The Book of Matt (14 page)

According to Doc, he had several customers in Laramie “that liked to hire a limo to take ’em down to Denver for a night out on the town,” a drive of just over two hours. He owned two stretch limousines; one was silver, the other white. With their plush interiors, well-stocked bars, tinted windows, and “a super discreet chauffeur” — usually Doc himself — “people could relax and not have to worry about how much alcohol they knocked back.” They could also get frisky if they wanted, Doc said, since a thick, opaque window stood between the driver up front and passengers in back. “I invented ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell,’ ” he boasted more than once.

It was well known from Doc’s extensive media interviews following the Laramie attack that both Matthew Shepard and Aaron McKinney frequently hired his limos. But after I was told by Dillon, the former Fireside employee, that Doc was involved in “a lot more than meets the eye” — some of it allegedly illicit — other Laramie sources informed me that Doc was also the proprietor of another business, which he advertised on his website (comeandgetit.com) as “Lincoln
Escort Service.” Although I was skeptical of much that Doc had to say, the scraps of verifiable information he regularly tossed my way took me off-guard. His admission that he had been a hustler himself, coupled with the anonymous, still-unsubstantiated claims that Aaron McKinney and perhaps Russell Henderson had secretly plied the same trade, prompted me to do some trawling around in Denver. A logical place to start was the city’s gay bars and nightclubs, especially those with a reputedly hustler clientele.

But four years had elapsed since Matthew’s murder. How likely was it that current bar patrons would remember if they had ever seen Doc or one of his limos around? Or Aaron and Russell for that matter? Doc volunteered that several other chauffeurs had worked for him the year Matthew was killed, so he had “no way of knowing what went on in the limos when I wasn’t driving.”

Doc’s knack for anticipating my questions and even reading my thoughts irritated me. He made me feel like the inexperienced, amateur investigator I actually was. He, on the other hand, was a crafty salesman and an expert at sticking to his version of things, whether true or not. Yet I had the persistent sense that Doc wanted me to get to the deeper truths behind Matthew’s murder, for reasons that eluded me. He openly acknowledged his affection for Matthew as well as Aaron and Russell, but what else was he hiding, and why?

I spent my first night in Denver barhopping on Broadway, just south of the state capitol and the popular gay neighborhood of Montrose. By the time I ordered a beer at the third establishment on my list, which featured scantily clad go-go boys dancing on the bar, I was convinced that I had succumbed to a very stupid idea. How could I possibly get information this way? Surely this wasn’t real reporting. Who the hell was I trying to fool? Only myself, I assumed.

As part of their sweaty routine, the dancers jumped off the bar and mingled with customers, grinding their hips before us with dollar bills poking out of their jockstraps and briefs. I tried talking with two of the young men, shouting in their ears over the pounding house music. I said I was a journalist and mentioned the name
Matthew Shepard
. Both of them stared at me seductively, but their eyes also chastised me for being a middle-aged party pooper. It was apparent
that as far as they were concerned I was talking about ancient history. Embarrassed, I slipped each of them the obligatory dollar bills they were waiting for, to which one responded with a peck on my cheek and the other a pinch on my rear end.

I was desperate by then to call it a night and go back to my hotel room. Rummaging through the downtown bar scene felt like a dead end or, at best, a waste of time. But since I probably wouldn’t return there, I decided to stop briefly at the last place on my list — the accurately but blandly named Broadway. A source had advised me that the bar had changed owners in recent years, though its regular crowd of mostly hustlers and johns had remained the same. At the time of Matthew’s murder, it was known as Mr. Bill’s.

Once inside the packed, smoky bar, I began to feel just as I had trying to solicit information from go-go boys down the street. What the f--k was I doing there? What was I trying to prove? Clearly it was time to go home. Instead I bought a beer to silence the clamor of critical voices. But I was also single then and had taken notice of the bearded, well-built bouncer straddling a stool near the entrance. Maybe that’s what really drew me to Broadway, to feed my own lust. I wasn’t attracted to most of the guys wandering around the bar, but the bouncer was another story. Wearing a plaid flannel shirt, snug jeans with a gash of ripped denim across one thigh, and a studded western belt, he also had a warm, inviting smile.

As it turned out, there was no quandary to confront. Minutes after I began talking to the bouncer, he confided that he was happily committed to a lover who would be waiting for him at home when the bar closed. He wanted to know where I was from and what brought me to Denver. I said I was a journalist doing undercover reporting for a possible story on gay hustlers — which was partly true. I also asked if he had worked there back in 1998 when the bar was called Mr. Bill’s.

No, he’d only been employed there for a year, the bouncer said. He suggested that I try to find a former manager named Duane who had worked at Mr. Bill’s for more than fifteen years. “He and his partner run a kitchen at a veterans post somewhere in town,” he added. “A VFW, I think. Duane’s the guy you want to talk to.”

The next morning in my hotel room, I was still full of doubt. Searching the Denver bar scene at random seemed to be a gratuitous detour, especially when Matthew’s murder had occurred in Wyoming. But something else had crept into my mind the night before. As I lay in bed, I couldn’t stop thinking about the murder of another gay man from Laramie that I had come across in my research — a 1993 killing that had never been solved. The victim, a forty-seven-year-old psychology professor at the University of Wyoming named Steve Heyman, had apparently come to Denver on a recreational trip and was murdered with extreme brutality. His body was thrown into speeding traffic from a bridge that crossed Interstate 70. What little was known about the crime was that Heyman had visited a few gay bars in the same Broadway vicinity where I had just been. There was brief speculation that he was the victim of anti-gay hate, but when police turned up no leads the case was essentially forgotten.

Along with many gay males of my generation whose coming out was made possible by the urban bar environment that began to flourish in the 1970s, I feared the kind of violence that killed Heyman. The nightmare of meeting a new acquaintance in a bar or disco and ending up robbed or beaten, or worse, occurred with numbing regularity among gays. But I also had a vague hunch that Steve Heyman’s murder in November 1993 and Matthew Shepard’s five years later had more in common than their shared gay identity and being from the same Wyoming college town. At the moment, I felt ill equipped to contemplate those parallels further, or the more daunting prospect of investigating another grotesquely violent crime. Like the murders of Matthew Shepard and fifteen-year-old Daphne Sulk, however, Heyman’s killing was plagued by mysteries and unanswered questions.

I phoned three veterans posts in Denver that morning — all Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) — and found out that none had kitchen facilities. On my final call, I had a surprise when I asked if Duane or Rob was working in the kitchen. Seconds later, a raspy, smoker’s voice picked up the phone. “This is Duane,” he announced politely.

Almost as soon as I introduced myself and asked if he remembered seeing photos of Matthew Shepard’s attackers in the news four years
earlier, he interrupted me. “Yes, absolutely,” he said. Duane quickly confided that he had “recognized them” from Mr. Bill’s bar. His first reaction, he recalled, was “shock” at the realization that “these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community.”

I was momentarily speechless.

“Mr. Bill’s was all about hustling,” Duane went on. “They’d hang around the pool table between turning tricks. They were doing the twenty dollar jobs” — which he called “the low end” of the trade.

Already my mind was flooded with questions. I had gotten the strong impression from Doc O’Connor that Aaron McKinney had dabbled in hustling, yet Doc said nothing about Russell Henderson, only that Russell had been in the limo a few times partying with Aaron and a couple of their friends.

Duane wanted to check with his partner Rob first but said he didn’t see any problem with both of them sitting down for an interview. He told me to phone him back in a few hours. Instead of asking Duane more questions I decided to end the call, as I was worried he might change his mind.

Late that afternoon, I met Duane Powers and Rob Surratt at VFW Post #1 on Bannock Street in Denver, just blocks from the bar formerly known as Mr. Bill’s. When I arrived, they were tidying up the kitchen at the end of their workday. Both men were lean and of medium height and had the worn look of old-time cowboys — or old bartenders who had worked too many all-nighters. As soon as the pair started talking, one could have mistaken them for brothers. They had a rough, easy banter, bossing each other around with good humor and finishing each other’s sentences.

Over a round of beers at a table in the bar area, where there were just a handful of patrons, Rob, a former bartender at Mr. Bill’s, confirmed in broad terms what Duane had told me on the phone. He pointed out that the only reason they had taken notice of Aaron and Russell was “they stood out from other hustlers cruising tricks” in the bar. “We knew they weren’t locals,” Rob said.

As I probed further, Rob and Duane admitted they had no personal knowledge of the activities Aaron or Russell engaged in
once they left Mr. Bill’s. But Duane, who claimed to have tended bar and managed there for eighteen years, said he had little doubt about what the two men had come there for. He repeated what he had stated previously about “the twenty dollar jobs” and added, “[They were] getting a blowjob in some guy’s car, then coming back again to have a few beers and shoot more pool, then do it all over again. They just had a different routine than the pros who’d been around a long time.”

Duane surprised me once more when he offered to call “the real Mr. Bill,” the bar’s former owner, to see if he’d be willing to talk to me. Since I was leaving the next morning for Laramie, I thanked him but suggested we wait until my return. There were other questions I wanted to ask Duane and Rob but thought it best to postpone them. Did they know Doc? Had they seen his limos around Mr. Bill’s? I also wanted to ask about drugs, a subject that could make them, and “Mr. Bill,” uneasy. I had no reason to doubt their allegations of hustling — which gave credence to other discoveries I had made—yet it seemed equally plausible that Aaron had gone to Mr. Bill’s to sell drugs, as he was known to do at bars in Laramie. Away from his hometown, where he was already on the radar of local cops, he was less likely to be apprehended.

In phone interviews, Aaron seemed insulted when I asked if he had ever hustled guys. But as I listened to Duane and Rob, I recalled again what Aaron had stated in his confession about a possible exchange with Matthew of “some cocaine or … some methamphetamines, one of those two, for sex.”

I wanted to ask Duane and Rob specifically about crystal meth and how prevalent it was at Mr. Bill’s and other bars in the area. I decided that could wait, too, but before we parted I turned to Duane, who had worked at Mr. Bill’s longer, and asked if he had ever heard of Steve Heyman, the murdered professor from Laramie. Duane shrugged; the name didn’t seem to register.

Then I mentioned how Heyman died, his body bludgeoned and dumped on the highway. Immediately Duane nodded and said, “I know exactly who you’re talking about.” Heyman had been a regular at Mr. Bill’s when he was in Denver and apparently liked hustlers.

Homicide detectives had long believed that Heyman met his killer in a local gay bar and that there may have been more than one assailant, but nine years had passed and no suspect had been charged.

Murders like this were not uncommon: A gay man meets a hustler; the hustler promises sex in exchange for money but his real plan is robbery; and the robbery turns deadly.

I was reminded once more of something that had been said about Aaron in the anonymous letter: “he was acting the part of ‘straight trade.’ ”

Had Steve Heyman gotten tangled up with straight trade? Had he perhaps known his assailant(s) previously?

Some suggested Heyman’s murder was a hate crime, but in light of things I’d been learning in Laramie it also seemed reasonable to ask: Was there a possibility drugs had been involved?

FIFTEEN

Tristen

My reexamination of the circumstances surrounding Matthew’s murder was a frustrating series of fits and starts. There were many dead ends and many occasions when I thought I should simply abandon the effort. Perhaps the most discouraging moment came in spring 2004 when
The New York Times Magazine
killed the article that I’d been working on for two years. Wasn’t that telling me something? If the world’s newspaper of record no longer wanted to publish the story, why should a novice journalist like me keep on?

Several friends had also urged me to “get on” with my life and career, subtly inferring that a self-respecting gay man and liberal shouldn’t be tampering with the accepted version of Matthew’s murder
anyway
.

But if I try to discern a rationale for my persistence with Matthew’s story, I can see in retrospect that a new lead would invariably appear or a break would occur just as I was on the verge of giving up. I was also constantly surprised by the source of these new leads, as they often came from the most unexpected places.

Tristen was a case in point.

In early April 2004 Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson sent me copies of an unexpected letter each of them had received from a “T. Henson” of Gulfport, Mississippi. Both men, still incarcerated at High Desert State Prison in Nevada, claimed they did not know anyone by that name, though Aaron hinted in his roundabout way that maybe the correspondence “could help” my investigation. The letters, dated March 24, 2004, were similar but not identical; they were typed, single-spaced, and less than a page long.