop by his apartment on the way because his place was closer to the campus than mine. And so I’d … pick him up and then we’d go grab coffee and then we’d go to class. And then later we’d meet for lunch.

  But on the patio at the Tornado as they talked again about their dreams, Tina could sense his emotions beginning to darken again. During the conversation, “Matt brought up death” — his own death.

  “He seemed to be having a pretty good time until we were driving home,” Tina was later quoted in Newsweek. “Then he slumped back into depression. He said he was bummed out about his family and the nightmares [he’d been having].”

  Before Doc drove them back to Laramie, however, Matthew invited a group of friends from the Tornado out for a late-night snack. He also asked Doc to join them.

  “The bar closed at 2, 2:15,” Doc said. “We end up [sic] going to Denny’s restaurant and a bunch of friends went with him in the car … I said, ‘Well, I’ll come in with you, sit with you guys … till my sandwich comes and then I’m going to go eat in the car’ … By this time there was [sic] about 10, 20 people around him. You know, just everybody … Matt bought the whole group everything.”

  It was about 3:30 AM when they left Fort Collins, Doc recalled. He also agreed with Tina about Matthew’s sudden mood change during the drive back to Laramie.

  “Matt was really upset … he was whimpering like a pup,” he said.

  Doc thought it might’ve had something to do with a boyfriend “that didn’t come up with [Matt] from Fort Collins,” but he wasn’t sure.

  Tina recounted the events of that evening to me over the course of several interviews, but she touched on the subject of crystal meth only once — and only in connection with Matthew’s friend Alex Trout, whom Matthew had described to her as “quite a speed freak,” she said. I also got the strong impression that Tina was not going to elaborate further and that she felt no obligation to explain why.

  But other sources in Laramie, including two former employees of the Library bar, identified a married couple from Casper who were longtime friends of Matthew as regular users of meth. The couple had socialized previously with Matthew and Tina, both at the Tornado and in Laramie.

  From all I had learned by then about Laramie’s meth underground, as well as t
he epidemic of meth use at gay bars, clubs, and circuit parties around the nation, it seemed all the more suspicious that the topic had been so thoroughly avoided by nearly everyone associated with the murder case, with the exception of Aaron McKinney’s defense team. But even their focus had been on Aaron’s personal addiction and not on the thriving criminal networks that had kept these groups of mostly young people supplied — and a growing number of them addicted.

  As Matthew grew more depressed on the drive back to Laramie, he talked not only about death but also about suicide; he mentioned a possible ultimate escape plan of “taking all his meds.”

  “There was a couple of times [when] he came to tears,” Tina said. What worried her most, though, was his offhanded comment that “if he died no one would even notice until his bills weren’t paid, then his parents would call up to bitch and find out he was dead.” According to Tina, it was those words that prompted her to sleep on Matthew’s couch that night, just so he wouldn’t be alone.

  The next morning, after Matthew reacted to an upsetting phone conversation with his mother by taking some fifteen Klonopin pills, Tina began to feel that he was having more serious money problems than she’d been aware of.

  As I thought about Matthew’s anxiety and deepening depression, I was constantly reminded of the threatening remark Aaron had made to Matthew in front of Ted Henson. “Watch your back,” Aaron had warned him outside a Laramie convenience store.

  But eventually another close friend of Matthew, who insisted on anonymity out of a concern for personal safety, revealed that Aaron was not the only person who had been cornering Matthew.

  Late in the afternoon on Saturday, October 3 — hours after his near-overdose in the company of Tina and three days before the attack — Matthew met at the Fireside Lounge with a local businessman to whom Aaron apparently owed money. According to Matthew’s friend who was present, there were only a few patrons hanging out in the bar.