BAD LIFESTYLE CHOICES:

Mark Adnum: You've said that the media reported the story of Matthew's murder 'inaccurately from the beginning', and as a result 'an overtly simplistic narrative got set in stone'. What core elements of the story are inaccurate?

Stephen Jimenez: Nearly every national news organisation originally reported that Matthew Shepard and his killers were strangers on the night they met. But Aaron McKinney and Matthew Shepard were not strangers. On the contrary, they had a tangled friendship and personal relationship that involved sex and drugs, primarily crystal meth. They partied together, bought and sold meth from each other, and had gotten to know each other months before the October 1998 attack. Interestingly, Aaron and Matthew were friends before Aaron and his accomplice Russell Henderson began their friendship in early summer 1998.

We've heard endlessly about Matthew being the victim of a 'hate crime', murdered 'because he was gay'. As recently as last week, Rachel Maddow on her NBC News show repeated as fact that Matthew had been 'beaten, tortured and tied to a fence, and left to die, because he was gay'. However, Cal Rerucha, the Albany County attorney who prosecuted the case and served for four consecutive terms, has stated unequivocally that there wasn't evidence of a hate crime, even if there had been a state or federal hate-crime law in place at the time. He was a fierce advocate for the Shepard family during the trial, but has steadfastly refused to cooperate with attempts to use the Shepard case as a case study of a civil-rights violation based on sexual orientation. Last September, he told the Casper Star Tribune, 'If meth [hadn't been present] in this case, we wouldn't have had a murder'. Rerucha's view is fully supported by several current and former Wyoming law-enforcement officers with firsthand knowledge of the Shepard case.

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