The Book of Matt (34 page)

In a media interview a few days after the crime, Kristen described Aaron’s actions after he arrived home:

He went straight to the bathroom. He was cleaning himself off and … I told him to take off his dirty clothes
and I helped him get undressed because he was stumbling. And I went and found some clean clothes and put that [sic] on him.

… He told me everything that happened. But he was stuttering. And he kept on telling me, “Look out the window, the cops are going to show up any minute, I know they are.”

During the same interview, Kristen was asked, “Now, why do you think they decided to rob Matthew?”

“I don’t know,” she answered. “I really don’t know.”

“What do you think happened in that bar?” the same reporter questioned her a minute or so later.

“I don’t know what exactly happened because I was not there,” she said. “And Aaron was too — his speech was too messed up to be able to really tell what was going on … Aaron said, ‘I was not myself. I don’t know who that was who did that.’ ”

It would not be until early evening on Wednesday, October 7 that Matthew was found at the fence, some eighteen hours after being abandoned there by Aaron and Russell. Around 6
PM
, while cycling in Sherman Hills, Aaron Kreifels, a University of Wyoming freshman, hit a patch of prairie scrub and fell off his mountain bike. As he got up, he saw something about fifteen feet away — what looked like blood shining off a face, probably a scarecrow.

“Halloween was coming up, so I thought it was just a Halloween gag,” he later told a TV reporter.

But as he got closer, he heard heavy breathing sounds and realized it was a person, injured and unconscious.

“[Matthew] was breathing very heavily through his nose … [it] was sounding terrible,” Kreifels would remember.

Immediately he ran for help, to the home of a university professor a couple of hundred yards away.

First to respond to the scene — at 6:22
PM
— was Reggie Fluty, a deputy with the Albany County Sheriff’s Department. Fluty’s
unsettling account of how she untied Matthew’s battered figure from the fence would soon become known worldwide, especially her initial impression that he was a boy of thirteen or so.

“Baby, I’m so sorry this happened,” she consoled him.

Horrified by Matthew’s massive head injuries and overcome by the pale tracks on his face where blood had been washed away by tears, she cradled him in her arms.

“Little boy, don’t die, please don’t die,” she pleaded.

At Cal Rerucha’s suburban-style ranch home on Duna Drive, his wife, Jan, was helping their two sons with homework when Rob DeBree phoned him around 7 pm with word that a badly beaten young man had been found.

“We’ve got a potential homicide, Cal, we’re at the hospital,” DeBree informed him. “Dr. Cantway doesn’t think the boy’s gonna make it. We may need search warrants.”

Cal was startled by the news — his home was just a few minutes from where the victim had been found, in an area where his eleven- and twelve-year-old sons liked to ride their mountain bikes. Cal’s immediate concern, however, was being sure the crime scene was secure and none of the physical evidence got lost.

“The first 24 hours are critical,” he later explained. “You can’t lose any of the evidence. Fast is important. If you lose stuff, you don’t get it back.”

He also asked DeBree, “Does the young man have family here?”

DeBree said he was working on that and would call him back with an update. But before he hung up, he added, “Cal, he’s gonna die. We’re gonna have a homicide.”

At about the same time, Tina Labrie phoned Laramie police to ask them to check on her friend Matt Shepard. She said she’d been trying to reach him since that morning but had gotten no answer and was worried about him. Tina was surprised when they told her they were sending an officer over to her home to talk to her. Phil, her husband, thought that Matt might have committed suicide, because of his intense depression lately.

Doc O’Connor claimed that he, too, had tried calling Matt numerous times during the day but Matt’s cell phone just rang and rang.

Dr. Cantway, who treated Matthew in the emergency room at Laramie’s Ivinson Memorial Hospital, would later say, “I’ve never seen anyone with such massive head wounds live.”

When Cantway phoned Matthew’s parents in Saudi Arabia and awakened them with the news — it was about 5
AM
there, due to an eleven-hour time difference — there was little he could offer them in the way of hope. He explained that Matthew had a severe spinal-stem injury from the horrific beating inflicted on him. He was comatose and was also suffering from hypothermia, as he had lost blood when the temperature dropped. The only thing Cantway could do was move Matthew by ambulance to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, where they had more advanced equipment.

Shortly after the ambulance transporting Matthew departed from Laramie, Rob DeBree arrived at Ivinson Hospital. Fellow officers had informed DeBree that Aaron was at the hospital. Kristen had driven him there to be treated for the injury he’d gotten during the previous night’s street fight.

But upon arriving at the hospital, DeBree later explained on the witness stand at Aaron’s trial, “The first thing … I noticed [was] the pickup in question, that I had seen at 7th and Harney that same morning. I walked up to the truck, and without doubt at that point I knew this vehicle had been at that scene [at the fence] … All of the botanical evidence located on the hitch was more than apparent to me that [sic] was going to be an immediate match … I immediately wanted that vehicle seized … until we could obtain search warrants.”

Police also saw a pair of black shoes inside the pickup that would turn out to be Matthew’s.

Inside the hospital DeBree proceeded with his plan “to initiate an interview with Aaron McKinney, who was in a room off to the side that they used to refer to as a suture room … Sitting in this same room was Kristen Price as well as Aaron.”

After verbally advising Aaron of his Miranda rights, DeBree said, “the first statement out of his mouth was whether or not I had caught the people that had done this to him.”

Aaron’s head injury notwithstanding, DeBree noted, “He knew his name, knew his whereabouts. He seemed coherent. Speech was not slurred … He did seem a little bit depressed but alert.”

DeBree continued to describe his interview with Aaron:

I asked him generally where he had been that day … especially that night previous … He told me that he as well as Russell Henderson had gone to … the Library Bar, and had some beers, and then he went into a story … that this unknown individual walked up and took his car keys from the bar and walked out and didn’t come back for over an hour. Obviously I considered that somewhat suspicious … I asked for the description of the individual. He was unable to give me one.

… [I] asked him why he didn’t call the police if somebody just took off with his vehicle. He stated he didn’t know, and the individual apparently showed back up again … [and] wanted to take them to a party … He stated he and Russell went with this individual, drove to the area of 7th and Harney where this individual got out, went to check and see where the party was at, and then Aaron said that the next thing, “we got jumped by these people,” allegedly.

After DeBree questioned him, Aaron was transferred to Poudre Valley Hospital as well, for twenty-four-hour observation of his subdural hematoma. While the wound to his left ear was minor compared with Matthew’s near-fatal injuries, Aaron — weirdly — seemed to be trailing in Matthew’s footsteps again. That night at the hospital the two men lay in beds just down the hall from each another.

“[Matthew’s] most serious wound, a crushing blow behind his right ear, caused a 2-inch depression to his skull,”
The Denver Post
reported a couple of days later.

Also at the hospital that night was Emiliano Morales, whose injury from Aaron’s gun required twenty-one staples in his scalp.

“Later on at night,” Cal Rerucha summarized, “stories are put in place so they can tell police a concocted story. This was done in advance by Kristen Price, by Chasity Pasley, by Mr. Henderson and Mr. McKinney. It was also at that time where [sic] Price, Henderson, and [Pasley] take bloodied clothes belonging to Mr. Henderson over to Cheyenne where … evidence of the crime can be hidden.

“… Officers from the Laramie Police Department will also tell you … that they recovered Adidas athletic shoes from Pasley’s mother’s residence, from where Henderson and Pasley had hidden them.”

Cal’s narrative regarding the attempts of Russell, Aaron, and their girlfriends to conceal evidence was meticulously accurate. But there was a critical element he left out, of which he was apparently unaware at the time (though he later said it didn’t surprise him at all). After Kristen left Aaron at Ivinson Hospital and was picked up there by Russell and Chasity, the three — on Aaron’s previous instruction — gathered all their drug paraphernalia together, including meth pipes and other items, and disposed of them in the trash at a Laramie fast-food restaurant. (All four confirmed this to me in separate interviews.) Since police barely touched on drugs during their investigation, Aaron’s plan to hide that part of the evidence succeeded perfectly.

Early in the morning on Thursday, October 8, police rounded up Russell, Chasity, and Kristen at the Fort Sanders trailer where Russell and Chasity lived. They took them downtown to the county sheriff’s office where each was questioned individually.

At a table in one of the three interview rooms, Kristen held her four-month-old son, Cameron, in her arms as she tried to convince Ben Fritzen that Aaron had fallen asleep in a Laundromat after the street fight he and Russell had with the two Mexican men.

“When he woke up he tried to figure out where he was,” she said. “I asked him why he didn’t come straight home and he said he was afraid those guys would follow him. He was worried about me and Cameron.”

Fritzen conducted an extended interview with Kristen that lasted more than three and a half hours. Her interview statements, which were made a few days before she remarked notoriously to a reporter, “[Aaron and Russ] just wanted to beat [Matthew] up bad enough to teach him a lesson, not to come on to straight people,” would also become the foundation on which Cal Rerucha built his case for first-degree murder.

During the first part of her interview, Kristen spilled out the long-winded alibi she and Aaron had made up with Russell and Chasity’s help. She said that late on Tuesday night Aaron and Russell were at the Library bar and had met a guy, an apparent stranger, who told them about a party and offered to drive them there.

“He had a driver’s license … and neither one of them were supposed to be driving,” Kristen stated. “… They said, ‘This guy is going to drive the truck over there and we’ll call you [and Chasity] later on tonight whenever we get at the party if you want to meet us there, or if it’s an okay party then we’ll call you and let you know.’ ”

Fritzen didn’t believe most of her story and reminded her of how much she had to lose, including her four-month-old son, who was by her side during the interview.

“What are we leaving out here?” he asked.

“You see, I can’t change my story now because then I go to jail,” Kristen answered.

“Listen to me,” he warned her in a firm but quiet voice. “… If I have to sit here for another two hours, drag information out of you, find out that you’re lying to me, [then] all bets are off and I am not going to work with you.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“My dear, you don’t have a choice.”

“I know I can’t — I’ve already gotten everybody in trouble …”

“Do you understand how serious this is, Kristen?”

“Yeah I do.”

“Do you understand what life in prison means?”

“Yeah. You better start the tape all over again then,” she told Fritzen. “… It’s also going to be my word against everybody else’s.”

“It sounds like you guys’ stories are pretty well rehearsed.”

“Yeah they are.”

In the second part of the interview Kristen made several statements that cast further doubt on the crime narrative that was soon to be solidified in official accounts and by the media.

Regarding Aaron’s plan to rob Matthew’s home, Fritzen inquired, “Did [Aaron] say where the money was hidden in the house?”

“No,” she said.

“But the guy [Matthew] did tell him where it was?”

“[Aaron] said that he told either him or Russ — I forget which one he said. He said he had told them where he had kept his money at and that they were going to go there and take the money.”

“Okay. Was that just in casual conversation that [Matthew] mentioned it or did he say that like, to get them to stop beating him, or …?

“No,” she said, “
it was at the bar he had told them
” (italics mine).

“Where he kept his money.”

“
Mmm hmm
[yes]. I guess.”

“Okay.”

“That’s what I think Aaron and [Russ] said.”

If Kristen’s statement is true, that the three men were at the Fireside when Matthew revealed where he kept his money, that suggests a very different purpose behind the meeting at the bar — and a different set of conclusions.

Since the evidence shows that Aaron and Matthew had a conversation in the bathroom, and that Russell and Matthew never spoke at the bar, one possibility is that Aaron was trying to collect a debt from Matthew — just as he’d done the previous night when he went looking for Monty Durand.

This might explain why Matthew was severely depressed over money and almost suicidal a few days earlier, and also why he’d told at least three friends that he feared for his life.

Lastly, on this particular Tuesday night when Matthew’s Denver group was scheduled to deliver the usual six ounces to Laramie
(including compensation of two eight balls for Matthew), Aaron, who owed his own suppliers money, may have seen the perfect opportunity to collect.

Detective Fritzen also wanted to know what Aaron had told Kristen about the actual beating.