The Book of Matt

by Stephen Jimenez

  Considering how threatened Matthew had felt for several days and the apprehension he’d expressed to Tina Labrie about being “sucked … back into [the drug scene],” it seems very likely that he found himself caught between rival operators. As she and others surmised, he may also have known too much.

  At the last minute on Tuesday evening, something or someone persuaded Matthew not to take Doc’s limo out and to steer clear of the six ounces scheduled for delivery to Laramie that night. How clued in was Aaron about the delivery? Was it Matthew’s sudden change in plans that Aaron discussed privately with him in the bathroom at the Fireside?

  Typically, the two people who made a meth run to Denver would each receive a quarter of an ounce as compensation, worth around four hundred dollars. But the “top dog” in Denver, whom Matthew knew well from his time living there, usually advanced a total amount of twelve ounces, with a street value of over twenty thousand. Six ounces were delivered first to Fort Collins, and then the remaining six ounces were distributed in Laramie.

  “Matt would be getting the quarter ounce … he’d be getting the two eight balls,” one of his friends from the Denver circle confirmed.

  While there’s no doubt that Aaron was hell-bent on robbing the entire six ounces, it’s also possible that his cohorts led him to believe that Matthew had gone ahead and made the run to Denver that evening, as planned. The two had taken limo rides together previously and Aaron knew what the routine was when it came to moving drugs. It would also help explain why Aaron went to the Library with Russell and waited there for more than an hour; and then to the Fireside, where Aaron continued to wait for news about the six ounces — allegedly from Ken Haselhuhn. Not only had Aaron and Matthew met at the Library for a previous drug exchange, but both men were also known to do drop-offs and pickups there and at the Fireside.

  After Matthew was fatally beaten and the national media descended on Laramie, both Aaron’s drug associates and Matthew’s scurried for cover. But a few of them say they still don’t know what happened to the six ounces of meth that night. They have reason to believe that the total delivery of twelve ounces made it as far as Fort Collins, where it was customary to drop off half the load. But did the other six ounces ever arrive in Laramie? If so, who delivered it — and perhaps more important, to whom?

  “This is the one time Matt didn’t go to Denver,” a key source told me. “He was supposed to go but didn’t.”

  After extensive interviews with former members of the Denver circle and a few of their associates, some of whom expressed bitterness as well as a sense of guilt and remorse over the murder, I found no evidence that the six ounces actually passed through Matthew’s hands that night — or through Aaron’s. One key player stated that the two men were pawns who were manipulated by two co-captains in Laramie.

  Sources from the Denver circle also believe an unforgivable betrayal occurred: that “someone set Matt up” by passing on misleading information to individuals close to Aaron — people to whom Aaron owed money. This only served to intensify an existing rivalry, they said.

  One thing is certain, however: Aaron was not the only person who was angry with Matthew or felt he had “moved too quickly” after he arrived in Laramie that summer. However, the same source who characterized Aaron and Matthew as pawns said that if Aaron had snitched on his suppliers to law enforcement, he would’ve been killed “in a flash.”

  “A very interesting thing happens at this time that has nothing to do with the Sherman Hills incident,” Cal later informed the jury. (Sherman Hills was the actual location of the fence where Matthew was beaten.)

  “… At 12:43 in the approximate location of 660½ North 6th Street, a vandalism was called in … Two individuals, Mr. Morales and Mr. Herrera, were on the streets … What they were doing was petty vandalism … They had taken a sharp object and punctured an individual’s tire.

  “… Flint Waters will tell you that in such a location … what [police] do is try to surround a general area and work in, and that is what they did … As the police were looking for vandals, Mr. Morales and Mr. Herrera are walking … and who should they come upon? Mr. Henderson and Mr. McKinney.”

  According to Aaron and Russell, they had just gotten out of the truck and walked to the corner. As they turned west on Harney Street, they began searching for a street address. But right after they made the turn, they surprised two young Mexican men puncturing a tire.

  “What the hell are you doin’ that for?” Russell apparently challenged them.

  One of the men, Emiliano Morales, then nineteen, was wielding a knife. The other, Jeremy Herrera, eighteen, attempted to conceal a small wooden club up his sleeve.

  “For shits and giggles,” Morales replied. “You got a problem?”

  Aaron was already in his face. “Yeah, we got a problem. I guess you wetbacks don’t have nothin’ better to do.”

  “Go to hell, man!” Herrera said, closing ranks with his friend.

  Russell looked Aaron’s way for some signal.

  “Real bitches, these two,” Aaron snickered.

  Herrera defiantly showed his weapon. A whittled-down piece of wood, maybe sixteen inches long, rounded like a miniature baseball bat.

  As Aaron ran to the pickup, Morales shot back at him, “Who are you, calling us bitches now?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Herrera saw Aaron racing back toward Morales with the .357 pointed at him.

  “Emiliano! He’s got a gun, man, let’s go!” Herrera shouted.

  The warning was too late. Aaron attacked Morales from behind, slamming the gun into the top of his head. Morales staggered across the pavement, hunched over in pain.

  With nothing to lose, Herrera charged Aaron, swinging the club into the side of his head. Aaron fell back, dazed by the blow.

  Herrera quickly grabbed Morales, whose head was spitting blood, and dragged him down the street. (Cal Rerucha would tell the jury that Morales’s wound looked “like a zipper on a bad sleeping bag.”)

  Cussing from the pain, Aaron stumbled back to the truck with Russell at his side.

  Moments later Flint Waters pulled up behind the truck in his Laramie Police Department vehicle. Once again, Russell was at the wheel and Aaron was on the passenger side.

  “The [police] have no idea what has happened in … Sherman Hills,” Cal explained. “What they think is that they have the people who have committed the vandalism … [Mr. Waters] tries not to get too close to the vehicle until help and back-up can arrive, but he watches the individuals …

  “There is a rearview mirror on the truck. He can see that the driver … can see him in the rearview mirror. At the same time, both doors fly open. In one direction flies Mr. Henderson, running as fast as he can. And on the other side … Mr. McKinney exits as fast as he can … and they go in opposite directions.”

  Immediately Flint Waters jumped out of his vehicle and took off after the driver.

  “He turned south through a yard,” Waters recalled. “Fortunately for me there was a bit of a shrub in the back of the yard, and he slowed down. That gave me the chance to catch up … I caught him [and] took him to the ground.

  “I cuffed him up; told him why I was there; said I wanted to make sure I understood what was going on … and he told me that I knew who he was. And I stood him up and turned him around, and sure enough I did — it was Russell Henderson … I saw that he had a pretty good cut on his face … it was a gash and it was open [and] there was a lot of blood … Soon as I saw that … I called for an EMS unit.”

  Waters escorted Russell back to his police vehicle and, minutes later, turned him over to the EMS crew, who had arrived with an ambulance. As they began treating Russell, Waters walked over to the passenger side of the black Ford truck.

  “I saw something laying on the ground,” he said. “I looked at it, and it was a large gun rug … for a large target pistol. I looked in the back of the truck and laying [sic] in the back … was a large frame revolver. The thing was huge. Like an
8-inch barrel that had blood all over it … Seeing that gun covered in blood, I assumed that there was a lot more going on than what we’d stumbled onto so far.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Witnesses

  Kristen Price would later tell police she was curled up on the sofa watching late-night TV when Aaron burst into their apartment, clutching a wound on the side of his head.

  “Shut the door!” he yelled.

  Kristen was shocked by the blood on his clothes. “What the hell happened to you, Aaron?”

  “Just turn off the lights,” he instructed her. “Everything —”

  As she quickly switched off the lamp and TV, he grabbed a towel in the bathroom to soak up the blood.

  According to Aaron,

  I couldn’t really talk. I was trying to tell her what happened … I knew what I wanted to say but it wouldn’t come out. It was just a bunch of mumbling. But she was obviously real concerned. My head’s bleeding — I’m covered in blood. Babbling on … You know, I was scared to death at that point.

  But when Cal Rerucha sketched out that part of the crime to the jury, he stuck to the facts; he wasn’t buying the proposition that Aaron was a victim that night.

  “[Mr. McKinney] is hurt from the blow on the head,” he stated bluntly. “He talks about the incident to his girlfriend … Kristen realizes there is a man either dead or badly hurt on the plains of Laramie, Wyoming. They do nothing.”

  In a media interview a few days after the crime, Kristen described Aaron’s actions after he arrived home:

  He went straight to the bathroom. He was cleaning himself off and … I told him to take off his dirty clothes and I helped him get undressed because he was stumbling. And I went and found some clean clothes and put that [sic] on him.

  … He told me everything that happened. But he was stuttering. And he kept on telling me, “Look out the window, the cops are going to show up any minute, I know they are.”

  During the same interview, Kristen was asked, “Now, why do you think they decided to rob Matthew?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered. “I really don’t know.”

  “What do you think happened in that bar?” the same reporter questioned her a minute or so later.

  “I don’t know what exactly happened because I was not there,” she said. “And Aaron was too — his speech was too messed up to be able to really tell what was going on … Aaron said, ‘I was not myself. I don’t know who that was who did that.’ ”

  It would not be until early evening on Wednesday, October 7 that Matthew was found at the fence, some eighteen hours after being abandoned there by Aaron and Russell. Around 6 PM, while cycling in Sherman Hills, Aaron Kreifels, a University of Wyoming freshman, hit a patch of prairie scrub and fell off his mountain bike. As he got up, he saw something about fifteen feet away — what looked like blood shining off a face, probably a scarecrow.

  “Halloween was coming up, so I thought it was just a Halloween gag,” he later told a TV reporter.

  But as he got closer, he heard heavy breathing sounds and realized it was a person, injured and unconscious.

  “[Matthew] was breathing very heavily through his nose … [it] was sounding terrible,” Kreifels would remember.

  Immediately he ran for help, to the home of a university professor a couple of hundred yards away.

  First to respond to the scene — at 6:22 PM — was Reggie Fluty, a deputy with the Albany County Sheriff’s Department. Fluty’s unsettling account of how she untied Matthew’s battered figure from the fence would soon become known worldwide, especially her initial impression that he was a boy of thirteen or so.

  “Baby, I’m so sorry this happened,” she consoled him.

  Horrified by Matthew’s massive head injuries and overcome by the pale tracks on his face where blood had been washed away by tears, she cradled him in her arms.

  “Little boy, don’t die, please don’t die,” she pleaded.

  At Cal Rerucha’s suburban-style ranch home on Duna Drive, his wife, Jan, was helping their two sons with homework when Rob DeBree phoned him around 7 pm with word that a badly beaten young man had been found.

  “We’ve got a potential homicide, Cal, we’re at the hospital,” DeBree informed him. “Dr. Cantway doesn’t think the boy’s gonna make it. We may need search warrants.”

  Cal was startled by the news — his home was just a few minutes from where the victim had been found, in an area where his eleven-and twelve-year-old sons liked to ride their mountain bikes. Cal’s immediate concern, however, was being sure the crime scene was secure and none of the physical evidence got lost.

  “The first 24 hours are critical,” he later explained. “You can’t lose any of the evidence. Fast is important. If you lose stuff, you don’t get it back.”

  He also asked DeBree, “Does the young man have family here?”

  DeBree said he was working on that and would call him back with an update. But before he hung up, he added, “Cal, he’s gonna die. We’re gonna have a homicide.”

  At about the same time, Tina Labrie phoned Laramie police to ask them to check on her friend Matt Shepard. She said she’d been trying to reach him since that morning but had gotten no answer and was worried about him. Tina was surprised when they told her they were sending an officer over to her home to talk to her. Phil, her husband, thought that Matt might have committed suicide, because of his intense depression lately.

  Doc O’Connor claimed that he, too, had tried calling Matt numerous times during the day but Matt’s cell phone just rang and rang.

  Dr. Cantway, who treated Matthew in the emergency room at Laramie’s Ivinson Memorial Hospital, would later say, “I’ve never seen anyone with such massive head wounds live.”

  When Cantway phoned Matthew’s parents in Saudi Arabia and awakened them with the news — it was about 5 AM there, due to an eleven-hour time difference — there was little he could offer them in the way of hope. He explained that Matthew had a severe spinal-stem injury from the horrific beating inflicted on him. He was comatose and was also suffering from hypothermia, as he had lost blood when the temperature dropped. The only thing Cantway could do was move Matthew by ambulance to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, where they had more advanced equipment.

  Shortly after the ambulance transporting Matthew departed from Laramie, Rob DeBree arrived at Ivinson Hospital. Fellow officers had informed DeBree that Aaron was at the hospital. Kristen had driven him there to be treated for the injury he’d gotten during the previous night’s street fight.

  But upon arriving at the hospital, DeBree later explained on the witness stand at Aaron’s trial, “The first thing … I noticed [was] the pickup in question, that I had seen at 7th and Harney that same morning. I walked up to the truck, and without doubt at that point I knew this vehicle had been at that scene [at the fence] … All of the botanical evidence located on the hitch was more than apparent to me that [sic] was going to be an immediate match … I immediately wanted that vehicle seized … until we could obtain search warrants.”

  Police also saw a pair of black shoes inside the pickup that would turn out to be Matthew’s.

  Inside the hospital DeBree proceeded with his plan “to initiate an interview with Aaron McKinney, who was in a room off to the side that they used to refer to as a suture room … Sitting in this same room was Kristen Price as well as Aaron.”

  After verbally advising Aaron of his Miranda rights, DeBree said, “the first statement out of his mouth was whether or not I had caught the people that had done this to him.”

  Aaron’s head injury notwithstanding, DeBree noted, “He knew his name, knew his whereabouts. He seemed coherent. Speech was not slurred … He did seem a little bit depressed but alert.”

  DeBree continued to describe his interview with Aaron:

  I asked him generally where he had been that day … especially that night previous … He told me that he as well as Russell Henderson had gone to … the Library Bar, and had some b
eers, and then he went into a story … that this unknown individual walked up and took his car keys from the bar and walked out and didn’t come back for over an hour. Obviously I considered that somewhat suspicious … I asked for the description of the individual. He was unable to give me one.

  … [I] asked him why he didn’t call the police if somebody just took off with his vehicle. He stated he didn’t know, and the individual apparently showed back up again … [and] wanted to take them to a party … He stated he and Russell went with this individual, drove to the area of 7th and Harney where this individual got out, went to check and see where the party was at, and then Aaron said that the next thing, “we got jumped by these people,” allegedly.

  After DeBree questioned him, Aaron was transferred to Poudre Valley Hospital as well, for twenty-four-hour observation of his subdural hematoma. While the wound to his left ear was minor compared with Matthew’s near-fatal injuries, Aaron — weirdly — seemed to be trailing in Matthew’s footsteps again. That night at the hospital the two men lay in beds just down the hall from each another.

  “[Matthew’s] most serious wound, a crushing blow behind his right ear, caused a 2-inch depression to his skull,” The Denver Post reported a couple of days later.

  Also at the hospital that night was Emiliano Morales, whose injury from Aaron’s gun required twenty-one staples in his scalp.

  “Later on at night,” Cal Rerucha summarized, “stories are put in place so they can tell police a concocted story. This was done in advance by Kristen Price, by Chasity Pasley, by Mr. Henderson and Mr. McKinney. It was also at that time where [sic] Price, Henderson, and [Pasley] take bloodied clothes belonging to Mr. Henderson over to Cheyenne where … evidence of the crime can be hidden.

  “… Officers from the Laramie Police Department will also tell you … that they recovered Adidas athletic shoes from Pasley’s mother’s residence, from where Henderson and Pasley had hidden them.”