The Book of Matt (20 page)

One central figure in the Denver circle was Mark Rohrbacher, known by his cohorts — including Matthew — as Mark K.

Rohrbacher was arrested in Laramie in 2001 for a variety of meth-trafficking offenses going back to 1997, the year before Matthew’s murder. Although Rohrbacher was incarcerated on the night Matthew was attacked, sources have identified him as one of the “top dogs” who taught Matthew how to deal in Denver and later showed him the ropes in Laramie. In a handwritten letter, a Rohrbacher associate who became a friend of Matthew recalled his first encounters with Matthew in Denver in 1997 — along with two other family members, Mason
^*
and Carl:

I truly hope and pray that none of this falls into the wrong hands. It could make me a dead man …

That was my job, that’s what I did — deal … Almost anyone we came in contact with got sucked in — one way or another … I was very good at the violence which would later make me a very valuable asset to a certain [organization] …

By the end of [a twelve-day period] Matt [had come] around twice … Mason said [Matt] was cool and … had helped to find the somewhat large amount of stuff we had been looking for …

Mason, Carl and Matt all rode to [a Denver bar] … and were able to set a deal for two grand within the space of an hour and a half.

The same source also recounted a second Denver incident that involved himself, Mason, Carl, Matthew, and two other members of the circle — Tom
^*
and Suzie
^*
:

Mason said he had to go because this dude [Matt] needed to get to class which really struck me as odd considering all the shit I was standing in at the moment. [Matt] truly looked too innocent and totally out of place to me …

Mason had a shotgun of his dad’s and I had my automatic and we set out to find Tom and discovered Matt would know where to find the chic [sic] who had gotten the dope from Carl …

We go to these apartments and get Matt … I was very irritated at this point … so I just wanted to get the dope and finish our business …

[Later] I saw the chic [sic] we had been looking for and she bolted … down a hallway and I raised my pistol and fired into the wall …

We went back to Suzie’s in Lakewood [Colorado] and got high for a while and [I] remember Matt telling anyone who [would] listen that night about the incident.

At the time of Matthew’s October 1998 murder, sources said, Mark K’s girlfriend, Jeanne Keenan, then thirty-four, who has a sizable
record of meth-related arrests of her own, continued to move the drug while he was in jail. But she did so with the help of other trusted family members. One was Matthew Shepard, who accompanied her to Denver and Fort Collins in the passenger seat — a secondary but critical role that dealers call a ride-along.

“Matt filled in for Mark K, doing the runs from Denver while Mark was away,” a former family member stated.

According to the same source, the drug runs were made on a regular biweekly basis. One of the routine runs was scheduled for Tuesday, October 6, the day Matthew was targeted for robbery by Aaron McKinney.

The trip was almost always the same: pickup of twelve ounces in Denver, a stop in Fort Collins for a drop-off of six ounces, then a final delivery to Laramie of the remaining six ounces. But for reasons that remain murky, it was decided at the last minute that Matthew would not go along this time. Whether Keenan or someone else made the trip alone, or with a different companion — or the run was canceled at the eleventh hour or its time changed — are a few of the questions still surrounding the murder.

Nonetheless, a number of previously hidden facts shed new light on the sequence of events leading up to the October 6 attack.

At a friendly sports bar in the Denver suburb of Lakewood, Glenn and I interviewed another member of the Denver circle, Doug
^*
, on the afternoon of October 19, 2004. A darkly handsome, long-haired army veteran who had served in the First Gulf War, Doug said he first met Matthew Shepard in Denver in 1997, but that he had known Aaron McKinney longer, “mainly in passing,” since they were both from Laramie.

Doug was not happy about talking to us and made no attempt to hide his displeasure. He had consented to meet with us in the bar’s quiet back room as “a favor” to a former girlfriend, yet he appeared just as anxious to find out what we knew as we were to hear anything he might be willing to tell us. Above all, he wanted to be sure that our conversation would not put him back in the penitentiary.

Clutching the neck of a beer bottle tightly in his right hand and slowly peeling away the label with his left fingernails, Doug confirmed
much of what we had been told by others: that Matthew began dealing for the circle in Denver but then “got into it fairly quickly and successfully when he moved back to Wyoming.”

“Some people thought Matt moved too quickly, ‘like who the fuck is this guy to be moving into it so fast’ in Laramie,” he said. “But those people didn’t know he’d paid his dues getting into it down here in Denver.”

We told Doug that other sources had suggested that when Mark K was jailed in early fall 1998 and therefore “out of the picture in Laramie,” Matthew had moved up and helped to fill the void. Doug nodded, nervously tapping the bottom of his beer bottle on the thick wooden table. Once more, he repeated that “some people” didn’t take kindly to seeing that happen.

After a long silence, he glared at Glenn and me. “And what have some of these other people you’ve been talking to had to say about
me
?” he asked.

Worried we had maybe pushed the conversation — and Doug — too far, each of us muttered some pleasantries about the rules and ethics of journalism, and that we were bound to protect all our confidential sources, including him. He seemed to accept what we had to say, but we knew it was time to end the interview. The combination of Doug’s bulging, bloodshot eyes and his twitchy mood indicated that he had probably been bingeing, and though he was smoothing the rough edges with beer, we thought it best not to ask more questions as he was starting to come down.

NINETEEN

Sleeping Dogs

On a Friday afternoon in late October 2004, a little more than six years after the murder, I drove two hundred miles to meet Kyle
^*
, a former drug cohort of Aaron McKinney, alone at an isolated truck stop off I-80 in western Wyoming.

I had interviewed Kyle twice before in prison and he had been surprisingly cooperative, so I felt more or less safe. Still, I took precautions since he had earlier advised me, “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” referring to his friends higher up on the drug-dealing food chain.

Kyle worked in the oil fields and had just gotten off a shift. He was still in company overalls, his face and hands stained with crude.

As we sat in the front seat of his parked car talking about Matthew Shepard, whom he had previously claimed to know only in passing, I suggested that Matthew might have gotten in over his head with drugs. Kyle snarled at me like I was an idiot, “Yeah, and he was taking stuff away from the rest of us!”

Without warning two other vehicles suddenly backed into spaces on both sides of us, wedging us in. When I saw what was happening I leapt from the car and ran into the middle of the parking lot, where there were more lights.

Kyle shouted for me to get back in the car but I refused. At that instant a friend of mine, who was planted in a nearby truck monitoring the meeting, called my cell phone. “Get out of there, Steve,” he yelled, “they’re setting you up!”

“Stay in your car, don’t let them see you,” I snapped back. Trying not to panic but worried I would get run over or shot, I spun around several times to keep Kyle’s car in view as I hustled across the parking lot to a truck stop restaurant. Before I reached the entrance, Kyle’s
vehicle and the other two tore out of the lot, tires screeching, heading for the ramp to the interstate.

Seconds later my friend picked me up in front of the truck stop, his face a sickly shade of white. In a halting voice he told me how close he thought he had come to losing me there. I knew he was right. With his help I had narrowly managed to escape, but clearly I had been given a message.

Driving away from the truck stop I took my friend’s advice and crouched down on the floor of his truck, out of sight. Evidently someone more powerful than Kyle had set me up.

I hardly slept that night in Laramie. Waves of anxiety surged through me till late the next morning. Why had I put myself in danger like that?

The next day, still agitated, I related my roadside experience to Cal Rerucha. He shook his head in disgust. “The methamphetamine trade has made Wyoming revert to the lawless anarchy of the Old West,” he remarked pungently. “It’s deadly.” By then, Cal had been voted out of office in Albany County, after four elected terms. He was now prosecuting state and federal drug cases in the twin cities of Rock Springs and Green River — the epicenter of methamphetamine traffic for the Rocky Mountain West.

After hearing my story Cal told me about a colleague, a Wyoming judge who had recently been surprised by an armed male intruder in the bathroom of his home one morning while shaving. The man was there to relay a message regarding a drug case in which he was awaiting sentencing by the judge. After a few curt words the man quietly slipped away.

I saw no point in asking what the judge decided with a gun staring him in the face. But Cal’s reference to the Old West brought back a conversation I’d recently had about Matthew’s murder with a veteran cop in the Albany County Sheriff’s Office. Friendly, with a studied good-old-boy charm, the cop leaned over his desk toward me, his chiseled, windburned face inches from mine.

“You sure you’re not quoting me on this?” he asked.

“It’s for background, I won’t be using your name,” I answered, trying to sound reassuring.

“What happened to Matthew Shepard wasn’t a hate crime, not at all,” he confided in a low voice. “But why do you want to go digging into all that again? Why not let sleeping dogs lie?”

I wasn’t inclined to answer his question candidly. Instead of laying out my suspicions about the involvement of other parties beyond Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson in events surrounding Matthew’s murder, I reminded him that the killing was “a seminal national event, a lot like the civil rights killings of the 1960s,” as if he were somehow unfamiliar with the stigma that continued to tarnish his hometown. “The public has a right to know whether the murder was really a hate crime,” I said with conviction, “and if not, what was it?”

The cop stared at me as he sank back from his desk, shrugging doubtfully. Almost as an afterthought he flashed me another knowing grin, but again his eyes told me to let sleeping dogs lie.

— PART TWO —

The Book Of Matt

TWENTY

One Spring Night

Nearly six years after Matthew’s murder Glenn Silber and I interviewed Flint Waters, a former officer in the Laramie Police Department. We were interested in talking with Waters because he was the first law enforcement officer to have contact with Aaron and Russell late on the night of October 6, 1998 — only minutes after they’d left Matthew tied to the fence, savagely beaten. Waters was responding to an unrelated report of someone slashing tires when he came upon the two men in Bill McKinney’s truck, parked on a quiet residential street. Although Aaron and Russell quickly fled from the scene, Waters chased Russell on foot and caught him.

During the recorded interview in summer 2004, Waters, who had left the police department and gone on to become a leading drug enforcement agent for the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation, made a statement that caught our attention.

“Looking back at … how this crime impacted Laramie, I think that there was a lot of media attention drawn to this town that was unrelated to anything that happened that night,” he said. “What’s bothered me about the ‘hate crime’ title is that I was involved in this the night [it] happened, and I was working security for the court house when all that excitement was going on [during the trials], and none of it appeared to be related.”

It was not until several years after that interview, however, that another law enforcement source told me about a separate investigation that Waters had been involved with — an apparently unsolved arson incident five months before Matthew was attacked. The source discreetly handed me a Laramie police record number and told me I’d have to request the report myself, which he indicated had been “buried” with other previously sealed documents. He surmised
that Waters had probably not mentioned it earlier because he was still working in law enforcement at the time. (Today Waters is the chief information officer for the state of Wyoming, appointed by the governor.)

A minute or two before 4
AM
on May 9, 1998, Flint steered his patrol car onto Park Avenue in Laramie’s handsome, tree-lined university neighborhood. Someone in the vicinity had phoned in a report of a car on fire. Heading east, Flint saw a pillar of orange-and-gray smoke billowing into the darkness above the street.

Later that morning, as early sunlight flickered across the prairie, he typed a routine report about the incident near 1115 Park Avenue.

Upon arrival I saw a station wagon parked in front of the residence … fully engulfed in flames. The flames reached … about 30 feet in height. I observed an individual who was later found to be the owner of the car, Daniel BALL, standing in the yard with a garden hose spraying water on a nearby pine tree.

… While I was talking to BALL one of the tires exploded and shot pieces of the bumper out across the ground … I remained in the area awaiting the fire units. I watched … for individuals who were wandering through or watching since this is the third fire of this type in a month.