Free The Book of Matt by Stephen Jimenez

Aaron acted the part of “straight trade” but “[he] really did like doing it with other guys.”
    Aaron was furious about the letter. “Total fucking bullshit, all of it,” he said. “None of it’s true.”
    But the first thing he wanted to know was whether I had shared the letter with his father. When I assured him I hadn’t, his relief was palpable. He insisted that I not get into “any of this sex stuff” with his father.
    According to Aaron, the only “messing around” he’d ever done with other males was when he was a boy growing up on Palomino Drive in Laramie — “the usual kids’ stuff,” he said more than once.
    On one of my early visits to the town, I drove through the quiet, nondescript subdivision where Aaron had grown up, only to realize its proximity to the fence area where Matthew was beaten. As a boy, Aaron had frequently played with his friends on the same stretch of prairie bordering the subdivision. A strange coincidence, I thought, that this was where he told Russell Henderson to drive the truck during Matthew’s abduction. The truck belonged to Aaron’s father, but Aaron couldn’t drive it because his license had been revoked.
    I recalled from conversations with Bill McKinney that he and Aaron’s mother had divorced when Aaron was five. I had also read in articles that Aaron’s mother locked him in the basement when he misbehaved. Bill McKinney nonetheless placed the blame for Aaron’s juvenile troubles jointly with himself and his ex-wife.
    “I was always on the road when he was a boy, hardly ever there,” he said. “His mother was physically at home, but she wasn’t really there either. She didn’t know how to raise him.”
    As I continued to think about the location of Matthew’s beating, I reexamined a letter Aaron had smuggled to Russell in jail after their arrest, advising him of a scenario they should use to explain the attack:
Hey Homeboy … When we go to court, if they try us together or seperate [sic] … they should hear you say what I said so this is what I told them, me and you was gettin fucked up at the bar and when we was fixin to leave Matt Sheppard [sic] asked us for a ride home, so we gave him a ride … and when we got out there he tried to get on me and I started kicking his ass … At no time did we know he was gay until he tried to get on me … The reason Matt told us he lived in imperial heights is because He wanted to get me in a dark place so we could get funky. That’s all I got for now I’m sure I’ll think of more later …
    Ironically, Imperial Heights was the subdivision where Aaron grew up. Matthew lived in a different part of town, close to the university.
    Aaron’s letter also revealed other inconsistencies in both his version of events and the one put forward by his girlfriend, Kristen Price — unsubstantiated alibis that became the basis of official accounts of the murder.
    According to Price’s statements after the crime, Aaron told her that Matthew had made a sexual advance in the Fireside bar , embarrassing him and Russell in front of their friends. Yet in his jailhouse letter Aaron instructed Russell, “At no time did we know he was gay until he tried to get on me [when we got out there in the truck] … ” (italics mine).
    In light of Aaron’s claim that he had not known Matthew previously, his use of the more familiar Matt in the letter also caught my attention again.
    Trying to untangle Aaron’s contradictory statements was exasperating at times, especially as I began to gather information from other sources suggesting that he and Matthew were, indeed, well acquainted. In both his recorded confession to police and my many interviews with him, Aaron offered up multiple versions of his motives, the events that led up to the crime, and the murder itself. He seemed to enjoy playing a game of cat and mouse with me, pretending not to see the many discrepancies in his story.
    I asked him if he could explain the