The Book of Matt (29 page)

When I posed these questions to several longtime sources, I heard a variety of stories in response. According to a female acquaintance of Aaron’s, he had “regular appointments” with a former athletic coach in town, who was not only very popular but also closeted. In addition, she said, the coach’s brother was a cop in town, so efforts were made to spare the family any embarrassment following Aaron’s arrest.

Ted Henson claimed that he and Matthew had run into Aaron in Laramie one day while Aaron was in the company of a gay male friend of Matthew’s from the University of Wyoming — John
^*
. Like Matthew, John was active in the gay student group on campus. Ted said that after Aaron and John walked away, “Matt told me, ‘They’re not boyfriends. Aaron’s getting paid for it.’ ”

But according to Ted, John later became very outspoken about the crime’s anti-gay motives, while concealing his personal association with Aaron.

After trying unsuccessfully to contact John by phone and email, I approached him in person at his Laramie office to request an interview. I offered to protect his privacy and not use his name or otherwise identify him, but he politely declined. I had no interest whatsoever in exposing his personal life; I just wanted to know if Ted’s allegations were true and whether John had played a part, however small, in covering up the truth about Aaron — and hence the complex truths about Matthew’s murder. (A former co-worker of John at the University of Wyoming suggested unconvincingly to me that John may have refused to talk to protect the reputation of the school, which was his alma mater.)

I also noticed other discrepancies that were intriguing. For instance, how many times had Aaron and Russell actually visited Haselhuhn’s home that night?

Russell was convinced he had been to Haselhuhn’s only
twice
. “The second and last time we went there was with Chasity, before we took her home, and I didn’t go in that time,” he said.

In a statement five months after the murder, however, Haselhuhn claimed that Aaron and Russell had visited him
three times
that night. According to Haselhuhn, Laramie police had questioned
him at length a couple of weeks after the attack and had shown him two guns to have him identify the one that belonged to Aaron. Yet I was unable to find a record of that interview in the unsealed police reports. It also seemed strange that police had chosen not to investigate Haselhuhn immediately after they arrested Aaron and Russell.

Aaron, whose recollections I often found to be the least credible of the three men—due, in part, to his prolonged drug use — told me in a 2003 interview that he and Russell had gone back to Haselhuhn’s home “maybe even four times,” but then he corrected himself and said “three to four times.” On the other hand, Aaron confirmed that Russell and Chasity had waited in the truck while he went inside to talk with Haselhuhn alone during the second visit.

One possibility I had to consider was that Aaron had gone back to Haselhuhn’s home a third or even a fourth time that night without Russell. By then I’d come to appreciate how thoroughly Aaron had lied to protect his drug cohorts; and that Haselhuhn and Doc had also given misleading statements — though perhaps to a lesser degree — in order not to incriminate themselves or their friends and associates.

After Aaron, Russell, and Chasity drove to the home of Haselhuhn’s dealer friend, they went to Aaron’s apartment on North 4th Street. According to Kristen’s later statement to Detective Ben Fritzen, “Me and Aaron sat down and he told me what he was doing that night and he was supposed to be home within 20 minutes … He was going to go sell the gun and … bring the money home.” Kristen said Aaron had told her earlier, “I am going to sell it and get our rent money.”

When Aaron and Russell left the apartment, they got into Bill McKinney’s truck and followed Chasity in her car to the trailer where she and Russell lived in Fort Sanders. Russell showered, changed his clothes, and before leaving again with Aaron collected some change to buy beer.

Aaron wanted to go to the Library bar and wait there until Ken Haselhuhn was able to reach his friend. Aaron’s choice of the Library
seemed telling, since Matthew had spent several hours drinking there that afternoon, on a school day while classes were in session and he was concerned about midterms. The bar had also been the site of a previous encounter between them that hadn’t gone well. And although Aaron liked to sell drugs there, mostly to students, it wasn’t his favorite place in town to drink.

According to a reliable confidential source, Haselhuhn had also been at the Library “very recently” while Matthew was there and “he definitely knew who Matthew was” prior to the attack. This was not a trivial piece of information insofar as Haselhuhn, like Aaron, had stated that he “didn’t know Shepard.”

On Tuesday night Aaron and Russell arrived at the Library between ten and ten thirty. They ordered a pitcher of beer and began drinking; Aaron also got up repeatedly and went to a pay phone to make calls — to Haselhuhn, he claimed.

“I’m not sure how long we were [at the bar] but we drank a couple of pitchers of beer while we were there,” according to Russell. He said they “decided to go to — somewhere else besides there” and “we ended up at the Fireside.”

But when asked, “Why did you go to the Fireside that night?” Russell answered, “I don’t know exactly why.”

Aaron, on the other hand, admitted it was he who picked the bars they went to — and the dealers’ homes they visited.

In Aaron’s extensive interview for
20/20
, only a small portion of which was broadcast, he explained what was really on his mind that Tuesday and retraced the steps he and Russell took before they went to the Fireside.

Aaron McKinney:
I was supposed to get some more [meth] that afternoon, but that fell through. That’s when I was supposed to trade the gun in. So when that fell through, that’s when I started to explore other options.

Elizabeth Vargas:
What other options?

Aaron McKinney:
Well, I had something brought to my attention … a guy that had a lot of it, so I decided I would go over there and rob him for it.

Elizabeth Vargas:
This was on Tuesday?

Aaron McKinney:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:
Your friend Ken at work told you that there was a dealer in town that had how much meth?

Aaron McKinney:
He said he had about six ounces in his house.

Elizabeth Vargas:
Did you tell Russell about your plan?

Aaron McKinney:
Uh, yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:
What’d he think?

Aaron McKinney:
Uh, he didn’t like it at all.

Elizabeth Vargas:
What’d he say?

Aaron McKinney:
Uh, he didn’t want to be a part of that.

Elizabeth Vargas:
Was it after work that you [came] up with this plan to rob this drug dealer?

Aaron McKinney:
No, during work.

Elizabeth Vargas:
It was during work?

Aaron McKinney:
Yes.

Elizabeth Vargas:
And you told Russell at that point?

Aaron McKinney:
No, sometime on the way there …

Elizabeth Vargas:
So you went to the drug dealer’s house, or you went to Ken’s house?

Aaron McKinney:
I think we picked Ken up first, and then we went to the dealer’s house.

Elizabeth Vargas:
Nobody home?

Aaron McKinney:
No, oh, yeah, he was home, but he didn’t have nothing [sic].

Elizabeth Vargas:
So then what’d you do?

Aaron McKinney:
Oh, well, we were supposed to wait, because he was supposed to get it. Supposively [sic] it was supposed to be there any minute, so … uh, we went to a bar [the Library] and waited for awhile.

Elizabeth Vargas:
Did you go back to the house?

Aaron McKinney:
Uh, I think so. We went back to Ken’s house.

Elizabeth Vargas:
And a second time you tried, and the dealer still didn’t have any drugs?

Aaron McKinney:
Yeah.

Elizabeth Vargas:
How many times did you call the dealer?

Aaron McKinney:
Well, probably four or five.

TWENTY-SIX

The Fireside Lounge

Sometime between 9:30 and 10:30
PM
Matthew drove his Ford Bronco to the Fireside Lounge downtown and parked on the street out front. Bar employees later questioned by police had slightly different recollections regarding the time of his arrival.

Doug Ferguson, a bouncer at the door who had started his shift at 9
PM
, felt pretty certain that Matthew had walked in between 10 and 10:30. Ferguson had seen Matthew at the Fireside many times previously but didn’t know his name, he said. He also noticed nothing out of the ordinary after Matthew’s arrival.

It was karaoke night, so the bar was a little livelier than on a typical weeknight, with about thirty-five to forty patrons. Matthew simply ordered a drink and sat by himself at the bar, next to the wait-station, Ferguson recalled.

Matt Galloway, a bartender who started work at 10
PM
, would later say that he’d seen Matthew in the bar approximately five times in the past and had spoken to him on a few occasions. A junior at the University of Wyoming, Galloway would also come to realize that he had attended grade school and part of high school with Matthew in Casper, though he was unaware of it on the night of October 6 when Matthew sat down at the bar.

Within a couple of days, media stories would offer a remarkably detailed picture of that evening’s bizarre sequence of events. Nearly all of them advanced the premise that Matthew had been quietly “lured” from the Fireside because — in so many words — he was the perfect target: He was well dressed, he was obviously gay, and he may have had the temerity to show a sexual interest in Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Repelled by his homosexuality, the two “rednecks” decided not only to rob him but also to beat him with the barrel of a gun and hang him on a fence for having only thirty dollars
in his wallet. Or in the words of Kristen Price, “Aaron and Russ … wanted to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people.”

According to
The Denver Post
, which cited bartender Matt Galloway, Matthew sat at the bar as he usually did and had three or four different kinds of beer over the two hours or so he was there. Similarly
Newsweek
reported: Matthew “kept to himself, nursing his drinks — a Heineken, a cocktail, a Corona — alone for two hours.” The general consensus was that Matthew hadn’t been intoxicated; at most he was “buzzed.”

Galloway believed there were fewer people in the bar than Ferguson had estimated — “20 to 25,” he thought.

Inevitably, there were also different recollections regarding the time that Aaron and Russell arrived at the Fireside. Doug Ferguson thought they had gotten there between 11 and 11:30
PM
; others placed the time at about 11:45.

But before they drove to the Fireside, Aaron and Russell did two things: They went to the home of Ken Haselhuhn again. Haselhuhn stated that they were there around 11:30
PM
. They also stopped briefly at the Cowboy bar downtown, where there was “not enough going on,” according to a statement by one of Aaron’s attorneys at his trial the following year.

Aaron and Russell said that when they arrived at the Fireside they ordered a pitcher of beer and sat on stools at the end of the bar, with two young women sitting next to them. It was their third pitcher of the evening, as they had already consumed two at the Library.

Matt Galloway was pretty sure Russell had ordered the pitcher, but it was Aaron who poured a bunch of change on the counter to pay for it. Galloway later described the two men to police as “not clean cut by any means. One of them had … extremely dirty hands … I just remember [their clothing] being just grungy.”

Galloway’s speculations regarding a motive for the crime were repeated frequently in media stories. “Here’s this little kid, dressed very nice,” he told a reporter for
Vanity Fair
. “Maybe they’ve seen him before and thought he was gay.”

Ferguson recalled that Aaron and Russell “were at the short end of the bar” when they got their beer, about four to five chairs from where Matthew was sitting. Ferguson didn’t hear their conversation and didn’t know how long they talked. Galloway agreed with him: He couldn’t hear what Aaron and Russell were saying, but they talked for “about 15 to 20 minutes” and it seemed like a regular conversation.

Ferguson said he had seen Aaron and Russell in the Fireside a number of times previously — “10 to 15 times,” with more frequent visits over the past month. He had also seen Matthew, Aaron, and Russell in the bar at the same time, though he didn’t remember them associating with one another.

Since Russell had just turned twenty-one two weeks earlier, on September 24, it seems unlikely that he would’ve been allowed into the Fireside before that date. He and Aaron readily acknowledged that they had been to the bar together on other nights, yet Aaron stressed that the drug sales he had conducted there were his alone. Aaron’s admission was later confirmed by sources familiar with his dealing activities at local bars.