The Book of Matt (12 page)

Even Cal Rerucha was uncertain about how involved Henderson had been in beating Matthew, or whether he had taken part at all. Rerucha was quick to point out that under Wyoming law Henderson was still legally responsible for the murder even if he never assaulted Matthew. Yet long after he had won the convictions of both men, I could see Rerucha was still troubled — morally if not legally — by what part Henderson had played in the chain of events that brought about Matthew’s death.

Nothing I could find in Russell Henderson’s personal history seemed to fit with the sadistic violence of the murder. In contrast, Aaron McKinney had a reputation around Laramie for his volatile temper as well as a long juvenile record. As a boy, McKinney had allegedly abused animals for the fun of it.

After Henderson’s arrest for the 1998 attack, his landlord, Sherry Aanenson, described him to a reporter as “quiet, polite, just your average male” and “the most American kid you can get.” “I have a hard time imagining him coming up with anything like this on his own,” she stated. “It seems extremely out of character …”

Carson Aanenson, Sherry’s husband, couldn’t make sense of Henderson’s involvement either. “The gay issue had never been an inkling of a concern,” he said.

In several conversations with Cal Rerucha, I revisited the question of Henderson’s role in beating Matthew. Sitting behind his hefty oak desk in the county courthouse, Rerucha explained that his chief investigator in the case, Detective Rob DeBree, had all but convinced him that “Russell must have held Matthew down while McKinney beat him or he took part in the beating himself.” DeBree based his opinion, Rerucha said, on the substantial amount of Matthew’s blood found on a silver Boss jacket belonging to Russell.

“If Russell wasn’t in close proximity to Matthew during the beating, blood couldn’t have spattered on his jacket that way,” Rerucha recalled thinking at the time. “We just assumed McKinney and Henderson were covering up the real amount of Henderson’s involvement.”

I was intrigued by the doubt I saw in Rerucha’s pinched expression and the subtle change of tenor in his voice. As he glanced at me across his desk, he pointed with his index finger to an area just over his mouth. “The gash above Russell Henderson’s lip had a half-moon shape,” he said plainly, “just like bruises found on Matthew Shepard.”

I had seen Henderson’s scar in courtroom photos and had simply accepted, like others, that it came from an unrelated street fight he and McKinney had gotten into with two young Hispanic men shortly after they left Matthew at the fence. I was also aware from court transcripts that at Henderson’s sentencing in April 1999, six months after the attack, he stated openly for the first time that he had tried
to stop McKinney from beating Matthew. According to Henderson, McKinney turned on him in a fit of rage, striking him across the face with the same .357 Magnum he was using to beat Matthew. But until Rerucha mentioned Henderson’s scar I had never given it much thought.

Although police reports showed that Russell Henderson received nine stitches in a Laramie emergency room that night, I was still leery of his motives. Was his new story just a ploy to win sympathy and a more lenient sentence? Henderson had been facing a possible death sentence for months. Why would his attorney wait until the hour of sentencing to reveal that he had been pistol-whipped by Aaron McKinney? Henderson himself initially told police he had been hit during the later street fight. Why should he be believed now?

Yet Cal Rerucha, who had won his conviction, was now implying that he believed “Russell finally told the truth” when he admitted being assaulted by McKinney with the murder weapon. By the time of his admission, though, Henderson had already accepted a plea bargain for two life terms — a decision he made in the final stages of jury selection while under a threat of the death penalty.

Upon hearing Rerucha’s doubts, my catalog of questions multiplied. What about Henderson’s bloodstained jacket? Was Detective DeBree right when he said Henderson “must have” been more involved in beating Matthew? Did he take turns with McKinney as widely believed?

My first attempt to communicate with Russell Henderson was through his grandmother Lucy Thompson, a soft-spoken daycare provider who had raised him along with her late husband, Bill. Lucy was polite but discouraging when I phoned her in 2002, more than three years after the murder. She said she had been hounded incessantly by the media and had “no faith whatsoever in journalists.” Although I promised to respect her privacy and not quote her without permission, I could tell she had heard it all before.

After calling Lucy intermittently over weeks, she finally allowed me into her tidy, single-story ranch home on Laramie’s South 26th Street to talk for what she assured me would be no more than ten
minutes. “If I feel uncomfortable I’m going to ask you to leave,” she warned me at the front door. It was early evening and her circle of young children had already gone home for the day.

Around Laramie I had heard several people declare, “Lucy’s raised half the kids in this town.” Cal Rerucha praised her as “a beloved fixture of the community for decades” and said she could provide genuine insight into Russell’s life. It was a life Rerucha himself knew intimately since he had advocated on Russell’s behalf in family court when he was a boy. Rerucha described how Lucy and Bill Thompson had rescued their grandson from the neglect of an alcoholic mother and a string of violent men who had passed through her life — men who had also abused Russell.

We sat in Lucy’s cozily furnished living room talking for almost two hours, surrounded by framed photos of her four daughters, several grandchildren, and others in her family. Before the conversation was over I had no trouble comprehending her distrust of the media. The intrusions of reporters and camera crews during thirteen months of court proceedings in late 1998 and 1999 had been so unremitting, she said, that she nearly suffered a breakdown.

Lucy eventually confided that she had been prepared to call the sheriff’s office and have me removed from her home if I behaved as others had. With a slightly mischievous glint in her eyes, she held up the portable phone resting on the arm of her chair. But as Lucy grew to trust my intentions, other conversations followed. Early on she arranged for me to meet Gene Pratt, the president of her Latter Day Saints congregation, and Deanna Johnson, a close family friend. Both had been close to Russell since he was a boy and agreed to advise Lucy regarding their impressions of me.

Pratt and Johnson asked pointed questions about what I hoped to accomplish and whether it would cause the family more pain. Lucy informed me afterward that they had reported back to her favorably, but still she was not optimistic that her grandson would talk with me.

“It’s Russell’s decision and I know he’ll make the right one, but he needs time to think about it,” she told me. “It’s up to him.”

Several other individuals who were close to Russell during his adolescence — relatives, friends, employers, co-workers, and a
former girlfriend — had stated in court documents that his world fell apart at age fifteen when his grandfather died. An employee at the Laramie post office, Bill Thompson was said to be the only male Russell bonded closely with or trusted. The two hunted and fished together, and during his early teen years Russell helped administer daily dialysis treatments to him. According to Lucy, “Russell adored his grandfather and Bill had the same feelings for him. When Bill passed away, so did a big part of Russell. It was painful to see how much he hurt.

“I’m not making excuses for Russell, he must pay for what he did,” Lucy added in a sad but resolute voice. “Matthew Shepard’s life was taken so terribly and his family will always suffer missing him. I pray for the Shepards every day because I know the hurt they feel. But there’s a lot more to Russell than what many people think. He’s not the cruel person he’s been made out to be.”

Even Cal Rerucha told me more than once, “We almost had a success with Russell, he almost made it.”

Rerucha’s use of we implied personal regret, if not responsibility, for the system having failed Russell in his passage to manhood. His observation registered with more poignancy when Lucy showed me a picture of Russell at age fifteen on the front page of Laramie’s
Boomerang
newspaper, taken shortly before his grandfather died. Standing at attention in a pressed khaki uniform covered with merit badges, he is beaming with pride as Wyoming’s governor presents him with an Eagle Scout citation.

Yet the belief of many that Russell Henderson’s world only came apart with the death of his grandfather was not entirely convincing to me. Was that, too, another myth of the Laramie tragedy?

After waiting months for a reply to several letters I had written him, I received a short typed note:

Mr Jimenez

I have taken a long time to send this because I have been debating on whether or not I want to see you or not [sic]. I have changed my mind a hundred times. I finally decided that it should not hurt to talk to you. Please understand
that for right now I want everything that I say to be “off the record”…

Respectfully,

[signed] Russell A. Henderson

#19624

Rawlins, Wyoming

Had it not been for Lucy, my letters to Russell most certainly would have gone ignored. But it took three of his devoted guardians to persuade him to communicate with me, even off the record.

By the time of our first face-to-face interview in the spring of 2003, Russell had been transferred from the Wyoming State Penitentiary to an austere prison in the Nevada desert. He was then in the fifth year of his double life sentence.

One purpose of the interview was to find out how involved Russell really was in the violence inflicted on Matthew Shepard. Matthew had been beaten so severely with the barrel of McKinney’s gun that his skull had been crushed. It was a topic Russell had been wary of discussing in letters or phone conversations when he knew they were being monitored by prison authorities. But because of my persistent doubts, I had questioned him relentlessly anyway. His story was always the same:

I have told you everything I know. I would even take a polygraph test to prove it to you. Maybe since I’ve been plastered all over the T.V. as one of the killers … people … want me to be more involved than I really was … Believe me, this life that I now have to live would be a lot easier if that were true … I hope that someday you will believe me but I understand why you don’t …

High Desert State Prison, tucked on the outskirts of Indian Springs, Nevada, was a one-hour drive through barren, clay-colored hills from the extravagantly outsized Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas where I was staying for two nights.
The New York Times Magazine
had given me
a modest travel budget but at the last minute I’d gotten a low-priced package deal online. Leaving behind the flashy commerce of the Strip, I soon found myself surrounded in every direction by clear cobalt skies, which made the horizon itself seem like a mirage.

I arrived at the prison wearing jeans and a pale denim shirt, my head buzzed close to the scalp, and was promptly advised that I was being turned away because my attire was virtually identical to the inmates’ uniform. An affable female guard with some rank smiled at my dilemma. “Your haircut doesn’t help,” she ribbed me. But she was also quick to give directions to a Super Walmart back down the highway, close to the edge of Las Vegas. “If you hightail it, you can buy yourself a new suit of clothes and be back here in just over an hour,” she promised.

Sure enough, when Russell Henderson was escorted into the visiting area later that morning he looked exactly as I had earlier, right down to his shaved scalp. Russell is shorter than average, about five foot seven, with a compact, slightly stocky build. As he joined me at a drab metal table in the middle of the room, I felt the steady gaze of his glassy blue-green eyes. Russell seemed intent on quickly assessing everything about me before I had a chance to do the same to him. Maybe it was a survival skill picked up in prison, but from what I had already learned secondhand he had spent much of his life in a state of high alert.

As we faced each other across the table and slowly got acquainted, Russell’s answers to my questions were clipped and flat. In earlier phone conversations, he had also come across as exceedingly introverted and guarded.

Near the end of that first visit, I asked how he was coping with two life sentences. Without a grain of self-pity, Russell answered, “I belong here for what I did.” I’m not sure what I expected him to say but I heard none of the usual convict’s complaint — that he was “innocent” or “got fucked over by the system” or was “framed” by someone else.

There was much I hoped Russell Henderson would clarify that day and the next morning when I returned. Instead I left the Nevada prison somewhat disappointed by his reticence. At his April 1999 sentencing, Russell had admitted that he drove the truck the night
Matthew Shepard was robbed and beaten, and that it was he who tied Matthew to the fence, albeit on the instructions of Aaron McKinney. Yet Russell also told me explicitly on several occasions that he “never raised a hand” against Matthew. “[I] never struck him, never hit him,” he repeated at a later date. “I never even pushed him. Never even shook his hand.”

Since Russell had agreed to a plea bargain and never presented concrete evidence to support his version of events, why should he be believed now?

After visiting him, I arrived back in my Las Vegas hotel room more puzzled than ever by his matter-of-fact, yet seemingly candid account of the crime that landed him in prison for the rest of his life. I also felt a lingering sense of confinement as I stared out the window at an opulent necklace of mosaic-tiled swimming pools in the perfectly manicured gardens many stories below. That evening, while drifting through the packed hotel casino in search of a restaurant — hundreds of slot machines chirping loudly and flashing their colored lights — the sensation of being trapped on a surreal journey of my own was exacerbated.