The Book of Matt--A Laramie Project

[TexasTowelie]

Sometimes, you don’t know what to think. You hear both sides of a story, both conflicting. Rumors are whispered, denials issued, and you’re left to make up your own mind. Right or wrong, there are some things you’ll never know for sure. And that goes for what’s inside The Book of Matt.

In early 2000, Stephen Jimenez went to Laramie, Wyo., to start work on a story for which he thought he had an “abundance of detail.” He had, in fact, planned on writing a screenplay about the murder of Matthew Shepard.

Laramie residents were friendly, he says, and it didn’t take long to find the prosecutor who won conviction of the two men who murdered Shepard. He hinted to Jimenez that there was more to the story than the news media had reported.

Intrigued, Jimenez dug for information and consequently, he says, discovered corruption and odd loose ends in the Shepard murder (and other cases). He spoke with witnesses and with people who knew Shepard and his killers. And, he claims, with some who were overlooked or inadequately interviewed by officials during the investigation. He believes that he was physically endangered many times because someone wanted him to stop asking questions.

More at http://www.dallasvoice.com/laramie-project-10161084.html .

[Behind the Aegis]

1. I have read bits of this (stuff that was released).

It is nothing but speculation, rumor, and innuendo. Unless the book actually has something factual, it is nothing but a hit piece by a useful idiot, an Uncle Roy*, if you will. The fact that Andrew "ML" Sullivan is pimping him and his book just makes it more likely it is filled with rancid, diseased bullshit.

*Uncle Roy, a similar usage of "Uncle Tom," but changed to meet the GLBT community. I use the name "Roy" based on Roy Cohn, a notorious anti-Semitic (he was a Jew) homophobe (he was gay).

[fizzgig]

2. we're about an hour south of laramie and matthew died in the hospital here

the local paper did a q&a with the author earlier this month

Question: This was not the story you set out to write, was it? What changed your story’s focus?

Answer: It was not. I went to Laramie in February of 2000 to do research for a screenplay for a television movie. Obviously, when the crime happened in October of 1998, I was appalled, shocked, horrified, like everyone was. But it was not until (Aaron) McKinney’s trial a year later — when it was ending in early November 1999 — that I began to think about the possibility of going to Laramie to work on this story.

What interested me was that the (case) record had been unsealed — it had been sealed for the whole year until right after the trial. I was really interested in going through it. I hoped to talk to people who had been witnesses because they had also been under a gag order during that same year. I started to go through documents at the courthouse, met the prosecutor Cal Rerucha and asked him if he would help educate me about the case, which he agreed to do. He initially was circling me like a fox, really trying to decide what my motives were for writing about the case. He didn’t want to inflict any more harm on the Shepard family; he said they’ve had enough. It was really eight months into that research process.

I had put together a first draft of the screenplay when I found this anonymous letter in a file at the courthouse which ... stated that Aaron McKinney’s gay panic defense was false and Aaron was bisexual and that he was very familiar with gay guys and gay bars, and it actually named someone in Laramie — a real person — Doc O’Connor. I knew Doc O’Connor had been a friend of Matthew Shepard’s. Suddenly, in my mind, I thought, what if there is some truth to this?

Now, obviously an anonymous letter is not, from a journalistic standpoint, credible or reliable. But it certainly got me thinking and that was the beginning of my decision to start to work on this case more as a journalist.

the rest here