The Book of Matt (30 page)

While Fireside employees were quick to distance themselves from any association with Aaron and Russell, sources also stated that Aaron regularly sold meth to a couple of people who worked at the bar.

Russell remembered that Aaron had tried talking with the two girls sitting on the stools next to them but “he wasn’t getting anywhere.” Russell said he began to pay more attention to the TV over the bar, hoping that by the time they finished drinking Aaron would have forgotten his earlier idea of robbing Ken Haselhuhn and his friend.

According to an Associated Press report, “The two friends [Aaron and Russell] shot pool” at the Fireside. Matt Galloway also claimed that the two men had played pool and that they had remained in that area of the bar for twenty minutes to half an hour. Aaron and Russell, on the other hand, insisted that they never shot pool that night. I was also unable to find any other bar patrons or employees who had seen them playing pool.

However, the Fireside DJ named “Shadow” said he had seen Matthew and one of the two men — Aaron or Russell — talking near the pool table.

“They were standing, talking for a little bit, for like two, three minutes …” Shadow recalled. “I can’t remember which one it was, he’s the one that had the sideburns … I remember the sideburns, like Elvis Presley sideburns. And he was the one actually talking to Matthew for a little bit down by the pool table. But then after Matthew came back, he just walked off.”

Photos taken a couple of days later, after Aaron and Russell were arrested, leave no doubt that the person with “Elvis Presley sideburns” — who spoke with Matthew at the pool table — was Aaron.

According to Shadow, he met Matthew for the first time “about two and a half, three weeks prior to that,” on the same night that he went to a party at Matthew’s apartment.

“I had met him with a group of people that came in here [to the Fireside] and partied,” he said. “And they invited me over to this party after our party and that’s how I met him.”

By all accounts it was the same party that three other friends of Matthew had told me about — during which hard drugs, including heroin, were used.

When I asked Shadow if he’d seen “more serious drugs” (heroin, meth, cocaine) at the party, he replied, “Not really. Okay, everybody was just trying to have a good time … I was trying to talk to a young lady, too, that I was kind of interested in, so I wasn’t paying attention to the surroundings around me.”

But earlier in the same interview, he stated, “I know when we went to the party at his house, there was a lot of alcohol. I mean,
lots of alcohol
” (emphasis in original).

Shadow also remembered what Matthew was drinking on the night he left the bar with Aaron and Russell: “He had a Heineken and a Jack and Coke if I’m not … mistaken. That was his last drink that he had.”

There were conflicting accounts as well about how Aaron and Russell “met” Matthew at the Fireside. Some speculated that Matthew had
offered to help pay their bar tab, which was not substantiated by Galloway, who had served all three. Other reports said Aaron and Russell went into the bathroom together to plan their robbery of Matthew, though there is eyewitness evidence indicating that Aaron went into the bathroom with
Matthew
, not with Russell.

Even prosecutor Cal Rerucha theorized — based on the evidence available at the time — that Aaron and Russell had lured Matthew out of the bar with some promise of sex. But what Matthew may have promised was not made public until Aaron’s trial, more than a year after the murder.

Within a few days of the crime, however, Rerucha and other officials were aware of Aaron’s allegation that Matthew had offered cocaine or methamphetamine in exchange for sex. But as a matter of legal strategy, they worked hard to keep any mention of drugs out of the record.

Moreover, despite his initial lies and misrepresentations, and those of Kristen Price — which formed the basis of his “gay panic” defense — Aaron has admitted that Matthew never made a sexual advance on him or on Russell at the Fireside. Instead, Aaron now acknowledges that it was he who approached Matthew first. He said he went over to Matthew, who had moved to a table, and “bummed a cigarette” while Russell was watching TV at the bar.

But before Matthew got up from the bar, Aaron quietly pointed him out to Russell. The slight, well-dressed young man Aaron indicated was not someone Russell knew or had met before.

“That’s when Aaron mentioned robbing Matthew,” Russell said. “I told him ‘No, I don’t want to do that.’ ”

Russell still hoped that if they kept drinking, Aaron would settle down and the night would come to an end. But according to both men, Aaron persisted.

“[He] explained how we should take [Matthew] out by Wal-Mart, that he would do everything and I didn’t have to do anything,” Russell continued. “I still said no.”

By then, Matthew had gotten up from the stool where he’d been sitting and was walking around the bar.

The contradictory accounts of what happened on the night of October 6 were not conclusively resolved by the police investigation, media stories, trial proceedings, or eventual convictions of Aaron and Russell. In numerous instances law enforcement officials, news organizations, and other parties reported significant facts and details erroneously — not only about events at the Fireside, but also with regard to the attack on Matthew and the motives behind it.

After a concerted examination of the trial testimony of witnesses who were at the bar, case records, formerly sealed documents, and some files that remain confidential — as well as my extensive interviews with Fireside patrons and employees, principals on both the prosecution and defense sides of the case, and numerous other sources — I will offer here what I believe to be a more accurate account of the violent events set in motion at the Fireside — events that had been simmering for weeks, if not longer.

Soon after Matthew left his stool at the bar, he stopped at the table of another patron, Mike St. Clair, then a twenty-two-year-old geology student at the University of Wyoming. According to St. Clair, who testified at Aaron’s trial and whom I interviewed, Matthew asked if he could sit down with him and muttered that he “didn’t want to talk to the assholes at the bar anymore.”

It was later assumed that Matthew had been referring to both Aaron and Russell, though I found no evidence that Russell and Matthew had spoken with each other.

Since Aaron had not approached Matthew directly yet, I wondered whether Matthew’s remark had to do with the preexisting discord between them. It was also not inconceivable that the two men had spoken by phone earlier in the day or had some contact over the preceding weekend, or even at the Library, where both had been earlier that evening. It was also possible that hostile communications had been relayed through an intermediary.

Lest we forget: Matthew had confided in a few different people about how frightened he was; he was “scared to death,” he said.

As I began to understand the brutally competitive meth-trafficking activities taking hold in Wyoming and Colorado at the time, none of those possibilities seemed out of the question.

I also remembered what I’d been told by a couple of sources who had been close to Aaron McKinney.

“We had a little syndicate going,” one of Aaron’s cohorts explained before he moved permanently from Laramie to take a job in the Pacific Northwest.

Kyle, the formerly trusted source who had set me up in a parking lot off the Wyoming interstate, had sneered, “[Matt] was trying to take stuff away from the rest of us.”

I’d also discovered by then that Kyle himself had played a part in the tangled web of events on the night of October 6.

Mike St. Clair, who is six feet tall and weighed 230 pounds at the time, was at the Fireside with two friends, Keith and Jay Staley. St. Clair would later testify at Aaron’s trial that when Matthew walked over to his table near the dance floor, he made a provocative, off-color remark.

“It set off something inside me,” St. Clair said. “It made me angry …

“[Matthew] leaned down and said something about ‘head,’ which at the time was really offensive to me …” he elaborated. “He also licked his lips like … it was him trying to be sexy … showing he was interested in me, hitting on me … but I think he got the idea that I was really mad when he did that.”

After re-reading St. Clair’s testimony several times and interviewing him at a Mexican restaurant he’d opened in Laramie, it occurred to me that the so-called gay panic aspect of the murder case had really begun with this little-understood incident that had occurred between Matthew and St. Clair, not between Matthew and Aaron. It was also evident as I talked with St. Clair that he was neither homophobic nor suggesting that Matthew was somehow responsible for, or “deserved,” the violence that was inflicted on him that night. St. Clair had simply felt uncomfortable and angry with the way Matthew had come on to
him, which I suspected had partly been a consequence of the amount of alcohol Matthew had consumed, beginning that afternoon at the Library.

Before news of the attack had spread, however, the notion of blaming the aggressive behavior of the victim held certain logic, albeit twisted. Aaron, for one, was desperate for a cover story that would protect his drug associates as well as himself — and he was apparently desperate to stay in the closet as well. His solution was to concoct a claim not unlike Mike St. Clair’s and allege that Matthew had made an unwanted sexual advance, which set off his rage.

Nearly six years later, after I’d questioned Aaron about his gay panic alibi innumerable times, he stated, “At the time, that seemed like … the best way to prove that I didn’t mean to kill him.” Aaron said the decision to use that strategy in court was “a little mine … a little of the lawyers … [but] it was mostly me.”

Once he and Russell arrived at the Fireside, the thing that was still foremost in Aaron’s mind was robbing the six ounces of meth that Ken Haselhuhn’s dealer friend was supposed to have.

“We went to the Fireside to wait and there was still no ounces,” Aaron said.

Since Haselhuhn had not been able to reach his friend yet, Aaron was privately seething. All he could think about was getting his hands on the meth.

But this is where Aaron’s story falls apart again. I don’t doubt that he was gradually slipping into a full-throttle meth rage; but there are also many reasons to believe that the six ounces Haselhuhn had bragged about and the six ounces Matthew was slated to deliver to Laramie that night were one and the same. And Aaron surely knew that. His suggestion that he randomly shifted plans from robbing Haselhuhn and his “friend” — whom he’d been plotting to rob since Haselhuhn told him about the six ounces early in the day — to robbing Matthew is another fabrication.

Whomever Aaron intended to rob, he was undoubtedly aware that robbing six ounces of meth that had come from an organized crime network in Denver was a serious offense and that someone had better
have his back, whether on the street, in prison, or both. He was shrewd enough to know that without protection he didn’t stand a chance.

From the estimates of several individuals who were at the Fireside that night, Aaron and Russell were in the bar for roughly an hour before they left with Matthew.

Mike St. Clair’s recollection was that Aaron and Russell sat at the bar from thirty minutes to an hour. Yet according to Russell, during the hour or so he and Aaron were in the Fireside “we were separated for about 20 minutes.” Aaron said the same thing: that he and Russell had separated for a while.

Assuming the latter statements are true — and I have found Russell’s version of events at the bar to be credible in light of all the available evidence, including Aaron’s belated admission that it was he who had approached Matthew first — their remaining time in the Fireside went like this:

Aaron and Russell got up from the bar and walked over to the dance floor. Aaron wanted to ask Shadow to play his favorite song — “Gettin’ It” by the rapper Too Short. As they made their way across the floor, Russell ran into an old friend, Nicole Cappellen, who was celebrating her birthday. Cappellen, whom I interviewed by phone at her home in Los Angeles in October 2004, said she and Russell had known each other “as kids and in high school.”

According to Cappellen, she danced a little with Aaron and Russell, though other witnesses — and Aaron himself — also recalled that Aaron had acted “a little crazy” on the dance floor.

“I talked to Nicole for a little while,” Russell later recounted in a letter, “then I went back and sat down alone at the bar, where we were originally sitting.”

In the meantime Aaron went to the DJ booth.

(It’s unclear whether Cappellen ever spoke to the police, as she left the following morning for a week’s vacation in Las Vegas. But both she and the DJ confirmed the above sequence of events.)

After Aaron requested the song, he made his way over to the table where Matthew was sitting with Mike St. Clair.

As Aaron leaned down to Matthew, St. Clair heard Aaron say,
“Hey buddy.” Aaron claimed he also “bummed a cigarette” from Matthew.