The Book of Matt (16 page)

Vargas, a savvy, statuesque correspondent with the glamorous presence and sometimes-fussy personality of a movie star, had been filling in frequently that summer for Peter Jennings in the anchor chair on the evening news. Publicly, Jennings was said to be on an extended vacation, but ABC insiders knew he was already ailing with terminal cancer.

The more Glenn Silber and I continued to investigate Matthew’s murder on the ground in Wyoming and Colorado — reporting our findings back to Vargas, Sloan, and other network executives — the more aware all of us became of the story’s volatility. To his credit,
Sloan believed our investigation was journalistically important and was willing to engage whatever controversy it stirred up. But he would also eventually draw the line at some chilling new information Glenn and I had uncovered about the sinister world of methamphetamine dealing into which Matthew had gotten swept up. No one at ABC News questioned its veracity; they just felt it was too incendiary to put on the air.

During several meetings with Elizabeth Vargas in Jennings’s handsomely appointed office, I noticed mementos from Jennings’s impressive career as a newsman, amazed that my investigation had found a home in such hallowed surroundings. But I was also walking a tightrope since I had promised
20/20
the interviews with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, but prison authorities had yet to give us a green light.

In the end Nevada prison officials overruled the Wyoming Department of Corrections and cooperated with us fully. Wyoming officials, for their part, settled on having an observer in the room while the interviews were filmed. Were it not for that single turn of events, I would have departed hastily from ABC News in embarrassment. I was certain I would never get another chance with the Wyoming authorities, who would have been content to silence Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson forever had it been in their legal power to do so. As “the killers” in the most highly publicized murder case in the state’s history, Aaron and Russell have the kind of notoriety that prison bureaucrats can live without.

But dealing with state officials was only one of our near-mishaps while producing the report. In July 2004, after shooting an interview at the home of a former Laramie police commander, Dave O’Malley — whom we suspected of concealing or at least ignoring important facts about the murder — Elizabeth Vargas had mistakenly left a confidential memo along with her makeup case in O’Malley’s bedroom, where she had been waiting while we set up the cameras. Glenn and I had prepared the memo as background for her interview with O’Malley.

When O’Malley later discovered the items he was livid. He complained vociferously that we at
20/20
had decided prior to the
interview that his version of what motivated the crime was not credible. And to some degree he was right. By then we had examined the entire case record — including his police reports and those of his fellow officers — and had already conducted interviews with dozens of other sources. O’Malley’s version simply did not add up. Nor did it add up in his lengthy interview with Vargas, during which he seemed to contradict himself.

Nonetheless, I stood by horrified as O’Malley threatened to distribute our confidential memo on the Internet, hoping to discredit and embarrass us. Vargas’s careless mistake had put the whole story in jeopardy and with it almost five years of my work. I was furious but did my best to contain myself.

During the
20/20
interview Vargas questioned O’Malley about Aaron’s criminal history, beyond his 1997 burglary of a Kentucky Fried Chicken.

“What other kinds of crimes?” Vargas asked him.

“You know, just a lot of the petty kind of stuff, and I really haven’t looked at [Aaron’s] background in so long I don’t remember,” O’Malley responded, “he was a suspect in a lot of incidents. He was, uh, one of the people that we, uh, quite frankly, uh, frequently, uh, received drug-related information about, and, uh, were looking into at different times, uh, regarding those kinds of issues.”

“We keep hearing in this town that methamphetamine use is pretty common,” Vargas stated.

“It’s increasing,” O’Malley said.

“Why is that?”

“We’re playing catch-up, basically, right now. We’re educating on the issue of methamphetamine use
ten years after we should have started doing that
[italics mine]. We knew in law enforcement it was going to become an issue and … it was going to cause a lot of problems for us. But it really has started I think in the last few years … to escalate a little bit more. It’s cheaper, the high is longer, [and] we’re on Interstate 80 so access coming in off of the interstate makes [Laramie] a little more liable to have that kind of traffic coming in here. And they were right — the experts were talking
about what kind of an impact methamphetamine was going to have on our country, and I wish we’d have started reacting to it before it got here.”

Later in the interview, Vargas asked O’Malley, “At what point did you first learn that Matthew Shepard was gay?”

“Pretty early in the investigation I received a call from one of his friends [who] was at Poudre Valley [Hospital],” O’Malley answered, “and how they got the information early on [that Matthew had been beaten], I don’t really know, I don’t really recall …”

“And did he [Alex Trout] — is he the one who first suggested perhaps that was the motive for this beating?”

“Uh, as I recall, he’d indicated that uh that he thought Matt had used crank uh, or whatever terminology uh —”

“Does that mean methamphetamines?”

“Yeah, I don’t know, I think so. But uh you know, we talked to I don’t know how many people during the investigation, that never came up again. We searched Matt’s apartment, there was no indication of methamphetamine use there, um, you know, I just, I, I thought [Trout] was a flake.”

“But while you thought he was a flake,” Vargas continued, “you still believed when he said that Matthew was openly gay and that might have something to do with the attack?”

“Yeah, I, I certainly did, yeah.”

“Why, if you didn’t believe the rest of what he was saying —”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe the rest of what he was saying, we couldn’t corroborate anything that he said.”

Yet later in the interview, O’Malley stated, “I had no indication that Matt was a [drug] user. Is anything possible, you know, certainly. But I don’t have any indication of that, and there was nothing that came forward that would make me believe that was the case.”

Was O’Malley really ignorant of the information that was present in official police reports, including his own? Trout had been Matthew’s friend for four years and Walt Boulden for about six. According to a report by Sergeant Jeff Bury:

Myself, Commander O’MALLEY and Sergeant DEBREE conducted an interview with Alexander TROUT AND Walter BOULDEN …

When asked about Matthew SHEPARD’S alcohol and possible drug use, they stated that he smoked marijuana occasionally, however, when he was in Denver, that he had gotten into some cocaine use and had also participated in methamphetamine use.

As I stood in the kitchen of O’Malley’s home watching a video monitor of the live interview in the next room, I was aware that there was a substantial amount of evidence — beyond Trout’s and Boulden’s statements — to indicate that Matthew had struggled with a serious drug problem. As journalists, we were determined to understand the real chain of events behind Matthew’s murder.

Surely O’Malley had also seen the same autopsy report I had? Performed five days after the attack, it documents the presence of numerous substances, including phenylpropanolamine, one of the precursor ingredients used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. (In her 2009 memoir Judy Shepard acknowledged candidly that Matthew “self-medicated.”)

During the same interview O’Malley said he was “not going to change” his view that Aaron and Russell “did what they did to Matt because [of] hatred towards him for being gay.” But O’Malley also admitted, “There’s other investigators that worked this case, really good cops, really good investigators, that won’t go along with that. [They believe] that there was some other motivation; I don’t believe that’s true … There’s some difference of opinion.”

If you look back at the massive media coverage of the case, however, you find virtually no suggestion of a difference of opinion among law enforcement officers about the motives behind the attack — until 2004 when we interviewed Cal Rerucha, O’Malley, Ben Fritzen, Flint Waters (a former officer in the Laramie Police Department), and others.

Moreover, when Vargas asked O’Malley if he’d been “surprised at the national reaction” to the crime, he recalled, “The phone kept ringing and it was the media, and I thought, what is going on here? And
one person called early [on] and they said, well, do you know the motivation for what happened here? And we said, we’re still working on it, we’re right in the middle of it, can [you] please just leave us alone? And they said, could this have been a hate crime? And I said, yeah, it could have been a hate crime. And he said, thank you and hung up, and then the phones really started ringing and the human rights groups … started calling.”

O’Malley added: “Laramie kind of got a bad rap … of being a redneck town and I think the people that spent the time to come here and really spend some time … found out that that’s not the case. We’re a pretty tolerant group of individuals … and I think we’re good people.”

“But getting back to how this wildfire started,” Vargas pressed him, “… after, ‘this could be a hate crime’ by a reporter and saying, ‘well, yes, it could have been’ —”

“Right,” O’Malley nodded.

“The next thing you know, it’s all over —”

“Right,” he agreed again.

“— the media [reports], this is a hate crime.”

“Oh, that was the media,” he said.

In essence Dave O’Malley concurred with Cal Rerucha about the genesis of the hate crime theory — a theory that defined to a large extent what followed in the police investigation as well as the court case. But it had also taken almost six years since the murder for officials to talk about that aspect on the record.

Near the end of the interview with O’Malley, Vargas touched on the iconic image of Matthew’s crucifixion, which remains painfully vivid, even today.

“One of the things you wonder, because massive media coverage can be so distorted and so much can sort of fuzz around the edges in the re-telling,” she prefaced her question. “Is it true that Matthew was tied up like he was crucified?”

“No, he was tied with his hands behind him and … kind of … sitting on his butt on the ground and then [he] had kind of fallen over.”

“So where did that story come from?”

“I have no idea,” O’Malley said hesitantly.

Then he went on, “I’ve got an idea that it came from someone in local law enforcement who had never been to the [crime] scene, but I don’t know that. That’s always been a suspicion of mine.”

In this regard, too, O’Malley was all but confirming what Cal Rerucha had told me: The inaccurate, yet highly explosive, crucifixion element of the story had been set in motion inadvertently by a law enforcement colleague during an early press conference with the media.

At
20/20
we were relieved when Dave O’Malley ultimately backed down regarding the confidential story memo he had discovered with Elizabeth Vargas’s makeup case. Later, however, O’Malley contributed to tenth- and fifteenth-anniversary “epilogues” to the acclaimed docudrama
The Laramie Project
, in which he (and the show’s creators) ridiculed our investigation of the role methamphetamine had played in Matthew’s murder. More troubling to us as journalists, however, was learning that O’Malley had tried to convince Cal Rerucha to refuse an interview with us and to avoid discussing certain aspects of the case that had been buried when it ended. O’Malley’s argument was a familiar one: to let slumbering truths lie when so much good has been accomplished in Matthew’s name. When Cal refused, his twenty-year personal and professional friendship with Dave O’Malley ended.

But this would not be the only consequence that resulted from Cal Rerucha’s willingness to tell the truth about Matthew’s murder. Other long-term ties were suddenly severed; there were missed career opportunities as well. Several times he was passed over for appointments as a prosecutor or judge — positions for which he was uniquely qualified — when just a few years before he’d been invited to the Clinton White House. He was also later honored with the American Bar Association’s prestigious Minister of Justice Award, yet in his home state of Wyoming he had trouble for a time finding a job.

As Glenn Silber and I continued filming the
20/20
story, Ted Henson grew more distant. Worried I might lose him as a source, I foolishly
phoned his mother’s home in Mississippi and left a message for him. My message was very discreet but it made him angry; he said I had violated his trust.

“It is not that I don’t want to talk about Matt, it’s just [that] no matter what I can tell you about [him], someone is going to twist it …” Ted wrote in one of his sporadic emails. “Yes, there was something going on in [Matt’s] life that was bothering him. And I am not going to get into that at this point. It was something that he and I talked about … But I am not saying no either. I am thinking on what Matt would want me to do.”

As our
20/20
broadcast date approached, it became clear that Ted would not agree to an on-camera interview. While I was disappointed by his decision, I could not shake the sense that he was still withholding important information. This feeling only intensified when I learned that he had been making frequent phone calls to Russell Henderson’s grandmother Lucy Thompson.

According to Lucy, Ted introduced himself as “Matt’s lover” and confided that he was “certain” Aaron McKinney was “the real culprit” in the murder, though he offered little by way of explanation. He also asked her to call him Tristen, which he said was his “real name.”

During their long phone conversations, Lucy said, he reminisced “affectionately” about Matthew and “shared his pain at losing him.”