Determined to make her mark, Joan did what generations of the young have always done: She enlisted in the army. She said that after eight weeks of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, at which she excelled, she was given advanced infantry training for another nine weeks, specializing in the lethal skills of hand-to-hand combat and biological warfare.
Before Joan and many of her buddies with whom she enlisted, male and female alike, had any clear idea of where Kuwait was situated, they received overnight orders for deployment to the Persian Gulf. There was little time for fear, family good-byes, or futile second thoughts. You’re in the army now, soldier.
Whatever machinations led up to Saddam Hussein’s military buildup against Kuwait — and the subsequent Iraqi invasion that sparked the First Gulf War — daily life for Joan and many of her fellow warriors would become a surreal blur as they encamped for months on the desert floor inside Saudi Arabia, and for years after returning stateside.
“It was war and it was traumatizing for all of us,” she summed it up curtly almost two decades later.
When she and Matthew met in Denver in 1997 and became friends, she said, he was one of a tiny handful of people she could talk to about her experiences in the Gulf, especially since he had lived in Saudi Arabia and his parents still had a home there. The two bonded like older sister and younger brother, calling each other by the names “Sis” and “Matty.”
Joan also trusted Matthew enough to confide in him about her experiences with methamphetamine on the battlefield — a drug she had never known until she went to war: the toxic assortment of everyday ingredients that soldiers gathered to make it; the hazardous cooking process; and how many of them came to depend on meth to keep them awake and alert when Saddam began blowing up Kuwaiti oil wells not far from their camp.
Much like her unnerving memories of service overseas, Joan said she continues to be haunted by the murder of her “little brother” in Laramie.
With great apprehension she’d agreed to revisit their friendship “to set the record straight on who Matty really was and why he was targeted.”
Excerpts from a videotaped interview with Joan:
Joan: Matt had a [routine]. When I heard that Matt didn’t go for the ride-along — Tuesday [October 6] at one in the morning, when obviously the crime was going on — [I suspected that] whoever wanted Matt beat up or robbed or whatever, obviously wanted him taken out of town. By the time that ride-along would have been done and reached its Laramie point, Matthew was nowhere to be found. [Note: Joan is referring to “one in the morning” on Wednesday, October 7, not Tuesday, October 6.]
Meth being the competitive little world it is … I think they wanted [Matt’s] end of it … or … they didn’t like Matthew and the power that he had at that time. They didn’t want Matt anywhere in the [Laramie] circle …
I think that it was planned from Jump Street … [Matt] was a businessman and so he was threatening to somebody. He threatened somebody the wrong way … [But Matt] didn’t walk around hurting people. He wouldn’t burn people or rob people. He really tried being straight with everyone that he ever met. And of all things, just everybody thinking he got killed because he was gay. I can’t let Matthew — he hasn’t been able to rest in peace for any of us … The record needs to be set straight.
During the interview, Glenn Silber and I asked Joan numerous questions.
Question: So as far as this being labeled the most heinous anti-gay hate crime, where do you stand on [that]?
Joan: It was heinous absolutely … but it wasn’t because Matthew was gay. NO way [emphasis in original]. Matthew was not beaten because he was gay … Everyone around him that dealt with him, that knew him, that met him, everyone knew he was gay … He was just good at what he did. And somebody wasn’t happy about that.
Question: After you got over the shock and revulsion of what you heard, what did you think [the crime] was about? If it wasn’t about him being gay?
Joan: I knew it was over drugs or money … The fact that Matt didn’t tell me what exactly was going on, I knew it was over drugs or money.
Question: When you heard that Aaron McKinney and another of his friends were the perpetrators —
Joan: I thought jeez, somebody wanted Matt dead. And I guess [Aaron] would be the perfect person to do it, you know. Somebody that was strung out looking for dope and money … Aaron McKinney knew Matt. So just by knowing that, I thought for sure Aaron was sent by somebody to do it. Maybe he owed somebody a lot and you know — they felt that Aaron was the perfect person to do this to Matt because they had the bad run-in previously [at the Library bar].
Question: In your circle of friends — people that knew Matt — did you ever hear anything from any of them, any speculations about why this had happened to Matt?
Joan: The people that Matt and I knew, they all believed the same thing. That [a Laramie rival] wanted Matt dead. And [that] Matt knew something he wasn’t supposed to … I think that Matt was protecting the circle. And he would have told the circle what was going on and somebody didn’t want that … it had to be something pretty important though … So maybe that person [is] gonna be protected for the rest of their life just because Matt’s dead. But there are some of us that are hip to a lot of things that were going on at that time. Who Matt was dealing with … There’s [sic] five of us that won’t rest until we know exactly what happened to Matthew and why.
THIRTY-FOUR
The Angel of Death
In the Albany County Courthouse on Wednesday, March 24, 1999, prosecutor Cal Rerucha and county public defender Wyatt Skaggs began choosing jurors for Russell Henderson’s trial. The selection process was scheduled to last no more than two weeks, with opening arguments slated for Tuesday, April 6.
During nearly six months of trial preparation since the murder, both Rerucha and Skaggs had deliberately downplayed Matthew’s homosexuality as a factor in the crime. But as far as public opinion was concerned, it was still widely believed that the chief motive behind the murder was anti-gay hate.
Shortly before Russell’s trial was set to begin, Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby for a federal hate crime bill that had been stalled for months in Congress. At a news conference on Capitol Hill, she appeared alongside a nephew of James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old African American man who had been chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas, on June 7 of the previous year — just four months before Matthew was fatally beaten.
Days after the Laramie attack The Boston Globe attempted to explain a critical difference between the two cases, underscoring why a federal hate crime law was important.
“Unlike the aftermath of the racially motivated [murder] of James Byrd, Jr.… when the FBI rushed in to lead the investigation,” the newspaper reported, “federal authorities have no jurisdiction in the Shepard case because the hate-crime law does not cover gays or lesbians.”
While it was true that federal authorities had no direct jurisdiction in the Shepard homicide, I later learned from Cal Rerucha that the federal government had played a considerably larger, behind-the-scenes role in the case than the media had reported or may have understood at the time. Federal agents did go to Laramie to investigate the crime and to follow up on the case, Rerucha said, but there was a consensus based on the evidence that Aaron and Russell should be prosecuted under state law for felony murder and related charges. In Rerucha’s opinion the evidence to prove a bias crime “wasn’t there.” He continues to hold that view today and has resisted attempts by federal officials to use the Shepard case as a model example of civil rights violations.
At her dying son’s bedside in October 1998, Judy Shepard had decided she would do everything she could to keep Matthew’s legacy alive. In addition to co-founding the Matthew Shepard Foundation with her husband, Dennis, she became active in the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s preeminent gay rights organization and a leading advocate of federal hate crime legislation. Matt
hew’s parents hoped to work through their foundation “to promote tolerance in hopes of sparing others their son’s brutal fate,” according to a December 1999 article in People magazine.
“There is no guarantee that these laws will stop hate crimes from happening, but they can reduce them,” Judy stated tearfully at the news conference on Capitol Hill. “They can help change the climate in this country, where some people feel it’s okay to target specific groups of people and get away with it.”
When asked about Russell’s upcoming trial, Judy said she and Dennis wanted to “allow justice to run its course.”
Over the next decade, both parents would lobby devotedly for the hate crime bill, even as it languished in Congress. They called it “the one piece of unfinished business” stemming from their son’s murder.
(On October 28, 2009, during his first year in office, President Barack Obama signed into law “the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.” Better known as the Matthew Shepard Act, the bill, which was attached as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010, expands the 1969 federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.)
The principal charges Russell would be facing at his trial were first-degree premeditated murder, kidnapping, and robbery — the same capital charges that Aaron would face in court later that year.
In their questioning of potential jurors, Russell’s lead defense attorney, Wyatt Skaggs, and county prosecutor Cal Rerucha both emphasized that the murder case was not about “lifestyles.”
“It’s not about politics,” Skaggs said. “It’s about judging a human being, possibly even the life and death of a human being … The lifestyle of any one individual in this case is irrelevant.”
Skaggs and his co-counsel, Jane Eakin — who were also married at the time—were more concerned with communicating to the large pool of potential jurors that Russell had only watched as Aaron beat Matthew with the barrel of a .357 Magnum, and had not participated in the beating himself.
Cal Rerucha was eloquent, yet firm, as he told jurors it was their duty to judge Russell Henderson — and by inference Matthew Shepard — without prejudice.
“It’s not whether we’re black or white, rich or poor, Catholic or Protestant or even atheist,” he stated. “Whether we have power or no power, whether we are straight or whether we are gay, we are equal because the Wyoming Constitution tells us we are equal. If any of you cannot follow that element of the constitution, you cannot sit on this jury.”
As the start of Russell’s trial drew closer, the town of Laramie braced itself for another invasion of outsiders. A security zone of several square blocks was established around the courthouse, making the area look like an armed camp. The building could only be entered through a single side door, where a police checkpoint with two metal detectors had been set up. Every courthouse employee had been trained in bomb detection.
According to Cal, most of the security measures had been put in place by the federal government in Washington, mainly the FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno’s office. But “other unidentified federal agents” were also keeping track of events as they unfolded in Laramie, he said. Even he and Detective Rob DeBree were being monitored constantly, “with people looking over our shoulders a lot.”
On several occasions Cal watched in disbelief from his office window as bomb specialists used mirrors to search under cars and TV trucks for explosive devices. Marksmen with high-powered rifles also stood guard on nearby rooftops.
The quiet college town Cal had grown up in and loved “began to feel more like Northern Ireland.”
In the first week of April 1999, just as Russell’s trial was about to begin, a surprise plea bargain was announced. On the advice and admonitions of Wyatt Skaggs, his chief defense attorney, Russell agreed to change his long-held plea of not guilty and forgo a trial to avoid the possibility of a death sentence. Instead he would plead guilty to felony murder and kidnapping, while sidestepping the charge of premeditated first-degree murder. In exchange, he would be given two life terms. Whether those sentences would be served concurrently or consecutively was left up to Judge Jeffrey Donnell.
But only with the passage of time is it possible to examine the complex factors behind the plea-bargaining process — and Russell’s decision — with any measure of objectivity or fairness.
One revealing fragment concerns the defense team’s unambiguous view of the case, which was summed up by attorney Skaggs shortly after Russell had been sentenced. Skaggs told journalist JoAnn Wypijewski that “drugs were not involved in this case” (Harper’s, 1999). Yet ironically, Cal Rerucha, his adversary in the courtroom, would later state the complete opposite: “It was a horrible murder … driven by drugs.”
It was evident from the court record that Skaggs had strenuously avoided any mention of methamphetamine — and I was puzzled even more when I was given access to his confidential defense files. While combing through his trial preparation notes, I came across explicit instructions that said, “Stay away from meth” and “Meth — don’t go into it.”
If “drugs were not involved” in the case, why these notes?
Had Skaggs been aware of Aaron McKinney and Matthew Shepard’s prior drug relationship and/or personal involvement, but made a strategic decision to avoid this incendiary element? The only way that essential evidence and facts could be elicited — and Russell could adequately defend himself against charges that he had targeted, robbed, and beaten Matthew because he was gay — was through a trial, yet Skaggs strongly recommended that Russell accept a plea bargain. The alternative would be the death penalty, Skaggs repeatedly told Russell and his grandmother.
In the relatively small world of Wyoming defense attorneys, Wyatt Skaggs was respected among his colleagues; Cal Rerucha had also spoken admiringly of him on several occasions. And although I had heard charges from many others in Laramie, including a former mayor, that Russell had been “railroaded,” it was too facile an explanation in a high-profile murder case in which crucial information and evidence had been sidestepped on all sides.
A former boss of Skaggs — renowned criminal defense attorney and state public defender Leonard Munker, who died in 2005 — offered the simplest but perhaps most logical rationale for Skaggs’s seemingly fainthearted approach to Russell’s defense. Munker told me in an interview at his home on the outskirts of Cheyenne that he was “absolutely certain” Skaggs would never have taken the case to trial, “out of fear.” With such high stakes, he said, Skaggs wouldn’t risk the possibility of Russell getting the death penalty — though Munker and other legal experts thought the chances of that ever happening were slim.
The sentencing hearing for Russell on April 5, 1999, was only the latest chapter in a family tragedy that was no longer the Shepards’ alone. Three months earlier, on the morning of January 3, Russell’s mother, Cindy Dixon, had been found raped and frozen to death on a desolate road in Rogers Canyon, eight miles from town. A twenty-eight-year-old Florida man, Dennis Menefee, whose nickname was “Dinger” — a convicted felon, an alleged counterfeiter, a known meth dealer, and also a friend of Aaron McKinney — would eventually be found guilty of manslaughter in Dixon’s death. Initially Menefee was charged with murder, but he was later offered a plea bargain and the charges against him were reduced.
The media paid scant attention to Dixon’s killing, which Matthew’s mother described as “mysterious” in her 2009 memoir, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed.
Menefee was given a four-to-nine-year prison sentence by Judge Jeffrey Donnell and was released after serving the minimum four years. But nearly a decade and a half after Dixon was abandoned by the side of a road in freezing temperatures and left to die, one of my trusted law enforcement sources in Wyoming, who has intimate knowledge of the Shepard murder as well as the meth underworld, continues to maintain that Matthew’s ki
lling and Cindy Dixon’s are “connected.” My source believes that Dixon was abducted for one of two reasons, or both: to convince Russell to remain silent, especially had his case made it to trial; and as a form of retaliation for Matthew’s robbery and murder in an ongoing dispute between rival drug factions.
Once again — according to official accounts — Cindy Dixon and Dennis Menefee were “strangers” who had met for the first time when Dixon got into his car on a Laramie street.
Very unlikely, my law enforcement source and others have told me. They said that both victim and perpetrator had associated with some of the same people locally, which may explain why Dixon had voluntarily gotten into Menefee’s car.
And once again the suspected link between them was methamphetamine.
At the April 5 hearing in Judge Donnell’s courtroom, Russell’s grandmother Lucy Thompson stood up to make a statement on his behalf. Many in the courtroom knew Lucy personally. For four decades she had run “Lucy’s Daycare” and was revered for the love and individual attention she gave all “her kids,” as some liked to call them.
Visibly heartbroken, Lucy walked slowly to the lectern in front of Donnell’s bench. Throughout the courtroom, tears were stifled before she started to speak. She turned first to Matthew’s parents and brother, Logan, who were seated in the front row of the gallery behind Cal.
“We would like to thank the Shepards for allowing us this opportunity,” she began. “You have showed such mercy to Russell. We know that there is nothing that can be said or done to ease your sorrow for your son and your brother, Matthew. You will always be in our prayers, as we know that pain will never go away.”
As Lucy reminisced about her grandson, her words appeared to identify him with Matthew, though her tone was deeply felt.
The Book of Matt Page 30
