The Book of Matt (9 page)

Admittedly, my nascent investigation was beginning to feel more dangerous. As I continued piecing together Matthew’s activities in the days and weeks before the attack, I located several other sources. Among them were Tina Labrie, a fellow student of Matthew at the University of Wyoming who had met him at a Laramie picnic on the Fourth of July weekend, 1998, and eventually became his close friend and confidante; and Phil Labrie, her ex-husband.

Two weeks after meeting Alex Trout, I spent a day and a half talking with Tina, then thirty, in the Colorado mountain town of Estes Park, where she was living with her two children. Earthy and personable, with a soft, round face and wavy brown hair, Tina said she had worked hard to put some distance between her family life and an often-insatiable media in the four years since Matthew’s murder. Although she had initially given “a couple of interviews,” including one to
Vanity Fair
, she subsequently decided to withdraw from the intense public attention.

“I didn’t like how it felt,” Tina later elaborated. “[In order to] heal and deal with things personally, I just kind of shut everybody out … Most of the people doing the interviews didn’t understand [the shock and grief] and they didn’t want to give anybody any space … They [were] all converging on this … almost like a battlefield. Like this tug of war. And that was really uncomfortable … They wanted to just superficially kind of put it all into one thing. And miss everything else about [Matt], you know.”

Until I met Tina, who had been introduced to Matthew by a mutual friend named Kathleen, the little I knew about her had come
from media accounts and a formerly sealed police report documenting events on Wednesday, October 7, 1998. That evening Tina phoned the Laramie Police Department to say she hadn’t heard from Matthew since Monday the fifth and was worried about him. In her report, Detective Gwen Smith wrote:

On 100798, I received a call at my residence from dispatch requesting I contact Sergeant Jeff BURY in relation to an ATL [“Attempt to Locate”] that had been called in on a subject, Matthew SHEPARD. Dispatch advised that SHEPARD had been located tied to a fence in the Sherman Hill[s] area. I contacted Sergeant BURY, who requested I talk to a Tina LABRIE …

At approximately 2030 hours, I went to 1007 Lyon and met with Tina LABRIE. Also present was her husband, Phillip. Tina told me that she was concerned about Matthew SHEPARD, an acquaintance she had known since July of 1998. She said that in the past week and a half, Shepard had been acting “not himself,” had become somewhat paranoid and began drinking heavily. He also changed the places he used to hang out and was now frequenting Elmer Lovejoy’s, the Third Street Bar and Grill and the Fireside Bar …

Tina said that she was concerned, as she had been unable to reach SHEPARD on his cell phone for the past two days. She said this was very unusual, as he always had his cell phone with him and had always been easy to contact before. The last time Tina spoke with SHEPARD was Monday evening, 100598, between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 pm. She took him to a grocery store, as he had been feeling ill and not wanting to drive there himself …

Tina continued by telling me that … Matthew … had also been spending large amounts of money, which was very unlike him. She said he would call Doc’s Limo Service to drive him home from the bars if he was too intoxicated. He also rented the limo for a trip to Fort Collins, which Tina
accompanied him, where he went shopping, had dinner, and then the limo returned them to Laramie.

After receiving that information, I did tell Tina and Phillip that Matthew had been located and that he had apparently been assaulted and was injured and was on his way to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins …

In my initial interviews with Tina in September 2002, she was outgoing and thoughtful as she shared memories of her friendship with Matthew. She also talked at length about the weekend before the attack, including the trip they took in Doc’s limo on Friday, October 2 to the Tornado, a gay dance club in Fort Collins, Colorado. Tina’s recounting of that night, of their return to Laramie in the early-morning hours, and of Matt’s anxiety and deepening depression over that weekend was more or less identical to what I had read in
Vanity Fair
.

After many hours of conversation, I sensed that Tina had more to say but was not willing to stray from her comfort zone. I also had many more questions I wanted to ask but knew that most would have to wait. Just as I’d become aware of contradictions and discrepancies between what Alex Trout had told the media and what I discovered interviewing him myself, I detected niggling inconsistencies between Tina’s version of events and the “official” narrative reported by police and the media.

In the aforementioned police report, the limo excursion Matthew and Tina had taken was summed up in the simplest of terms: “[Matthew] also rented [Doc’s] limo for a trip to Fort Collins, which Tina accompanied him, where he went shopping, had dinner, and then the limo returned them to Laramie.”

In fact, the purpose of the limo trip was to go to the Tornado, a nightclub that Matthew, Alex Trout, and others in their circle often patronized, yet the police report had made no mention of the Tornado or of Doc being the driver, and had described the trip instead as involving “shopping” and “dinner.” Had it been a simple omission or maybe just a routine summary of facts? From what Alex Trout had revealed about meth and his alleged “stalking” encounters with Doc,
however, I realized again that references to drugs and sex were mostly absent from official accounts.

But it would not be until almost a year later, after Tina Labrie grew more comfortable with me, that she began to fill in more details of what had been troubling Matthew in the days before the attack — confirming some of what I had suspected but could not yet prove.

“Matt said he always ended up with the wrong people, involved with drugs, then would go someplace else and start over,” Tina told me in August 2003.

She would also have more to say about the ride she and Matthew took in Doc’s limo. After they spent the evening at the Tornado, Matthew invited a group of friends for a late-night snack at Denny’s — Doc included. But afterward Matthew’s mood darkened again.

“During the limo ride home [Matt said] … that sometimes Alex really annoyed him because he could be quite a speed freak,” she recalled.

It was the first time Tina had mentioned meth (“speed,” “crystal,” “crank,” etcetera) in connection with that weekend.

She said Matthew had also expressed suicidal thoughts in the limo, prompting her to spend the night at his apartment. Moreover, by the following morning, he had taken a near-overdose of prescription drugs, which she felt was precipitated by his worries about money.

But what, if anything, did Matthew’s depression and money concerns have to do with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, and their ill-fated encounter three days later? And where did Doc fit in this murky picture — if he had a place at all?

Despite my accumulation of tantalizing new details, I felt like I was still stumbling around in the dark or, worse, chasing my own tail.

Since Aaron was still denying that he had ever met Matthew previously, I redoubled my efforts with sources who were well acquainted with Aaron, hoping they would be more forthcoming. I also conducted numerous phone interviews with Russell in late 2002 and early 2003, but he, too, insisted that he had never met Matthew before and steered clear of discussing anything involving Aaron.

“There are two things I don’t want to talk about,” Russell told me
emphatically. “I don’t want to talk about Aaron and I don’t want to talk about that night.”

In my frustration I wanted to blurt out,
Why the hell are we talking then? Do you think I spent all this time negotiating with the prison bureaucracy so we can have a friendly social chat?

Even when I avoided mention of Aaron and tried more tactfully to discuss specifics of the crime, Russell would often say, “You’ll have to ask Aaron about that.”

One of many questions gnawing at me was whether Matthew’s meeting with Aaron and Russell at the Fireside had been planned in advance. During Aaron’s 1999 trial, Cal Rerucha had argued that Aaron and Russell lured Matthew from the bar by pretending to be gay.

“McKinney and Henderson watch Matthew Shepard, becoming like two wolves watching a lamb,” Cal had stated in his closing argument, “and they go into the bathroom together for this purpose … [According to Kristen Price’s trial testimony] … when Mr. McKinney came home [later that night] … he said … when we came out of the [bathroom], we had hatched a plan that we would pretend that we were gay … so we could get Mr. Shepard out of the bar so we could rob him … [They] pretended they were homosexuals. Once the hook was set, they reel Mr. Shepard in just like a fish to the bank.”

But in Aaron’s taped confession to police, I found what appeared to be another small but revealing slip-up in his story:

Detective DeBree:
Let’s go back again one more time to the [Fireside] bar.

Aaron McKinney:
All right.

Detective DeBree:
You meet [Matthew Shepard] and … how did you meet him?

Aaron McKinney:
It was the fag? The queer, yeah? We were meeting in the bar?

Detective DeBree:
He was a homosexual, yeah.

Aaron’s use of the words
we were meeting
instead of the past-tense
we met
seemed to indicate a previous plan or intent to meet Matthew in the bar.

Aaron McKinney:
Okay. He approached us.

Detective DeBree:
Okay.

Aaron McKinney:
I was drinking a beer.

Detective DeBree:
What did he say to you?

Aaron McKinney:
Asked us what we were drinkin’, what we were doin’.

Detective DeBree:
Bought you some drinks?

Aaron McKinney:
No, he didn’t buy us nothin’.

(More Q & A follows here.)

Detective DeBree:
You guys more or less led him to believe that you were homosexuals yourselves and you’d take him for a ride?

Aaron McKinney:
Well, I never told him I was gay at all.

Detective DeBree:
Did Russ?

Aaron McKinney:
Not that I know of.

Beyond Aaron’s own words, however — including his mention of a possible drugs-for-sex deal with Matthew — other sources had informed me that the Fireside was one of the Laramie bars where Aaron regularly sold meth. He also sold at the Library and Ranger bars, which Matthew frequented as well.

According to a longtime female friend of Russell who requested anonymity, during the week before the attack she had accompanied Aaron and Russell when they drove to the Fireside one evening. She said she had waited outside in Bill McKinney’s truck while the two went into the bar, but “it was clear Aaron was doing some business” and “Russell was just trailing along with him.” She was certain the drug stop-off had taken place before Friday, October 2, but after Russell’s twenty-first birthday on September 24 “because he wasn’t allowed into the bar before then.”

Other sources had also informed me that Aaron, Russell, and a couple of their friends had started bingeing on meth on Russell’s birthday and that the binge continued for more than a week — until the weekend before Matthew was attacked. But since no one was willing to go on the record, even anonymously, I still had no way to confirm it.

TEN

The Bad Karma Kid

The more I explored the circumstances surrounding Matthew’s murder, the more aware I became of a conspicuous absence at the center of the story, an absence other journalists before me had noted: the character of Matthew himself.

From the torrent of media reports following his attack and death in October 1998, to the widespread coverage of Aaron McKinney’s trial a year later, the same basic set of facts was repeated over and over. Perhaps the most prevalent image of Matthew was that of “an all American son.” As Dennis Shepard had stated eloquently at the time, “Matt was not my gay son, he was my son who happened to be gay.” Overnight, however, the compelling identity of “everyone’s son” was exploited by an array of interests that mythologized or desecrated Matthew — or both.

Among gay activists, Matthew was anointed the heroic martyr to a pressing human rights cause. Religious Right fundamentalists, meanwhile, deplored him as the embodiment of sin in a morally corrupt world that had grown increasingly tolerant of homosexuality. But who was the real Matthew Shepard? And why was so little known about this young man whose fatal beating captured the attention of millions of people worldwide? Was it the graphic violence of his reported crucifixion and the evocative surname
Shepard
that created an almost religious taboo on depicting him as a complex, flesh-and-blood human being?

Early in my research I had pored over every media story I could find, hoping to learn more about Matthew. But it quickly became apparent that the few journalists who had attempted to examine his life in more than a summary fashion had been hindered in their efforts by sealed court records and witnesses who had been ordered to remain silent.

The most incisive accounts were the
Harper’s Magazine
report by JoAnn Wypijewski and a
Vanity Fair
article by Melanie Thernstrom, both published in 1999 before McKinney’s trial. According to Thernstrom,

The mythologizing of Matthew … has left him oddly faceless. No one has seemed interested in publishing the details of his life — as if they would detract from his martyrdom. But pity is not understanding, and Matthew’s sorrow did not begin at the fence.