The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  “A couple of guys were shooting pool and there was one bartender,” the friend said. “The place was dead.”

  While Matthew and the businessman talked privately in front of the jukebox, his friend noticed that Matt got upset during the conversation. After the businessman left the bar abruptly, Matthew tried to reassure his friend. “Don’t worry, I have it under control,” he mumbled unconvincingly.

  But it was not the first time Matthew had been approached by this same individual, whose suspected criminal ties ran deep.

  “I’d tell Matt, ‘watch this fucker,’ ” his friend recalled. “[The businessman] made it known he could take care of someone who crossed him.”

  Coincidentally, I, too, had been warned by several sources not to cross this individual. I quickly realized that the danger was not being overstated when a highly placed law enforcement officer informed me of threats the businessman had recently delivered at gunpoint, yet unaccountably no charges had been filed against him by local cops.

  Matthew’s friend who had been at the Fireside that Saturday afternoon offered a blunt explanation: “[For] most of the people in Laramie if you’re a dealer, you go to jail. And you serve time. [But] if you’re a drug dealer and you talk to the police [as an informant], you don’t serve time.”

  As an afterthought, the friend stated, “Matt definitely knew something that he wasn’t supposed to.”

  Like Mark Rohrbacher (Mark K), Matthew’s friend was a member of the Denver dealing circle; and like Rohrbacher, the friend would also later be convicted and serve prison time for an assortment of offenses — but not until years after Matthew’s murder case was closed.

  For several weeks prior to the October 6 attack, this same friend had met with Matthew frequently for exchanges of methamphetamine, alternating their roles of buyer and seller depending on which of them had product.

  “Matt never carried anything [worth] under 120 bucks, he had his rules,” the friend said. “And he was taught them by good people.”

  Yet the friend added pensively, “He had a lot of plans for his future … and he was just trying to make extra money and got involved with the wrong people … He was a terrific kid [and] he loved [his mother] more than anything.”

  These words echoed sentiments that had been expressed to me by Doug, another former dealer from the Denver circle.

  “[Matt] really was a good dude and the world is less [sic] off without him,” Doug wrote in a letter. “I wish I had payed [sic] more attention to him than I did. I just thought he really had it together and was going places that none of us could ever go.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  Friends

  Over the remainder of that first weekend in October 1998, Matthew grew more anxious and fearful. On the afternoon of Sunday the fourth, he phoned Tina from Lovejoy’s Bar & Grill on 1st and Grand downtown and asked her to join him there.

  Situated in the old Johnson Hotel, a handsome red-brick building across from the railroad tracks, Lovejoy’s had also been the site of a 1955 fire that killed seven people — the worst blaze in Laramie’s history.

  When Tina arrived at the bar, Matthew confided that he was still depressed and that he was feeling “paranoid.” “He said that he just got off the phone with Walt [Boulden] and Walt was chewing him out for his drinking …” Tina recalled. “Walt thought he was drinking too much and that he needed to slow down … [Matt] asked me, ‘Do you think I’m turning into an alcoholic?’ ”

  Tina said she, too, had noticed that Matthew was “drinking more progressively.” “As a friend I just thought it would be best just to support him in coming to terms with that in his own time,” she explained.

  But Tina also had more to say about his state of mind that weekend:

  He was really worried. A lot of worry … I kept getting the feeling there was something he wanted to tell me but he didn’t feel like he could. I don’t know if he felt he could tell anybody. But it just seemed like there was something bugging him … He was more … pensive … more guarded. He was thinking of getting a roommate or something. Because he didn’t feel safe anymore … and he thought maybe having a roommate or somebody else in the apartment … might give more security.

  After a long conversation at Lovejoy’s, Tina told Matthew that she had to get home to her kids. Matthew said he wanted to stay at the bar and called Doc O’Connor to invite him down for a drink.

  Doc arrived at Lovejoy’s a short while later, and, according to his version of events, he and Matthew spent the next several hours talking about every conceivable subject, first at the bar, then at a Subway shop near the university, where Matthew bought him a sandwich.

  “That turned out to be approximately a three and a half to four hour conversation with him [at Subway],” Doc said. “I knew more about him than I knew about my own self probably that night … It was kind of like, he … found somebody that would actually listen to him.

  “As time went on, he told me about his first [sexual] experiences” — and before the end of the conversation Matt had allegedly confided, “Doc, I am going to be honest with you … I’ve got HIV.”

  “He told me he was depressed about it,” Doc continued, and he hinted — as he had to Tina — that he was thinking about suicide and “he would just get all his pills together.

  “But when we started leaving, Matt really blew me away and this still, today, bothers me a lot … He goes, ‘You know, I want you to know something. I am going to die real quick here someday, real quick.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean you are going to die?’ And he said, ‘Well somebody is going to beat me to death, murder me, and you know, kill me because I am gay.’ And I said, ‘In Laramie, Wyoming … what are you, crazy?’ ”

  In my early interviews with Doc O’Connor, which were spread out over a couple of years, he continued to maintain that he had met Matthew for the first time on the Friday when Matthew hired a limo to take him to Fort Collins with Tina (October 2). Other sources, however, including three close friends of Matthew and a female companion of Doc, insisted that they had been in the company of Doc and Matthew together weeks and even months before the murder. But Doc swore they were all lying.

  Another aspect of Doc’s story that I still had some doubts about concerned his “four-hour conversation with Matt” on Sunday, October 4. If Doc is to be believed, Matthew poured out the intimate details of his life to a relative stranger, including the disclosure that he was HIV-positive. While I was able to confirm that the two had been at Lovejoy’s together and I had no reason to disbelieve that they had a sandwich at Subway, new sources came forward in 2004 and 2005 with pieces of information that Doc appeared to have purposely left out.

  Only gradually, with the passage of more time, did Doc relent and finally admit that he had known Matthew far longer than he had originally claimed.

  One new source, a female friend of Matthew, said she had seen Matthew and Doc together on that same Sunday night, October 4 — not at Lovejoy’s or Subway but in the bar at the Eagles club, a Laramie fraternal lodge in which Doc served as a trustee. Matthew had come to the club to seek Doc’s “advice,” the friend stated.

  “Matt came in and he was really worried,” she recalled. “He was sweating. He said he was scared to death and was fearful he was going to get beaten or strangled. He was freaked out … [and was] talking privately to Doc about what he should do.”

  I couldn’t help but notice that Matthew’s friend and Doc had used similar words to describe what Matthew was afraid of: that he was going to get beaten or killed.

  According to the friend, she heard Doc reassure Matthew, “Calm down, we’ll take care of it.”

  After Matthew left the Eagles club, she said, the name of the businessman with whom Matthew had an upsetting encounter the previous day at the Fireside came up in conversation at the bar. A male patron who took part in the exchange suggested that the businessman was the source of Matthew’s fear but he also said, “Matt is trying to straighten out the problem.”


  Although Doc’s version of Sunday’s events and that of Matthew’s female friend did not otherwise coincide — and Doc denies to this day that he saw Matthew at the Eagles club — I kept wondering if Matthew had, in fact, been threatened with violence several days before the attack, as his friend now claimed.

  What I knew for certain was that Aaron McKinney was well acquainted with the businessman Matthew had conferred with at the Fireside.

  As I continued to reconstruct the events of that first weekend in October 1998, something Tina Labrie had said during her 20/20 interview stuck out.

  “Do you think [Matthew] owed money for drugs to anybody?” Elizabeth Vargas asked her.

  “He might have,” Tina replied. “Or it might have been a case that he knew too much … I don’t know.”

  Tina’s speculation that Matthew might have known too much was consistent with what I’d been told by Matthew’s friend who had been with him at the Fireside the previous afternoon. Despite his anxiety Matthew had tried to reassure the friend, “Don’t worry, I have it under control.”

  Yet according to this same friend, “Matt definitely knew something that he wasn’t supposed to.”

  Every time I went back over the sequence of events on that weekend, I was confronted by the question of whether Matthew had been set up.

  If so, by whom?

  But there was also something else troubling me: I’d been told that Mark Rohrbacher, a cohort from the Denver circle who was incarcerated on the night Matthew was attacked, had been desperate for Matthew to see some confidential “discovery” documents related to Rohrbacher’s drug case. If true, was it that information that made Tina wonder if “[Matt] knew too much”? Or that caused his other friend to say, “Matt definitely knew something that he wasn’t supposed to”?

  I made multiple attempts to interview Rohrbacher, as I was interested in discussing his later conviction in 2002 on charges related to the interstate trafficking of methamphetamine. Although Matthew’s murder occurred in 1998, Rohrbacher admitted as part of his plea agreement that his meth activities went back to 1997, the year before Matthew was killed. It was also in 1997, sources informed me, that Rohrbacher had his first meth dealings with Matthew in Denver.

  The last time I spoke with Rohrbacher by phone, he refused to sit down for an interview in person but not before acknowledging that he had, indeed, known Matthew and that Matthew had been part of his meth supply chain. According to Rohrbacher, he “wasn’t Matt’s direct supplier” but he had “supplied someone else that supplied Matt.”

  On the same weekend that Matthew was growing more fearful — Friday, October 2 through Sunday, October 4 — Aaron McKinney was in the throes of a methamphetamine binge that had begun with a celebration of Russell Henderson’s twenty-first birthday on September 24.

  “Aaron and I had been awake for about a week or so prior to this whole thing happening,” his friend Ryan Bopp would later say. “We were on a hardcore bender that week.”

  Ryan and his wife, Katie, were regulars in Aaron’s party circle; Ryan also owned a .357 Magnum with a seven-inch barrel that Aaron coveted and hoped to buy.

  When Glenn Silber and I finally tracked down Ryan, who had quietly gone into hiding after the 1999 trials, we were surprised to learn he had left his drug activities behind and had settled into a new life far from Wyoming. Once a high-strung meth addict whose scrawny body was plastered with tattoos and amply pierced, he was now living in a pristine Amish farming community.

  Sitting alongside his wife, Katie, in the kitchen of their rustic nineteenth-century farmhouse, Ryan said he had decided to talk because he despised “all the lies you media people put out there about Aaron and Matt.” Katie, who had been part of the same druggy underworld in Laramie, nodded in agreement as he divulged some well-kept secrets surrounding the case. He spoke, among other things, of parties he’d been at when both Aaron and Matthew were present as well.

  “Aaron McKinney and Matthew Shepard were not strangers,” Ryan stated without a trace of hesitation. “They knew each other. Everybody knew Matt Shepard was a partier just like Aaron, just like the rest of us … I had seen them at parties … I knew Aaron was selling and … him and Matt would go off to the side and they’d come back … Matt would be doing some meth then.”

  But in addition to Ryan and Katie Bopp, several other sources eventually acknowledged that they, too, had consumed or exchanged meth and other drugs with Aaron in the week-and-a-half period leading up to the October 6 attack. A few said they had not spoken up earlier because of the stringent gag order that had been in force. But most were afraid of retaliation either by law enforcement officials or by individuals outside the law.

  Early on that first weekend in October 1998, Aaron and Russell dropped by Shari’s, a twenty-four-hour restaurant on Laramie’s North 3rd Street strip where two of Aaron’s friends, Shannon Shingleton and Jenny Malmskog, both in their early twenties, were working the graveyard shift. Shingleton was also a casual friend of Matthew’s, though he had socialized more frequently with Aaron, beginning in 1997 when Aaron shared a trailer with a group of roommates at a trailer park in West Laramie.

  “[The trailer] was essentially a drug haven for McKinney and his buddies and that’s pretty much all it was,” former Laramie Police Detective Ben Fritzen explained to me. Fritzen had investigated Aaron and his friends on a number of occasions, usually for offenses related to drugs.

  According to Shingleton and Malmskog, Aaron and Russell arrived at Shari’s in the early-morning hours on Friday, October 2, “sometime after midnight.” Soon Aaron began bragging to them about a stash of cocaine he had just gotten his hands on and invited them to come to his place.

  “Aaron wanted to go party and came in pretty strung out, talking about drugs,” Malmskog said.

  From the way he was acting, Malmskog assumed he had been bingeing.

  “Aaron said he had all kinds of coke,” Shingleton agreed, “an ounce or two,” and he wanted to share it with them.

  Shingleton and Malmskog declined his offer, but by Monday, October 5 — the day before the attack on Matthew — they had heard from mutual friends that “Aaron had blown through all the coke … [it] was gone in four days,” Shingleton said.

  One of the many questions that remain unresolved is where Aaron got the cocaine. Like Matthew, he was experiencing financial difficulties and was said to owe several people money. According to Kristen Price, Aaron’s girlfriend, they didn’t have the cash to pay October’s rent, yet she was also aware “he was trying to get his hands on some coke.”

  One of Aaron’s creditors was the businessman Matthew had met with at the Fireside on Saturday afternoon, to whom Aaron allegedly owed twelve hundred dollars.

  But if Aaron was in possession of an ounce or two of cocaine that weekend, with a street value of a few thousand dollars, what else was going on?

  Several sources active in the Laramie drug trade during that period in 1998 said there was not much cocaine in town then. “Meth was cheaper and much more available,” one former dealer stated.

  However, a dealer who had been part of the Denver circle claimed that Aaron “got into some very deep shit over his meth habit.” But the dealer also indicated that Aaron’s troubles stemmed from “ripping off another dealer’s cocaine” — apparently the same cocaine that Aaron had offered his friends a few days before he robbed and fatally beat Matthew.

  Shannon Shingleton and Jenny Malmskog both reminisced without nostalgia about drug parties during which friends from their circle “used to be up for days and days,” Malmskog said, mostly on meth. Aaron McKinney was often among them.

  When asked whether Matthew had participated, Shingleton responded, “I can confirm that Matt was at these parties … In Laramie you were either part of the drug crowd or you weren’t.”

  Not long after Matthew’s murder, Shingleton and Malmskog were interviewed extensively by members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, creators of the docudrama The Laramie Projec
t. Both Shingleton and Malmskog were later listed in the on-screen credits of HBO’s adaptation of the play.

  “We talked to those guys for hours,” Malmskog recalled.

  “I told people [from the Tectonic] everything I knew,” Shingleton added, including what he knew firsthand of Aaron’s and Matthew’s involvement with crystal meth.

  Shingleton said he was “angry at how fake [The Laramie Project] is” and he couldn’t understand why its makers had betrayed the truth to make a political statement.

  On the morning of Friday, October 9, 1998, hours after he was arrested for attempted murder, Aaron McKinney gave Detectives Rob DeBree and Ben Fritzen a recorded statement. The complete contents of that statement remained sealed until Aaron’s trial a year later, when a recording was played in the courtroom. Not even Russell Henderson, his co-defendant, had been allowed to review the statement while preparing his defense.

  The first time I read a transcript of Aaron’s thirty-two-page statement, I was startled by several things he’d said, especially his claim that Matthew had offered an exchange of drugs for sex on the night of October 6.

  “[Matthew] said he could turn us on to some cocaine or something, some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex …” Aaron told DeBree and Fritzen. “I said I’m not gay, I don’t do that stuff.”

  For a long time I questioned whether there could be any truth to Aaron’s allegation, which DeBree and Fritzen had left unexplored. But I initially neglected to pay close attention to the Q & A that followed:

  Detective DeBree: You’ve been involved with methamphetamine before, though, haven’t you?

  Aaron McKinney: Yeah, in the past.

  Detective DeBree: Okay. How long ago in the past … a month? Two months?

  Aaron McKinney: No, it’s been longer than that.

  Oddly, the subject of drugs in general, and methamphetamine specifically, was dropped for the rest of the recorded interview. Yet it was well known among Laramie cops that Aaron was a chronic meth user and dealer; DeBree and Fritzen had personally investigated him for earlier offenses and knew his history.