The Book of Matt: The Real Story of the Murder of Matthew Shepard
480
The Book of Matt: The Real Story of the Murder of Matthew Shepard
480Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
On the night of October 6, 1998, twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar with two alleged “strangers,” Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. Overnight, a politically expedient myth took the place of important facts. By the time Matthew died a few days later, his name was synonymous with anti-gay hate. The Book of Matt, first published in 2013, demonstrated that the truth was in fact far more complicated – and daunting. Stephen Jimenez’s account revealed primary documents that had been under seal, and gave voice to many with firsthand knowledge of the case who had not been heard from, including members of law enforcement.
In his Introduction to this updated edition, journalist Andrew Sullivan writes: “No one wanted Steve Jimenez to report this story, let alone go back and back to Laramie, Wyoming, asking awkward questions, puzzling over strange discrepancies, re-interviewing sources, seeking a deeper, more complex truth about the ghastly killing than America, it turned out, was prepared to hear. It was worse than that, actually. Not only did no one want to hear more about it, but many were incensed that the case was being re-examined at all.”
As a gay man Jimenez felt an added moral imperative to tell the story of Matthew’s murder honestly, and his reporting has been thoroughly corroborated. “I urge you to read [The Book of Matt] carefully and skeptically,” Sullivan writes, “and to see better how life rarely fits into the neat boxes we want it to inhabit. That Matthew Shepard was a meth dealer and meth user says nothing that bad about him, and in no way mitigates the hideous brutality of the crime that killed him; instead it shows how vulnerable so many are to the drug’s escapist lure and its astonishing capacity to heighten sexual pleasure so that it’s the only thing you want to live for. Shepard was a victim twice over: of meth and of a fellow meth user.”
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781586422523 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
| Publication date: | 06/30/2020 |
| Series: | Truth to Power: Documentary Narratives |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 480 |
| Sales rank: | 657,172 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
New Introduction by Andrew Sullivan
There’s a phrase sometimes credited to George Orwell or Randolph Hearst (no one quite knows the real source) that most professionals in the newspaper business hold as something of a sacred definition of their trade: “Journalism is publishing something someone doesn’t want you to print; all the rest is public relations.”
If I were to describe this tight, closely reported and engrossing account of the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in one word, it would be journalism.
No one wanted Steve Jimenez to report this story, let alone go back and back to Laramie, Wyoming, asking awkward questions, puzzling over strange discrepancies, reinterviewing sources, seeking a deeper, more complex truth about the ghastly killing than America, it turned out, was prepared to hear. It was worse than that, actually. Not only did no one want to hear more about it, but many were incensed that the case was being reexamined at all. Considerable political forces, including much of the gay and lesbian establishment and mainstream press, attempted to prevent this story from getting wider attention; they targeted Jimenez’s reputation as a journalist; and they insisted that all the myriad details in this book were concocted or invented. All of it was fabricated, they claimed, a “conspiracy theory,” while refusing to refute specific facts or details that Jimenez had uncovered. And Steve as a gay man was subjected to even more calumny: that he was a traitor to the cause, advancing the interests of the antigay haters and bigots by giving them some reason to debunk the heinous crime.
The truth, you see, was already out there. It was crystal clear and carried a simple message: that hate is everywhere in America, especially in red states, and every member of a minority is under constant danger of being attacked, or even killed. And the narrative was gripping and horrifying, something out of a horror movie. A diminutive, innocent, boyish young gay man, Matthew Shepard, walked into a bar in a deeply red state one night, and two strange men lured him into their pickup truck to rob him, and, after Matthew allegedly made a pass at one of them, Aaron McKinney, McKinney went berserk with raging homophobia and assaulted him. He then drove Shepard down a dark, rural, lightly traveled road and took his ghastly revenge: bludgeoning the young gay man in the head with unbelievable and unconscionable force, sadism, and ferocity; tied him to a fence; and left him there to die, without any means of escape. Matthew was discovered the following day and rushed to the hospital, but he never regained consciousness and died six days later.
Almost instantly, he became a symbol of the toll, viciousness, and pervasiveness of hate.
And he was a perfect symbol: young, pretty, tiny, he presented himself to the world as the most acceptable form of a young gay man, almost a boy. (The man who discovered his bloodied, tortured body thought he was around thirteen years old.) His father described him as “an optimistic and accepting young man who had a special gift of relating to almost everyone. He was the type of person who was very approachable and always looked to new challenges. Matthew had a great passion for equality and always stood up for the acceptance of people’s differences.” A champion of toleration and openness had been brutally beaten to death for being gay. The lesson could not be clearer, nor the tragedy deeper. To add a touch of perfection to the picture, his murderers were also out of a Hollywood movie script: redneck losers from a rural state obviously brimming with anti-gay hatred.
I remember vividly my own response to the news: an involuntary spasm of disgust, nausea, and terror. It was, after all, a classic gay nightmare, the kind of thing that kept me and countless others in the closet for years: a possible hookup with a stranger that could go terribly wrong. Just the bare facts of the story as we heard them — gay kid murdered by rural bigot, left to die — cemented in our minds and psyches everything we had feared as we grew into gay adulthood. We instantly believed we knew the truth — because it had haunted our souls most of our lives. And what other motive could there be for savagery like that? It reeked of unhinged, irrational, violent homophobia.
It took some time before it emerged that the first mention that the murder was an anti-gay hate crime was when the girlfriend of Aaron McKinney, Kristen Price, came up with the idea in the panicked hours after the assault. Price later conceded she had made that up. But the early rumor was enough for the media to run with the story of hate until, within days, the outlines had been set, and the stakes raised. Suddenly a horrifying murder was a way to reveal just how deadly much of the country allegedly was for gays and lesbians and to evoke sympathy and horror from every segment of society. That horror could help advance the argument for gay equality in a period when it was very much in the headlines and the Congress. It was a time when marriage equality was in the news and when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was the military’s policy toward gay service members. The message was particularly useful for gay rights groups like the Human Rights Campaign, whose fundraising skyrocketed in the wake of the shocking murder.
But it wasn’t true. The story, as you will read in these pages, is far darker, murkier, and revealing than a classic hate crime. Rereading this book years later, it seems to me that the murder had absolutely nothing to do with homophobia. It involved rather what was then a growing scourge of crystal meth use among both the rural poor and the gay male community at the turn of the century — and the murder of a young gay man in rural Wyoming was a classic case of where the two meth populations met and overlapped. As the cops eventually conceded, this was a drug-related murder, related to a meth delivery, a desperate McKinney seeking money or another hit, and a naive kid caught up in a world he didn’t fully understand. Shepard knew McKinney, his murderer, before their encounter at the bar that night; and the two had been sexually involved on and off for quite some time. More telling to me was that the savagery of the murder is far more plausibly explained by the fact that McKinney had been on a meth binge of several days and nights before he lost his mind in rage, rather than that he had instantly become a raging bigot, with no record of homophobia before.
Sometimes I imagine what would have happened if we had always known the more complicated truth. The lesson would be about a drug that was cutting a swath through the middle of the country, especially in rural areas, and devastating gay men in cities in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Vulnerable souls — seeking confidence or release or exhilaration for a while — were prey for this particular poison, and gay men, often surviving childhood trauma or laced with self-hatred or sexually compulsive, seemed particularly at risk. If we had been able to have a serious national conversation about this otherwise concealed epidemic of drug abuse, especially among gay men, then we might have been able to save some lives. In the two decades since, I’ve seen so many men fall under meth’s devastating spell — their lives ruined, their very personalities altered, their bodies wasted away, their teeth rotten, their souls absent, and their rate of recovery surpassingly low. For gay men in 1998, meth was a far, far greater danger than redneck strangers. And it still is. But we decided to focus on what was acceptable to speak about rather than what was staring us, more embarrassingly, in the face.
I’m proud to introduce a reissue of this book. I urge you to read it carefully and skeptically, to get to know the characters involved, and to see better how life rarely fits into the neat boxes we want it to inhabit. That Matthew Shepard was a meth dealer and meth user says nothing that bad about him and in no way mitigates the hideous brutality of the crime that killed him; instead it shows how vulnerable so many are to the drug’s escapist lure and its astonishing capacity to heighten sexual pleasure so that it’s the only thing you want to live for. Shepard was a victim twice over: of meth and of a fellow meth user, driven to a form of madness that sustained meth use invariably produces. Gay men did not want this to be known — because it muddied the narrative of sainthood for Matthew and aired some dirty laundry many in the community wanted kept out of sight. Straight people who wanted to display how concerned they were had a unique chance to weigh in with genuine sadness, shock, and pity and were not inclined to ask questions. And then there was the huge pressure not to query a murder that seemed to have no purpose if it didn’t advance gay equality.
So we now have the body of Matthew Shepard interred, like a martyr to homophobia, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC. And you begin to understand how saints are indeed made: by legend and by orthodoxy. What Jimenez has done is to peer behind this facade and tell us the awful, messy, tragic, human truth. It seems to me that we can honor the memory of Matthew Shepard by refusing to lie about him anymore. And this book is a start.
Andrew Sullivan
Provincetown
August 2019
Table of Contents
Introduction ix
Author's Note xv
Part 1 Darkness on the Edge of Town 1
Part 2 The Book of Matt 163
Part 3 Rogers Canyon 303
Part 4 The Circle Unbroken 347
Epilogue 391
Afterword 394
Conclusion 418
List of Sources 439
Acknowledgments 443
What People are Saying About This
Law Enforcement Officers with Firsthand Knowledge of the Matthew Shepard Case:
“Methamphetamine was a huge part of this case . . . It was a horrible murder driven by drugs.” — Prosecutor Cal Rerucha, who convicted Matthew Shepard's killers
“Methamphetamine . . . was the root cause of the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard . . . That people continue to deny that meth had a major role in this tragedy is a tragedy itself.” — Former Laramie Police Department Sergeant Mark Beck
“There were two enormous tragedies that stemmed from this case. The first obvious tragedy is that a young man lost his life. Regardless of the criminal activity that Matthew Shepard was involved in, no human being deserves to be treated in the same fashion that he was. The second tragedy was how pathetic and how poorly the media handled this case. It has been painfully obvious to me for many years now that the media had absolutely no interest in learning or reporting the facts of this case. The media simply wanted to sensationalize this homicide as a hate crime instead of reporting it for what it really was about: DRUGS.” — Former Laramie Detective Ben Fritzen, a lead investigator on the Matthew Shepard murder
“Many people have called this a hate crime . . . The Court does not find this matter to be so simplistic, for it is quite clear that a number of motives and emotions were involved.” — Former District Court Judge Jeffrey Donnell, who presided over the sentencing of one of Matthew Shepard's assailants
“My educated opinion at the start of the investigation was that drugs were the motive behind the murder and that opinion was bolstered by conversations with other officers and detectives during and at the conclusion of the investigation. The more information I gather now, the more that conclusion becomes unchangeable.” — Former Laramie Police Sergeant Mitch Cushman
“[The Book of Matt] documents the original failure of the media, the community and the criminal justice system to find the real truth." — Former Laramie police officer Flint Waters, who captured one of Matthew's assailants and recovered the murder weapon
"In the tradition of In Cold Blood and The Executioner's Song, this is a work of literary true crime that reaches far beyond the case itself to probe deep and troubling recesses of the American psyche." — Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Hellhound on His Trail
“The Book of Matt provides us for the first time with the real story of an American tragedy.” —Kevin Baker, author of Strivers Row
"No one should be afraid of the truth. Least of all gay people... Shouldn’t we understand better why and how?" — Journalist Andrew Sullivan
