The Book of Matt (23 page)

Shannon Shingleton and Jenny Malmskog both reminisced without nostalgia about drug parties during which friends from their circle “used to be up for days and days,” Malmskog said, mostly on meth. Aaron McKinney was often among them.

When asked whether Matthew had participated, Shingleton responded, “I can confirm that Matt was at these parties … In Laramie you were either part of the drug crowd or you weren’t.”

Not long after Matthew’s murder, Shingleton and Malmskog were interviewed extensively by members of New York’s Tectonic Theater Project, creators of the docudrama
The Laramie Project
. Both Shingleton and Malmskog were later listed in the on-screen credits of HBO’s adaptation of the play.

“We talked to those guys for hours,” Malmskog recalled.

“I told people [from the Tectonic]
everything
I knew,” Shingleton
added, including what he knew firsthand of Aaron’s and Matthew’s involvement with crystal meth.

Shingleton said he was “angry at how fake [
The Laramie Project
] is” and he couldn’t understand why its makers had betrayed the truth to make a political statement.

On the morning of Friday, October 9, 1998, hours after he was arrested for attempted murder, Aaron McKinney gave Detectives Rob DeBree and Ben Fritzen a recorded statement. The complete contents of that statement remained sealed until Aaron’s trial a year later, when a recording was played in the courtroom. Not even Russell Henderson, his co-defendant, had been allowed to review the statement while preparing his defense.

The first time I read a transcript of Aaron’s thirty-two-page statement, I was startled by several things he’d said, especially his claim that Matthew had offered an exchange of drugs for sex on the night of October 6.

“[Matthew] said he could turn us on to some cocaine or something, some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex …” Aaron told DeBree and Fritzen. “I said I’m not gay, I don’t do that stuff.”

For a long time I questioned whether there could be any truth to Aaron’s allegation, which DeBree and Fritzen had left unexplored. But I initially neglected to pay close attention to the Q & A that followed:

Detective DeBree:
You’ve been involved with methamphetamine before, though, haven’t you?

Aaron McKinney:
Yeah, in the past.

Detective DeBree:
Okay. How long ago in the past … a month? Two months?

Aaron McKinney:
No, it’s been longer than that.

Oddly, the subject of drugs in general, and methamphetamine specifically, was dropped for the rest of the recorded interview. Yet it was well known among Laramie cops that Aaron was a chronic meth user and dealer; DeBree and Fritzen had personally investigated him for earlier offenses and knew his history.

While I had repeatedly heard rumors that drugs were behind Matthew’s murder — and even whispered talk of an official cover-up — the drug angle only began to preoccupy me when I discovered evidence of a strained personal relationship between Aaron and Matthew prior to the crime. If, indeed, a drug component to the murder had been deliberately concealed, whether by Aaron, Russell, Doc, drug traffickers, law enforcement officers, and/or parties unknown, it once again raises the question: Why?

Did Detective DeBree really take at face value Aaron’s statement that he hadn’t used meth recently? A careful examination of Aaron’s daily activities shows that he lied in his confession. In reality, he had been smoking or snorting a minimum of one to two grams of meth per week, mixing it with other street drugs and large amounts of alcohol. But according to Aaron, “There have been times when I’d use two, three grams a day” (italics mine).

At the time, a gram of meth sold for about eighty dollars in Laramie. With his monthly take-home pay of $1,000 or less, and a $370 rent payment, Aaron was spending, at a minimum, the equivalent of $500 a month on his meth habit, excluding cocaine and marijuana.

Aaron himself has also admitted the degree to which he misled police during his recorded statement. “I didn’t really want to reveal that I was that into drugs,” he stated simply — though he didn’t explain why.

It seems equally odd, however, that officials didn’t order drug testing for Aaron and Russell, given what they knew of Aaron’s activities. Instead DeBree held fast to the opinion he had formulated early in the investigation. In a published interview with author Beth Loffreda for her 2001 book
Losing Matt Shepard: Life and Politics in the Aftermath of Anti-Gay Murder
, DeBree was quoted as follows: “There’s just absolutely no involvement with drugs” and “there’s no way” the murder was a meth crime.

“From everything that we were able to investigate, the last time [Aaron and Russell] would have done meth would have been up to two to three weeks previous to that night,” DeBree said.

In contrast, former homicide detective Fritzen told me in a 2004 interview, “Shepard’s sexual preference or sexual orientation certainly
wasn’t the motive in the homicide … What it came down to really is drugs and money.”

But Fritzen had something else to say about the police investigation itself. “Anybody who was closely involved in investigating the case … pretty much came up with the same consensus … that this wasn’t a hate crime,” he recalled. “Initially everybody agreed … [but] as time went on, some [fellow officers] became politically involved in these issues.”

Fritzen and prosecutor Cal Rerucha were in agreement about how the case had been exploited politically, even by a few of their law enforcement colleagues who apparently enjoyed being in the national media spotlight. But it wasn’t until six years after the murder that Rerucha was willing to speak for the first time on the record about the role of meth.

“If Aaron McKinney had not become involved with methamphetamine, Matthew Shepard would be alive,” he stated explicitly. “It was a horrible murder … driven by drugs.”

TWENTY-THREE

The Ranger

On Monday, October 5, Matthew wasn’t feeling well. He had a cold and was still “very agitated,” according to Tina Labrie.

Over the course of the day, Matthew spoke on the phone with another friend, Brian Gooden, a thirty-six-year-old Denver optician who was unaware that Matthew had been in a crisis that weekend. The two men had struck up an online friendship several months earlier after Gooden read Matthew’s AOL profile (“Matt6926”). According to Gooden, they quickly discovered that they could talk about “anything and everything,” from outdoor activities like hiking and camping to fashion or the latest gossip about Madonna.

By late summer the two men had switched from chatting online to talking by phone most of the time. But Gooden also remembered that when they had first started talking, “Matt’s mouth was still wired shut” — from the assault he had suffered in Cody, Wyoming, in mid-August.

“You wanted to be around [Matt], he had this energy that wouldn’t end,” Gooden said. “You just wanted to be part of it … One time I spent 45 minutes with him on the phone talking about what clothes he was going to wear.”

The more they conversed, however, the more Matthew opened up about his life and some of the issues he’d been struggling with, including depression.

While he was living in Denver and the nearby suburb of Aurora earlier that year, “Matt had a hard time keeping [a] job,” Gooden recalled him saying. Matthew also complained about a lesbian roommate who had kicked him out of their Denver apartment “for smoking too much pot.”

But according to Gooden, the move to Laramie wasn’t proving to be the kind of change Matthew had hoped for, least of all as a gay
male. “He said he was an easy target, so he made a conscious effort to dress straight,” Gooden mentioned in our first interview more than a decade ago.

“Matt would cry [when he was] insulted for being gay, it would rip him up,” he continued. “[But] his world didn’t revolve around being gay. He just wanted to meet people. Matt was a worldly person [who] was alone … [and] he was reaching out.”

During phone conversations with Gooden, Matthew described Tina and Phil Labrie, whom he had just met that summer, as his “best friends.” Yet from other things Matthew had confided about their marriage, Gooden got the impression that “Matt was the glue in [their] relationship.”

Matthew also slipped another tidbit into one of their long phone chats: He confessed that he had stolen a car when he was a teenager. Gooden couldn’t remember the details, but as with most of what Matthew told him he simply took it in stride. It didn’t diminish their budding friendship, Gooden said, nor dampen his excitement about driving to Laramie the following Friday, October 9, so they could finally meet in person. Matthew had invited him to homecoming weekend at the University of Wyoming, with plans to attend the Cowboys football game on Saturday and the town parade afterward. Maybe they’d even take a drive out to the Snowy Range on Sunday or to Lake Marie, where the fall colors would be reaching their peak. Matthew didn’t like driving too much but he loved taking trips and being outdoors every chance he got.

Since Matthew was still fighting a cold on Monday evening, Tina packed her five-year-old son and two-year-old daughter in the car and drove over to his ground-floor apartment on North 12th Street to see if he needed anything. When she saw he was low on food and out of cold medicine, she took him to the grocery store with the kids. Matthew also asked if they could stop to pick up his Ford Bronco, which he had parked on the street downtown.

Once they arrived back at his apartment, the four watched TV, Tina said. She couldn’t recall the exact times that everything had occurred that night, but she remembered that Matthew had been eager to watch
Will and Grace
, which had debuted just two weeks before, and that after flipping the channels for a while he’d finally found the show on a Denver station. (A local Wyoming affiliate apparently blocked the broadcast of
Will and Grace
then, due to its gay content.)

Tina estimated that she and the kids had stayed at Matthew’s apartment until about 10
PM
, when her husband Phil finished a class.

But according to a Laramie police report two days later, Tina told Detective Gwen Smith that the last time she had spoken with Matthew was “Monday evening … between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00
PM
.”

While I had no reason to doubt Tina’s honesty or the accuracy of her recollections, I noticed that her versions conflicted with the account that Matthew’s friend Alex Trout had given to police — and later to me — regarding Matthew’s whereabouts on Monday evening. Trout said he had been with Matthew at the Ranger bar.

“The last time he had seen Matt was Monday in Laramie at the Rancher [sic] at approximately 7:30
PM
,” Laramie Police Commander Dave O’Malley wrote in his report.

Yet in August 2003, nearly five years after the murder, Tina repeated to me that she had been with Matthew “from 7 to 9
PM
, or 7 to 10
PM
” on Monday night. Even today, she still believes Matthew stayed at home that evening, with the exception of their short trip to the grocery store and to pick up his Bronco.

Where Matthew really was on Monday night, October 5 — and with whom — would only become relevant in light of other facts that gradually emerged long after the trials had ended. Just as Aaron, Matthew, and some of their respective friends frequented the Library bar, a traditional college pub and restaurant, they also patronized the Ranger bar, a rougher, less upscale establishment on North 3rd Street that includes a motel and package store. Aaron had lived at the Ranger Motel several weeks earlier with Kristen and their infant son. He and a couple of his associates had also sold meth and done “drop-offs” at the bar, which was known to have a more openly gay clientele.

Though Tina told police that Matthew “had become somewhat paranoid … and changed the places he used to hang out and was now frequenting Elmer Lovejoy’s, the Third Street Bar and Grill and
the Fireside,” Alex Trout stated that he had gone with Matthew to the Ranger on Monday night. The Ranger and the Library had been Matthew’s favorite bars.

Nevertheless, the question of whether Matthew was really at the Ranger on Monday night with Alex Trout is still a mystery. Despite Trout’s statement to police that it was the last time he had seen Matt alive, a few days later in Laramie he told an ABC News correspondent that he had not seen Matt on Monday night but had only talked with him.

“I spoke to him on — it was Monday,” Trout said. “I was down here that weekend. And I spoke to him and I was trying to get to see him and he … said … he was studying and that we’d get together, uh, Friday, this last Friday [October 9] and, uh, go out to lunch or dinner and then go to Tornado, a club …”

I had already felt uncertain about Trout’s credibility, but it didn’t stop me from wondering why he would lie about the last time he had seen Matthew in person.

Was Trout aware of Matthew’s involvement with the Denver family? Did he decide that the safest course was to remain silent and not incriminate himself due to his own problems with crystal meth? I remembered how positive Trout had been that “Matt was killed because he was gay,” while he apparently had no firsthand knowledge of the crime or the motives behind it.

If we set these questions aside briefly, a closer examination of the activities of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson on Monday, October 5, and during the day on Tuesday the sixth provides new insight into the sequence of events that exploded in violence on Tuesday night.

If we also simultaneously retrace Matthew’s steps on those days, a more complicated scenario begins to emerge — not of two disparate worlds about to collide in a deadly meeting of “strangers” but of three troubled young men whose parallel fates had been on a tragic path to convergence.

On Monday, October 5, during the day, Aaron was still bingeing on meth, but by that evening he had turned to the cocaine left over from
the weekend. In interviews with me, he said he “did a bunch of meth” that night with Joe Lemus, the brother of his landlord and roofing boss, Arsenio Lemus.