The Book of Matt (15 page)

“Dear Mr. McKinney,” the letter to Aaron began. “It has taken me many years to finally decide to write to you. I have so many questions and I really don’t know where to start … I was dating Matthew Shepard
when you did what you did to him. If you just needed money you could have asked him and he would have called me and I would have gave [sic] you the money so you wouldn’t have hurt him. I wish you could have seen him in the hospital and what it has done to many of us … I even tried taking my own life. For the loss of missing him so much.”

The letter to Russell Henderson began similarly, yet the writer immediately asked the question, “Why Matt?”

“He would not have done anything to hurt anyone,” Henson continued. “And if it was for money all you had to do was ask and he would have gave [sic] it without any problems. My doctor says it is time I at least write to you and Aaron. So I can try to overcome this. You both took my life when you took Matt away from me.”

When the letters were forwarded to me, I had already been researching Matthew’s murder on and off for four years. But I had never come across the name T. Henson before or any reference to their dating relationship. If Henson was the person he professed to be, it seemed strange that none of Matthew’s friends I had interviewed ever mentioned him. There had also been no mention of him in the yearlong media coverage or in any of the court documents.

As I compared the two letters more carefully, I noticed a few subtle differences. In his letter to Aaron, Henson stated, “you could have asked [Matt] and
he would have called me and I would have gave you the money
so you wouldn’t have hurt him” (italics mine). Yet to Russell he wrote, “If it was for money all you had to do was ask and [Matt] would have gave it without any problems.”

Henson’s statement to Aaron implied that Matthew didn’t have “the money,” but that he, Henson, would have provided it had Aaron only asked. Why, on the other hand, did Henson tell Russell that Matthew “
would have gave [the money] without any problems
”? (Italics mine.)

My curiosity stemmed from knowing that Matthew had been very anxious about money on the weekend before the October 1998 attack. Yet incongruously, he had also spent about eleven hundred dollars in cash on the night of Friday, October 2, hiring Doc O’Connor to drive him in a stretch limo with his friend, Tina Labrie, to a Colorado dance club. According to Tina, Matthew became increasingly preoccupied and depressed as the evening went on.

“He mentioned on the way down … ‘Do you think this is selfish of me?’ ” she recalled. “ ‘I’m spending all this money [on a limo service] and … I could be giving this to … poor starving children somewhere.”

But during a later interview, Tina spoke more candidly about Matthew’s state of mind that evening. “He was really worried …” she explained. “It just seemed like there was something bugging him, something on his mind … kind of those fears of who do I trust and who don’t I trust.”

Concerned about Matthew, Tina slept over at his Laramie apartment that night. The following morning, she overheard an upsetting phone conversation he was having with his mother, who was in Saudi Arabia. The subject was money.

The fact that Henson raised the issue of money in his letters to Aaron and Russell more than five years later made me reconsider what it was that Matthew was so worried about. What was behind his “fears of who do I trust and who don’t I trust”?

After the call with his mother ended abruptly, “Matt began to cry uncontrollably and panic,” Tina said, then went into the bathroom and “took a lot of his anti-anxiety medication.”

I asked him, how much did you take. And at first, he didn’t want to tell me. And then finally he told me how much he took … I said this would kill most people, you know. I don’t remember the milligram dosage but he took up around fifteen [pills] … I was like, do I need to take you to the emergency room. He said, no, no, no, just monitor me. And I was like okay. I took his cell phone and nothing happened … He was fine. It amazed me.

… He said he was having a harder and harder time being able to relax, being able to sleep, being troubled by nightmares … One of those pills would have probably put me out for two days. And here he is, eating them like candy. Like [he] can’t survive without them.

Tina also reminded me again of Matthew’s size; that he weighed only 105 pounds.

The first time Tina described his near-suicide-attempt, I was doubtful that such extreme despair had resulted from a parental phone call over money. But I still couldn’t make sense of the discrepancy between Matthew appearing to be flush with cash on that Friday night — he had even treated a group of friends to a meal at Denny’s — and Henson’s letters to Aaron and Russell suggesting that Matthew didn’t have money when he met them at the Fireside a few nights later.

I also kept wondering why Henson focused on
money
yet he never brought up their reputed hatred of Matthew for being gay.

I questioned Aaron and Russell about Henson again, only to have them repeat that they had no idea who he was. Their response prompted me to write to him myself at the Mississippi post office box he had given as a return address, with a simple explanation of how I had learned about him.

I was intrigued by Henson’s straightforwardness but was also puzzled as to why he had waited more than five years to talk openly about his relationship with Matthew. If the two had been as close as Henson said, what else might he know?

In the remainder of his letter to Aaron, he seemed tormented by questions for which he had no answers:

I am not understanding why you did it. [Matt] was so giving all the time … I can tell you that I … wanted to see you die … But [now] I want you to live and live with what you did to him …

I also believe that you don’t have that much hate in you … I don’t think that you intended to kill Matt. But … you left him out there in the cold, hurt and bleeding. You could have … called someone and told us where he was at. Matt never hurt you and you know it …

If you can find it in your heart somewhere please everyday that your [sic] alive, please say to Matt in a prayer that you’re sorry …

I know what was said in court and I am asking for you to please tell me the truth, please. There is nothing else that anyone can do to hurt me as much as you have done
 … I just want to know why. Please tell me. I need to know why my Matt? Why him? Thanks for taking the time to read this. T. Henson

Each time I re-read the letters, I was aware of Henson’s intense need to understand the murder. But his persistent questions about motive contrasted sharply with the clear-cut logic of media accounts as well as the statements of a couple of key law enforcement officers. Instead Henson offered his own convictions, while giving no clue what they were based on: “you don’t have that much hate in you … I don’t think that you intended to kill Matt … Matt never hurt you and you know it.”

Henson’s words had a surprisingly personal tone considering that he was unacquainted with Aaron McKinney, and that, according to all media reports Henson might have seen, Aaron and Matthew had never met prior to their encounter at the Fireside bar on Tuesday, October 6.

Within days I received an email response from a “Ted” Henson, who said his real name was Tristen but he preferred I call him Ted.

Ted’s first few emails were short and guarded. Despite his tentativeness, though, I got the sense that he was relieved to unburden more of his feelings about Matthew and the murder. It also became clear from the abundance of personal details that gradually poured forth that he and Matthew had, indeed, enjoyed a close relationship.

According to Ted, he met Matthew in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, in the mid-1990s while visiting relatives who lived in the American compound there. Matthew, then sixteen, was attending a boarding school in Switzerland but was home on vacation. Although Ted was twenty-three at the time, he said they grew close quickly and maintained an intimate bond as friends and lovers until the first weekend of October 1998, a few days before Matthew was attacked.

On Friday, October 2 — the same night that Matthew took Tina to the Tornado dance club in a limo — he and Matthew had “a little spat” in Fort Collins. Ted had been “staying with a friend” in the Colorado town, he said, but he declined to elaborate on what his quarrel with
Matthew had been about. As soon as he got word of Matthew’s near-fatal beating, however, he rushed to nearby Poudre Valley Hospital, where he spent time at Matthew’s bedside until Matthew’s parents arrived from Saudi Arabia. Ted later recounted that he had been in such severe shock that a hospital physician prescribed heavy doses of sedatives and anti-depressants for him.

When I began communicating with Ted in spring 2004, I was also in discussions with ABC News
20/20
about producing a story that would reexamine the murder. As our investigation got under way at the network that summer, Ted appeared to grow more trusting and cooperative. He was still reluctant to meet in person but he began to open up about his personal life. He revealed that he was the adoptive father of a three-year-old son and said that he and Matthew had “talked about raising a family together.” On several occasions Ted also spoke of the anger and bitterness he felt toward Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson — “I still am hoping that something happens to them like they did to Matt” — and he repeated more urgently the central question he had posed in his letters to them: “All I am after … is the answer to WHY?… One way or the other I am going to get it!!!”

Ted offhandedly mentioned “a guy named Bear in Laramie,” hinting that he might know more about the murder than he had previously let on. I was aware that “Bear” was the nickname of Aaron’s first cousin Adrian McKinney; I had already interviewed him, in fact, but for the moment I kept that to myself. Like Aaron, Bear had acknowledged that he’d been deeply involved with methamphetamine at the time of the murder, both using the drug and selling it.

I found it curious that Ted had brought up Bear’s name in three consecutive emails he had written to me in early July. I wondered, of course, what the connection was — if any — between the two men, but I also realized I had to proceed slowly.

When I pushed Ted to tell me more about Bear, he was vague and said he was “a friend of a friend.” Yet he was unequivocal regarding any involvement with methamphetamine on Matthew’s part, or for that matter his own.

“As for Matt using meth I would have to say no,” he wrote, “he never did around me and I am more than sure he would not.”

But in his emails that July, Ted passed on other scraps of provocative information that could only mean one thing: He, too, knew a lot more about the personal circumstances surrounding Matthew’s murder than he had acknowledged.

“[Aaron] McKinney would sell [himself] to other guys,” he stated bluntly, “but I do not believe that Matt would have ever done anything with him like that.”

Two days later Ted was more explicit: “McKinney slept with other guys for money to get his drug. There is a guy there in Laramie that was one of McKinney’s main guys … Matt had told me a while before the murder took place that a guy named Aaron had offered [him] sex for money. But Matt said he did not do it.”

I was astonished by Ted’s claims. Not only did they lend some credence to what Aaron had told police in his long-sealed confession about a possible drugs-for-sex deal with Matthew, but they also fit with the anonymous letter that had launched my investigation; with Doc’s intimations about hustling in Laramie and beyond; and with what I had learned during my underground search in Denver.

Still, I was left with a web of convoluted questions that Ted — and presumably others — would be unwilling, unable, or simply not ready to answer.

For one, how did Ted know so much about Aaron’s alleged sex-and-drug activities?

And given his longtime intimacy with Matthew, why had Ted’s name never appeared in the public record?

In late June 2004 at ABC News headquarters in New York, Glenn Silber and I made final preparations for filming Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson’s
20/20
interviews at High Desert State Prison in Nevada. All of us involved in producing the report were on edge. At the last minute Wyoming prison officials were trying to prevent us from going forward with the interviews, citing state regulations that prohibit face-to-face interviews with inmates. But the more liberal Nevada Department of Corrections, which was housing a large group
of Wyoming prisoners under special contract, insisted the decision on whether to grant interviews was theirs alone.

Elizabeth Vargas, a rising star in TV news who had recently inherited her
20/20
co-anchor chair from Barbara Walters, was stretched thin that summer. Vargas was eager to do the McKinney and Henderson interviews as they represented the kind of exclusive “get” that Walters and other anchors had built their careers on, but she was also nervous that I had been investigating Matthew’s murder mostly on my own as an independent journalist. With her reputation on the line and her sights already trained on anchoring the evening news, she was understandably concerned about taking chances with a reporter she didn’t know.

Until just a few months before, I had been writing an investigative article about the murder as a freelancer for
The New York Times Magazine
. With the departure of head editor Adam Moss from the magazine, the story had been killed without explanation. Moss, who had commissioned the piece, is widely regarded as a brilliant and somewhat fearless editor; he also happens to be gay. Although his successors at the magazine commended my strong reporting and said they’d like to work with me on “something else,” I surmised that the story’s politically sensitive content was the problem.

Fortunately for the story, another prominent, openly gay news executive, David Sloan, the executive producer of ABC News
20/20
, was willing to take it on. Sloan, a trusted adviser and friend of Barbara Walters and one of the network’s influential gatekeepers, convinced Elizabeth Vargas it was worth a full hour on
20/20
.