The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  But beyond his personal loyalties, Aaron may have had other reasons for keeping silent. I’d been told that the unnamed supplier had inspired fear in those he supplied with drugs and that he’d always kept a well-trained pit bull nearby.

  One friend of Aaron, who had formerly sold drugs himself, said, “When I was in jail, they [agents of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation] offered me a deal if I’d rat [the supplier] out. His arm is very long, long enough to reach me in the pen. I just did my time and shut up.”

  Russell Henderson, for his part, had used meth frequently with Aaron and their girlfriends yet he wasn’t privy to most of Aaron’s dealing activities. Similarly, Kristen Price said that Aaron had been “very secretive” about his drug transactions, even with her, and that he was especially guarded when it came to his suppliers. The only thing she knew about the dealer with the pit bull, for example, was his nickname; but “I was never permitted to go into his house” when Aaron went there for pickups. The same was true of Russell — he was always told to wait in the truck.

  After Haselhuhn, Aaron, and Russell left the second dealer’s home they drove to the residence of their roofing boss, Arsenio Lemus, because Haselhuhn claimed that Lemus owed him some money. Apparently, only Haselhuhn got out of the truck and went to the door; he returned shortly and said Lemus “wasn’t there,” so they took Haselhuhn home.

  According to Aaron, Haselhuhn had no idea he was planning a robbery — nor did Russell. But soon after they dropped Haselhuhn off, Aaron told Russell that what he really wanted to do was steal all the drugs rather than trade the gun.

  “It wasn’t anything I wanted to do [and] I told Aaron that,” Russell recalled. “I was still sober and wouldn’t go along with [it] … I figured if we just got to the bar and started drinking, he’d forget about it.”

  As for Haselhuhn, he did not learn of Aaron’s plan to rob him until after Aaron was convicted and sent to the Wyoming State Penitentiary for life. Haselhuhn was serving time at the prison for a larceny offense when inmates with ties to Aaron reported back to him what Aaron’s real intent had been on the night Matthew was robbed and beaten.

  Haselhuhn said it only confirmed what he had suspected all along, “that McKinney was up to no good.”

  Nonetheless, Aaron and Russell returned to Haselhuhn’s home again on that Tuesday evening, shortly after nine o’clock.

  “That’s why me and Russ went to the Library, to wait for this dude [Haselhuhn’s friend] to come home,” Aaron explained.

  Aaron said he kept calling Haselhuhn from a pay phone in the bar, but Haselhuhn still hadn’t been able to reach his friend.

  According to Doc O’Connor’s version of events, Matthew phoned him at the Eagles club “at about 7:20” that evening. Doc even provided me with the landline number at the Eagles where he had received the call.

  Once again, I was surprised at how scrupulous Doc had been about keeping records — or the precision with which he had reconstructed a time line after the fact. Then again, it was still a mystery to me why Doc had retained an attorney after Matthew’s attack when no charges had been filed against him.

  Doc said Matthew had called him at seven twenty from the University of Wyoming campus where he was attending a meeting. Apparently Matthew still planned to take the limo out, though he had canceled plans with Walt less than an hour earlier and — somewhat improbably – had still not told Doc where he wanted to go.

  “I told Matt to call me back [because] this meeting will get out at about 8:45,” Doc recounted. “I said, ‘I’ll go to Bosler, get the limo, and be back about 9:30–10.’ ”

  “Matt promised to call back,” Doc said, “but I never heard from him again.”

  By all accounts, the meeting Matthew attended of the campus LGBTA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Association) was uneventful. Fewer than twenty people — a mix of students, university staff, and a couple of other area residents — regularly participated in the gatherings. Since Gay Awareness Week was scheduled to begin the following Monday, the group focused that evening on preparing for the upcoming events, including a lecture by Leslea Newman, author of a book about lesbian families.

  One member would later tell police she “could smell alcohol on [Matt’s] breath.” It was one of the few hints that something wasn’t quite right with him that night. Earlier at the Library bar, he had approached two female patrons that he didn’t know and asked if he could sit with them at their table.

  A week after the attack, Detective Rob DeBree interviewed one of the women — Kim McDougall. “MCDOUGALL stated that they advised SHEPARD that they had friends that were coming to meet with them … and SHEPARD graciously pardoned himself and returned to the bar …” DeBree wrote in his report. “MCDOUGALL stated that she was under the impression that SHEPARD was slightly intoxicated, but was unsure.”

  According to an account of that evening’s events in the Los Angeles Times, “At the [LGBTA] meeting, the group’s president [Jim Osborn] told of an incident in which he was harassed near the campus’ Fraternity Row and advised students to be careful.” The inference of that newspaper — and a large number of other news organizations that reported on the attack — was that Laramie was an unsafe, homophobic environment. But to be fair, that impression was abetted by early interviews with town locals. For example, a manager of the Fireside bar was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “If I were a homosexual in Laramie, I would hang low, very low. Openly gay behavior is not only discouraged, it’s dangerous.”

  Yet The New York Times also quoted Jim Osborn’s comment, “There are always going to be individuals who are narrow-minded and hateful and who are going to cause problems. That happens in any community and is not isolated to Laramie.”

  At first Osborn was reluctant to talk publicly about Matthew or the violent assault that occurred just a couple of hours after the two men had been together. Following the LGBTA meeting, members of the group had gone to a nearby Village Inn restaurant on East Grand Avenue, where they pushed four tables together and spent time socializing and eating. Several would recall that Matthew had snacked on cherry pie and that he tried to convince them to go to the Fireside bar afterward. But no one seemed to be in the mood.

  “What Osborn found impossible to understand was why anyone would want to kill Matthew Shepard, a small, slight man who threatened nobody,” an article in The Denver Post stated a few days later.

  When the gathering of friends at the Village Inn broke up, Kim Nash, a member of the LGBTA group, drove Matthew home to his apartment on North 12th Street at around 9 PM. She told police that she waited for him to go inside and believed he was in for the night.

  If we accept Doc O’Connor’s statement that as of 7:20 PM Matthew still wanted a limousine later that night, and that Doc told him he’d “go to Bosler [after the Eagles club meeting], get the limo, and be back about 9:30–10” — a round trip of thirty-six miles — the most probable scenario is that Matthew was still considering making the regularly scheduled “run” to Denver, with the usual stop in Fort Collins on the way back.

  (Several former dealers who were active in the Laramie drug trade then — and knew Matthew — confirmed this as a well-established delivery route. In addition, numerous case documents involving local, state, and federal investigations support their claims.)

  About two and a half hours after he talked with Doc, Matthew would drive his own Ford Bronco to the Fireside bar. The notion that Matthew wanted an expensive stretch limo, with the advance reservation it required, for a five-minute drive across town to the Fireside is utterly implausible. It would have been far easier for him to ask Kim Nash to drop him at the Fireside instead of at home.

  If my supposition is correct — and if it’s also true that Doc “never heard from [Matt] again” — something happened between their phone call at 7:20 PM and Matthew’s arrival at the Fireside at approximately 10 PM that convinced him not to leave Laramie that night.

  Again, a diligent examination o
f phone records by police might well have yielded concrete evidence about where Matthew intended to go in Doc’s limo.

  But my suppositions only raise more questions:

  Why did Aaron and Russell follow in Matthew’s tracks so methodically that evening, first to the Library and then to the Fireside? Did Aaron (and Ken Haselhuhn?) know about the routine run scheduled for that night?

  Is it possible the run was canceled altogether?

  More than a decade after the murder, Ted Henson, who had quarreled with Matthew a few days before the attack, offered another opaque clue.

  “I know [Matt] was mad about not being able to go to Denver to pick up some meth,” he said. “It could have been [because he told] someone he was going to get [the meth] and it did not happen … I do not care what Tracy* or any [of Matt’s] other friends say, they kept him on meth. I blame them some for Matt’s habit.”

  At nine o’clock on Tuesday evening, Russell and Aaron picked up Russell’s girlfriend, Chasity, at the University of Wyoming student union, where she had just gotten off work. The three drove together to Ken Haselhuhn’s home for a second attempt to connect with his dealer friend. This time Aaron went inside to talk with Haselhuhn alone while Russell and Chasity waited in the truck.

  After Aaron left Haselhuhn’s residence and got back in the truck, he instructed Russell to drive to the home of one of the dealers they had visited earlier, with no explanation of what Haselhuhn had to say. Once again Russell and Chasity waited in the truck while Aaron went to the dealer’s door, leaving his gun behind. But apparently the dealer still hadn’t come home.

  If Aaron’s real interest had been selling or trading the gun, it makes no sense that he left it in the truck instead of taking it along to show a potential buyer. Haselhuhn had also told Aaron earlier that he wouldn’t take him to the dealer’s front door, but this time Aaron went to the door unaccompanied while Haselhuhn stayed at home.

  In truth, Aaron knew both dealers whose homes they visited that evening quite well. One was thirty-eight-year-old John Earl Baker Jr., a well-known auto mechanic and reputedly a leading player in Laramie’s secretive methamphetamine underground.

  From a review of previously undisclosed documents I’d learned that in March 1999, shortly before Russell’s trial was set to begin, defense investigator Priscilla Moree had interviewed more than a dozen of Aaron and Russell’s fellow inmates at the Albany County Detention Center — including Baker. Baker, who had known Aaron prior to their incarceration, spoke of conversations he had with Aaron at the jail. Initially Baker seemed to confirm Haselhuhn’s story about a gun sale, but he also added something more.

  “There is something about a drug deal and McKinney was supposed to trade the gun for drugs,” Baker told Moree. “A guy named Ken [Haselhuhn] … had something to do with the drugs. They were getting dope from Shepard.”

  In May 2003 I met with John Earl Baker Jr., then forty-two, and several other sources familiar with the local meth scene for a group interview at Laramie’s Village Inn restaurant, coincidentally the same restaurant Matthew had visited with a group of college friends on the evening of October 6, 1998, hours before he was attacked.

  By the end of the interview Baker confirmed what he had told Moree at the county jail four years earlier: that Aaron had mentioned something to him about a drug deal and “getting dope from Shepard,” and that Haselhuhn had functioned as an intermediary on the night of the crime.

  Prior to Matthew’s murder and in the years since, Baker has accumulated a record of meth-related crimes that — if nothing else — demonstrates an exceptional personal knowledge of the drug trade. While his credibility deserves careful scrutiny, his position as a key figure in the Laramie meth scene was confirmed by numerous sources on both sides of the law.

  I was also fascinated to discover that several other inmates interviewed by Moree seemed to echo what a close friend of Matthew from the Denver circle had confided about Russell’s participation in Aaron’s scheme.

  “It’s possible [Russell] knew something was going to go down, but not the extent of it,” Matthew’s friend told me.

  Ron Golas, who was Aaron’s cellmate during part of the time he was incarcerated, told Moree, “Russell did not have anything to do with it at all. He was like a bystander. McKinney was the man who hit him [Shepard].”

  A second inmate, John Paul Baker (not to be confused with the aforementioned John Earl Baker Jr.), stated, “Russell did not do anything … If it wasn’t for McKinney, Russell would not have been arrested. Russell did nothing.”

  And according to a third inmate interviewed by Moree, named Dan O’Connell, “[Henderson] did not have anything to do with it.”

  While I’d ordinarily be very skeptical of jailhouse sources, I was aware that Cal Rerucha had also relied on one of Aaron’s fellow inmates as a confidential informant, to learn about Aaron’s conversations at the jail. In addition, two other inmates incarcerated with Aaron and Russell when Moree conducted her interviews in March 1999 were Monty Durand and Chris Baker; both Durand and Baker were friends of Aaron and had extensive knowledge of his meth-dealing activities. In Durand’s case, Aaron had attacked him in a fit of anger the night before he attacked Matthew — also over drugs.

  Another inmate interviewed by Moree at the Albany County Detention Center (known locally as “ACDC”) was Albert Castaneda. Moree’s written report on her interview with Castaneda suggests a view of Aaron McKinney at odds with depictions of him as rabidly anti-gay.

  “Albert is gay and when McKinney was his cell mate, they talked openly about homosexuality,” Moree noted. “McKinney gave him no problems at all … and they got along fine.”

  Moreover, a high-ranking officer in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office, who requested anonymity on the subject of Aaron’s sexual orientation, stated that at least two other law enforcement officers had witnessed Aaron engaged in homosexual activity while he was under surveillance. One incident occurred at the jail while he was awaiting trial for Matthew’s murder. But on a different occasion long before his arrest, police grew suspicious when they surprised Aaron and a male companion in a parked car one night. The two men were in a deserted “lovers-lane-type area in town” and the vehicle’s lights were out.

  Did officials write routine reports on those episodes, much as they had documented Matthew’s presence at the scene of a mysterious fire several months before he was murdered? If such reports ever existed, were they deliberately expunged from the public record? And why had officials kept silent regarding Aaron’s known homosexual activities?

  When I posed these questions to several longtime sources, I heard a variety of stories in response. According to a female acquaintance of Aaron’s, he had “regular appointments” with a former athletic coach in town, who was not only very popular but also closeted. In addition, she said, the coach’s brother was a cop in town, so efforts were made to spare the family any embarrassment following Aaron’s arrest.

  Ted Henson claimed that he and Matthew had run into Aaron in Laramie one day while Aaron was in the company of a gay male friend of Matthew’s from the University of Wyoming — John*. Like Matthew, John was active in the gay student group on campus. Ted said that after Aaron and John walked away, “Matt told me, ‘They’re not boyfriends. Aaron’s getting paid for it.’ ”

  But according to Ted, John later became very outspoken about the crime’s anti-gay motives, while concealing his personal association with Aaron.

  After trying unsuccessfully to contact John by phone and email, I approached him in person at his Laramie office to request an interview. I offered to protect his privacy and not use his name or otherwise identify him, but he politely declined. I had no interest whatsoever in exposing his personal life; I just wanted to know if Ted’s allegations were true and whether John had played a part, however small, in covering up the truth about Aaron — and hence the complex truths about Matthew’s murder. (A former co-worker of John at the University of Wyoming suggested uncon
vincingly to me that John may have refused to talk to protect the reputation of the school, which was his alma mater.)

  I also noticed other discrepancies that were intriguing. For instance, how many times had Aaron and Russell actually visited Haselhuhn’s home that night?

  Russell was convinced he had been to Haselhuhn’s only twice. “The second and last time we went there was with Chasity, before we took her home, and I didn’t go in that time,” he said.

  In a statement five months after the murder, however, Haselhuhn claimed that Aaron and Russell had visited him three times that night. According to Haselhuhn, Laramie police had questioned him at length a couple of weeks after the attack and had shown him two guns to have him identify the one that belonged to Aaron. Yet I was unable to find a record of that interview in the unsealed police reports. It also seemed strange that police had chosen not to investigate Haselhuhn immediately after they arrested Aaron and Russell.

  Aaron, whose recollections I often found to be the least credible of the three men—due, in part, to his prolonged drug use — told me in a 2003 interview that he and Russell had gone back to Haselhuhn’s home “maybe even four times,” but then he corrected himself and said “three to four times.” On the other hand, Aaron confirmed that Russell and Chasity had waited in the truck while he went inside to talk with Haselhuhn alone during the second visit.

  One possibility I had to consider was that Aaron had gone back to Haselhuhn’s home a third or even a fourth time that night without Russell. By then I’d come to appreciate how thoroughly Aaron had lied to protect his drug cohorts; and that Haselhuhn and Doc had also given misleading statements — though perhaps to a lesser degree — in order not to incriminate themselves or their friends and associates.

  After Aaron, Russell, and Chasity drove to the home of Haselhuhn’s dealer friend, they went to Aaron’s apartment on North 4th Street. According to Kristen’s later statement to Detective Ben Fritzen, “Me and Aaron sat down and he told me what he was doing that night and he was supposed to be home within 20 minutes … He was going to go sell the gun and … bring the money home.” Kristen said Aaron had told her earlier, “I am going to sell it and get our rent money.”