When Aaron and Russell left the apartment, they got into Bill McKinney’s truck and followed Chasity in her car to the trailer where she and Russell lived in Fort Sanders. Russell showered, changed his clothes, and before leaving again with Aaron collected some change to buy beer.
Aaron wanted to go to the Library bar and wait there until Ken Haselhuhn was able to reach his friend. Aaron’s choice of the Library seemed telling, since Matthew had spent several hours drinking there that afternoon, on a school day while classes were in session and he was concerned about midterms. The bar had also been the site of a previous encounter between them that hadn’t gone well. And although Aaron liked to sell drugs there, mostly to students, it wasn’t his favorite place in town to drink.
According to a reliable confidential source, Haselhuhn had also been at the Library “very recently” while Matthew was there and “he definitely knew who Matthew was” prior to the attack. This was not a trivial piece of information insofar as Haselhuhn, like Aaron, had stated that he “didn’t know Shepard.”
On Tuesday night Aaron and Russell arrived at the Library between ten and ten thirty. They ordered a pitcher of beer and began drinking; Aaron also got up repeatedly and went to a pay phone to make calls — to Haselhuhn, he claimed.
“I’m not sure how long we were [at the bar] but we drank a couple of pitchers of beer while we were there,” according to Russell. He said they “decided to go to — somewhere else besides there” and “we ended up at the Fireside.”
But when asked, “Why did you go to the Fireside that night?” Russell answered, “I don’t know exactly why.”
Aaron, on the other hand, admitted it was he who picked the bars they went to — and the dealers’ homes they visited.
In Aaron’s extensive interview for 20/20, only a small portion of which was broadcast, he explained what was really on his mind that Tuesday and retraced the steps he and Russell took before they went to the Fireside.
Aaron McKinney: I was supposed to get some more [meth] that afternoon, but that fell through. That’s when I was supposed to trade the gun in. So when that fell through, that’s when I started to explore other options.
Elizabeth Vargas: What other options?
Aaron McKinney: Well, I had something brought to my attention … a guy that had a lot of it, so I decided I would go over there and rob him for it.
Elizabeth Vargas: This was on Tuesday?
Aaron McKinney: Yeah.
Elizabeth Vargas: Your friend Ken at work told you that there was a dealer in town that had how much meth?
Aaron McKinney: He said he had about six ounces in his house.
Elizabeth Vargas: Did you tell Russell about your plan?
Aaron McKinney: Uh, yeah.
Elizabeth Vargas: What’d he think?
Aaron McKinney: Uh, he didn’t like it at all.
Elizabeth Vargas: What’d he say?
Aaron McKinney: Uh, he didn’t want to be a part of that.
Elizabeth Vargas: Was it after work that you [came] up with this plan to rob this drug dealer?
Aaron McKinney: No, during work.
Elizabeth Vargas: It was during work?
Aaron McKinney: Yes.
Elizabeth Vargas: And you told Russell at that point?
Aaron McKinney: No, sometime on the way there …
Elizabeth Vargas: So you went to the drug dealer’s house, or you went to Ken’s house?
Aaron McKinney: I think we picked Ken up first, and then we went to the dealer’s house.
Elizabeth Vargas: Nobody home?
Aaron McKinney: No, oh, yeah, he was home, but he didn’t have nothing [sic].
Elizabeth Vargas: So then what’d you do?
Aaron McKinney: Oh, well, we were supposed to wait, because he was supposed to get it. Supposively [sic] it was supposed to be there any minute, so … uh, we went to a bar [the Library] and waited for awhile.
Elizabeth Vargas: Did you go back to the house?
Aaron McKinney: Uh, I think so. We went back to Ken’s house.
Elizabeth Vargas: And a second time you tried, and the dealer still didn’t have any drugs?
Aaron McKinney: Yeah.
Elizabeth Vargas: How many times did you call the dealer?
Aaron McKinney: Well, probably four or five.
TWENTY-SIX
The Fireside Lounge
Sometime between 9:30 and 10:30 PM Matthew drove his Ford Bronco to the Fireside Lounge downtown and parked on the street out front. Bar employees later questioned by police had slightly different recollections regarding the time of his arrival.
Doug Ferguson, a bouncer at the door who had started his shift at 9 PM, felt pretty certain that Matthew had walked in between 10 and 10:30. Ferguson had seen Matthew at the Fireside many times previously but didn’t know his name, he said. He also noticed nothing out of the ordinary after Matthew’s arrival.
It was karaoke night, so the bar was a little livelier than on a typical weeknight, with about thirty-five to forty patrons. Matthew simply ordered a drink and sat by himself at the bar, next to the wait-station, Ferguson recalled.
Matt Galloway, a bartender who started work at 10 PM, would later say that he’d seen Matthew in the bar approximately five times in the past and had spoken to him on a few occasions. A junior at the University of Wyoming, Galloway would also come to realize that he had attended grade school and part of high school with Matthew in Casper, though he was unaware of it on the night of October 6 when Matthew sat down at the bar.
Within a couple of days, media stories would offer a remarkably detailed picture of that evening’s bizarre sequence of events. Nearly all of them advanced the premise that Matthew had been quietly “lured” from the Fireside because — in so many words — he was the perfect target: He was well dressed, he was obviously gay, and he may have had the temerity to show a sexual interest in Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Repelled by his homosexuality, the two “rednecks” decided not only to rob him but also to beat him with the barrel of a gun and hang him on a fence for having only thirty dollars in his wallet. Or in the words of Kristen Price, “Aaron and Russ … wanted to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people.”
According to The Denver Post, which cited bartender Matt Galloway, Matthew sat at the bar as he usually did and had three or four different kinds of beer over the two hours or so he was there. Similarly Newsweek reported: Matthew “kept to himself, nursing his drinks — a Heineken, a cocktail, a Corona — alone for two hours.” The general consensus was that Matthew hadn’t been intoxicated; at most he was “buzzed.”
Galloway believed there were fewer people in the bar than Ferguson had estimated — “20 to 25,” he thought.
Inevitably, there were also different recollections regarding the time that Aaron and Russell arrived at the Fireside. Doug Ferguson thought they had gotten there between 11 and 11:30 PM; others placed the time at about 11:45.
But before they drove to the Fireside, Aaron and Russell did two things: They went to the home of Ken Haselhuhn again. Haselhuhn stated that they were there around 11:30 PM. They also stopped briefly at the Cowboy bar downtown, where there was “not enough going on,” according to a statement by one of Aaron’s attorneys at his trial the following year.
Aaron and Russell said that when they arrived at the Fireside they ordered a pitcher of beer and sat on stools at the end of the bar, with two young women sitting next to them. It was their third pitcher of the evening, as they had already consumed two at the Library.
Matt Galloway was pretty sure Russell had ordered the pitcher, but it was Aaron who poured a bunch of change on the counter to pay for it. Galloway later described the two men to police as “not clean cut by any means. One of them had … extremely dirty hands … I just remember [their clothing] being just grungy.”
Galloway’s speculations regarding a motive for the crime were repeated frequently in media stories. “Here’s this little kid, dressed very nice,” he t
old a reporter for Vanity Fair. “Maybe they’ve seen him before and thought he was gay.”
Ferguson recalled that Aaron and Russell “were at the short end of the bar” when they got their beer, about four to five chairs from where Matthew was sitting. Ferguson didn’t hear their conversation and didn’t know how long they talked. Galloway agreed with him: He couldn’t hear what Aaron and Russell were saying, but they talked for “about 15 to 20 minutes” and it seemed like a regular conversation.
Ferguson said he had seen Aaron and Russell in the Fireside a number of times previously — “10 to 15 times,” with more frequent visits over the past month. He had also seen Matthew, Aaron, and Russell in the bar at the same time, though he didn’t remember them associating with one another.
Since Russell had just turned twenty-one two weeks earlier, on September 24, it seems unlikely that he would’ve been allowed into the Fireside before that date. He and Aaron readily acknowledged that they had been to the bar together on other nights, yet Aaron stressed that the drug sales he had conducted there were his alone. Aaron’s admission was later confirmed by sources familiar with his dealing activities at local bars.
While Fireside employees were quick to distance themselves from any association with Aaron and Russell, sources also stated that Aaron regularly sold meth to a couple of people who worked at the bar.
Russell remembered that Aaron had tried talking with the two girls sitting on the stools next to them but “he wasn’t getting anywhere.” Russell said he began to pay more attention to the TV over the bar, hoping that by the time they finished drinking Aaron would have forgotten his earlier idea of robbing Ken Haselhuhn and his friend.
According to an Associated Press report, “The two friends [Aaron and Russell] shot pool” at the Fireside. Matt Galloway also claimed that the two men had played pool and that they had remained in that area of the bar for twenty minutes to half an hour. Aaron and Russell, on the other hand, insisted that they never shot pool that night. I was also unable to find any other bar patrons or employees who had seen them playing pool.
However, the Fireside DJ named “Shadow” said he had seen Matthew and one of the two men — Aaron or Russell — talking near the pool table.
“They were standing, talking for a little bit, for like two, three minutes …” Shadow recalled. “I can’t remember which one it was, he’s the one that had the sideburns … I remember the sideburns, like Elvis Presley sideburns. And he was the one actually talking to Matthew for a little bit down by the pool table. But then after Matthew came back, he just walked off.”
Photos taken a couple of days later, after Aaron and Russell were arrested, leave no doubt that the person with “Elvis Presley sideburns” — who spoke with Matthew at the pool table — was Aaron.
According to Shadow, he met Matthew for the first time “about two and a half, three weeks prior to that,” on the same night that he went to a party at Matthew’s apartment.
“I had met him with a group of people that came in here [to the Fireside] and partied,” he said. “And they invited me over to this party after our party and that’s how I met him.”
By all accounts it was the same party that three other friends of Matthew had told me about — during which hard drugs, including heroin, were used.
When I asked Shadow if he’d seen “more serious drugs” (heroin, meth, cocaine) at the party, he replied, “Not really. Okay, everybody was just trying to have a good time … I was trying to talk to a young lady, too, that I was kind of interested in, so I wasn’t paying attention to the surroundings around me.”
But earlier in the same interview, he stated, “I know when we went to the party at his house, there was a lot of alcohol. I mean, lots of alcohol” (emphasis in original).
Shadow also remembered what Matthew was drinking on the night he left the bar with Aaron and Russell: “He had a Heineken and a Jack and Coke if I’m not … mistaken. That was his last drink that he had.”
There were conflicting accounts as well about how Aaron and Russell “met” Matthew at the Fireside. Some speculated that Matthew had offered to help pay their bar tab, which was not substantiated by Galloway, who had served all three. Other reports said Aaron and Russell went into the bathroom together to plan their robbery of Matthew, though there is eyewitness evidence indicating that Aaron went into the bathroom with Matthew, not with Russell.
Even prosecutor Cal Rerucha theorized — based on the evidence available at the time — that Aaron and Russell had lured Matthew out of the bar with some promise of sex. But what Matthew may have promised was not made public until Aaron’s trial, more than a year after the murder.
Within a few days of the crime, however, Rerucha and other officials were aware of Aaron’s allegation that Matthew had offered cocaine or methamphetamine in exchange for sex. But as a matter of legal strategy, they worked hard to keep any mention of drugs out of the record.
Moreover, despite his initial lies and misrepresentations, and those of Kristen Price — which formed the basis of his “gay panic” defense — Aaron has admitted that Matthew never made a sexual advance on him or on Russell at the Fireside. Instead, Aaron now acknowledges that it was he who approached Matthew first. He said he went over to Matthew, who had moved to a table, and “bummed a cigarette” while Russell was watching TV at the bar.
But before Matthew got up from the bar, Aaron quietly pointed him out to Russell. The slight, well-dressed young man Aaron indicated was not someone Russell knew or had met before.
“That’s when Aaron mentioned robbing Matthew,” Russell said. “I told him ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ ”
Russell still hoped that if they kept drinking, Aaron would settle down and the night would come to an end. But according to both men, Aaron persisted.
“[He] explained how we should take [Matthew] out by Wal-Mart, that he would do everything and I didn’t have to do anything,” Russell continued. “I still said no.”
By then, Matthew had gotten up from the stool where he’d been sitting and was walking around the bar.
The contradictory accounts of what happened on the night of October 6 were not conclusively resolved by the police investigation, media stories, trial proceedings, or eventual convictions of Aaron and Russell. In numerous instances law enforcement officials, news organizations, and other parties reported significant facts and details erroneously — not only about events at the Fireside, but also with regard to the attack on Matthew and the motives behind it.
After a concerted examination of the trial testimony of witnesses who were at the bar, case records, formerly sealed documents, and some files that remain confidential — as well as my extensive interviews with Fireside patrons and employees, principals on both the prosecution and defense sides of the case, and numerous other sources — I will offer here what I believe to be a more accurate account of the violent events set in motion at the Fireside — events that had been simmering for weeks, if not longer.
Soon after Matthew left his stool at the bar, he stopped at the table of another patron, Mike St. Clair, then a twenty-two-year-old geology student at the University of Wyoming. According to St. Clair, who testified at Aaron’s trial and whom I interviewed, Matthew asked if he could sit down with him and muttered that he “didn’t want to talk to the assholes at the bar anymore.”
It was later assumed that Matthew had been referring to both Aaron and Russell, though I found no evidence that Russell and Matthew had spoken with each other.
Since Aaron had not approached Matthew directly yet, I wondered whether Matthew’s remark had to do with the preexisting discord between them. It was also not inconceivable that the two men had spoken by phone earlier in the day or had some contact over the preceding weekend, or even at the Library, where both had been earlier that evening. It was also possible that hostile communications had been relayed through an intermediary.
Lest we forget: Matthew had confided in a few different people about how frightened
he was; he was “scared to death,” he said.
As I began to understand the brutally competitive meth-trafficking activities taking hold in Wyoming and Colorado at the time, none of those possibilities seemed out of the question.
I also remembered what I’d been told by a couple of sources who had been close to Aaron McKinney.
“We had a little syndicate going,” one of Aaron’s cohorts explained before he moved permanently from Laramie to take a job in the Pacific Northwest.
Kyle, the formerly trusted source who had set me up in a parking lot off the Wyoming interstate, had sneered, “[Matt] was trying to take stuff away from the rest of us.”
I’d also discovered by then that Kyle himself had played a part in the tangled web of events on the night of October 6.
Mike St. Clair, who is six feet tall and weighed 230 pounds at the time, was at the Fireside with two friends, Keith and Jay Staley. St. Clair would later testify at Aaron’s trial that when Matthew walked over to his table near the dance floor, he made a provocative, off-color remark.
“It set off something inside me,” St. Clair said. “It made me angry …
“[Matthew] leaned down and said something about ‘head,’ which at the time was really offensive to me …” he elaborated. “He also licked his lips like … it was him trying to be sexy … showing he was interested in me, hitting on me … but I think he got the idea that I was really mad when he did that.”
After re-reading St. Clair’s testimony several times and interviewing him at a Mexican restaurant he’d opened in Laramie, it occurred to me that the so-called gay panic aspect of the murder case had really begun with this little-understood incident that had occurred between Matthew and St. Clair, not between Matthew and Aaron. It was also evident as I talked with St. Clair that he was neither homophobic nor suggesting that Matthew was somehow responsible for, or “deserved,” the violence that was inflicted on him that night. St. Clair had simply felt uncomfortable and angry with the way Matthew had come on to him, which I suspected had partly been a consequence of the amount of alcohol Matthew had consumed, beginning that afternoon at the Library.
The Book of Matt Page 21
