The Book of Matt (41 page)

The horrible irony … was that his death had an enormous amount to offer us in lessons and that many of those were missed opportunities because of the shorthand of the media …

You see the icon and how it differs from the real person, but there’s been such tremendous value in that icon having been created … Even if all you know is the barest misrepresentation of what took place, if it’s important for you to know that, I’m glad that you do.

Later in the same interview when I asked Marsden about the possible role of drugs in Matthew’s killing, he replied,

Methamphetamine was a very big problem [and] very seldom discussed in Wyoming at that time … I remember thinking … especially when it started to come out that McKinney was surrounded by people who were deep into the methamphetamine problem, that this was perhaps
the most spectacular methamphetamine related crime that had ever happened in Wyoming …

It was very clear ten years ago … to those who were watching this problem emerge, that it was going to become a scourge in Middle America, in our rural communities … It dominates life for a lot of people in our state … We’ve got needles on the side of the road in Wyoming … drug lab materials that are thrown out the window of someone’s car on the interstate …

I remember thinking at the time that the Matt Shepard case would forever go down in history as, you know, one of the saddest examples of gay bashing, but what it also was, was one of the saddest examples of the desperate lengths people on methamphetamine will go to.

What Marsden and others may not have realized at the time was that Aaron was not the only figure in this tragedy “surrounded by people who were deep into the methamphetamine problem.” The ravages of meth, which helped destroy Matthew’s life — not to mention the lives of Aaron and Russell, and the shattering impact on the families of all three — were never adequately examined or brought to light, and in some cases were deliberately covered up.

THIRTY-THREE

Soldier Girl

For a long time I’d been asking Joan, a friend of Matthew who belonged to the Denver circle, to tell me how she first became involved with methamphetamine. She was very reluctant at first, but eventually she agreed to fill in pieces of her personal story and how it related to her friendship with Matthew, whom she met in Denver in 1997. She also agreed to an on-camera interview, which I conducted with my producing partner Glenn Silber.

In 1989, at the hopeful age of nineteen, Joan had already known what she wanted to do with her life. She saw two choices for herself and either one would have suited her well: join the Denver Police Department and move up through the ranks to a starring role in the war on crime, or scrape together the money to get to New York and train for a career in the performing arts — acting, singing, dancing.

Eight years later when Joan met “Matty” Shepard and they got close enough to talk “about anything,” they confessed to each other how much they loved performing and their frustration at not being on stage.

Leggy and attractive, with deep-set brown eyes, high cheekbones, and a mane of shiny black hair, Joan exuded optimism and self-confidence. She also thrived on competition with an intensity some may have considered “un-feminine.” To most, she was a natural leader.

But Joan said her 1989 application to the police academy got stuck in limbo, where it remained. A qualified Latina candidate, she felt she was at an ironic disadvantage in a season when the department was apparently recruiting African Americans. With money tight in her large family, dreaming of Broadway seemed naive and utterly beyond her reach.

Determined to make her mark, Joan did what generations of the young have always done: She enlisted in the army. She said that after
eight weeks of basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, at which she excelled, she was given advanced infantry training for another nine weeks, specializing in the lethal skills of hand-to-hand combat and biological warfare.

Before Joan and many of her buddies with whom she enlisted, male and female alike, had any clear idea of where Kuwait was situated, they received overnight orders for deployment to the Persian Gulf. There was little time for fear, family good-byes, or futile second thoughts.
You’re in the army now, soldier
.

Whatever machinations led up to Saddam Hussein’s military buildup against Kuwait — and the subsequent Iraqi invasion that sparked the First Gulf War — daily life for Joan and many of her fellow warriors would become a surreal blur as they encamped for months on the desert floor inside Saudi Arabia, and for years after returning stateside.

“It was war and it was traumatizing for all of us,” she summed it up curtly almost two decades later.

When she and Matthew met in Denver in 1997 and became friends, she said, he was one of a tiny handful of people she could talk to about her experiences in the Gulf, especially since he had lived in Saudi Arabia and his parents still had a home there. The two bonded like older sister and younger brother, calling each other by the names “Sis” and “Matty.”

Joan also trusted Matthew enough to confide in him about her experiences with methamphetamine on the battlefield — a drug she had never known until she went to war: the toxic assortment of everyday ingredients that soldiers gathered to make it; the hazardous cooking process; and how many of them came to depend on meth to keep them awake and alert when Saddam began blowing up Kuwaiti oil wells not far from their camp.

Much like her unnerving memories of service overseas, Joan said she continues to be haunted by the murder of her “little brother” in Laramie.

With great apprehension she’d agreed to revisit their friendship “to set the record straight on who Matty really was and why he was targeted.”

Excerpts from a videotaped interview with Joan:

Joan:
Matt had a [routine]. When I heard that Matt didn’t go for the ride-along — Tuesday [October 6] at one in the morning, when obviously the crime was going on — [I suspected that] whoever wanted Matt beat up or robbed or whatever, obviously wanted him taken out of town. By the time that ride-along would have been done and reached its Laramie point, Matthew was nowhere to be found. [
Note:
Joan is referring to “one in the morning” on
Wednesday, October 7
, not Tuesday, October 6.]

Meth being the competitive little world it is … I think they wanted [Matt’s] end of it … or … they didn’t like Matthew and the power that he had at that time. They didn’t want Matt anywhere in the [Laramie] circle …

I think that it was planned from Jump Street … [Matt] was a businessman and so he was threatening to somebody. He threatened somebody the wrong way … [But Matt] didn’t walk around hurting people. He wouldn’t burn people or rob people. He really tried being straight with everyone that he ever met. And of all things, just everybody thinking he got killed because he was gay. I can’t let Matthew — he hasn’t been able to rest in peace for any of us … The record needs to be set straight.

During the interview, Glenn Silber and I asked Joan numerous questions.

Question:
So as far as this being labeled the most heinous anti-gay hate crime, where do you stand on [that]?

Joan:
It was heinous absolutely … but it wasn’t because Matthew was gay. NO way [emphasis in original]. Matthew was not beaten because he was gay … Everyone around him that dealt with him, that knew him, that met him, everyone knew he was gay … He was just good at what he did. And somebody wasn’t happy about that.

Question:
After you got over the shock and revulsion of what you heard, what did you think [the crime] was about? If it wasn’t about him being gay?

Joan:
I knew it was over drugs or money … The fact that Matt didn’t tell me what exactly was going on, I knew it was over drugs or money.

Question:
When you heard that Aaron McKinney and another of his friends were the perpetrators —

Joan:
I thought jeez, somebody wanted Matt dead. And I guess [Aaron] would be the perfect person to do it, you know. Somebody that was strung out looking for dope and money … Aaron McKinney knew Matt. So just by knowing that, I thought for sure Aaron was sent by somebody to do it. Maybe he owed somebody a lot and you know — they felt that Aaron was the perfect person to do this to Matt because they had the bad run-in previously [at the Library bar].

Question:
In your circle of friends — people that knew Matt — did you ever hear anything from any of them, any speculations about why this had happened to Matt?

Joan:
The people that Matt and I knew, they all believed the same thing. That [a Laramie rival] wanted Matt dead. And [that] Matt knew something he wasn’t supposed to … I think that Matt was protecting the circle. And he would have told the circle what was going on and somebody didn’t want that … it had to be something pretty important though … So maybe that person [is] gonna be protected for the rest of their
life just because Matt’s dead. But there are some of us that are hip to a lot of things that were going on at that time. Who Matt was dealing with … There’s [sic] five of us that won’t rest until we know exactly what happened to Matthew and why.

THIRTY-FOUR

The Angel of Death

In the Albany County Courthouse on Wednesday, March 24, 1999, prosecutor Cal Rerucha and county public defender Wyatt Skaggs began choosing jurors for Russell Henderson’s trial. The selection process was scheduled to last no more than two weeks, with opening arguments slated for Tuesday, April 6.

During nearly six months of trial preparation since the murder, both Rerucha and Skaggs had deliberately downplayed Matthew’s homosexuality as a factor in the crime. But as far as public opinion was concerned, it was still widely believed that the chief motive behind the murder was anti-gay hate.

Shortly before Russell’s trial was set to begin, Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother, traveled to Washington, DC, to lobby for a federal hate crime bill that had been stalled for months in Congress. At a news conference on Capitol Hill, she appeared alongside a nephew of James Byrd Jr., a forty-nine-year-old African American man who had been chained to the back of a pickup truck and dragged to death in Jasper, Texas, on June 7 of the previous year — just four months before Matthew was fatally beaten.

Days after the Laramie attack
The Boston Globe
attempted to explain a critical difference between the two cases, underscoring why a federal hate crime law was important.

“Unlike the aftermath of the racially motivated [murder] of James Byrd, Jr.… when the FBI rushed in to lead the investigation,” the newspaper reported, “federal authorities have no jurisdiction in the Shepard case because the hate-crime law does not cover gays or lesbians.”

While it was true that federal authorities had no direct jurisdiction in the Shepard homicide, I later learned from Cal Rerucha that the federal government had played a considerably larger, behind-the-scenes
role in the case than the media had reported or may have understood at the time. Federal agents did go to Laramie to investigate the crime and to follow up on the case, Rerucha said, but there was a consensus based on the evidence that Aaron and Russell should be prosecuted under state law for felony murder and related charges. In Rerucha’s opinion the evidence to prove a bias crime “wasn’t there.” He continues to hold that view today and has resisted attempts by federal officials to use the Shepard case as a model example of civil rights violations.

At her dying son’s bedside in October 1998, Judy Shepard had decided she would do everything she could to keep Matthew’s legacy alive. In addition to co-founding the Matthew Shepard Foundation with her husband, Dennis, she became active in the Human Rights Campaign, the nation’s preeminent gay rights organization and a leading advocate of federal hate crime legislation. Matthew’s parents hoped to work through their foundation “to promote tolerance in hopes of sparing others their son’s brutal fate,” according to a December 1999 article in
People
magazine.

“There is no guarantee that these laws will stop hate crimes from happening, but they can reduce them,” Judy stated tearfully at the news conference on Capitol Hill. “They can help change the climate in this country, where some people feel it’s okay to target specific groups of people and get away with it.”

When asked about Russell’s upcoming trial, Judy said she and Dennis wanted to “allow justice to run its course.”

Over the next decade, both parents would lobby devotedly for the hate crime bill, even as it languished in Congress. They called it “the one piece of unfinished business” stemming from their son’s murder.

(On October 28, 2009, during his first year in office, President Barack Obama signed into law “the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.” Better known as the Matthew Shepard Act, the bill, which was attached as a rider to the National Defense Authorization Act for 2010, expands the 1969 federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability.)