What If the Most Notorious Murder of a Gay Man Wasn’t a Hate Crime?
A generation ago, Matthew Shepard was brutally murdered in what appeared to be a homophobic attack. This month, Ben Kawaller traveled to the scene of the crime. He heard a different story.
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Nearly twenty years ago, in the fall of 2004, ABC News ran a 20/20 segment, co-produced by the journalist Stephen Jimenez, positing that the attack on Shepard was motivated not by hatred of homosexuals but by drugs and money. That argument was fleshed out in Jimenez’s 2013 The Book of Matt: The Real Story of the Murder of Matthew Shepard, which reveals that Matthew Shepard had been dealing meth and was killed by a rival dealer who wanted to rob Shepard to pay his debts. His murderer, Aaron McKinney, is currently serving a life sentence, as is McKinney’s accomplice, Russell Henderson. (As Jimenez explains, Henderson was pressured into accepting a plea deal, despite his not having laid any blows on Shepard, in part because the county had enough money only for one trial.)
