OFFICIAL Biden-Harris Campaign Thread

Thirteen years ago, journalist Stephen Jimenez went to Laramie, Wyo., to do research for a screenplay he wanted to write about the murder of Matthew Shepard, the gay college student who was tied to a fence on the prairie and beaten to death in October 1998.

Jimenez thought he knew the story. Two men had been already gone to prison for Shepard’s killing, and Shepard had become a heartbreaking symbol of a gay hate crime, murdered by two strangers who targeted him in a Laramie bar and killed him because he was gay.

Except, as Jimenez quickly began to discover, the received wisdom in the case was not accurate. There was more -- much more -- to the case.

It took Jimenez more than a decade to interview scores of people, many of whom repeatedly changed their stories, before he was able to write “The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard.” His conclusion? That Matt Shepard was killed not because of his homosexuality but over methamphetamines and money.

“I went to Laramie in February 2000 to write the story that all of us knew,” Jimenez said Monday evening at a book signing and community discussion at Fogartyville in downtown Sarasota. “I went with the idea of writing a screenplay on the anti-gay hate crime.”

Shepard’s murder resonated particularly deeply in the gay community, of which Jimenez is a part.

“It encapsulated all our fears,” he said.

But as he began to research the crime, digging into records that were sealed for a year after the trials of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both of whom were sentenced to two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole., he found an anonymous letter to Cal Rerucha, prosecutor in the case, tucked into a file.

“Dear Mr. Rerucha, I was shocked to hear that Aaron McKinney’s attorneys claim gay panic in their defense...Aaron and Russ were quite familiar with gay bars and have frequented gay bars. ...”

What Jimenez discovered through his years of investigation was that while Russell Henderson did not know Matthew Shepard, Aaron McKinney not only knew him, but also was part of a group of people, including Shepard, who were involved in dealing and using methamphetamines, and that Shepard and McKinley had been sexually intimate with each other.

When the three men left the bar in Laramie on the night of Oct. 8, 1998, it was McKinney’s intent to settle a drug score with Shepard.

Much of “The Book of Matt” is devoted to outlining the methamphetamine trade in Wyoming and to the silence in the community and in law enforcement. Jimenez came to believe that the silence surrounding the meth trade was like the silence in the gay community in the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Silence equals death in the AIDS fight, silence equals death in the drug wars, he said.

“Matthew Shepard was a dealer and addicted to methamphetamines,” he said. “In October 1998, the national media was not reporting on that at all.”

Reaction to Jimenez’s book has ranged across the spectrum, he said. But the men who went to prison for killing Shepard were charged not with a hate crime, but with felony murder, which is murder in conjunction with a robbery. It was drugs and money that drove McKinney -- and to a lesser extent, Russell Henderson, who Jimenez believes should have been charged as an accessory because he did not join in the beating that took Shepard’s life -- to crack Shepard’s skull with a gun.

“I certainly didn’t write this book to de-gay Matthew,” he said.

He writes late in the book, “During the years that I’ve been preoccupied with Matthew’s murder, I’ve come to believe that the complex truths of his tragedy -- and the parallel tragedies of Aaron and Russell -- have a universal meaning that defies and transcends the politically correct mythology that’s been created as a substitute. There’s no doubt that the violence inflicted on Matthew triggered a national awakening about the harsh realities of anti-gay hate, just as there is no doubt that other positive developments followed on the heels of his murder, including a long overdue expansion of civil rights -- a mission that remains incomplete as of this writing.

But the more I learned about Matthew’s life and his suffering, the more convinced I became that clinging to a partly false mythology could never yield the subtler, more powerful meanings of his sacrifice. It would also be a disservice to Matthew’s memory to freeze him in time as a symbol, having stripped away his complexities and frailties as a human being.”