In 1998, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in Wyoming, the apparent victim of gay-hate. But a new book suggests fresh answers may lie in the crystal meth subculture of his home town

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.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Russell Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, right, 22, in court in Laramie in 1998. Photograph: Ed Andrieski/AP

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.”

Matthew Shepard. His killers are serving long prison terms. Photograph: AP

Swept up in 'gay panic'?

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.