Not a gay hate crime after all, Matthew Shepard's murder: 'What it came down to is drugs and money'

[Bill Taylor]

Ok who is going to step up to the plate and get the ball rolling
to repeal that stupid fag protection law?

For 15 years, Matthew Shepard’s unspeakably brutal murder on a
lonely prairie in Wyoming has been a byword for the very worst
of American anti-gay bigotry and a rallying cry for a more
tolerant, more inclusive society.

The 21-year-old University of Wyoming student was found trussed
to a fence post, bleeding and half-frozen to death, in a rocky
field on the outskirts of Laramie. He had been pistol-whipped so
severely that his brain stem was crushed. His killers even
removed his shoes, on the off-chance he broke free of his bonds
and tried to run to safety.

Shepard’s death inspired the play The Laramie Project – later
turned into a television movie – countless songs, a foundation
devoted to his memory and a political lobbying effort that
pressed for, and eventually obtained, a new federal hate crimes
statute named after him.

All this creative energy has been based on an important central
premise: that Shepard was targeted solely because of his sexual
orientation. According to conventional wisdom, he met his
killers by chance in a bar, told them he was gay and left with
them when they appeared to respond to his advances. They started
attacking him almost as soon as he climbed into their pickup.

It now appears, however, that the conventional wisdom may be
wrong. A new book by investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez
has challenged many of the central assumptions about Shepard’s
murder and argues that anti-gay hatred was not the primary
motivation for his killing, if it was a factor at all.

Instead, Jimenez makes a persuasive case – based on interviews
with the murderers, their former girlfriends, friends of
Shepard’s, and police investigators – that Shepard was already
acquainted with his killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell
Henderson. That acquaintance hardly casts Shepard in the best
light.

All three of them, Jimenez argues, were involved in Laramie’s
crystal meth subculture, as users and dealers. McKinney and
Shepard may also have had a casual sexual relationship.

“Shepard’s sexual preference … certainly wasn’t the motive in
the homicide,” Jimenez quotes police investigator Ben Fritzen as
saying. “What it came down to really is drugs and money.” A
number of other sources close to the story and the protagonists
confirmed much the same thing.

As Jimenez reconstructs it, McKinney was coming down from a week-
long meth binge and desperate to cover his mounting debts. He
believed, rightly or wrongly, that Shepard could lead him to a
delivery of about $10,000 worth of meth coming in from Denver,
which he intended to steal. McKinney’s plan was to beat the
information out of Shepard, but the beating, fueled by severe
drug-induced paranoia, ran quickly out of control.

Jimenez’s findings have sparked outrage from gay rights groups
who see his book as an act of betrayal (Jimenez is himself gay).
The Matthew Shepard Foundation has accused him of succumbing to
“factual errors, rumors and innuendo” to build a sensationalist
conspiracy theory and drag Shepard’s name through the mud.

Their outrage has been mirrored on the other side of the
political spectrum by some social conservatives crowing that the
“gay grievance industry” has taken a knocking.

The picture Jimenez paints of Shepard is certainly far from
angelic. He traces a history of depression, of heavy drinking,
of crystal meth and heroin use and a lurid series of sexual
misadventures including episodes of rape and molestation.

But Jimenez is also careful to point out that his goal is
understand Shepard as a complex human being and make the fullest
possible sense of his murder, not to suggest in any way that he
deserved his horrific fate. “We have enshrined Matthew’s tragedy
as passion play and folktale,” he writes, “but hardly ever for
the truth of what it was, or who he was – much to our own
diminishment.”

Jimenez’s problem is that he has trodden on hallowed ground.
America, as John Ford cannily observed in his western The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance, is a country that likes to build up
its heroes and villains and rarely appreciates having the record
corrected to restore them to the stature of ordinary, fallible
human beings. By now, Shepard’s story has been elevated close to
legend, and Shepard himself to a near-messianic figure who
suffered for the ultimate benefit of the rest of us.

Some of the early news reports even had him tied to the fence
like Christ on the cross – yet another detail Jimenez debunks by
quoting the lead detective in the murder saying he was in fact
found sitting on the ground, head slumped, with his hands tied
behind his back.

Jimenez does not have all the answers. As his detractors have
pointed out, many of his sources have changed stories multiple
times over the years. Others, from the drug underworld, seem
inherently unreliable. Others still are quoted anonymously.
That, in turn, has spurred longstanding accusations – notably
from Glaad, the gay rights advocacy group – that he has twisted
the facts to fit a foregone conclusion.

But many of Jimenez’s central contentions are shared by the
prosecutor in the case, Cal Rerucha, and by police officers who
investigated the murder. “When you cast a play in hell – and
methamphetamine is hell,” Rerucha hauntingly observes, “you’re
not going to get angels for actors.”

The question, of course, arises: if the authorities did not
believe Shepard’s murder was a hate crime, how come the rest of
us were given that impression?

Jimenez points to two friends of Shepard’s, Alex Trout and Walt
Boulden, who told the media repeatedly in the aftermath of the
killing that he had been attacked because of his sexual
orientation. Neither, however, had direct knowledge of the crime.

McKinney then cemented the story by arguing, as his defense,
that he had been swept up in a “gay panic” and was not fully in
control of his faculties. Jimenez believes that story was
designed to keep the authorities away from his drug activities
and protect his friends. McKinney himself eventually told
Jimenez from prison that the gay panic defense was nonsense.

McKinney and Henderson entered guilty pleas to avoid the death
penalty and are now serving life sentences. But their roles were
far from equal. Henderson acknowledged to Jimenez that he did
many things wrong: he drove the pickup, tied Shepard’s hands,
failed to stop McKinney delivering the fatal blows and failed to
raise the alarm when they returned home. But there is no
evidence he contributed directly to Shepard’s death, and a
better lawyer might have advised him not to fear capital charges
and insist on a full jury trial.

One chilling story told in the book is that, three months after
Shepard’s death, Henderson’s mother, Cindy Dixon, was raped and
left to freeze to death in a lonely canyon near Laramie. The
culprit was a friend of McKinney’s. He, too, entered a plea deal
with the prosecution. But he received a far less severe
punishment, despite the similarities to the Shepard murder, and
was back on the streets in four years.

Jimenez points to the distorting effect of the media as one
reason for this discrepancy. The media, in his eyes, also played
a role in mythologizing Shepard and discouraging deeper
inquiries into what happened, and why. It was easier, in the
end, to believe that an over-trusting young gay man faced grave
danger simply because he was living in the macho cowboy culture
of the prairie.

“Tangled secrets of this landmark crime persist,” Jimenez
writes. And many people, it seems, are happy to leave them
undiscovered.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/14/matthew-shepard-
murder-wyoming-book?google_editors_picks=true