But not how you think! Special guest Mike Owens tells Sarah and Mike about the (attempted) debunking of the gay-bashing victim. Digressions include Leopold and Loeb, Basic Instinct and Rolling Stone. The sound quality is even worse than usual.
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But not how you think! Special guest Mike Owens tells Sarah and Mike about the (attempted) debunking of the gay-bashing victim. Digressions include Leopold and Loeb, Basic Instinct and Rolling Stone. The sound quality is even worse than usual.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Matthew Shepard
Sarah: Only a straight man could believe that having sex with someone makes them less likely to murder you.
Mike: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast where we set right what we once got wrong. We're still working on the tagline, but welcome to our show. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a writer for Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for the New Republican and Buzzfeed.
Mike: And we have a special guest today. Our special guest is Mike Owens, who is a Twitter friend, the longstanding Twitter friend of the show who is a lawyer in Portland, which Sarah has heard of from growing up here.
Mike Owens: Ah, thanks for having me, guys.
Mike: So today we're going to talk about Matthew Shepherd who, because I am gay and Mike is gay, Matthew Shepard was always this totem for us. It was a huge deal. I guess I should say what it was, but Matthew Shepard's murder was something that really galvanized the country and it put the issue of gay bashing on the agenda. And then he became the symbol. And like all symbols, I assume that it's more complicated than we thought it was.
Mike Owens: I do think that it's a good starting point. So yeah. What do you guys, what's your kind of initial memory of how his murder went down and what happened?
Sarah: So I was 10 at the time, and I remember that this was something that I heard about while watching little bits of the adult news. I remember the way he was murdered being described in specific and really harrowing detail. And I can't remember what it involved specifically, but I remembered being like, these are some details about people doing something to a person that I've never heard of happening to a person before, because I'm a child.
Mike: That was my memory, too. That he was playing pool and a bar, and two guys came up to him and thought that he was acting effeminately or something. And then I think they hustled him out of the bar, somehow beat him up. And then they tied him to a fence post. This was always the detail that always really haunted me was that they tied him to a fence post sort of half dead and then they just left him there until he died. It's like the most horrible thing you can possibly imagine. And then it became this huge cause celeb, as it should have, and then it got more complicated from there. But Mike, what is your relationship to this case?
Mike Owens: I was a senior in high school in Sheridan, Wyoming, which is in Northern Wyoming, when he was killed.
Mike: And he was killed in Laramie, Wyoming.
Mike Owens: He was killed in Laramie, Wyoming at the University of Wyoming, which is in Southern Wyoming. So I remember very well that, I'm pretty sure it was on the front page of the Sheridan Press, which is the local newspaper in Sheridan, Wyoming, where I lived and was a senior in high school. Gay man, beaten, attacked, and Laramie, that thought alone has always seared in my mind. I, at this time, I was not out to really anyone except maybe one of my sisters, but I definitely knew that I was gay. And so this was something that I was deeply interested in from the get-go. And so the following fall, a little less than a year after he died, I enrolled at the University of Wyoming and began my freshman year there. And I worked at the student newspaper because I was a journalism major. I didn't personally cover the trial of Aaron McKinney, which was the one that was going on this second trial for his killers, but I was in the newsroom a lot while the reporter who was covering it was coming back, and everyone was talking about it and of course I was on campus. And I got to see the protests with Fred Phelps, who was the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, who brought his anti-gay crew to Laramie, to small town Laramie. And so I just lived through the community response to his murder and the trials of his killers.
Mike: So, what were actually the facts of the case?
Mike Owens: And I have to say, without giving away too much at the later talk, the initial facts of the case are still true. Matthew Shepard went to a bar on, I believe it was October 6th, 1998, he was alone. He met Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney there. We don't know exactly what was said between the three of them. They left together. They definitely knew that he was gay. They told him in the car that they were going to rob him, that they'd basically tricked him. And then they proceeded to rob him, beat him within an inch of his life, pistol whipped him multiple times. And then as you remember, Mike, they tied him to a fence post on the outskirts of Laramie. Sometime in the next, I want to say 24 to 48 hours, he was found by a cyclist who was riding through the hills. The one image that a lot of people remember is that some people think he was tied up like a scarecrow. He wasn't, but the guy who found him said he thought it might be like a scarecrow or some kind of Halloween decoration, because it was just a few weeks before Halloween, because Matthew Shepard was apparently a very small man and he was laying nearly lifeless tied to this fence post.
So he found him, the Sheriff's deputy came, they brought them to the emergency room there in Laramie. He had to be moved to the emergency room in Fort Collins, Colorado, a slightly bigger town a short distance away. And then on, I think it was October 12th, so about six days after the attack, where he actually died. So he was alive there for several days and holding on. He was in rough shape, and I don't think his prognosis was ever considered very good, but there was at least some hope.
Mike: What do we know about just Matthew Shepard as a person?
Mike Owens: He grew up in Casper, Wyoming. I believe his dad was involved in the oil industry. And so at some point when he was midway through high school, they moved to Saudi Arabia and they lived in the middle east for a while. And then he lived in a few different places shortly after high school, including I think he lived in Denver for a little. And then he was 21 when he enrolled at the University of Wyoming. So he was a bit old. I don't know that he was a true first-year student because I think he'd done some college work in a couple places. And so he was a 21 year old, a little older for being a new student to the University.
Mike: One of the details that always stuck with me from, I think this was from the Laramie Project or one of the documentaries about Matthew Shepard that I watched at the time, was that he wore braces. I don't know why I remembered that, but there was just something very human about that, that he's just this 21-year-old kid who wears braces and was probably slightly insecure about it. And I don't know why, but I always fixated on that detail. That it just made him seem more kid-like to me. And more sort of vulnerable.
Mike Owens: I guess one biographical detail that is also important to know, is that in Morocco a few years before he was murdered, he was apparently gang raped. Yeah. It's something his mom talked about and the effect that it had on him. And the reason, the only reason I can think that detail even matters is because there's some talk about how he was very depressed and anxious, and that later gets spun into explanations for why. And we'll get into this more later, he was involved in the drug trade in Laramie, and that really had to do with his being killed. And I believe the guy who came about and wrote the new narrative about Matthew Shepard suggested his anxiety and nervousness and stuff showed that he knew he was going to be killed because he was deeply involved in the meth scene. But I think that his mom and family members said a lot of his mental health trauma to the extent he had was from that gang rape experience.
Sarah: Yeah. Or even just, if you were just a young, gay man living in Wyoming, I would imagine there would be cause for anxiety.
Mike: Was Matthew Shepard out?
Mike Owens: Yeah. He definitely attended very shortly, gosh, it might even be the night he was attacked he attended the LGBTQ student group meeting.
Mike: And I'm assuming 1998 Laramie, Wyoming was not wildly progressive. There was still a lot of homophobia in the air.
Mike Owens: It is so hard for me to know what Laramie was like in 1998, because I know what Laramie was like in 1999. And that was after Matthew Shepard had died and everyone is trying so hard to prove how much we're open and tolerant. I have to imagine it was more progressive than you'd think, because it was a college town. And as much as it was a conservative college town in the least populous state in the union, there was no question when I was in Laramie, its campus was a much more liberal place in general than the state overall. So I doubt that it was just that his murder changed everything and made people more tolerant, but I'm sure that it did in some ways, but I think it was probably a place where you'd feel relatively safe being gay compared to the rest of Wyoming.
Even before Matthew Shepard was killed, I think I already knew or had a good idea I'd probably end up going to college there, and I was so excited. Oh, I'm going to go to college in a college town. I'll be able to come out. I had the idea that it would at least be acceptable for me to be gay and out there, if not rainbow banners flying all around.
Mike: So, it's actually by the standards of Wyoming, it was pretty good. It was a pretty good place to be gay. A young, gay dude.
Sarah: What are the standards of Wyoming? What was Sheridan like in 1998?
Mike Owens: I don't think there was a gay bar or club in the entire state.
Mike: A lot of rest stops, though. A lot of highways and rest stops, man, you gotta. That's where a lot of us had our first… Do you just want to give us a list of your sexual partners and experiences right now? Do you just want to list those off, everyone's social security number? I think that's the best way to proceed from here.
Mike Owens: There was certainly nobody that was out in my high school. It's hard to remember the timeline of this because again, Matthew Shepard's murder did open up a lot of discussions that weren't had before. I'll say this, the teachers I really liked and knew well in high school I always felt would be supportive. It's not like I was afraid like, oh, I'm gay and if everyone finds out it'd be the end of the world. I did feel like there was a community of people, even in Sheridan, Wyoming, where if I came out, they'd be cool.
And I did start to come out. I guess I first started telling my friends in December of 1998. So basically, a couple months after he was murdered, unrelatedly, those things had nothing to do with each other. I'd been ready to come out. And finally, as I'm watching the end of high school near, I'm like, ah, I can start telling people.
Mike: Yeah. That's what I did, too. Because it's like, I'm not going to see these people again, unless I want to so I might as well, I don't really care if they ostracized me.
One thing that the Matthew Shepard killing did was shatter that myth though, right? That I think a lot of gay people and a lot of straight people thought you can tell teachers you're gay, you can talk about being gay. And then there's this poor kid that just gets murdered in the worst imaginable way. And it makes everybody think or realize, I guess, that I'm not as safe as I thought. This was the time of, I think it was Will and Grace, it was Queer Eye, it was this kind of opening up of a conversation around gay people, they're not so bad. And then all of a sudden, there's this wake-up call that no, it's still actually really bad for gay people. And there are still places where we can have the worst things imaginable done to us simply for our sexual orientation. Isn't that kind of what Shepherd became totemic of?
Mike Owens: Yeah, I think so. Although I should say, that's one of the things that bothered me a little bit about the response to his murder is that, very much was like, oh, this is cowboy Wyoming, it's not a safe place. And obviously he was murdered there. But one thing a lot of people in Laramie like to talk about after he was killed was how much gay bashing went on in big cities, which is absolutely the case, especially at the time, even more so than now.
Mike: Which is totally fucking true. I've so many friends that have been gay bashed in London and in Copenhagen. I was at bars and Copenhagen where I saw people get their ass kicked for being gay. It's not like it's some paradise in bigger cities.
Mike Owens: right. I am thinking back to a memory I know was pre-Matthew Shepard, was when Ellen DeGeneres came out. I happened to be in the teacher's lounge at my high school and I saw a copy of Time Magazine and it was that kind of iconic cover that Ellen's on and it says, “Yep, I'm gay.” And I just remember seeing that and thinking oh cool, the teachers are seeing this, they know about it, this is really changing the culture.
But another thing that, to me proved that Wyoming wasn't that bad was that after his murder, that was a catalyst in a good way in Wyoming, for a lot of people to come out and openly state, “I'm okay with gay people.” For me it felt like as terrible as his murder was, the good result was, I said this earlier, maybe in a flippant way, everybody in Laramie was trying to prove how tolerant they were, but that was good. It felt awesome to me to be starting school in a place where this horrific tragedy had happened, but at least because of that, so many people were coming out to say, I'm an ally, I'm supportive. There were safe spaces, signs all over the university, all over town, editorials and all the newspapers. The political culture was still very Republican and so they weren't going to pass any hate crimes laws or anything like that. But even the conservative politicians felt the need to express statements of tolerance, that maybe by today's standards would seem pretty proforma and not very impressive. But, in terms of what it did to the environment, it felt good to be living through those changes.
Mike: Yeah. It's weird to idealize those times politically, because they sucked. But it also was a time when partisanship was less bad. And where even conservative politicians, center right politicians, were willing to say hey let's relax about gay people. Hey, gay people aren't so bad. They would still probably say, I don't want to give them any credit. They still would want to amend the constitution to take away our marriage rights. But at least the murder of gay people is bad. At least it was a time when they could be against the murder of gay people. Whereas now it's like even an admittance that trans women of color are being killed at really alarming rates. Even admitting that is a problem is oh, you're a social justice warrior. You're a virtue signaling. You wouldn't even be able to do that now because it would look like, oh, you're giving in to the forces on the left.
Sarah: It also makes me think of, because I think of what we're living in now is really just the Fox news era of right-wing rhetoric. The party has just become Fox news, I think essentially. And that makes me think of how after Ellen came out, there was a little bit of a sense of, oh, the world is just so gay friendly now, and TV is going to be filled with all sorts of… There was a Saturday Night Live sketch where they're saying, ‘since Ellen has been so successful, NBC is adding lesbians to all of their shows’. And I feel like I remember America being really kind of liberal to central America feeling self-satisfied.
Mike: With the media aspect of this, I think one of the things the media really struggles with is holding two contradictory ideas in its mind at the same time. Oftentimes you have these very incremental shifts, and then everybody writes their hot take of ‘the age of homophobia is over’. And ‘we're launching into this new dawn of gay rights and there's going to be lesbians on every TV show’. And then Matthew Shepherd gets killed and it's the era of homophobia is back and we're going into this darkness again. And it's every event is the country making a 180 degree turn over and over again, when really the country was slowly warming up to gay rights and some people weren't, and there was somewhat of a backlash of that. And the fact that many people's parents became cool with gay people after having gay kids or gay cousins or whatever, all the homophobic people were still there. They were all still alive in the country. They were all still hanging out.
Sarah: Yeah. And there's a sense where the mass media, and also the public consensus, if it emerges from a large population are somehow purports to be representative of the countries, it's like this golem. Which maybe leads us to debunking, because I feel like there's something really interesting that happens generally when we have a narrative or an event that the country believed a certain narrative about, and then it flips a little bit, or it changes, and we seem to tend to believe that when a specific story alters that it has to alter completely.
Mike: Yeah, it has to flip completely. It can't just become slightly more nuanced.
Sarah: The victim becomes the villain. The villain becomes the victim.
Mike: So Mike, before we get to the debunking, what do we know, or what did we know at the time about the killers?
Mike Owens: They were from Laramie. I think they were both, I don't know if they were born there, but definitely grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. They weren't students at the university, they just lived in Laramie. I don't remember a ton more about their biographies. I think it's pretty uncontroversial that at least Darren McKinney was a meth user, maybe Russell Henderson as well. I don't even know what kind of jobs they were working. I do remember there was testimony, or at least talk during McKinney's trial, about one or both of them being Boy Scouts and like they’re community kids, they grew up here, they're not monsters. No human being is a monster. I think just the fact that they were like hometown boys from Laramie and Matt, is this kind of, yeah, he grew up in Casper, but he also lived all over the world. He's this worldly, gay dude who came back. It helped set up the narrative of redneck ,Wyoming, meth users kill angelic ,international, cosmopolitan Matt Shepard.
Mike: You could just insert the archetypes straight into it.
Sarah: And during the aftermath, I'm curious about this because as the community was trying to respond to this murder by creating safe spaces and by trying to reach out and be vocal about wanting to create a safer world for the gay people in their lives. I find it really interesting that that doesn't happen when women get murdered. And there's really often more of a sense of we're going to find the one guy who did this, and he'll be ideally some sort of outsider to society. And then we will throw the book at him and put him in prison forever or execute him, and then everything will be fine. And there's so little sense of this happened because of this pervasive problem in society that we need to address. We're really so entrenched in our white lady gets murdered narratives in America, which is the number one blockbuster narrative on grown-up news. That automatically goes into let's find the one monstrous culprit and punish them, and then everything will be fine again.
Mike: Especially with domestic violence, where it's never like safe spaces are never let's make it easier for women to report. Let's make sure that we get guns out of the hands of domestic violence. perpetrators. It's much harder to make those structural arguments when you're talking about something like domestic violence.
Sarah: And we’ve had those conversations at various times. We talked about addressing domestic violence as an epidemic in the late seventies and the mid-nineties. And I think we're doing that right now. But yeah, we really don't. We don't talk about structural issues if we're talking about an individual female murder victim typically. I'm curious if there was a sense of a need for vengeance within the community.
Mike Owens: I guess the national narrative was, this is probably more a systemic Wyoming…
Sarah: Cowboy masculinity or something
Mike Owens: Yes. Locally there was very much an attempt to do exactly what you're describing happens when women are victims of violence. And that is, it is just these two guys, we're not like that as a people, as Wyomingites. I'm sure the truth is somewhere in the middle of those two poles.
So there was definitely an attempt to be like, no, it's just these two guys, but there was also an attempt to mitigate the seriousness of the violence. I will never forget a faculty member who said to me, I don't remember what we were talking about, but she said, “Matthew Shepard was no angel.”
Mike: Nice. That phrase, that fucking phrase, man.
Guest: I looked it up to make sure my memory was correct. It was Michael Brown who was shot in Ferguson, that really kicked off the Black Lives Matter movement, where the New York Times literally used that same phrase about him in one of their write-ups. An article that ran in August of 2014, “Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel”. It goes to show you how much there is that need to point out that the victim was not an angel is an important narrative for any victim of some form.
Sarah: Because some people deserve to get murdered as the implicit.
Mike Owens: Maybe they didn’t deserve to be murdered, but.
Mike: I'm not saying they deserve to be murdered, but there's always this sense of, I want to complicate it. I want to make things a little bit less clear-cut victimhood narrative.
Sarah: It’s also a great phrase because it means literally nothing, because no one is, what's your point?
Mike Owens: It's such a great way of deemphasizing the humanity of a victim while saying literally nothing about them. In some ways that phrase could be used to sum up the entirety of the debunking. The first go at trying to recast what happened with Matthew Shepard's murder. You could literally just call it the, all right now, we're out to prove that Matthew Shepard was no angel, and that is where the debunking comes in.
Mike: So, give it to us Mike. What was the debunking? What happened?
Mike Owens: In 2004, 2020 runs a piece about Matthew Shepherd. The producer is a guy named Steven Jimenez, and it promises a bunch of bombshell exposés about the case that nobody knew. I wasn't able to find it online, so it's been several years since I've watched it. So I have to go off, not only my memory, but a paper I wrote about in grad school. But what I remember were the big bombshells that here are the things you didn't know about the Matthew Shepard murder.
Sarah: Here are the things we’ll hint at before commercial.
Mike Owens: One, that Matthew Shepard wasn't killed because he was gay, he was killed because at least in large part, it was just a robbery gone bad.
Mike: So they didn’t know he was gay. They just wanted his wallet. He fought back, and they happened to kill him.
Mike Owens: Tony doesn't deny that they knew he was gay, but that's not why they killed them. Because, and here's a great twist, Aaron McKinney, one of the two killers is himself bisexual, or at least he's had sex with men.
Sarah: And felt great about it surely and super well-adjusted.
Mike Owens: I'm going to just briefly run through the bombshell stuff, and then I'll talk about them.
Sarah: We can stop heckling.
Mike Owens: It's hard not to, I sympathize they're right there, heckle worthy. Another one was that Matt Shepherd himself was deeply enmeshed in the underground meth scene in Laramie. And so he was, again, he's no angel. He used meth and was a meth user and dealer, I think they insinuate. Some of this stuff is hard to separate what was in that original 2020 report, from what Steven Jimenez has later said about Matthew Shepherd. He went on to write a book that came out, I think in 2014, where he elaborated in great detail on all these theories. I haven't read the book so I can't criticize. One of his favorite things when people were attacking it when it came out, is all these people are critics and they haven't read the book. I didn't want to give him any of my money. I thought about checking it out at the library, but I also don't want to give him any of my time. So I can't discuss all the things he alleges in the book, although Media Matters and several others, like GLAAD and other entities have really lengthy debunkings of the book. But in any way, in terms of the 2020 report, the big things where they didn't come because he was gay, they just wanted to rob him. They knew him. That's the other big bombshell. Matt Shepherd and Aaron McKinney, I don't remember if it was alleged in that report that they'd actually had sex together, Matt Shepherd and one of his killers, but certainly that they knew each other.
Sarah: Only a straight man could believe that having sex with someone makes them less likely to murder you.
Mike Owens: Isn't that absolutely true. Or that because a person is either bisexual or at least has had sex with men, they couldn't kill someone for that very same reason, any kinds of internalized homophobia or, I think sometimes about the number of porn, occasionally I'll read about a porn star or someone who is straight, gay for pay, and ends up killing a person that was paying them for sex to get their money. And it's yeah, exactly, the idea that having sex with someone means you don't harm them is just crazy.
Sarah: It's very heteronormative.
Mike Owens: Oh, I guess I should also add the idea that they were all probably high on meth at the time. And so it was like a meth fueled crime, as opposed to homophobia fueled crime.
Sarah: Kato Kaelin claimed in his book that OJ was on meth at the time of the murder. So I feel like there's a whole basket of attempted debunking saying, maybe all of the nineties happened because everyone was on meth.
Mike: Ellen, when she revealed her homosexuality, was on meth. I'm sure that would be the next debunking. But then what was the reaction, Mike, to this 2020 piece at the time?
Mike Owens: What really bothered me about the piece wasn't so much that it ran and I thought it was pretty shoddy journalism, it was the fact that a number of prominent voices, especially on the seemingly pro-gay side of the spectrum, endorsed the theories. Or at least said, gosh, that we really ought to take a look at this. And the most prominent one was Andrew Sullivan. He was known as a conservative, who was very not in line with the kind of general gay rights, movement and entities. And so he appeared in the 2020 report and gave it a bit of a stamp of approval, we need to think about this.
Mike: Wait, Andrew Sullivan was in this 2020 report?
Mike Owens: He was in the 2020 report. Yes. They interviewed him.
Mike: He doesn't have any expertise on this situation. Why did they interview...
Mike Owens: Because they wanted a gay person, a prominent gay person, to appear on camera and suggest that it was okay to accept these new facts. And I emailed him. I printed off the email. I sent him a two-page email and I detailed with him the biggest problems I had with the report and why they were wrong. And his response was just extremely short and flip. Not like I expect him to give a lot of time to a random reader, but I laid out facts and sources and here's what's wrong with this stuff. And it was just, well, it adds another important voice to the discussion. I was like, no, it doesn't.
Sarah: So just, the more the merrier, theory of discourse.
Mike: What you're saying is a lot of people in institutions accepted this debunking. They accepted, oh maybe it was a meth thing and maybe it's more complicated than that. And let's make sure that we hear every side of the story, et cetera.
Sarah: Because that's the kind of response that I would personally feel inclined to give if a case or a story like this that I had related to meaningfully, or that had been important to my community, if details emerged suggesting that it was more complicated, I can imagine wanting to make sure everyone knew that I was totally reasonable and not acting based on emotion. And I was willing to consider all of the details anyone wanted to discuss, even if they didn't really make sense. The whole idea that anyone murders anyone for only one reason is so silly to me.
Mike Owens: I guess that's one of the reasons I wanted to ask both of you at the start. What do you remember about his murder? Because one of the things that was so frustrating about the debunking, the new theories where a lot of the stuff that's still uncontroversial about the debunking is uncontroversial, precisely because it was known all along. No one ever disputed that Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson wanted to rob Matthew Shepard. There was never any idea that these two guys got together and said, “We hate gay people, let's go find one and kill him.” That's not what happened at all and that was never the narrative. I guess if you only read headlines and nothing more, maybe you would have left with that impression.
And so, I guess I'd be okay if maybe a random member of the public had that idea, but someone who's a journalist and who presumably should be following a little more closely, especially if they're going to comment on it, should at least be familiar with the narrative as it was reported at the time. And so, it was never denied that they really were seeking to rob Matthew Shepard. Within days of his attack, and I think maybe even before he died, Aaron McKinney told police, “We wanted to Rob him. We knew that he was gay. We pretended to be gay to lure him out of the bar.” And then there is a dispute about whether the ferociousness of the attack was increased because Matt made a pass at one of them or something. And I think Aaron McKinney suggested in his confession and interview with the police a few days after it happened, that it was because Matt grabbed his leg or something. He later denied that and said it didn't really happen. And as far as I'm concerned, maybe he was making that up, maybe he was exaggerating Matt hitting on him to make it seem more reasonable.
Sarah: But talking to a police officer, I'm sure I'm male policeman saying, you know who among us...
Mike Owens: Exactly. Come on. A dude puts his hand on your leg, you're going to beat him up, yeah. And so I don't know, maybe he was exaggerating that, but the full narrative from the get-go was, it was pretty clear if you're paying attention they thought he would be an easy target for a robbery because he was gay. Now, does that mean it's not an anti-gay hate crime? I don't think so. I don't think it is only a hate crime if you literally decide, yeah, let's go kill gay people. We're going to leave tonight. We got a plan involved. I think most types of bias crimes probably don't happen that way. You're out in the world and you see someone who fits an identity category you don't like, and then become aggressive toward them. But so, it just was weird to have this new narrative, a lot of which was just what we knew all along.
Mike: Yeah. I always think of it what we know about suicide now. Is that suicide is often a much more spontaneous act than we think it is. You'd think that putting a barrier up on a bridge would stop people from jumping off the bridge. You think if 15 people jump off this bridge every year, you put up a barrier, 15 extra people are just going to shoot themselves in the head or take a bunch of painkillers. But no, that's not what happens. You put up a barrier on the bridge, and 15 fewer people kill themselves because oftentimes it's literally that you're walking home from work and you happen to be on that bridge and you had a really bad day and you're like, oh fuck it. I'm just going to jump off this bridge and it is this spontaneous act.
And so I think it's probably somewhat like that with hate crimes too, that they're not necessarily premeditated, let's go find a homosexual. It's you're playing pool. There's this guy there, you probably have some latent homophobia. He acts a little effeminate and you're super misogynistic. And then you're like, oh fuck this guy, let's rob this guy. But then you can see the ways in which a murder like this could be spontaneous and a hate crime at the same time. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
Mike Owens: Going back to your point earlier, Sarah, about how we talk about the violence toward women, how much we ignore intimate partner violence and violence toward women from people they know, which is much more common than strangers. It also is that same idea that this could only have been a homophobic attack if they went out seeking to harm gay people. And in the same way, it can't be a misogynistic attack on a woman because this guy clearly loved that she was a woman. That's why he was dating her. How can he hate women? He's having sex with her.
Mike: This guy has sisters and a mom. He couldn't possibly be misogynist.
Sarah: And as a father of daughters, et cetera. Yeah. I would imagine - I don't have numbers in front of me - but I would imagine that most rapes are crimes of opportunity. And especially if we're talking about the kind of anonymous violent assault that we tend to focus on in the media to the exclusion of acquaintance rape, which is far more common. But even if we're talking about the media's favorite rape, I think it's much more often that you see someone who just feels like the right victim, and there's something about them that you need to dominate, that you need to vent some kind of hatred on to. And if you're a bisexual man who's bisexuality maybe makes them more likely to kill someone who is openly gay than less likely, if we're going to imagine that scenario, which to me seems a lot more likely than the 2020 version. I imagine too, that you're not going out planning anything. Or maybe you are planning a robbery, but then you end up with someone who maybe reminds you of the parts of yourself that you would like to kill.
Mike Owens: I should say too, the producer of that 2020 segment who went on to write the book, he's gay. And so it's a big part of the kind of defense of what I think is the shoddy journalistic practices. His natural instinct would be to support the narrative.
Mike: My longtime obsession with this case and the debunking is about our use of symbols and our use of cases to illustrate larger phenomena. You saw this a lot with Michael Brown actually, and with Trayvon Martin. That those cases come out. It's horrible. That's used as a tag to talk about police killing African Americans at wildly disproportionate rates. And then everybody pops out of a trashcan and is like, actually Michael Brown, it looks like he fought back against the officer. Or maybe Trayvon Martin was shoplifting that day. And they try to complicate the narrative of this anecdote on which we've hung this larger trend. And frankly, who fucking cares? Maybe everything that the racists say about the Michael Brown case is true, and maybe everything they say about the Trayvon Martin case is true. That does not negate the fact that statistically speaking African Americans are more likely to be killed by police than white people. So, it really doesn't matter whether they are correct about their “debunking” of these cases. But to make a trend interesting, to make a trend important, you have to tie it to these events. And then we get into these events being more complicated than they seem at first, which fucking every event is more complicated than it seems at first. That's how human life works. And this idea of like you were saying, no angel, nobody's no angel. Of course Trayvon Martin's no angel, of course Michael Brown is no angel. They are human beings.
And so then we start to complicate this narrative and then the entire edifice of the social problem falls apart. They say that cops are killing black people at disproportionate rates, but I read on Breitbart that like this Michael Brown kid was fighting with the officer, and the whole thing gets swept away. And I think it's just something human and a huge weakness of journalism that you have to tie bigger trends to these stories. And then once the story gets debunked, the trend gets debunked.
Sarah: That's such a good point. And that never occurred to me that that is just what we do, but it's if you're training a dog and they get a Pavlovian response to something and they always get fed from the green bucket. So every time you bring the green bucket out, they're like ‘food’. I'm working with dogs right now.
Mike: Dog mentions every episode.
Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And then this idea that we learn about political realities and systemic realities by these totemic narratives. And then if someone can flip the narrative or take it away from us, we're like, oh, if the green bucket goes away, we're like, oh, there's no food in the whole world. No, the bucket is not the food, the bucket just has come to signify the food for you, but it's still real. Everything seems so much simpler to us that we have these structural issues that we store the vitality of in these certain narratives and then if we can explain them away in a way that makes us feel like they're not true anymore, then the whole thing goes away. It's really such a brilliant defense mechanism. It's terrible for trying to run a country.
Mike: The thing that I think is really hard for people to incorporate is that even if all of the debunking about Matthew Shepard was true, or even more true, let's say he was trying to sell them meth and he was this huge meth kingpin, and he's just this terrible human being, it still doesn't stop the fact that he's gay and he got murdered. And it still doesn't stop the fact that homophobia in 1998 in America was a huge problem. And that many gay people were killed or beaten up or harassed or whatever due to their sexuality. So even if the debunking of the Matthew Shepard case was true, it doesn't negate the larger point. But then of course, then the person who's arguing with you is going to say then why did you bring up Matthew Shepard in the first place if Matthew Shepard ultimately doesn't matter, if the facts of this case don't matter, then why include them in the narrative at all? And then the answer is basically because nobody will read about homophobia unless it's linked to one of these cases, because that's how media works. You have to have this totemic example first, and then in paragraph five, you mentioned 10,000 homosexuals were killed last year or whatever. That's just how media works. And also, how humans work. We need to hear a story for us to care about the trend.
And it just fucking sucks because I wish you could just write a story saying, ‘Hey, homophobia is bad.’ ‘Hey, lots of people got killed for their sexuality last year’, without tying it to this narrative. Because when you tie it to this narrative, you're basically saying Matthew Shepard matters, but then you're also saying Matthew Shepard doesn't matter. And in that duality is where we get into these asinine debates about the facts of these specific cases when really, they don't actually matter all that much.
Mike Owens: People feel like as long as they debunk one, the whole trend is gone. What happened with Matthew Shepard, his murder as tragic and terrible as it was, I think so many good things came from it. I wasn't one of the people who learned a lot. You asked me earlier about Matt's life and Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney. Truth is, I don't know a lot of details about any of them individually. It was never my big thing to learn about any of their biographies. Matt, I would care more about obviously, as the victim of this crime. But without knowing that much about Matthew Shepard, I've always felt very grateful, not grateful, that's the wrong word, but I feel like that's someone who sacrificed so that a lot of good things could happen. And at least for me, the environment that followed his death in Wyoming was so much better than it had been before.
All those people, not just LGBT people coming out of the closet, and I should really say gay people coming out of the closet because, I think back to those days, and it was very heavily focused on the gay part. The other parts of that we still need a lot more progress. You were talking earlier about violence against trans people, especially. But not just gay people coming out of the closet, but allies coming out of the closet in huge numbers, vocally, was just such a big deal for that state. And for me personally, it's one reason why it almost didn't matter all the individual details about what happened. But, as someone who was in training to be a journalist at the time, and now someone who's an attorney who cares a lot about like sources and facts, and it was just from a journalistic perspective, it was so frustrating, how this report went down.
Mike: So, debunk the debunking for us. What came out about the 2020 report afterwards?
Mike Owens: It really wasn't even afterwards. All these entities put out press releases and denunciations as it was coming out, Matthew Shepard's mother was one of them. Judy Shepherd, which what they did to her was really awful, because they edited her into the report to make it seem like she was neutral or maybe even agreed with their perspective, but she did not at all. And then one of the bad sides of the post murder environment in Laramie is that everybody I ran into was Matthew Shepherd's best friend. That's why I said early on I wanted to be very clear when I said I was involved with, I just meant witnessing the environment after his murder. I did not know him. I was not his friend. And the reason I feel it necessary to say that is because you would talk to so many people were like, “Oh, I knew Matt, we were really close.” Who would act as though his loss was personal to them, it was about them personally. I don't fault people too much for that, there was a sense, especially those of us who worked in the newsroom at the student newspaper, you felt a little guilty that there was a sense that this story in the national attention actually could be good for you personally, because it could launch like a journalism career. It could be like, oh, I get to be up front and center covering this. And so there was a real kind of guilty sense that yeah, this terrible tragedy happened, but we can all benefit from it. And that same kind of sense is what I got from people who were like, yeah, it's a terrible tragedy. Let me tell you my role in it. Here's how I knew Matt and here's how I was really good friends with him. And that always frustrated me so much because I was like, if Matthew Shepard had so many great friends, so many best friends, why was he drinking alone at the bar that night? Who knows? Maybe they really all were really good friends with him. I don't know, I wasn't there. But what that translated to with the 2020 report is they were just totally credulous of anyone who said they knew Matt or knew stuff about him. And I think that's probably continued again.
I haven't read his book, but from the reports I've read about it, he interviews all kinds of people and uses all kinds of anonymous sources who just claim oh yeah, I knew Matt. I knew this about him, without any kind of corroboration. I think the most interesting example of that is there's this guy, his name is Doc O’Conner. He apparently runs a limousine service in Laramie, he's a limousine chauffeur.
Sarah: Busy guy. I'm sure.
Mike: Owens: Yeah. Exactly. I remember when I first learned this, I was like, man, how? You're busy on prom night and then what?
Mike: I didn’t want to say that, because I didn't want to sound like a west coast, liberal elite. I'm glad one of you guys said it.
Sarah: I’m allowed to say something passive aggressive about Wyoming because I'm in Wisconsin with the two W’s.
Mike Owens: But here's the thing, I love that that's your guys' initial response, because he first shows up, I first become aware of him because he's a part of the Laramie Project. And for anyone who doesn't know, the Laramie Project was a play that was created by the Tectonic Theater Project in the year and a half after Matt's death. They came from New York to Laramie. They interviewed tons of people and then they wrote a play where they played both themselves doing interviews and then would turn around and play out the roles of different community members. And I really did like the Laramie project. I thought overall it was great. I watched it when it opened in Laramie and sobbed two nights in a row watching it. I thought it was a very good experience, but again, these are playwrights, they're not journalists.
And so there were some anecdotes and stories in the Laramie project that always struck me as a little odd. And one of them was Doc O’Conner, the one that sticks out more than anything was this Doc O'Connor guy, right? So he's a limo driver. He shows up in the Laramie Project and he tells this story that he met Matthew Shepard a few days before he was killed, and Matt hired him to drive him. The way he told it was, Matt hired me and he said, “I want you to take me to the gay bar.” And I said, “I hope you have money because there's no gay bar in Wyoming.” And he was like, “Yep, I know. I want you to drive me down to Fort Collins.” And so he took him in his limo from Laramie, Wyoming to Fort Collins, Colorado, which is about a 45 minute drive in good weather, which it often is not. And just immediately, this story sounded so fantastic to me that it was hard to believe. So that doesn't mean it didn't happen. I don't know. It is possible that Matthew Shepard really was such an interesting idiosyncratic guy.
Sarah: Where did he get that kind of cash though?
Mike Owens: I want to make that point too, but to be fair, sounds like his family did have some money, so yeah. So, let's assume.
Sarah: Anything is possible.
Mike Owens: Let’s assume that the story is true. And that's the thing, even though hearing it at the time, I thought I kind of don't believe this when I saw it in the Laramie Project, who cares. It's like a colorful, weird anecdote. Maybe it's a guy in the community who wants to exaggerate and make stuff up. But in some ways maybe that's part of the story of the Laramie Project is to see what people will say about someone. It doesn't particularly bother me. It's a colorful, weird story. He drives Matt down to the gay bar in Fort Collins. Okay. Fine. Fast forward to the 20/20 report, 2004 Doc O'Connor is now the source for the idea that Aaron McKinney, one of the murderers, is bisexual or has had sex with men. Why? Because Doc O'Connor says he had sex with Aaron McKinney in the backseat of the limo. I think it was the backseat. I should be clear, sometimes I wonder if I'm adding my own details, but he says he hooked up with Aaron McKinney. And now it starts to be like, has anyone corroborated anything that this dude has said? What a random set of coincidence is that he both met Matthew Shepard a few days before his. And drove him in the limo down to Fort Collins and now also says he's hooked up with Aaron McKinney in a three-way, he had a three-way with Aaron McKinney. Again, I don't know. It's possible that these stories are all true, but I do think on top of that, he changed his story and then also claimed that he'd known Matthew Shepard for a long time.
So he tells the Tectonic Theater project when they're doing the Laramie Project that he just met him. Now he's telling 20/20 no, I knew Matt for a long time. So they rely on Doc O'Connor, this colorful story. That's the heart of their claim that Aaron McKinney wouldn't have murdered Matt because he was gay. He also was into dudes and on some level.
Sarah: And so the whole theory of the murder and how it can't have been motivated by homophobia hinges on the fact of this person's bisexuality, which had been established by this story, that is pretty unlikely.
Mike Owens: And no point this 20/20, again, I think if you're going to air the story fine, if you're gonna hear that guy's account, they should have at least confronted him with his inconsistencies. Well wait, didn't you say…
Mike: Or told the audience too, of Hey, here's the story, just so you know, it's a bit more complex than this. Let's take this with a grain of salt. There's also, I think the real, or one of the problems with this is that there is a way that journalism weighs new facts over relevant facts. Because the fact that this killer might've been bisexual is Ooh, the plot thickens. Oh, it's new. But like we said before, it doesn't actually change anything. It doesn't in some way invalidate what actually happened. It's an interesting wrinkle, but the fact that it's new, it almost makes us think that nothing else matters or that it's an important fact. When really, when you think about it, the fact that this killer, whether it's true or not, it sounds like it's probably not true, but even if this killer was bisexual and he had a three-way with a dude, okay, and then he murdered a gay guy and tied him to a fence.
Sarah: Bisexuals do.
Mike: Now that we know he's bisexual, it makes sense. But it really doesn't untie anything, it doesn’t explain any mystery or wipe off the table, any of the facts that we had before, it's like finding out that he's left-handed or something. iHe's left-handed, it's not that he was falsely accused. It's not that he couldn't have been there that night. It's not the DNA evidence exonerates him or something that would actually invalidate the central facts of the case. It's just oh, here's like a fact to add to his Wikipedia page.
Sarah: And it's funny too, because bisexuality in the nineties was often proof that someone, I guess they're saying he's a bisexual who planned a really violent, but non homophobia motivated robbery. And that just makes me think as I often do of Sharon Stone and how in Basic Instinct, the whole opening act of that as the detectives being like she's bisexual. She’s probably the killer. It's not relevant, but it's something that the public always likes to find out that someone's bi-sexual.
Mike: I also love that the bombshell that he was bisexual plays on exactly the same homophobia that this case was boasted debunk. It's oh, he's Bi, so it's just a case of gays killing gays. You know how queer people are constantly killing each other, like normal queer stuff. Why should we be concerned about the larger trend of societal homophobia? When it's just a bunch of queers killing each other at a pool table. It's like we're putting in all these new tropes and this is exactly the thing that we're all angry about.
Mike Owens: That's absolutely right. And it's also funny to me that they found one person who claims to have hooked up with Aaron McKinney, and that definitely makes them at least bisexual. He couldn't possibly just be a straight dude who one time was like, Hey guys, I'm in a college town, whatever. I'll try it. It's no dude would ever hook up with another dude, unless they were at least bisexual. Come on, dudes. What are you straight dudes? You don't do that. Which is funny because, so they go to Aaron McKinney. They interview him in the story, and he's a big source of their, ‘it wasn't really about Matthew Shepard being gay’, because he's now denying that that's why he killed Matthew Shepard. Unsurprisingly, why wouldn't you? He's a big proponent of the, I was high on meth at the time and that's the only reason. And it had nothing to do with Matthew Shepard being gay. Which he has every reason to say, because it makes him seem a lot less monstrous, but whatever.
Mike: I'm a murderer, but I'm not a homophobe. The murder thing is true. I just want you all to know I'm not a homophobe. That just shows how much the culture had shifted by that point.
Mike Owens: It's true. And because his defense at trial was the exact opposite. One thing to keep in mind is that to the extent that original narrative got over-hyped on, it's all because Matt was gay, that's because that was Aaron McKinney's defense at trial. He put on the gay panic defense or tried to the trial court very much limited how much he was able to do that. And that's the first I'd ever heard of that. That was apparently an existing defense, which people still try sometimes, the first I knew of it, where you would argue that literally straight people, we all rationally hate gayness so much that we can't control ourselves when we're confronted with it or hit on, and we panic and act irrationally and lash out. And so his defense, I was reading a quote from his attorney's closing argument the other day, “This attack started because McKinney was a chronic meth user. And it ended because he panicked about being hit on” because Matt grabbed his balls, that was the line. So his own defense is to exaggerate, and I think probably did indeed exaggerate how much of it was to do with Matt being gay, to try to not be convicted. Which, hey, I'm an attorney. I don't blame you. You'd say what you got to say. Got it, fine.
But then now 20/20 goes to him a few years later, they say, “So did you kill him because he was gay?” “No, absolutely not. That was never a part of it. I made all that up.” Okay. Fine. We believe you. We're basically going to report it as truth, that the gay thing wasn't really part of it now. Hey, this guy, Doc O'Connor says you two hooked up. I'm sorry. I don't know who that is. So, we're expected to believe McKinney now that he didn't kill Matt because he was gay. But when he denies knowing Doc Connor of ever having met this guy, yeah, he's probably lying about that part, it's, again, it's just like you pick and choose which parts of each witness or source we believe based on whatever narrative we're trying to fit this current story into.
Sarah: That’s one of the really useful things about narrative making with murderers, that you can just say that they're lying whenever what they say doesn't corroborate your story and say that they're telling the truth when it does. And nobody cares.
Mike: Yeah, they're already murderers. Any lesser sin you're going to be like, they're also probably shop-lifters. Once we know they're murderers, we can definitely be like, oh yeah, they're doing everything else too. So calling them liars after that, it's probably really easy.
Sarah: And I think there's just an overriding sense that if they say something that confirms the narrative you want, then it's them being good and saying the truth and being helpful for once, thank you. And if they're like, oh no, that's not a thing. You're like, you would say that because you're a murderer.
Mike: One of the things I think about a lot is when I was interviewing people for this big story, I did about millennials last year. I remember one person, we had talked for an hour on the phone, and I said, “Hey, thanks a lot for the interview.” And they said, “Thanks for the opportunity.” And sometimes I get nervous that people that I'm interviewing think of it as an opportunity or think of it as some way for them to get their name in the paper. Some way for them to send out a message to their friends or to some way tell themselves a narrative about themselves. It sounds like that might be happening here to some extent that this limo driver wanted to be on TV, wanted to get his name in the paper, wanted to drop a bombshell and be the center of this story and really blow up this narrative for the rest of the country and the producers weren't skeptical enough. They didn't think, look, we are a television crew, we're going to put you on TV and make you super famous. That's power. That's a weapon. And we need to be really careful in how we use that weapon, especially with TV where people's faces are on TV. And it's somewhat like you do get famous after you've been on 2020. I feel like those producers should be triple checking everything.
Sarah: And you can see how there's this unconscious collusion too, as a producer that you're constantly vulnerable to. Where someone comes to you with a story that's highly unlikely, but really colorful and gives you a detail that you can peg a whole investigation on. And it would be so hard to not be like, yeah, that must be true because I want it to be true and therefore you seem credible. I feel like one of the paradoxes of journalism too, is that if you're working with a subject matter that falls within the public interest and trying to create a more ethical world in some way, you're being able to spread that message has a lot to do with your own opportunism and your willingness to find a story.
Mike: What do you mean, how so.
Sarah: Well, this idea that, so for example, I want to talk about what happens when pregnant women are in jail awaiting trial, where there are often way fewer social and medical services. And if you're actually in prison and since there's a big backlog, you end up waiting around in jail for a long time, potentially. And there was a case in Milwaukee last year where a woman named Shadé Swayzer, went into labor in her cell and gave birth and her baby died. And the jail’s defense was well, it was profitably stillborn, which is not a great defense if that's your ideal situation in the jail that you're running. This is like one of those stories. You have that little backburner of stories that you've pitched around ,and people are like, there's not really a story there, we need to talk about how this could happen, we need to find the really compelling person who this happened to. Someone you wouldn't think would be in jail, a nice white lady. You really need to find nice white ladies to peg most social issues on. And then you're in a position where you need to maybe opportunistically try and find a nice white lady and hold on to the parts of her narrative or encourage the parts of her narrative that make it a compelling story that people will be drawn to find whatever the legal reporting equivalent of bisexuality is.
And then also where, this is a separate thing, but equally relevant to what we're talking about in order to try and talk about the problems afflicting a community, the example story that you need to bring in to interest the so called general public is someone who is somewhat unrepresentative of the broader swath of people that this is happening to.
Mike: I think about all the time that Rolling Stone campus rape article that fell apart. Because I'm a terrible person, whenever anything, whenever anyone is found to have done something, I always project myself into their shoes. And so I've never done this obviously, but I can see the temptation as a journalist. You're like, you're walking around this campus, you're talking to people about campus rape. You get this amazing story, and you don't want to check it out. You're like, man, they're saying like grab its leg. It's a gang rape in a fraternity. It's so bad. I can just see myself having the impulse to be like, I'm just not going to check this one out. It's too good. I don't want it to fall apart. But that is a function of this structure, that again, campus rape is an actual problem, and you need to find stories to hang this problem on. And there's a huge pressure to find these stories and it's really hard to find stories because there's a lot of people in the world and they don't always want to tell you about their brutal rape, and you can't get these stories from people in it. So there's just this pressure and so obviously the Rolling Stone journalists, the whole system there broke down, but the incentive is there for every journalist is to try to find the limo driver who's going to tell you the juicy thing about this person who's seen as a saint, because then you can promo it by saying Matthew Shepard was no angel and you'll get really big ratings. In the same way if some journalists came up with something about one of these Parkland kids right now, if you could find something that like David Hogg was a member of Stormfront two years ago, blah, blah, blah. And you could debunk these saintly kids. You get huge ratings for that. And there's huge incentives for journalists to seek those kinds of things.
Sarah: And then the NRA is exonerated if David Hogg stole a candy bar at one time.
Mike: And then it would become this whole gun control doesn't matter, David Hogg stole a candy bar. So, let's definitely not ban assault rifles.
Mike Owens: It’s funny too, because you guys are actually working journalists, whereas that's a career I only contemplated and never went into. But when I remember how much when I was a student at the University of Wyoming and I was writing a story, I could be like, okay, I need to get both sides. Who do I call to get the other side? Okay. I know it's going to be one of these sources. How easy it was to just pre-constructed narrative, find the people you want to say it...
Mike: The fill in the blank journalism where you're like, oh yeah, I need a quote from someone who doesn't like the new healthcare administration standards.
Mike Owens: Obviously for me, that was on a much simpler level than the kind of stuff you're talking about, where it really is big bombshell stuff that does prove an important, talk about important public issue, but it was just something that really hit me early on about how easy it is to game the system as a journalist, how you've got to be on guard to make sure that even if you're the best of intentions, trying to shine a light on something that's real and legitimate, you have to be careful about who you believe or give credibility to. I was looking back through the paper that I wrote about this in grad school and I wrote there that the prosecutors decided not to call Doc O’Connor as a witness because they doubted his credibility. I don't remember, I don't have a source for that in my papers. I don't remember where I got that idea from, but I trust myself that it was legit. It just makes me think. I'm not saying that, especially journalists, do not have to go to the same rigorous standards as you do in a court and I don't think you should have to, but it matters that you don't give a platform to someone who is just telling you a great story, but maybe not an honest one.
Sarah: Yeah. Speaking of gay youths, this is something I learned recently and found totally mind blowing and is to me an interesting example of the power of the story and the power of the debunk, where in the Leopold and Loeb murder trial, which was the famous case where two gay teenagers, which is not part of the narrative, that they were sleeping with each other at the time. And that Nathan Leopold loved Richard lobe and he just wanted to be with him and so helped out with a murder, which you shouldn't do.
But there's a famous quote from Leopold where they have him riding around and going to the different scenes of the crimes commission and the press is there with him and they're needling and needling and needling him trying to get him to say something about it, about the murder that they committed. And he finally says something to the effect of, I guess you could justify this like a scientist, like an entomologist would justify sticking a bug on a pin. And one or some of the reporters are like, oh, he's talking about the murder and that's how he felt about committing the murder, that he was a scientist conducting an experiment and he saw this kid's life as a bug.
And what he says in his book, in his memoirs which he eventually published in the fifties is that he actually meant that he felt like he was the bug, and he was being experimented on by these people who are just trying in a scientific way to figure out what the situation was and why he would do this, which I think he himself felt pretty baffled by at the time. And what I find so interesting about that is that bug quote becomes one of the hallmark quotes of the whole case, and it's proof that they were monsters and that they just had no connection to human life and no empathy at all. And then he comes out with this bombshell of I was actually just talking and thinking about myself at that time, and it wasn't a manifesto and that hasn't been absorbed.
Mike: Although Sarah, do you think there's any chance that he's lying?
Sarah: What's funny is that never occurred to me. And I think that also has to do with the fact that I was reading this memoir that he wrote when he was like 57 years old, which is around the time that he was released on parole and lived a quiet life of birdwatching after that. And through reading this book, this is on like page 50 and at that point I already felt a sense of really deep empathy for him as someone who just was a brilliant and morally vacant teenager, who would have just done anything for the guy that he loved. I was like, I could have been Nathan Leopold. We all could have been Nathan Leopold.
Mike: I was Nathan Leopold, a morally vacant teenager with inappropriate crushes.
Sarah: Yeah. And so he gets to that and I'm like, oh my God, of course, this kind of thing happens all the time. And I like you. Yeah. It did not occur to me at this moment to be like, oh yeah, it would be a very smart thing to be like, I didn't mean it.
Mike: But so Mike, so after the debunking and the debunking of the debunking, are we left back with Matthew Shepard where we started?
Guest: Yeah, I think so. Unfortunately, I think a lot of people, if they're paying any attention at all, but just like the medium level of attention, they probably have a sense that oh, that story was more complicated. I was looking back at the thing that Andrew Sullivan wrote me, and he said ‘obviously the crime was much more complicated than a random and anonymous hate crime, but that's how it has been sold. Before that becomes the reality and the drugs and robbery motives are lost, ABC news version does a useful thing.’ And I'm like the robbery and drug motives were always part of the story. Yeah, these guys, they admitted, they used drugs and they were broke, and they saw him as a target for robbery, that was always there.
So I think, yeah, we're back to where we started, if you had an accurate view of the murder from the get-go. If you didn't and we're paying much attention and all you saw was gay person killed and then assume that meant that two monsters who were not even human beings, went out that night in search of a gay person to murder and tie up like a scare crow, which is not actually quite what happened. If that's what you thought at the get-go, probably now you just think, no, that's totally false. It's all complicated. And I guess, I can't account for someone who pays that little attention, what can you do? But I think anybody who's like really pays attention. Yeah, we understood this story. We understood what happened to Matthew Shepard pretty clearly right after it happened.
When I look back, the best source of information about why he was murdered is the details of Aaron McKinney's interview with the police on October 9th. That's three days after Matthew Shepard is attacked and four days before he dies, he was still alive when Aaron McKinney was talking about how, yeah, I don't like gay people when they come on to me and we lured him out because he was gay and once he was in the car, we said, guess what? We're not gay. You're going to get jacked. As far as I know, he hasn’t talked to an attorney yet, or he wouldn't have been talking to the police. This isn't some master plan to defend themselves. This is the unvarnished immediate story. And it has the complexities, it's not like we went out and saw a gay dude to kill him.
Mike: And he was on meth. He admitted that?
Mike Owens: Yeah. At least that was part of his story at trial. I doubt he told the police that in that interview, but definitely part of his defense at the trial was yet, he's a chronic meth user and so like he needed the money. If you knew the facts of the time, if you just go back and read the contemporary accounts of the case, which I did, I'm prepping, I went back and looked at a New York Times article that was published in December of 98. This is before any of the trials have started, this is a month and a half after Matt Shepherd's attack, you can get almost everything you need to know about why he was killed, the full complexity of it from those contemporary news articles. And so this weird notion that we ever needed to go and debunk an oversimplified story is part of its own occasional journalistic temptation that I want to be the one that proves that we got it wrong.
Sarah: If people are speaking to this need to address how we covered a story to simply back then, and now we can countenance how complicated it is. You know why this story? Because there are a lot of stories that we covered much more. I don't think that this was an over-simplistic coverage either. I'm sure at the time, when anyone becomes a symbol of a movement, then their lives become simplified in some way. But in both versions of this story, in both the original version and the quote debunked version, two people tortured and killed a very young man in a horrible way for no reason. You don't have to kill someone when you rob them. The robbery element doesn't really matter. So why is this the story that we're trying to prove our complexity on?
Mike Owens: From what I know from the later elaborations of the story, he really gets into the idea that Matt was deeply involved as I mentioned. So this might have been an actual drug execution, so that there was a reason. It was related to him maybe stiffing someone on a drug deal. I don’t know. And just one of the things I always find so interesting about this, Laramie Wyoming is at the time, at least it was a town of about 26,000 people. Yeah, sure, plenty of people did meth, it’s a rural town in the west, especially at the time, was common, but you read these ideas and it’s like, how big was the underground meth scene of detailed networks of we’ve got to off people. And also, I've seen claims that Matt and Aaron McKinney were both actually gay prostitutes. And I'm like, how many gay prostitutes were in Laramie? I didn't know about them when I lived there. You know what I mean? It's easy for me to hear how ridiculous some of these theories sound because I lived in this very small town in a very small state. Again, I'm not saying no one's ever been killed over drugs in a small town, it happens, but you come away from it getting this the Godfather-style like network of crime families and stuff. And it's like in this tiny little town.
Mike: My extremely inflammatory hot take on this is that I watched the Laramie Project when it first, when it came out as a movie, which I forget the year, but I'm pretty sure it was before the ABC 2020 special. And I fucking hated it. And the reason I hated it was because it was this saintliness narrative, for understandable reasons. People wanted to get more attention on the problem of homophobia in America and homophobic motivated assaults in America. And one of the ways to get mainstream America to do that is to create a saint that has been murdered. It is totally understandable that this happened, but it is also extremely unfortunate because sometimes people who suck get murdered and that is also bad.
Sarah: Do you think that then maybe the later attempt to complicate the narrative is a well-intentioned, but fundamentally, when it comes down to the details of the actual story misguided attempt to say, in 1998, we had to make the argument that hate crimes and homophobia are bad because sometimes when you're trying to kill a gay person, you accidentally kill someone really great. And that's just a regular gay person.
Mike Owens: Not just a run of the mill disposable gay person.
Sarah: Like a really nice one.
Mike Owens: I have no problem with criticism of the Laramie Project, even though I found it very moving. I will never forget the line that bothered me the most. I don't remember what character says it, but they make some joke where they're like, “I told him he was afraid of faggots, and that's why he killed him. Now you're going to prison and you're going to be a faggot.” And yeah, it was totally a prison rape joke thrown in with the F bomb. You get the idea that, okay, this guy is using that offensive, awful word, but he's doing it in a way that we all like, a prison rape joke. It's funny because now I think the culture has turned more against those types of prison rape jokes, thankfully, although you still hear them sometimes.
Mike: America is the only country in the world that has prison rape. Prison rape is something that is very preventable and is really not cool.
Sarah: We have it because we like having it and we all accept that it’s part of the deal.
Mike Owens: Exactly. I like to think that wouldn't happen now, but it also supports that idea that yeah, we all agree being gay is pretty bad, but you shouldn't kill someone for it, but if you do, your punishment is you have to be gay yourself.
Sarah: But also, being gay is fundamentally scary and it hurts and it's something that's imposed on you in a place that you want to escape from, right?
Mike: I think we should end with what we've learned. And I think what I learned is that these cases are always more complicated than we think they are. And that saintliness, I think, is something we should be super wary of. And a lot of social problems don't have convenient victims. And that makes them really hard to talk about.
Sarah: I've learned that when a case that captivated the nation bobs up again, and there's some election debunking information, that it's good to look at it from a perspective of, is this something we're hearing about because it's interesting or because it's something that we can be counted on as consumers to find interesting or intriguing. Because that reminds me of when there was a guy who claimed to confess to being JonBenet Ramsey’s killer, and there were no details that really bore that out, but it was interesting. It was interesting that he said it, he seemed nuts, he was on TV for a few days. You have these stories that are willingness to grapple with a social issue, get pegged to, and then if we can destroy the stories or question them in some way that allows the consumer, the citizen, to absolve themselves and wash their hands with the story, then they can wash their hands with the whole situation.
Mike: What did you learn, Mike?
Mike Owens: I think that's true. That's absolutely true. The end result of that is that yes, if you build a victim up to be particularly saintly or angelic, it's going to make the ideological opponents of making structural and societal changes, it's going to make their job easier. The more you build them up to be a Saint, the easier it will be for them to penetrate that narrative and knock it down. But having said that you don't even have to do that. You don't have to turn them into an angel or a saint, they're still going to come after the victim.
Sarah: Yeah. And that gives us another pattern to look forward to too, cause if you see people refuting something that no one actually said, Michael Brown was no angel, that's interesting. No one ever said that. So you're saying that you think a black teenager needs to be literally an angel in order to not deserve to be killed by the police for no reason. So, we're learning a pattern of tells.
Mike: I think another central lesson of this is that we should be really skeptical of any sorts of podcasts that attempt to do any debunking because debunking is really problematic. I just think that the institution of debunking is really bad, and we should stick with the cultural narratives that we have.
Sarah: They're all fine.