The Book of Matt (13 page)

In Russell’s next round of letters, mixed with answers to my ongoing questions about the murder, he charted his daily prison routine for me: finishing classes for his high school diploma; basketball workouts; fantasy sports competitions; planting a vegetable garden in parched desert soil; and drawing portraits late at night in his cell with pencils and a sketch pad sent by his grandmother. His activities sounded more campuslike than the infernal atmosphere usually conjured up by
maximum security
. But by then I was coming to understand that Russell is expert at masking his pain.

Long before he and I met, I had heard a rumor in Laramie that his first year at the Wyoming State Penitentiary was a nightmare; that he had been placed in segregation for a time for his own protection. There had been talk of a “Mom” and “Dad” taking ownership of him as their “boy,” which he steadfastly denied to me. If true, it was a humiliation he clearly did not want me writing about.

After my initial visits with Russell, I would not admit to anyone but myself the discomfort sparked in me as I got to know him personally, or the empathy I had begun to feel. Most of the time I simply
retreated to a more detached professional stance, in part to protect my work on the story but mostly to protect myself from becoming attached to him. At age twenty-five, with two life sentences and a reputation as a contemptible anti-gay killer, Russell’s predicament was nothing if not bleak.

THIRTEEN

Alibi

One person I was still very eager to talk to was Kristen Price, Aaron McKinney’s former girlfriend and the mother of his son. Because she was prosecutor Cal Rerucha’s “star witness,” she had been sequestered outside Wyoming for nearly a year while awaiting McKinney’s 1999 trial. “We wanted to be sure nothing happened to her,” Rerucha explained drily. “Without her testimony, our capital case against McKinney would have been weak.”

Not long after McKinney’s conviction, Price and members of her immediate family vacated their Florida home and vanished as if they had been swept into a witness protection program. After I finally managed to locate Price’s mother, Kim Kelly, who reluctantly agreed to act as an intermediary, I grew impatient with the many preconditions she insisted upon for meeting her daughter. But I also realized from her nervous communications that she was genuinely worried about the safety of her daughter and grandson. She said there had been “boxes of letters with threats against Kristen” while the case was going on in Laramie.

Five years after the murder, Price and her family were living in seclusion in a quiet midwestern suburb. They had gone to extreme lengths to put those events behind them, so the prospect of a journalist looking into them again was disconcerting. Late-night emails that Kelly sent me before our first meeting conveyed high-strung emotions bordering on paranoia, which I didn’t dismiss. She said she was afraid “other people might find us, just like you did.”

As a safety measure I hired a recently retired FBI agent to accompany me as a driver, on the outside chance someone hostile or unknown had gotten word of the interview. It was the first time I felt the need for a bodyguard while investigating Matthew’s murder.

Facing Kristen Price and her mother in a window booth at a brightly lit chain restaurant, I appreciated why Cal Rerucha had placed so
much stock in Price as a witness. Despite my suspicion that she had told bald-faced lies to the police and the media and that she may have perjured herself on the witness stand, I found something ingenuous about her; her openness and maturity surprised me.

A pert, wholesome-looking brunette, Kristen said she decided to talk to me because she had not resolved her emotional distress over Matthew’s murder. She was “still deeply upset” that she had helped conceal evidence after learning of the crime from Aaron, and especially that she had not notified authorities that Matthew was left tied to a fence, which might have saved his life.

But Kristen also echoed her mother’s fears and expressed the same concerns Aaron had. She was worried that telling the truth might put their four-year-old son in danger.

By the time I met Kristen, Aaron had already revealed to me his extensive drug-dealing activities during the three-year period preceding the murder. He was also adamant about not naming his dealing cohorts or “talking out of school.” When I mentioned this to Kristen, her mother interrupted.

“Aaron would definitely keep his mouth shut, to protect Kristen and their son,” Kelly said.

In our initial interviews in 2003, Kristen admitted that she had fabricated significant portions of her original story to the police and the media in October 1998, including the claim that Matthew made an unwanted sexual advance at the Fireside bar — an incident that never happened. Her hope then was to win sympathy for Aaron.

“I would have said or done anything at that point to get him out [of jail],” she stated.

As a young mother at the time, Kristen was also desperate to avoid prison herself as an accessory to murder. Later, as the prosecution’s main witness, she helped diminish the role of methamphetamine in the case. But now, as she changed her story about Aaron and Russell’s anti-gay motives, she revealed that her life with Aaron had revolved around buying, selling, and using meth.

“It was an everyday thing,” she confessed, shaking her head plaintively.

Another reason she wanted to “come clean,” Kristen said, was that she had been battling her own addiction “on and off” since leaving
Laramie and was still struggling to put that chapter behind her. Like Aaron, however, she would not name names or provide details about his chain of suppliers or those he was selling meth to at the time of the murder.

From the very start of the Shepard investigation, a couple of key police officers had consistently downplayed Aaron’s involvement with meth and denied it was a factor. Yet several other knowledgeable sources informed me that, among other activities, Aaron had traveled to a California meth lab as a courier — a federal meth-trafficking offense — and that he and other young dealers in his circle had even sold drugs to local cops.

In reality the drug trade in Wyoming, and Laramie in particular, was not something new. Since the 1980s a handful of local dealers had prospered, abetted by corruption on the part of some respected businesspeople, attorneys, physicians — and police.

According to a close friend of Matthew Shepard who grew up in Laramie, “The cops are as involved with drugs in this town as the citizens are.”

Several years before Matthew’s murder one cop who would later work on the case was investigated by state law enforcement agents for concealing a cache of $160,000 in drug proceeds in the basement of his Laramie home. To the chagrin of state officials familiar with the investigation, the cop was never charged with a crime and remains a sheriff’s deputy today. Apparently, local police offered no complaints since the confiscated drug money was used to buy new equipment and uniforms.

Until the mid-1990s cocaine was the top drug of choice in the Rocky Mountain West, including Wyoming. Within a couple of years, however, an epidemic of methamphetamine addiction and meth-related crime took hold in Wyoming (and many other parts of the country), and for more than a decade held the state in its devastating grip.

Before I met Kristen Price and her mother, Aaron McKinney had already admitted to me that his “gay panic” story was a lie and that Matthew coming on to him sexually was not the source of his murderous rage. But I suspected as much long before his disclosure. It was
not simply the rumors I had heard that he was gay or bisexual and a hustler. It was also the lengths Aaron had gone to enlisting others in his half-baked alibi, including his jailhouse letter instructing Russell Henderson on exactly what to say.

According to Aaron, he had already come up with his gay panic alibi before his arrest and persuaded Kristen and Russell (and indirectly, Russell’s girlfriend, Chasity, an art student at the University of Wyoming) to go along with it. In his confession to police, Aaron held to that basic story they had agreed upon, but he made a few critical changes. The most glaring discrepancy was that instead of saying that Matthew made a sexual advance on both him and Russell at the Fireside bar, as Kristen alleged, Aaron said the reason he exploded was because Matthew grabbed his leg in the truck as the three men were driving through town.

All four accomplices would eventually admit to me that they had lied about the crime’s motives in a concerted attempt to cover up. They also revealed how they had gotten rid of all their drug paraphernalia, successfully concealing that evidence from police investigators.

“I figured the police would come look in [my] apartment …” Aaron said. “I needed to get everything out of the house that [could] get me in any kind of trouble.”

In phone interviews with Aaron, I sensed that he was growing more comfortable with me. Or at least he was more willing to discuss specifics of his drug-dealing activities, as long as I was also talking to other clued-up sources on the outside, whose information he could simply confirm or deny. Aaron’s refusal to be a snitch — or to be perceived as one — was something he was vigilant about.

I was therefore surprised when he confided that his “real plan” on the night of the crime had been something altogether different. He claimed that a roofing co-worker had tipped him off about “another dealer” in town who had six ounces of methamphetamine, worth more than ten thousand dollars on the street. Aaron said he had planned to steal all the meth, believing it would not only solve his money problems but also provide him with an ample personal supply of the drug. It was only when he couldn’t pull that robbery off that he decided to rob Matthew “instead.”

It was a story — or another lie — I hadn’t encountered before, including in Aaron’s confession. It served to throw me off course a bit and left me guessing as to why he might have mentioned this other robbery plan. Was there any truth to it or was it just another attempt to deceive?

Despite my many phone interviews with Aaron, I was also still apprehensive when I got word from Nevada correctional authorities that I could finally meet him in person. Cal Rerucha had told me more than once that his worst fear was that “Aaron will kill again if he’s given the chance. Prison won’t stop him. Next time it’ll be a guard or another inmate.”

Forty-five miles from Las Vegas, in the same desolate prison where I’d met Russell, a guard escorted me into a dank holding cell not far from the main visiting area. Aaron, then twenty-six, was waiting for me there.

He quickly stood up to shake my hand, pursing his lips and smiling sheepishly. Although the guard positioned himself several yards away, I’d felt anxious about being left alone with Aaron.

Almost immediately, though, I felt disarmed by his small size and timid demeanor. I saw in his glazed eyes the look of a lost adolescent, someone who would need protection to survive within those unforgiving walls, despite pumping weights religiously to beef up his chest and arms.

As we sat talking on a narrow metal bench welded to the floor, I was eerily aware that this young man alongside me had slammed a seven-inch gun barrel into Matthew Shepard’s skull over and over until his brain stem was crushed. That Aaron McKinney was not coming across as unrepentantly evil made my emotions all the more confused.

For a moment I speculated about his capacity for remorse and atonement. But later I would be embarrassed to admit to anyone but myself that I sensed fragility in Aaron, however distorted or damaged.

Was he playing me like a con artist, eliciting pity and compassion when none were deserved?

During his incarceration in Laramie’s county jail while awaiting trial, Aaron had shamelessly autographed his name as “Killer,”
and, according to a jailhouse snitch, he threatened to take a pregnant female guard hostage.

Long after our first prison meeting in Nevada, I was haunted by a photograph of Aaron taken during his 1999 trial, which I had seen in
Vanity Fair
. Clad in a bright orange jumpsuit, Aaron leered menacingly past the camera lens. His gaze — piercing yet remote — seemed to invite intimacy while simultaneously repelling it.

“It looks like his eyes are dead — dead inside,” Matthew’s mother was quoted in the article. “I believe there are people who have no souls.”

I could not theorize about Aaron’s psychological makeup or judge whether there was anything redeemable in him. It was a pointless exercise, as he seemed destined to spend the rest of his life in prison. But many who followed his trial felt cheated by an outcome that spared him the death penalty. Lethal injection was too good for McKinney, they said.

Several times during my investigation, however, I was forced to thoroughly reconsider my understanding of Aaron McKinney’s character and his motives. One catalyst was my research into the relationship between methamphetamine addiction and violence, under the tutelage of an internationally renowned substance abuse expert at UCLA Medical Center.

But on another occasion it was Aaron himself who gave me pause. In a filmed interview he spoke with unexpected candor about his accomplice, Russell Henderson.

“It’s really hard for me to talk to Russ, to see him in this situation, knowing that I’m the one that put him here,” he said. “I ruined that guy’s life. He was a good kid. Squeaky clean … He didn’t do nothing [sic]. The only thing that man’s guilty of is keeping his mouth shut.”

FOURTEEN

The Mile High City

Before Doc O’Connor moved to Bosler, Wyoming, in 1979 and began to remake the crumbling old railroad town into his “Western Village,” he had run several businesses in Denver, where, by his own account, he’d already gained a reputation as something of an outlaw, “at least in my personal life anyway.”

The two enterprises Doc had owned that he was proudest of were a used-furniture and antiques shop, and an adult bookstore. With little modesty, he hinted that a lot more had gone on in the bookstore than selling porn and adult novelties. Doc had liquidated the Denver businesses years before, but one of his more recent ventures, “Doc’s Class Act Limousine Service,” still kept him connected to the Mile High City, where his mother and other family members made their home.