Last year, I called Big Bend National Park to see about getting the file on the death of Shannon Roberts. I started to describe the case, but the guy at the ranger station interrupted me: “You mean the guy who strangled his boyfriend?” That’s the official interpretation of what happened between Doc and Baker. The case file repeatedly states that the two men were lovers. So does the only other lengthy account of the crime, a chapter in an anthology of deaths and other assorted tragedies in national parks called Death in Big Bend. There’s a dark, upsetting logic to this narrative; Doc’s death becomes a sex game taken too far, a classic example of autassassinophilia.

The investigators seemed to take the stories that Doc told his friends about Baker being his boyfriend at face value, even though their reports also note other fantastic tales he seemingly invented (such as being on the run from the Mexican Mafia and being a member of the Witness Protection Program). The particulars of Doc’s hidden life as a gay man seemed alien to them. In San Antonio, they enlisted an agent to dress up “flamboyantly” and “go undercover” in a gay bar to retrieve an alt magazine in which Doc had advertised his death fantasies.

The one investigator who would talk to me about the two men’s supposed relationship seemed like he’d rather not. Cary Brown spent three years investigating the case. When I pushed him on it, he told me that he disagreed with the case file and didn’t believe that Baker and Doc were lovers. “We never could confirm it,” Brown said. “Shannon told people that [Baker] was his lover, [Baker] always denied it. My gut feeling was that it was a fantasy of Shannon’s. He was infatuated with him, [Baker] had a girlfriend… my read on it was that it probably never happened.” Baker wrote in his confession that Doc made “sexual advances,” but he’s always denied reciprocating. The investigators didn’t know how they could confirm the story either way, and didn’t feel as though they needed to. “It was irrelevant to us in the pursuit of our investigation,” Brown said.

When I first wrote to Mike Baker, in February 2014, I expected some sort of stock story: I was a sinner then but I have seen the error of my ways or my parents fucked me up or there has been a miscarriage of justice. Instead, in his emails he was surprisingly matter-of-fact about the whole situation. He’d had a fine childhood, the cops hadn’t railroaded him, his lawyer was adequate; he’d made mistakes and been caught fair and square. Most strikingly, he had no regrets about killing Doc. Those were his exact words: “I have no regrets.” I dropped the subject for a little while, and we corresponded about books and graffiti and bad prison food.

Once Baker confessed, the investigators didn’t need to parse his motivations any further. But I couldn’t stop thinking about them. In December, after we’d been corresponding for nearly a year, I broached the subject of Doc’s death once more. “The crime itself has never bothered me,” he replied. “[T]he only thing that stings a little is the damage I caused to my family and ‘friends’. I really could have done without spending over a decade in prison. I’ve missed the entire lifetime of the iPod, which REALLY pisses me off. In the next couple years, the stand alone iPod will be gone and I will have never gotten to hold a new one… Also, the death and re-birth of the Camero [sic], very upsetting.”

Baker has a dark sense of humor and a tendency to be brutally honest, which I appreciated. But this time, his words gave me a funny feeling. The worst thing about killing this guy, ostensibly your friend, was missing the iPod? I started a few responses, but kept closing the email window before I sent them. Finally, I decided to meet his blunt honesty with some of my own. I wrote Baker that his lack of remorse sometimes unnerved me. Ninety percent of the time, I didn’t think he was a psychopath, but then sometimes he’d say something that made me wonder.

His response came in three emails, because he kept running up against the 15-minute time limit for using the prison computer. My email “got [his] heart going,” he said. “It bothers me a little that you could view me as a nut. I think the reason it bothers me is because I see someone who is nuts as out of control (I know that isn’t a valid description) and the idea of being out of control runs contrary to everything I think that I am.”

He began to explain how Doc’s death was the result of logical decisions he’d made while he was totally in control of himself. “[Doc] had no business at all being free in society….I don’t have the ability to accurately convey how disturbed he was,” he wrote. “This wasn’t a depressed gay dude. This was a really fucked up individual.” He went on at length about how Doc was a child molester and a pervert, an “absolute dirt bag” who destroyed people’s lives. (There’s no evidence whatsoever that Doc molested children.) Baker couldn’t walk away from the situation because Doc wouldn’t let him; he didn’t call the police because he was doing too many other illegal things at the time — and plus, people in action movies never called the cops.

“Did I want to kill him? No, of course not. Was it easy to talk myself into it? No. However, once it was done, it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Do I view myself as psycho/socio-pathic? No, and I have taken the psych courses to know the signs. I think what I did was make a very deliberate, almost logical decision. I made that choice and to this day, I am still content with it.”

His dad, the ultimate authority, approved of what he’d done — “Maybe not the execution of that decision, but at least with the fact that I made the choice and followed through with something I felt I had to do,” he wrote.

There’s an uncomfortable tension running throughout these emails. I think it’s because Baker and I have different stories in our heads. In Baker’s, he’s calculating and deliberate, like the bad guy in an airport thriller. I wanted to believe — I still want to believe — that Baker was caught up in something huge and overwhelming, that whatever was going on between him and Doc — whether it was sex or drugs or money or stalking or some dire combination of all those factors — left him feeling trapped and confused and out of control, and that killing Doc truly seemed to him like the only way out. That’s how I can feel sorry for him, instead of scared of him.

Baker’s friends and family told me some things that aligned with my preferred version: How in the month or so before Doc’s death, Baker was in a precarious place. How his mom had kicked him out of her house because he didn’t have a job. How he was crashing on friends’ couches, jobless, aimless, doing too many drugs. (Baker, predictably, refuses this characterization: “I always had a job when I needed one,” he told me.) In any case, he remembers this as one of his “vampire periods,” when he’d stay up all night and sleep while the sun was up. A family member who saw him around this time was troubled by how unkempt he looked — an ominous sign in a guy who was usually so meticulous about his appearance that his friends had to remind him to untuck his shirt when he went to go talk to a girl.

Meanwhile, Doc’s fixation on Baker intensified. He paged Baker frequently, and showed up at his mom’s house if he didn’t answer. Baker had been very careful about not introducing Doc to his current girlfriend — he didn’t want her mixed up with that side of his life. But when his girlfriend graduated from high school, Baker says he saw Doc in the audience, watching. “There was some stalking behavior,” Cary Brown told me. “But I’m not sure it wasn’t mutually beneficial.” Baker took drugs from Doc; he sometimes borrowed Doc’s car for days. According to Travis, a few times Baker was in possession of an unexpected wad of cash. When Travis asked him where he got it, Baker would shrug and say that Doc gave it to him.

None of Baker’s friends from those days are still in touch with him. “How can I associate with someone who did that?” his high school classmate Ross told me. Still, the handful that I talked to defended their old friend, after a fashion. “Doc was sick. I think he preyed on Baker,” his friend Rodney told me via text message. (He declined a phone interview.) “I think [Baker] was just a confused kid that was desperate and got caught up in something,” Ross said. “He was this quiet, shy, very smart kid who kept to himself and all of a sudden he was on this path. Who could he talk to? I think he was just a kid that got too far in and couldn’t get out.”

On a warm, false-spring day in January, I finally got a chance to visit Baker face-to-face at the low-security prison where he’s serving out the final years of his sentence. He was tall and tattooed and handsome, in a mechanic on a soap opera kind of way. Throughout our conversation, which included a discussion of Infinite Jest and the prison cats of Leavenworth, Baker was unhurried and thoughtful. He recounted stories from his past with a vividness that made me wonder whether he had a photographic memory. As he spoke, he seemed to be gazing into an interior distance, eyes moving back and forth, giving the impression of a computer moving at high speed. Afterward, he wrote me an email apologizing for not making eye contact; he’s gotten out of the habit, he said: “I don’t think that helps too much with my reputation as an asshole.”

Midway though our seven-hour conversation, I asked Baker about the murder. The memory of that day felt surreal, he said. As he told the story, he slipped in and out of the present tense, vague on some points but recalling others with a hallucinatory intensity. He kept coming back to the grave Doc had dug for himself, how long it took to dig it, how deep and wide and big it had been. I’d been listening Baker’s story for so long that his decisions were starting to make a kind of sense to me. I found myself in the strange position of nodding along to an account that I knew ended with a man being killed.

“I remember the last time he was down in that hole, digging,” he told me, “thinking it would be so easy just to get this over with. Because I really didn’t want him back in my car.” And so he grabbed the rope and tossed it around Doc’s neck. Doc tried to clamber out of the hole, but couldn’t — it was too deep. He swung the pickax at Baker, who dodged it easily. Finally, he stopped struggling. There’s a pause here on the tape, full with the background sounds of the prison visiting room, the clank-thump of candy bars dropping down from vending machines. “So he didn’t want to die,” I asked eventually. Baker let out an odd, strangled half-laugh. “It sure didn’t seem like it,” he said.

That same month, 15 years to the day after Baker and Doc’s first trip to the desert, my boyfriend and I drove out to Big Bend National Park to look for the grave. Tom Alex, the park’s former archaeologist, wrote down its approximate GPS location for us. We drove 5 mph down Old Ore Road, which was so pitted and washed out that the car listed like a ship on rough seas. After a few miles, we pulled over and walked into the desert.

Without a path pointing the way forward, it was easy to feel swallowed up by the desert, the disorienting presence of all that open space. The official report said that Doc dug his grave next to an abandoned stock tank. I had imagined something man-made and substantial. But there was nothing so obvious at the GPS location. “It’s okay,” I said to my boyfriend. “I’ll know it when I find it.” What “it” was, though, I couldn’t have told him. A hole? A stray tent stake? A feeling of doom? I crisscrossed my way across the plateau, thinking about how convicted criminals who express remorse do us all a favor by reaffirming the societal order that they transgressed, and how hard it is to know what to do with someone who insists he isn’t sorry.

We wandered the area for a couple hours until the sun started to set. Twilight moves slowly in Big Bend — the sky is so big that it holds on to light for a long time. But we hadn’t brought any flashlights with us. Maybe, my boyfriend suggested gently, it was time to turn back. There was a slight chill in the air as we walked back to the car, prefiguring the cold night to come. I hadn’t found what I was looking for, but the defeat felt appropriate, somehow. I think what I mean to say is: You can only ever get so close.

This story was written by Rachel Monroe. It was edited by Michael Benoist, fact-checked by Hilary Elkins, and copy-edited by Lawrence Levi. Illustrations by Steve Kim for Matter.