Free The Book of Matt by Stephen Jimenez Page B

been close to Matthew for several years and had first learned of the attack when Matthew’s father phoned Boulden from Saudi Arabia. Trout had also helped Matthew move from Denver to Laramie the previous summer, driving a U-Haul along with a third friend, Ronnie Gustafson.
    According to Trout, one of the first things he and Boulden did after hearing that Matthew had been severely beaten was call Jason Marsden, a gay reporter friend at the Casper Star-Tribune . They also contacted gay organizations in Wyoming and Colorado. Very quickly the Associated Press and other national media picked up the news of a presumed anti-gay attack.
    “Once it started, it took off like a wildfire,” Cal Rerucha recalled, “nothing was going to stop it.” Rerucha said the story of a hate crime was also fueled, in part, by a couple of Laramie law enforcement officers “who couldn’t resist being in front of the [TV] cameras.”
    When I later interviewed Jason Marsden, the reporter friend, he gave a slightly different account than Trout had given.
    “I was sitting in the newsroom at my desk and there was a littlebit of commotion around the fax machine,” Marsden told me in July 2004. “I saw a couple of the senior editors conferring over something … [They] … laid this press release from the Albany County Sheriff’s Office on the desk and said, ‘We’ve received this press release recently about a young man having been attacked in Laramie and the tipster who alerted us … tells me that he is a friend of yours. His name is Matt Shepard. Do you know Matt Shepard? ’ ”
    Marsden, who had just seen Matthew “about four or five weeks before that in Laramie,” said he was stunned.
    I asked Marsden, “When … there was mention … that the attack could have been motivated at least in part by Matt being gay, was that something that was part of that initial press release?”
    “It was not in the initial press release, just the bare details that he had been found and [was injured] … and left overnight,” he responded. “But some of those friends in Laramie … had begun calling reporters, trying to talk to the detectives … and pretty quickly came to the conclusion that there was a likelihood that he had been targeted for being gay … I did talk to [Trout and Boulden] that day. I can’t — I wish I could remember better the exact chain of events … But it happened very quickly in there; the press release, phone calls … They were very worried that the police might not take it seriously … that [Matt’s] credibility as a victim … would be in some way diminished because he was gay and they were very concerned to make sure that that didn’t happen.”
    Despite a few small discrepancies, Marsden’s account of how the story of a hate crime got started confirmed Boulden and Trout’s versions — and also Cal Rerucha’s. According to Rerucha, “[Trout and Boulden] were calling the County Attorney’s office, they were calling the media and indicating … we don’t want the fact that [Matthew Shepard] is gay to go unnoticed.”
    In an ABC News interview a few days after the attack, Boulden, whom Matthew had allegedly befriended as a fifteen-year-old teenager looking for a mentor, stated simply, “I know in the core of my heart it happened because [Matt] revealed he was gay. They targeted him because he was gay.” Similarly, Boulden told the University of Wyoming student newspaper, the Branding Iron , that he wasconvinced the crime was clearly motivated by hate. “There is no maybe,” he said.
    Yet Cal Rerucha, who had met with Boulden and Trout shortly after the crime, later stated unequivocally, “I don’t think the proof [of a hate crime] was there … That was something they had decided.”
    As Alex Trout drove me back to the Rochester airport on the afternoon of June 12, 2002, he admitted — after several hours of conversation — that he had personally struggled with addiction to