The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard by Stephen Jimenez

A friend read this book recently and told me about it. I said it sounded interesting so he gave me his copy when he finished. I’m a little sorry I expressed interest because the book turned out to be way more about the murder of Matthew Shepard than I cared to know. But I am glad to have a clearer understanding of this important story. And I always enjoy reading books recommended by friends even if just so I can talk about them later.

Stephen Jimenez is a journalist who worked on the Matthew Shepard case for more than a decade, first on assignment for New York Magazine, for a story that never ran, then for an hour-long segment on 20/20, which aired in 2004, and then for this book, published in 2013. The thrust of the book is that the story of Matthew Shephard’s October, 1998 murder as an anti-gay hate crime quickly took over and obscured the very different, and much more complicated truth.

The simple narrative of a murder motivated by “gay panic” was invented by one of the killers himself, Aaron McKinney, shortly after his arrest. Aaron had two purposes for his lie. First, he hoped to hide his own activity as a bisexual who sometimes had sex with men for money, and second, to steer attention away from the drug trade, which both Aaron and Matthew were involved in, out of fear that if his higher-ups in the trade were ensnared in the investigation of the case they might take revenge on him even while in prison. Aaron’s lie about an anti-gay motivation was accepted as self-evidently true by a few of Matthew’s gay friends who then spread the lie to the media where it was used by gay rights groups and politicians for their own ends of advocating for Federal hate crimes legislation.

The story, invented by McKinney, is that McKinney and his friend Russell Henderson were drinking together in a Laramie bar on the night of Tuesday, October 6, 1998. They saw Matthew Shepard, who they claimed not to know, a student at the local college, drinking alone at the other end of the bar: slight of build (barely more than 5 feet tall and 100 pounds), well dressed, innocent-looking; they sized him up as an easy mark for a petty robbery. They coaxed him into their truck. Shepard mistook their feigned-friendliness for sexual interest and came on to them, which so enraged the homophobic McKinney that he and Henderson beat Shephard unconscious then left him tied to a fence outside of town as a warning that this is what happens to queers in Laramie.

In fact, Aaron and Matthew had known each other for about a year before the murder. Both of them were connected to a man named Doc O’Connor, a former porn actor who lived outside of Laramie and managed a drug-dealing and male prostitution business that also included the rental of stretch limousines used to transport Laramie residents down to the clubs in Denver and to transport meth from Denver up to Fort Collins and Laramie. Both Matthew and Aaron did the drug runs. Aaron also had sex for money or in trade for drugs with men picked up in hustler bars in Denver. At the time of the murder Aaron was heavily in debt due to his practice of accepting shipments of meth on the promise that he would pay for it later from the proceeds, but often came up short in sales because he was using the drugs himself. The day of the murder, Aaron and Russell, who had met earlier that year and worked together for a roofing company, had attempted to raise the money Aaron needed by robbing another dealer in town under the pretext of selling a gun Aaron owned. When that scheme came to nothing Aaron switched his attention to his sometime friend and drug-dealing colleague or rival, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Matthew Shepard.

Aaron suspected that Matthew was either holding a shipment of meth, which he knew Matthew had been scheduled to bring back from Denver that evening, or, if not the drugs, the $10,000 or so in cash the drugs would have been worth when sold. Aaron and Russell visited several bars they knew Matthew frequented and finally found him. The lured him into their truck. Russell drove. Aaron told Matthew he was being robbed and started beating him with his gun in the front seat of the truck. At this point, meth-fueled rage, hallucinations, and an out-of-body feeling took over in Aaron, and after they reached a secluded spot outside of town, the robbery became murder. It appears Russell didn’t participate in beating Matthew, in fact Aaron even struck Russell once, but neither did Russell do much to stop the attack or report the incident to the police when he had the chance later that night. Shepard was found the following evening, barely alive. He was taken to a hospital where he lingered in a coma for several days before dying.

Jimenez does an impressive job of research. He includes over 100 named contacts in his book (there’s a list at the end) plus another 20 or so who spoke anonymously. Many of the contacts are eager to speak, wanting to set the story straight, refuting the gay hate crime story; others are more circumspect not wanting to incriminate either themselves or others with stories about the illegal drug activity. Jimenez’s primary sources are the attorney who prosecuted the trial, Cal Rerucha; and a boyfriend of Matthew’s, Ted Henson. He also spoke several times with both Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson in prison. Both are serving two consecutive life sentences for the murder.

Jimenez seems intent on tracking down every detail of his story even when the threads take him far afield or end inconclusively. Some witness statements get repeated at different points in the book as his investigation keeps circling and circling. Ultimately, this is the story of Jimenez’s long investigation, rather than a tight narrative of the events of Matthew’s murder, which is more what I had hoped to read.

There’s a lot of background in the story I felt I really didn’t want to know. In the final pages of the book we learn that Matthew had been a victim of sexual abuse on three separate occasions as a boy and teenager. At age fifteen he was arrested himself for molesting two eight year-old boys. He had taken a semester off of college to deal with psychiatric issues. His use of alcohol and drugs, including prescription anti-anxiety meds, and his thoughts of depression and suicide, likely stem from these childhood troubles. Aaron McKinney’s mother died of a botched hysterectomy when he was a teen. Russell Henderson’s mother was murdered while he was in prison awaiting trial. The meth use, and the sex for hire in the back of stretch limousines… it’s all sordid, and sad, and horrible. It’s pathetic. I feel compassion for the poor folks living in that world, struggling in it, and hoping to get out of it. But it’s also an ugly way of life that I don’t care to spend too much time looking at.

How much easier to think of Matthew as an innocent victim. To see the bright-eyed, boyishly handsome, college student. To make his death a story of bigotry to be redeemed by the justice of new hate crimes legislation, rather than a story of out-of-control meth use in the urban gay community and rural parts of our country, a problem so much more difficult to solve (and which has eased now only to evolve into opiod abuse). We know how to tell stories of innocents dying for our collective sins, so Matthew having been tied to the fence, both hands behind his back, becomes Matthew tied on the fence, hands outstretched like a crucifixion. His name is “Shepard” for God’s sake. And Jimenez gives his book the Gospel title: The Book of Matt.

As gay journalist Andrew Sullivan said, quoted in the book from an interview included in the 20/20 segment, “People really do want to mythologize important events in history… And in almost all cases, the mythology, to some extent, takes on a life of its own, and you forget what happened, or what might have been the reality. It may be that as a culture we don’t want to let go of the myth. The myth serves far too many purposes. But myths aren’t truth, and however complicated the truth is, I think it’s worth finding out. Not to puncture any myth, but simply to find out the truth. I mean, nothing, no context could make this crime less awful… If you’re going to base a civil rights movement on one particular incident, and the mythology about a particular incident, you’re asking for trouble, because events are more complicated than most politicians or most activists want them to be…”