PINK ON PINK:

What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepard's murder was wrong? What if our most fiercely held convictions about the circumstances of that fatal night of October 6, 1998, have obscured other, more critical, aspects of the case? How do people sold on one version of history react to being told that facts are slippery -- that thinking of Shepard's murder as a hate crime does not mean it was a hate crime? And how does it color our understanding of such a crime if the perpetrator and victim not only knew each other but also had sex together, bought drugs from one another, and partied together?

None of this is idle speculation; it's the fruit of years of dogged investigation by journalist Stephen Jimenez, himself gay. In the course of his reporting, Jimenez interviewed over 100 subjects, including friends of Shepard and of his convicted killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, as well as the killers themselves (though by the book's end you may have more questions than answers about the extent of Henderson's complicity).  In the process, he amassed enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard's sexuality was, if not incidental, certainly less central than popular consensus has lead us to believe.  [...]

But in what circumstances does someone slam a seven-inch gun barrel into their victim's head so violently as to crush his brain stem? That's not just flipping out, that's psychotic -- literally psychotic, to anyone familiar with the long-term effects of methamphetamine. In court, both the prosecutor and the plaintiffs had compelling reasons to ignore this thread, but for Jimenez it is the central context for understanding not only the brutality of the crime but the milieu in which both Shepard and McKinney lived and operated. [...]

Despite the many interviews, Jimenez does not entirely resolve the true nature of McKinney's relationship to Shepard, partly because of his unreliable chief witness. McKinney presents himself as a "straight hustler" turning tricks for money or drugs, but others characterize him as bisexual. A former lover of Shepard's confirms that Shepard and McKinney had sex while doing drugs in the back of a limo owned by a shady Laramie figure, Doc O'Connor. Another subject, Elaine Baker, tells Jimenez that Shepard and McKinney were friends who had been in sexual threesome with O'Connor. A manager of a gay bar in Denver recalls seeing photos of McKinney and Henderson in the papers and recognizing them as patrons of his bar. He recounts his shock at realizing "these guys who killed that kid came from inside our own community."

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