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Authors: Stephen Jimenez
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it.’ I just shut my window and didn’t say another word.”
Only after I questioned Doc intermittently over months did he concede, “Matt may have been one of the guys in back [of the limo] with Aaron … I can’t say for sure.”
I also asked Doc numerous times about one of the many businesses he owned, called Lincoln Escort Service. He answered with a straight face that it was “a service to escort big trucks with heavy loads on the interstate.” I told him that an “escort service” means something altogether different where I come from.
But Doc stuck to that story, even after boasting that he had arranged to bring Denver-based female strippers to Wyoming to perform in a bar there.
“They call ’em ‘exotic dancers’ now, but they do the same thing they’ve always done,” he said with a cool shrug.
I was reminded again of the anonymous letter I found at the courthouse long before, stating that Aaron “was acting the part of ‘straight trade’ ” and “his excuse was: he was only doing it for the money to spend on his girlfriend.” Did Doc run an escort service that employed young males like Aaron and perhaps Russell, too? And where did Matthew fit in Doc’s schemes, if at all?
What I thought was just an innocuous suggestion by Doc in an early interview would later lead me to a seedy hustler bar in Denver called Mr. Bill’s, as well as a few other gay bars along the city’s Broadway strip. Those late-night excursions prompted me, in turn, to go back to Doc with more questions — and more confusion.
For reasons I did not understand, Doc had also divulged that shortly after Matthew’s attack he had hired a prominent defense attorney to represent him. If Doc had nothing to do with the murder and Cal Rerucha had never brought charges against him, why did he need a lawyer? Each time I broached the subject, Doc deflected my questions by shifting to something else.
“There are some things you’ll never get me to talk about,” he swore.
Doc made no attempt to hide his fear that “someone might put a bullet in my back some night when I’m driving home from the Eagles,” a Laramie fraternal club in which he’d been an active member and trustee for decades. He always drove into town and back home again on Highway 30, the same deserted, two-lane county road that first took me to Bosler to meet him in 2002.
EIGHT
Palomino Drive
During the summer of 2002 I also began a series of extensive phone interviews with Aaron McKinney, who was then incarcerated at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. It would not be until 2004, however, after he was transferred to a prison in Nevada, that correctional authorities allowed us to meet face-to-face. Aaron’s father, Bill McKinney, a long-haul truck driver whom I first met in June 2002 in the snack bar of an Arizona golf course, facilitated my introduction to him.
Initially the elder McKinney was gruff. He told me he was still bitter over the media’s treatment of his son, which he felt had compromised the fairness of his 1999 trial. He also complained that reporters had taken his own remarks out of context, in order to cast him “as an anti-gay redneck, just like Aaron.”
According to an article in The Denver Post a few days after the attack on Matthew Shepard, Bill McKinney stated, “The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual. Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news.”
Bill McKinney’s words — along with a televised interview that week in which Aaron’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, claimed that “[Aaron and Russ] just wanted to beat [Matthew] up bad enough to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people” — amounted to pouring gasoline on a blazing fire. Within days more than fifty vigils, marches, and demonstrations protesting the attack on Matthew took place around the nation. After such blatant
Only after I questioned Doc intermittently over months did he concede, “Matt may have been one of the guys in back [of the limo] with Aaron … I can’t say for sure.”
I also asked Doc numerous times about one of the many businesses he owned, called Lincoln Escort Service. He answered with a straight face that it was “a service to escort big trucks with heavy loads on the interstate.” I told him that an “escort service” means something altogether different where I come from.
But Doc stuck to that story, even after boasting that he had arranged to bring Denver-based female strippers to Wyoming to perform in a bar there.
“They call ’em ‘exotic dancers’ now, but they do the same thing they’ve always done,” he said with a cool shrug.
I was reminded again of the anonymous letter I found at the courthouse long before, stating that Aaron “was acting the part of ‘straight trade’ ” and “his excuse was: he was only doing it for the money to spend on his girlfriend.” Did Doc run an escort service that employed young males like Aaron and perhaps Russell, too? And where did Matthew fit in Doc’s schemes, if at all?
What I thought was just an innocuous suggestion by Doc in an early interview would later lead me to a seedy hustler bar in Denver called Mr. Bill’s, as well as a few other gay bars along the city’s Broadway strip. Those late-night excursions prompted me, in turn, to go back to Doc with more questions — and more confusion.
For reasons I did not understand, Doc had also divulged that shortly after Matthew’s attack he had hired a prominent defense attorney to represent him. If Doc had nothing to do with the murder and Cal Rerucha had never brought charges against him, why did he need a lawyer? Each time I broached the subject, Doc deflected my questions by shifting to something else.
“There are some things you’ll never get me to talk about,” he swore.
Doc made no attempt to hide his fear that “someone might put a bullet in my back some night when I’m driving home from the Eagles,” a Laramie fraternal club in which he’d been an active member and trustee for decades. He always drove into town and back home again on Highway 30, the same deserted, two-lane county road that first took me to Bosler to meet him in 2002.
EIGHT
Palomino Drive
During the summer of 2002 I also began a series of extensive phone interviews with Aaron McKinney, who was then incarcerated at the Wyoming State Penitentiary. It would not be until 2004, however, after he was transferred to a prison in Nevada, that correctional authorities allowed us to meet face-to-face. Aaron’s father, Bill McKinney, a long-haul truck driver whom I first met in June 2002 in the snack bar of an Arizona golf course, facilitated my introduction to him.
Initially the elder McKinney was gruff. He told me he was still bitter over the media’s treatment of his son, which he felt had compromised the fairness of his 1999 trial. He also complained that reporters had taken his own remarks out of context, in order to cast him “as an anti-gay redneck, just like Aaron.”
According to an article in The Denver Post a few days after the attack on Matthew Shepard, Bill McKinney stated, “The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual. Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news.”
Bill McKinney’s words — along with a televised interview that week in which Aaron’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, claimed that “[Aaron and Russ] just wanted to beat [Matthew] up bad enough to teach him a lesson not to come on to straight people” — amounted to pouring gasoline on a blazing fire. Within days more than fifty vigils, marches, and demonstrations protesting the attack on Matthew took place around the nation. After such blatant
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