10/11/98

"Beating not a hate crime, suspect's family says"

By Jim Hughes and David Olinger

Denver Post Staff Writers

LARAMIE - The two men accused of bludgeoning a gay college student targeted him because he flirted with one of them at a bar, the father and girlfriend of a suspect said Saturday.

Aaron James McKinney and Russell Arthur Henderson never set out to nearly kill University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, McKinney's father and girlfriend said.

But McKinney, 22, was embarrassed that Shepard made two passes at him in front of his friends Tuesday night at the Fireside bar, said Bill McKinney and Kristen Price.

To get back at Shepard for the apparent humiliation, McKinney and Henderson, 21, lured the political science major outside to rob him, they said.

Sitting inside Price's small apartment in a dilapidated wooden house in northern Laramie, the elder McKinney's eyes brimmed. He said there's no excuse for what his son and his friend are accused of doing to the 21-year-old Shepard.

But there isn't really a good reason for the nationwide media attention over the case, either, he said.

"The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion, because it involved a homosexual,'' McKinney said. "Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news. Now my son is guilty before he's even had a trial.''

The national discussion of the attack has centered on two things: that Shepard, 21, is gay and that he reportedly told this to his suspected attackers before they lured him out of the downtown Laramie bar.

The girlfriends of McKinney and Henderson - 18-year-old Price and Chastity Pasley, 20 - face charges of being accessories after the fact. Price and McKinney have a 4-month-old son, Cameron.

Price admitted she and Pasley, who attends the University of Wyoming with Shepard, initially lied to police about the whereabouts of their boyfriends Tuesday night. But she said neither she nor the other three suspects hate gays.

"It wasn't meant to be a hate crime,'' she said. "They just wanted to rob him.''

The four suspects are best friends who spend time together almost every day, Price said.

She said she was released on a $30,000 bond before the first court hearing Friday partly because she was the first to tell investigators the truth of what she knew about that night and partly because she had Cameron to take care of.

Pasley is still in custody; her bail is set at $30,000 cash. Henderson and McKinney are also still in jail; bail for each is set at $100,000 cash.

McKinney was the last of the four suspects taken into custody. Authorities arrested him Thursday at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, where he was being treated for a head injury. McKinney apparently sustained his injury in a separate altercation in Laramie, authorities said. Details were unknown.

Bill McKinney and Price said their understanding of what happened Tuesday night and early Wednesday is based on conversations Price had with the younger McKinney when he came home disoriented and covered in blood about 1:30 a.m. Wednesday. Some of the blood was his own, she said.

"He walked in and said he thought he had killed someone and that he had gotten beat up,'' she said.

She said that after she had cleaned him up, given him a glass of water and laid him down, Aaron McKinney told her his version of the story that would soon change their lives.

"He said he met a guy at a bar,'' she said. "The guy had told him that he was gay, and they decided to take him out and rob him. That was their only intention. He said (Shepard) pushed himself onto him and that he embarrassed him and Russ in front of all their friends and everybody at the Fireside.''

Price and Bill McKinney both said Aaron McKinney doesn't like to be embarrassed in front of other people.

Neither McKinney nor Henderson is much bigger than the 5-foot-2, 105-pound Shepard. But McKinney's temper can be fierce when provoked, and he sometimes does stupid things to impress a crowd, his girlfriend and father said.

When he noticed that other people in the bar were snickering, Matt Shepard probably changed in his eyes from somebody not all that important to him to somebody with whom he had to get even, Price said.

"I guess they (the people in the bar) knew that Matt Shepard was gay and maybe it got around that Aaron was gay or something,'' she said. "Later on, Aaron did say he told him he was gay just to rob him, because he wanted to take his money for embarrassing him,'' she said.

McKinney's story, as remembered by Price, echoed the version prosecutors have presented in court documents.

"He told me that they took him out past Wal-Mart'' near the eastern edge of town where Shepard was found the next evening, she said. "Matt asked, "When are we going to get to where you live?' and Aaron told him, "Guess what, I'm not gay, and you just got jacked.' He asked him to give him his wallet, and the guy gave him his wallet.''

McKinney and Henderson then continued in Bill McKinney's pickup truck to a spot where they planned to tie Shepard up, return to Laramie and burglarize his house, she said. Henderson tied him up and McKinney took the student's shoes, she said, because he thought Shepard would be able to free himself from the fence and walk back to town. She said they wanted enough time to burglarize his house before Shepard could report his kidnapping and attack to police. But for some reason, they kept beating him, she said.

Bill McKinney said that's what he doesn't understand, quickly adding that the whole series of events is inexcusable. He said it hurts him to know his son has the potential for such apparent viciousness.

"None of that ever should have happened,'' he said. "They should never have decided to rob him or beat him up or any of it.''

Price agreed. "It just got out of hand, I guess, and they realized he was unconscious and that's when they decided to leave.''

Russell Henderson and Chastity Pasley lived at the cheap end of Laramie, near the railroad tracks to the Mountain Cement Co., in a neighborhood where rusting cars and junk piles are stored in yards for future use. They paid $340 a month for an aging mobile home with a quilt hanging in its front door window. People who know Henderson in Laramie find it hard to believe he could do something so cruel. He drank, they say, and he had flashes of temper, but mostly he was the mild-mannered, polite young man who answered "yes sir'' to all the judge's questions after kidnapping, robbery and attempted-murder charges against him were read in court.

Carson and Sherry Aanenson, the couple who rented a mobile home to Henderson for three years, called him a follower, not a leader. They found it hard to imagine him initiating the savage beating described in court Friday.

Sherry Aanenson remembered Henderson at last year's Christmas party at the Chuck Wagon restaurant in Laramie, shyly asking her, "When you get a chance, can I have a dance?'' But now she wonders about something else she noticed, something hollow in his eyes.

"I felt just like my experience with Russell was - he kinda had that little blank-look stare about him,'' she said.