The Book of Matt (27 page)

Cindy Dixon — Russell Henderson’s mother — was found frozen to death in a remote canyon on January 3, 1999, while Russell was awaiting trial for Matthew Shepard’s murder. Dixon’s killer, who pled guilty to manslaughter and admitted raping her, served four years.
Courtesy of Lucy Thompson

Cal Rerucha outside the Albany County Courthouse with Judy and Dennis Shepard, after Russell Henderson was sentenced to two life terms, April 1999.
Getty Images/Kevin Moloney

Aaron McKinney at the Albany County Courthouse on the day he was sentenced, November 1999.
AP Photo/Ed Andrieski

Aaron and his father, Bill McKinney, during a prison visit.
Courtesy of D. Harper

Russell Henderson at Nevada’s High Desert State Prison, 2004.
Courtesy of John Sharaf

TWENTY-FIVE

The Library

On Tuesday, October 6, 1998, Tina stayed at home all day with a cold. Something seemed to be going around. Her husband, Phil, had caught a cold on Saturday, Matthew had one on Monday, now it was her turn.

Several times during the day Tina tried to reach Matthew by phone but wasn’t having any luck. Phil, who frequently gave Matthew rides around town, would later say he was surprised when “Matt never called on Tuesday.”

But one person who did hear from Matthew that afternoon was Doc.

“Matt called me from the Library [bar] at 3:15
PM
,” Doc told me curtly.

Doc said he knew where Matthew was “because the Library’s number showed up on my caller ID.”

It was unusual for Doc to be so perfunctory, but on this particular subject he was sticking to just the facts.

According to what Doc told a reporter for
Vanity Fair
, Matthew had been thinking of hiring a limo that night to go someplace with friends but he hadn’t said where he wanted to go. Doc explained to Matthew that he had a trustees’ meeting at the Eagles club that evening. Since he didn’t expect the meeting to get out late, he asked Matthew to call him back later.

Several of Matthew’s friends would later say he always carried his cell phone with him, so his call to Doc from a landline at the Library was out of the ordinary.

During my review of the police reports and court files I’d also noticed that there was virtually no mention of Matthew’s cell phone. If police had, indeed, checked his phone records — which would be more or less routine in a homicide investigation, especially a case in
which the suspects were facing the possibility of the death penalty — they had not included that information in their reports.

Apparently Matthew had changed phone numbers often, which a former member of the Denver circle said was a protective measure common among their friends. Nonetheless, an examination of Matthew’s cell phone records and a few landlines he had used might have yielded crucial evidence about the individuals he had been in touch with in the days leading up to the attack. Had this been an oversight on the part of investigators or was the information intentionally kept out of the public record?

Patrons who were at the Library bar that evening would later tell police that Matthew had been there until 6 or 6:30
PM
. Police reports also noted that Matthew had called his friend Walt Boulden at about 6:30
PM
to cancel plans they had tentatively made to celebrate Walt’s forty-sixth birthday. When Walt asked where he was, Matt said he was at a bar.

“We were gonna go to a movie together,” Walt later told a reporter. “And he called and he had gotten behind in his French and he had to go to classes the next day, so he was gonna study. And so we made plans to get together later in the week and go to the movies.”

But in fact Matthew was still planning to take one of Doc’s limos out that night. Where he intended to go, or with whom, has never been clarified.

“This conversation [with Boulden] was over SHEPARD’s cell phone,” a police report stated, “which was identified by the number of 761-2673.”

At about the same time Matthew was leaving the Library, Aaron and Russell had just gotten off work. According to police reports, media accounts, interviews, and other records, Aaron and Russell, still in their work clothes, drove to 809 Beaufort Street, the home of Ken Haselhuhn, their co-worker.

The alleged purpose of the visit was that Aaron wanted to show Haselhuhn his .357 Magnum, which he was carrying in a black case, in the hope that Haselhuhn knew someone with whom he could trade
the gun for drugs. Some reports suggested that Haselhuhn was a gun collector and that he might’ve been contemplating buying the gun himself. Haselhuhn would later say he had spoken to some neighbors downstairs, but when they heard a gun was involved they wanted nothing to do with the trade.

Five months after the murder, Priscilla Moree, a respected criminal investigator who was hired by Russell Henderson’s defense attorney, interviewed Haselhuhn. She wrote in her report:

Ken told the police that McKinney and Henderson had wanted to sell the gun for $300 or trade it for crack or meth … McKinney and Henderson came back to Ken’s house later that evening, again asking him if he could help them get rid of the gun … [Then] they again came back to his house later on. He doesn’t remember the time that was, but says it was late … [he] was in his bathrobe getting ready for bed.

But there was more going on that night than a possible gun trade.

By the time Aaron arrived at Haselhuhn’s home, he had already come up with a robbery plan, which he had not yet disclosed to Russell. Part of his plan, Aaron said, was to rob
Haselhuhn
; the business of trading or selling the gun was just a pretext. However, Russell and Haselhuhn did not learn what Aaron had in mind until later.

Earlier that day, while the three men were working together at Bethesda Care Center, Aaron had convinced Haselhuhn to broker a deal for him: He wanted three hundred dollars’ worth of meth in exchange for the gun. All three men confirmed to me that Haselhuhn had promised to introduce Aaron and Russell to a friend that evening.

According to Aaron, Haselhuhn boasted to him, “My guy has six ounces of meth, I’ll get an eight ball for you.”

An eight ball is one-eighth of an ounce. Coincidentally, the six-ounce quantity Aaron planned to rob was also the exact amount that was regularly delivered to Laramie by members of the Denver family. As payment, the two members who made the delivery each received two eight balls, or a quarter of an ounce.

Since Aaron owed his suppliers money and had run out of excuses, the prospect of getting his hands on the whole six ounces was irresistible. If he robbed Haselhuhn’s friend, he could satisfy his meth craving and also pay off his debts.

“I was going to rob Ken and the dealer,” Aaron told me. “I was carrying two bullets in my back pocket — one for Ken, one for the other guy. I wasn’t planning to shoot them, just force them to hand over the meth.”

Shortly after six thirty that evening, Haselhuhn used a pay phone near his apartment complex to call his dealer friend, whom he wouldn’t identify by name to Aaron and Russell. Afterward, Haselhuhn got into Bill McKinney’s truck with the two men and drove with them to the home of a dealer friend, who lived across the street from Washington Park. All three men said that friend was not at home, though Haselhuhn later told defense investigator Moree that only the dealer’s wife was at home when he went to the door. They decided they’d try him again later.

According to Haselhuhn, he had asked Aaron to wait in the truck while he went to the door alone. He claimed he “didn’t trust McKinney” and felt something wasn’t quite right.

“I told him I wasn’t taking him up to the guy’s front door like that,” Haselhuhn stated.

I would later discover that the three men also stopped at another dealer’s home — someone with whom Aaron had done business for a couple of years and to whom he owed money. Yet the dealer’s name never came up during the murder investigation, at least not in the official records unsealed after the trials were over.

Aaron demanded that I not identify the dealer by name.

“Why would I do that to him?” he snapped at me on the phone.

During a later interview with Aaron in person, when I told him my life had been threatened by one of his former cohorts, I expected him to ask,
Who?
or
Which one?
Instead he shrugged with indifference.

“Maybe it’s because you’re poking into a hornet’s nest,” he said.

But beyond his personal loyalties, Aaron may have had other reasons for keeping silent. I’d been told that the unnamed supplier
had inspired fear in those he supplied with drugs and that he’d always kept a well-trained pit bull nearby.

One friend of Aaron, who had formerly sold drugs himself, said, “When I was in jail, they [agents of the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigation] offered me a deal if I’d rat [the supplier] out. His arm is very long, long enough to reach me in the pen. I just did my time and shut up.”

Russell Henderson, for his part, had used meth frequently with Aaron and their girlfriends yet he wasn’t privy to most of Aaron’s dealing activities. Similarly, Kristen Price said that Aaron had been “very secretive” about his drug transactions, even with her, and that he was especially guarded when it came to his suppliers. The only thing she knew about the dealer with the pit bull, for example, was his nickname; but “I was never permitted to go into his house” when Aaron went there for pickups. The same was true of Russell — he was always told to wait in the truck.

After Haselhuhn, Aaron, and Russell left the second dealer’s home they drove to the residence of their roofing boss, Arsenio Lemus, because Haselhuhn claimed that Lemus owed him some money. Apparently, only Haselhuhn got out of the truck and went to the door; he returned shortly and said Lemus “wasn’t there,” so they took Haselhuhn home.

According to Aaron, Haselhuhn had no idea he was planning a robbery — nor did Russell. But soon after they dropped Haselhuhn off, Aaron told Russell that what he really wanted to do was steal all the drugs rather than trade the gun.