While I had repeatedly heard rumors that drugs were behind Matthew’s murder — and even whispered talk of an official cover-up — the drug angle only began to preoccupy me when I discovered evidence of a strained personal relationship between Aaron and Matthew prior to the crime. If, indeed, a drug component to the murder had been deliberately concealed, whether by Aaron, Russell, Doc, drug traffickers, law enforcement officers, and/or parties unknown, it once again raises the question: Why?
Did Detective DeBree really take at face value Aaron’s statement that he hadn’t used meth recently? A careful examination of Aaron’s daily activities shows that he lied in his confession. In reality, he had been smoking or snorting a minimum of one to two grams of meth per week, mixing it with other street drugs and large amounts of alcohol. But according to Aaron, “There have been times when I’d use two, three grams a day” (italics mine).
At the time, a gram of meth sold for about eighty dollars in Laramie. With his monthly take-home pay of $1,000 or less, and a $370 rent payment, Aaron was spending, at a minimum, the equivalent of $500 a month on his meth habit, excluding cocaine and marijuana.
Aaron himself has also admitted the degree to which he misled police during his recorded statement. “I didn’t really want to reveal that I was that into drugs,” he stated simply — though he didn’t explain why.
It seems equally odd, however, that officials didn’t order drug testing for Aaron and Russell, given what they knew of Aaron’s activities. Instead DeBree held fast to the opinion he had formulated early in the investigation. In a published interview with author Beth Loffreda for her 2001 book Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder, DeBree was quoted as follows: “There’s just absolutely no involvement with drugs” and “there’s no way” the murder was a meth crime.
“From everything that we were able to investigate, the last time [Aaron and Russell] would have done meth would have been up to two to three weeks previous to that night,” DeBree said.
In contrast, former homicide detective Fritzen told me in a 2004 interview, “Shepard’s sexual preference or sexual orientation certainly wasn’t the motive in the homicide … What it came down to really is drugs and money.”
But Fritzen had something else to say about the police investigation itself. “Anybody who was closely involved in investigating the case … pretty much came up with the same consensus … that this wasn’t a hate crime,” he recalled. “Initially everybody agreed … [but] as time went on, some [fellow officers] became politically involved in these issues.”
Fritzen and prosecutor Cal Rerucha were in agreement about how the case had been exploited politically, even by a few of their law enforcement colleagues who apparently enjoyed being in the national media spotlight. But it wasn’t until six years after the murder that Rerucha was willing to speak for the first time on the record about the role of meth.
“If Aaron McKinney had not become involved with methamphetamine, Matthew Shepard would be alive,” he stated explicitly. “It was a horrible murder … driven by drugs.”
TWENTY-THREE
The Ranger
On Monday, October 5, Matthew wasn’t feeling well. He had a cold and was still “very agitated,” according to Tina Labrie.
Over the course of the day, Matthew spoke on the phone with another friend, Brian Gooden, a thirty-six-year-old Denver optician who was unaware that Matthew had been in a crisis that weekend. The two men had struck up an online friendship several months earlier after Gooden read Matthew’s AOL profile (“Matt6926”). According to Gooden, they quickly discovered that they could talk about “anything and everything,” from outdoor activities like hiking and camping to fashion or the latest gossip about Madonna.
By late summer the two men had switched from chatting online to talking by phone most of the time. But Gooden also remembered that when they had first started talking, “Matt’s mouth was still wired shut” — from the assault he had suffered in Cody, Wyoming, in mid-August.
“You wanted to be around [Matt], he had this energy that wouldn’t end,” Gooden said. “You just wanted to be part of it … One time I spent 45 minutes with him on the phone talking about what clothes he was going to wear.”
The more they conversed, however, the more Matthew opened up about his life and some of the issues he’d been struggling with, including depression.
While he was living in Denver and the nearby suburb of Aurora earlier that year, “Matt had a hard time keeping [a] job,” Gooden recalled him saying. Matthew also complained about a lesbian roommate who had kicked him out of their Denver apartment “for smoking too much pot.”
But according to Gooden, the move to Laramie wasn’t proving to be the kind of change Matthew had hoped for, least of all as a gay male. “He said he was an easy target, so he made a conscious effort to dress straight,” Gooden mentioned in our first interview more than a decade ago.
“Matt would cry [when he was] insulted for being gay, it would rip him up,” he continued. “[But] his world didn’t revolve around being gay. He just wanted to meet people. Matt was a worldly person [who] was alone … [and] he was reaching out.”
During phone conversations with Gooden, Matthew described Tina and Phil Labrie, whom he had just met that summer, as his “best friends.” Yet from other things Matthew had confided about their marriage, Gooden got the impression that “Matt was the glue in [their] relationship.”
Matthew also slipped another tidbit into one of their long phone chats: He confessed that he had stolen a car when he was a teenager. Gooden couldn’t remember the details, but as with most of what Matthew told him he simply took it in stride. It didn’t diminish their budding friendship, Gooden said, nor dampen his excitement about driving to Laramie the following Friday, October 9, so they could finally meet in person. Matthew had invited him to homecoming weekend at the University of Wyoming, with plans to attend the Cowboys football game on Saturday and the town parade afterward. Maybe they’d even take a drive out to the Snowy Range on Sunday or to Lake Marie, where the fall colors would be reaching their peak. Matthew didn’t like driving too much but he loved taking trips and being outdoors every chance he got.
Since Matthew was still fighting a cold on Monday evening, Tina packed her five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter in the car and drove over to his ground-floor apartment on North 12th Street to see if he needed anything. When she saw he was low on food and out of cold medicine, she took him to the grocery store with the kids. Matthew also asked if they could stop to pick up his Ford Bronco, which he had parked on the street downtown.
Once they arrived back at his apartment, the four watched TV, Tina said. She couldn’t recall the exact times that everything had occurred that night, but she remembered that Matthew had been eager to watch Will and Grace, which had debuted just two weeks before, and that after flipping the channels for a while he’d finally found the show on a Denver station. (A local Wyoming affiliate apparently blocked the broadcast of Will and Grace then, due to its gay content.)
Tina estimated that she and the kids had stayed at Matthew’s apartment until about 10 PM, when her husband Phil finished a class.
But according to a Laramie police report two days later, Tina told Detective Gwen Smith that the last time she had spoken with Matthew was “Monday evening … between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 PM.”
While I had no reason to doubt Tina’s honesty or the accuracy of her recollections, I noticed that her versions conflicted with the account that Matthew’s friend Alex Trout had given to police — and later to me — regarding Matthew’s whereabouts on Monday evening. Trout said he had been with Matthew at the Ranger bar.
“The last time he had seen Matt was Monday in Laramie at the Rancher [sic] at approximately 7:30 PM,” Laramie Police Commander Dave O’Malley wrote in his report.
Yet in August 2003, nearly five years after the murder, Tina repeated to me that she had been with Matthew “from 7 to 9 PM, or 7 to 10 PM�
�� on Monday night. Even today, she still believes Matthew stayed at home that evening, with the exception of their short trip to the grocery store and to pick up his Bronco.
Where Matthew really was on Monday night, October 5 — and with whom — would only become relevant in light of other facts that gradually emerged long after the trials had ended. Just as Aaron, Matthew, and some of their respective friends frequented the Library bar, a traditional college pub and restaurant, they also patronized the Ranger bar, a rougher, less upscale establishment on North 3rd Street that includes a motel and package store. Aaron had lived at the Ranger Motel several weeks earlier with Kristen and their infant son. He and a couple of his associates had also sold meth and done “drop-offs” at the bar, which was known to have a more openly gay clientele.
Though Tina told police that Matthew “had become somewhat paranoid … and changed the places he used to hang out and was now frequenting Elmer Lovejoy’s, the Third Street Bar and Grill and the Fireside,” Alex Trout stated that he had gone with Matthew to the Ranger on Monday night. The Ranger and the Library had been Matthew’s favorite bars.
Nevertheless, the question of whether Matthew was really at the Ranger on Monday night with Alex Trout is still a mystery. Despite Trout’s statement to police that it was the last time he had seen Matt alive, a few days later in Laramie he told an ABC News correspondent that he had not seen Matt on Monday night but had only talked with him.
“I spoke to him on — it was Monday,” Trout said. “I was down here that weekend. And I spoke to him and I was trying to get to see him and he … said … he was studying and that we’d get together, uh, Friday, this last Friday [October 9] and, uh, go out to lunch or dinner and then go to Tornado, a club …”
I had already felt uncertain about Trout’s credibility, but it didn’t stop me from wondering why he would lie about the last time he had seen Matthew in person.
Was Trout aware of Matthew’s involvement with the Denver family? Did he decide that the safest course was to remain silent and not incriminate himself due to his own problems with crystal meth? I remembered how positive Trout had been that “Matt was killed because he was gay,” while he apparently had no firsthand knowledge of the crime or the motives behind it.
If we set these questions aside briefly, a closer examination of the activities of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson on Monday, October 5, and during the day on Tuesday the sixth provides new insight into the sequence of events that exploded in violence on Tuesday night.
If we also simultaneously retrace Matthew’s steps on those days, a more complicated scenario begins to emerge — not of two disparate worlds about to collide in a deadly meeting of “strangers” but of three troubled young men whose parallel fates had been on a tragic path to convergence.
On Monday, October 5, during the day, Aaron was still bingeing on meth, but by that evening he had turned to the cocaine left over from the weekend. In interviews with me, he said he “did a bunch of meth” that night with Joe Lemus, the brother of his landlord and roofing boss, Arsenio Lemus.
“We began with meth and ended up with some cocaine,” Aaron stated.
In testimony Joe Lemus later gave at Aaron’s trial, he confirmed that he had seen Aaron smoke meth on Monday the fifth and snort it the following day, Tuesday the sixth.
Another source, Adrian “Bear” McKinney, a cousin of Aaron, acknowledged to me that he had given Aaron meth on that Monday and also verified that Aaron had been on an extended binge.
But along with his extreme drug use and the compulsive urge to keep feeding his addiction, Aaron was also feeling besieged by other mounting pressures. Sources said that he owed a substantial amount of money to at least two of his regular drug suppliers, who were described to me as co-captains of the local trade. In the meantime his own dealing activities and cash flow were constantly up and down. He was also still awaiting sentencing for his December 1997 burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant.
Aaron’s worst fears, however, may have concerned his ability to financially support his girlfriend Kristen and their four-month-old son. According to Kristen, she had told Aaron in no uncertain terms, “We need formula … we need diapers … we need these things, and you have to pay the rent.”
Looking back, she added, “I think he was really torn because it’s the desperation of getting your fix or taking care of your family” — a struggle Kristen would come to know even more acutely after the case was over, when she had a second child on the way but was also grappling with her own addiction.
On that same Monday night, October 5, Russell Henderson stopped by to visit his grandmother Lucy Thompson at her home on Laramie’s south side. Although Russell had done his share of drinking and using drugs since his birthday on September 24, he was not caught up in the tumult of a nonstop meth binge like Aaron was.
According to Lucy, “Russell showed no signs at all” of being under the influence that evening. Lucy was well practiced at detecting those signs after struggling for years with the alcoholism and drug abuse of her daughter — Russell’s mother — Cindy Dixon.
Russell would later say he “didn’t even like how [he] felt on meth.” His drugs of choice had been “beer and weed,” he confessed awkwardly. But he said he began using meth with his girlfriend, Chasity, while they were dating and then “got into it a lot more” when he and Aaron became friends in the summer of 1998.
During that spring and early summer while Aaron was being held in the Albany County Detention Center pending trial on burglary charges, Russell had been spending time with a half brother he’d just gotten to know that year — David Farris. Russell and David shared the same biological father, Gerry Farris, and had been born on the same day one year apart. David, the younger of the two, also happened to be Aaron McKinney’s “best friend.”
On June 11, after spending two months in jail and pleading no contest, Aaron was released.
“I first met Aaron when David brought him over to my house [and] he mentioned that he needed a job,” Russell explained in a letter. “I talked to Arsenio [Lemus] and that’s when Aaron started working [at Laramie Valley Roofing].”
Russell had been a close friend of Arsenio’s younger brother, Joe Lemus, since high school.
But the friendship between Aaron and Russell did not actually begin until early July, a few weeks after Aaron got out of jail. By early October the two had been friends and co-workers for about three months.
As Russell sat in his grandmother’s living room on Monday evening, everything seemed normal, Lucy said. Russell told her that he’d been busy at work but they talked “as openly as we usually did.” He spoke of his plans to marry Chasity and mentioned that he was still making installments on a ring for her at Alexander’s, a local jewelry store. They also talked about the Christmas party they would have that year.
But Russell was not as forthright with his grandmother as she may have thought, not only about his drug and alcohol use but also about Chasity and other things. His relationship with Chasity had recently been on shakier ground; both of them were trying to sort out their feelings and decide if they were going to stay together.
Russell had grown more confused in May when he and David Farris dropped by Taco Bell, where Russell had worked while he was in high school. He ran into his old girlfriend and former supervisor, Shaundra Arcuby, with whom he hadn’t been in contact since she broke up with him nearly four years earlier. There was still a strong connection between them and Russell promised to give her a call — “but he made it clear it was just a friendship sort of thing because of [his relationship with] Chasity,” Shaundra would later recall.
By the end of May there had also been other indications that Russell’s life was not quite on track. Whatever it was that was bothering him, he apparently didn’t feel comfortable discussing it with Chasity or his grandmother — or anyone else.
Along with his work as a roofer, Russell held a job as an assistant manager at a Conoco gas station in town
. According to his boss at the time, Gina Cookson, he also did “a lot of maintenance work … on apartment units” on the side, for the former station owner, Dale Poledna. In yet another small-town coincidence, Poledna became Matthew Shepard’s landlord that summer.
Cookson, who knew Russell for about four years, described him as “a very kindhearted person” — dependable, ambitious, and someone who always came to work on time, usually opening the station at 6:30 AM. He would even bring her lunch when he was off-duty.
But in early spring Cookson noticed some changes.
“Russell started hanging out with a wild bunch of guys from LVR [Laramie Valley Roofing],” she later told a defense investigator. “They would come to Conoco. David Farris also would come hang around.”
On Memorial Day weekend Russell was scheduled to work at the station on Saturday morning. He never showed up for work and didn’t call Cookson until late Sunday night. Evidently Russell had gone out drinking with his roofing buddies for the holiday. Although Cookson believed he was afraid to come in and talk with her and that he was “avoiding a confrontation,” there was no choice but to fire him.
Later, Cookson would characterize Russell as “a follower” who was easily influenced by others. She also felt “he went downhill” after he stopped working for Conoco.
But almost as a footnote, Cookson mentioned that she had first met Russell through Chasity’s mother, Linda Larson. Cookson said he “got along very well” with Linda and her girlfriend Candy Roberts and that he was “okay” with their lesbian relationship.
After he was fired at Conoco, Russell began putting in more hours at Laramie Valley Roofing.
Two weeks later when Aaron was out of jail and desperate for a job, his “homeboy” David Farris knew just the person to turn to: his “new” half brother, Russ Henderson, who would be happy to help out.
In the early-morning hours of Tuesday, October 6, wired from his high-speed cocktails of meth and cocaine but out of money and almost out of drugs, Aaron broke into the Laramie home of his cousin Dean McKinney.
The Book of Matt Page 18
