“Well, is he kind of laughing about it ’cause the guy’s —”
“No, he was so scared,” Chasity said.
“He was scared?”
“Yes. He doesn’t know what came over him …”
“What was Russell like?”
“He was scared.”
TWENTY-NINE
The Consensus
Upon his release from Poudre Valley Hospital at about 11:30 PM on Thursday, October 8, Aaron was arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder before police escorted him back to Laramie. DeBree thought it would be best to allow him to have a good night’s sleep — and also give him time to think.
“I’m not real tired,” Aaron stated when he arrived at the Albany County Detention Center around 1 AM.
After he was advised of his rights, he said he still wanted to tell his story.
Aaron’s recorded statement to DeBree and Fritzen the following morning — before he had sought the advice of an attorney — would become the basis of the state’s case against both him and Russell Henderson. The sometimes-muddled confession, which was rife with inconsistencies and lies, was made less than two days after he’d been admitted to the hospital with a hairline fracture to his skull (or what some described as a subdural hematoma). But later attempts by Aaron’s defense lawyers to have the confession deemed inadmissible would ultimately fail.
The complete tape and transcript were said to contain strong evidence of Aaron’s homophobic motives for the attack on Matthew, but the court immediately sealed the statement and prevented it from being examined until more than a year later. That didn’t stop the media, however — and hence the public at large — from quickly concluding that an anti-gay hate crime had occurred, based almost exclusively on the hearsay statements of Kristen Price, Alex Trout, Walt Boulden, and a couple of others.
Six days after the crime, Boulden, then forty-six, and Trout, twenty-one, were interviewed on Larry King Live, with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer acting as the guest host (“The Death of Matthew Shepard: Examining Anti-Gay Violence in America”). Blitzer introduced the report by stating, “Authorities in Laramie, Wyoming, still say robbery was the main motive but that Shepard may have been targeted because he was gay.”
Blitzer asked Boulden, “Tell us what, in your opinion, was the motive. What happened to Matthew Shepard?”
“Well, the way I understand —” Boulden said, “Matt made the mistake of basically just telling these guys that he was gay, and for Matt, that would have been … He had to feel incredibly safe around somebody to let them know he was gay, and the way I understand it is … in the course of a conversation with these two gentlemen, he revealed that he was gay, and then they told him that they were also gay, and that’s how they got him to go with them.”
Boulden was quoted similarly in The New York Times, but in essence he was repeating Kristen’s story — which she had allegedly heard from Aaron.
“[Matt] was sitting at the bar, having a beer, when two men came up and talked to him,” Boulden said. “He indicated he was gay, and they said they were gay, too.”
The New York Times also noted, “Mr. Shepard’s friends say he did not know his alleged tormentors.”
In the early-morning hours of Friday, October 9, Cal Rerucha couldn’t sleep. He got up around 4 AM and turned on the TV, “hoping to catch a Three Stooges rerun.”
Aaron McKinney would be questioned in just a few hours. Cal was eager to hear what he had to say, but from the conflicting stories of Russell, Kristen, and Chasity, he and his investigative team were already beginning to construct a theory of what had happened on the night Matthew left the Fireside with the two men.
As Cal flipped the channels, he landed on a news show and saw the Albany County sheriff, Gary Puls, talking to reporters outside the county courthouse the previous day. According to Cal, he had carefully gone over the press release the sheriff had written, which they planned to distribute.
“It had basic information — the charges, who’s been caught, things like that,” Cal explained. “Then Puls went out back [of the courthouse]
and gave a press conference.” (This was the same press release that Matthew’s friend, Jason Marsden, remembered coming over the fax machine in the newsroom at the Casper Star-Tribune. It didn’t mention that Matthew was gay; nor did it suggest any possibility of a hate crime.)
While watching TV at that hour, “I saw what the case was about to become, it was going to be a huge media event,” Cal said.
During the press conference it had somehow slipped out that, yes, the attack might have been a gay bashing — and it might even be accurate to describe it as a crucifixion.
“I like to be very careful about publicity and stay close to the code of ethics,” Cal added. “But the fence and where we are [geographically] also had a lot to do with how people viewed this … It would be the worst case we’ve ever had. Never [had] one like this before.”
Cal was right: News of the appalling crime on the Wyoming prairie spread nationally and internationally in a matter of hours. People everywhere were stunned by reports that a boyish-looking, “all-American” college student had been beaten savagely and hung on a fence because he was gay. More significantly, an outraged gay community mobilized immediately.
At the time many — myself included — agreed with Walt Boulden’s reasoning. “If you’re going to rob somebody, you go knock them in the head, take their money, and dump them somewhere,” he told Wolf Blitzer. “… They hung [Matt] to that fence as a very clear message for the rest of us that this isn’t a place that you’re supposed to be if you’re gay … They displayed him like some kind of a trophy. You don’t do that to a robbery victim.”
In the wake of reports that Matthew had been not only beaten mercilessly but also tortured, burned with cigarettes, crucified, and left to die on a freezing prairie, an array of interests seized on this graphic image and began to embellish it further.
One major newspaper published an illustration of a Christ-like Matthew with his arms spread out, bound to a crossbeam.
A front-page headline in The Washington Post read, “Gay Man Near Death After Beating, Burning … Hate Crime Suspected.” The story began, “Matthew Shepard, slight of stature, gentle of demeanor and passionate about human rights and foreign relations, lived a relatively open gay life in [Laramie] … This week, he paid a terrible price.” The article went on to report “burn marks on his body” and stated he was “tied to a fence like a dead coyote.”
But embedded in these and other media accounts were a surprising number of inaccuracies and distortions, both large and small. Although it was reported that Aaron and Russell burned Matthew with cigarettes, no such burning took place. Time magazine described the two assailants as “tall, muscular men” when both are below average in height — only a few inches taller than Matthew, who was barely five foot two. In just a single paragraph of that magazine’s coverage, I found half a dozen factual errors.
“Everything happened so fast [that] all we could do is try to stay one step ahead of the blaze,” according to Cal Rerucha. “We’d never had a case that big in Wyoming before, with the whole world watching us.”
But it was not only the media who were to blame, he said. “We never intended to misrepresent the facts, but a reporter would shove a camera in the sheriff’s face and ask if Matthew was crucified, and the next thing you know the sheriff is kind of agreeing, ‘Well, I guess from the way he was tied to the fence you might say that.’
“Now that time has passed we might look back and see things differently, but all we could see then was what was right in front of us.”
Cal emphasized again that words like might came into play often in the rapidly unfolding story of the attack — and the motives behind it.
Matthew’s friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout rushed to his side at Poudre Valley Hospital after Boulden received a call from Dennis Shepard in Saudi Arabia with the news that Matthew had been severely beaten. Along with conta
cting Jason Marsden, Matthew’s friend at the Casper Star-Tribune, Boulden and Trout contacted gay organizations in Wyoming and Colorado to report that Matthew had been the victim of an anti-gay attack. Trout said that Marsden, who is gay but had yet to come out publicly, was instrumental in helping to disseminate the story nationally through the Associated Press. (Today Marsden is the executive director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation.)
Boulden and Trout would later state that the first time they heard talk of a hate crime was at Poudre Valley Hospital when an unidentified police officer had mentioned in passing that the attack on Matthew “might have had something to do with him being gay.” The two men said the remark confirmed their worst fears and prompted them to act.
But Tina Labrie told a somewhat different story when Elizabeth Vargas interviewed her in 2004. The following excerpt from that interview was not broadcast at the time:
Elizabeth Vargas: When did you first hear that Aaron and Russell may have attacked Matthew because he was gay?
Tina Labrie: That day [Thursday, October 8] while we were down at Poudre Valley Hospital … when Walt and Alex showed up that evening, and that was pretty much their take on the situation.
Elizabeth Vargas: They just assumed that he was beaten up because he was gay?
Tina Labrie: Well, they were pretty sure about it.
Elizabeth Vargas: But you don’t know why they were sure?
Tina Labrie: No.
Elizabeth Vargas: And told the media that this was a hate crime.
Tina Labrie: … I just know that’s what they talked about a lot.
Elizabeth Vargas: How soon after Walt and Alex arrived at the hospital … did they begin to feel that this beating happened only because Matthew was gay?
Tina Labrie: That was pretty much the consensus every time I saw them.
Elizabeth Vargas: But they never told you what proof they had for that.
Tina Labrie: Right. They never told me what led them to that conclusion …
Elizabeth Vargas: How quickly did they begin to call the media and gay rights groups?
Tina Labrie: That day. We were up at the hospital — and then media showed up that evening …
Elizabeth Vargas: All asking questions about whether this was a hate crime?
Tina Labrie: Yeah … it was pretty weird … that frenzy of media attention. This very quickly became an enormous issue about being gay and about homophobia … Like they wanted to make [Matt] a poster child or something for their cause or their anti-cause … they either wanted to make him a saint or they wanted to say he was burning in hell … I think when you go to [those] extremes, you lose the truth.
As Cal Rerucha prepared for the arraignments of Aaron, Russell, Kristen, and Chasity on the afternoon of Friday, October 9, the case got off to an uncommonly chaotic start.
“The media stormed the walls for the arraignment,” Cal recalled. “It was as close to a riot as I’ve ever seen.”
Reporters and television crews crammed into the district courtroom on the second floor of the Albany County Courthouse, surrounding the judge’s bench with cameras and boom mikes, with barely an inch to spare. Cal found one reporter squatting under his desk and another perched on top.
Unable to handle the pressure, Circuit Court Judge Robert Castor began to hyperventilate, forcing Cal to take charge in the frenzied courtroom. Castor had been a mentor and boss to Cal at the start of his legal career, which made his sudden loss of confidence in the judge’s ability to deal with the media presence all the more difficult.
“I grabbed a couple of officers in back and we pushed all the press people back behind the communion rail,” Cal said, shaking his head in disbelief long after the murder case had ended.
But even with a semblance of order restored in the courtroom, “television cameras lined one wall,” according to a newspaper account. “Friends of Matthew Shepard, reporters and curious citizens filled the chairs, knelt on the carpet and spilled into the hallway outside.” Several gay activists from Denver and Fort Collins had also traveled to Laramie for the arraignment.
The following day, The Denver Post reported:
The judge read aloud from investigative reports that show prosecutors believe [Matthew Shepard] did nothing to provoke the attack except let his eventual assailants know he is gay.
… For Shepard’s friends, several of whom attended Friday’s hearing, Castor’s reading of the official allegations sounded like confirmation of what they had suspected all along — that Shepard was beaten because he is gay.
That afternoon Castor ordered that Aaron and Russell be held in the Albany County Detention Center on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar cash bond.
Kristen had already been released earlier in the day on a thirty-thousand-dollar bond. But Chasity, who had been less cooperative with police — at least initially — didn’t fare as well. She was arraigned on the charge of being an accessory to attempted first-degree murder and held in lieu of a thirty-thousand-dollar bond. According to The Denver Post, she “sobbed throughout the hearing, dabbing at her face with a tissue.”
Cal also filed an official notice that day under the ominous caption, “Potential of the Death Sentence,” and requested that Judge Castor seal the case records. Castor agreed to take the latter under consideration.
For Matthew’s parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, the ordeal of traveling home to the United States from Saudi Arabia was agonizing — first a wait of eighteen hours for visas, then a twenty-eight-hour journey with several layovers. On the way to Colorado, they stopped in Minnesota to pick up Matthew’s younger brother, Logan, who was attending boarding school there. Logan accompanied them on the flight to Denver and, lastly, the one-hour drive to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins where Matthew lay in a coma.
When the Shepards arrived at the hospital on Friday evening, October 9, they were startled to find not only the media waiting but also dozens of flower arrangements lining their path to the elevator.
But nothing had prepared Dennis and Judy to see Matthew in such a lifeless state.
“I wasn’t even sure this was Matt,” Judy would later say.
They found him propped up slightly in bed, with his head shaved and wrapped in bandages — comatose and motionless. His swollen face was covered with stitched wounds; there were tubes everywhere; and just one of his blue eyes was partially open.
“To walk into his hospital room and see him lying there, not moving … made me want to just sit down and cry,” Dennis recalled.
Beyond the family’s muffled sobs, the only sound in the room was the rhythmic contraction of the respirator that was allowing Matthew to breathe.
A full day would pass before Logan could muster the strength to go into the room and face his brother. The two had talked of rooming together the following year when Logan enrolled at the University of Wyoming as a freshman.
Ted Henson said he, too, was at the hospital when the Shepard family arrived. He remembered feeling lost in a haze of grief, not only from “seeing how bad Matt looked,” but also from realizing “Matt isn’t going to make it.”
Tina, who had visited Matthew the previous night with her husband Phil and two other friends of Matthew — newlyweds who had just returned from their honeymoon and gotten the news — remembered feeling “like I was in some surrealist environment.”
“It’s something nobody wants to see,” Tina said, “… it [was] pretty overwhelming. And then on the other hand it was kind of bizarrely comforting.
“… I had a chance to say good-bye to Matt. And that’s something I feel fortunate about. Because I think on some level, even though he was brain dead and not really connected with his body … his spirit was able to hear me say good-bye … There was so much I wanted to still tell him and there was so much he would have been able to tell me.
“… I felt like … nothing was really real.”
On Cal’s instructions, Rob DeBree met the Shepards at Poudre Valley Hospital on Friday night and remained at th
eir side for the next couple of days, serving as a buffer between the family and a growing number of reporters and camera crews outside.
Over that weekend, spontaneous candlelight vigils were held outside the hospital and began to crop up at locations around the country.
President Bill Clinton also phoned the hospital to express his sympathy and support to the Shepard family, and to promise his administration’s assistance in bringing Matthew’s assailants to justice.
As Matthew lay in a coma and it was all but certain that he wouldn’t survive his injuries, the president made an impassioned statement urging Americans to support the federal hate crime bill then stalled in Congress. He likened Matthew’s beating to the racially motivated lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, four months earlier.
“There is nothing more important to the future of this country than our standing together against intolerance, prejudice, and violent bigotry,” Clinton said. “We cannot surrender to those on the fringe of our society who lash out at those who are different.”
However well-intentioned the president may have been, he spoke up prematurely, before law enforcement agents on the ground in Laramie had completed a thorough investigation of the crime and its circumstances.
News of the alleged hate crime also became an instant flashpoint that further polarized liberals and conservatives, who were already pitted against each other in so-called culture wars.
During the previous summer, then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had made comments on national television suggesting that gays are “sinners,” according to his reading of the Bible.
“You should try to show them a way to deal with [homosexuality] just like alcohol … or sex addiction … or kleptomaniacs,” Lott said.
Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network had warned, “The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization.”
Now, in the aftermath of the attack on Matthew, each side took turns pointing the finger at the other about who was to blame for the violence, and why hate crime legislation was either desperately needed or altogether unnecessary.
The Book of Matt Page 26
