Man Pleads Guilty in Shephard Slaying
By Jim Hughes
Denver Post Staff Writer
April 6 - LARAMIE, Wyo. - A Laramie roofer on Monday pleaded
guilty to the murder of gay University of Wyoming student Matthew
Shepard, eliminating the need for the capital murder trial that
was scheduled to begin Wednesday.
If a jury had found him guilty, Russell Henderson, 21, could have
been sentenced to death.
Instead, in a plea bargain initiated by a letter to Albany County
Attorney Cal Rerucha on April 1, Henderson sidestepped the
premeditated first-degree murder charge, pleading guilty instead
to felony murder and kidnapping in exchange for a sentence of two
terms of life. District Judge Jeffrey Donnell ordered Henderson
to serve the terms back to back despite public defender Wyatt
Skaggs' request that Henderson's jail time run concurrently.
After the hearing, both Skaggs and Rerucha said it is unlikely
Henderson will ever leave prison. Under Wyoming law, only a
governor's pardon could get him out. Skaggs said he couldn't
imagine any governor doing so. He declared the plea bargain a
victory, saying that his goal all along has been to keep his
client alive.
Henderson, along with his friend Aaron McKinney, was accused of
luring the 21-year-old Shepard out of a Laramie bar and driving
him to a subdivision outside of town where they pistol-whipped
him, tied him to a fence and left him for dead on Oct. 6.
McKinney is scheduled to face a capital-murder trial of his own
on Aug. 9. Neither Rerucha nor Skaggs would say whether or not
Henderson will testify in that trial, though neither ruled it
out.
In delivering his judgment, Donnell addressed the widespread
belief that Shepard's murder was a hate crime, based on
investigators' early statements that Shepard was killed at least
in part because he was gay.
The cruel imagery of Shepard lying alone outside for 16 hours,
his skull crushed and his face made unrecognizable by the rain of
blows quickly became international news last fall, inspiring
rallies against hate-crimes around the country and calls from gay
civil-rights groups and President Bill Clinton for state laws
addressing hate crimes.
But Donnell called that perception of Shepard's murder simplistic
and suggested that the motives of the young man's killers
probably entailed more than homophobia alone.
After the hearing, both attorneys also downplayed Shepard's
homosexuality as a factor in his killing. But Rerucha said the
gay-bashing question should be answered one way or the other in
McKinney's trial.
Regardless of the motives, Shepard's murder was a "heinous
crime, savage and brutal in its nature, and evidencing of a total
disrespect of the dignity of human life,'' Donnell said in
sentencing Henderson. "At the very least, you stood by while
he was struck again and again. You left him there for 16 hours,
knowing full well that he was there.
"I wonder, Mr. Henderson, whether you fully realize the
gravity of what you've done, even as you stand here today,''
Donnell said. "The pain that you caused here, Mr. Henderson,
will never go away, never. It will always be here.''
Henderson had admitted to as much on the stand, testifying under
oath as to what happened that night. He described a night in
which he and McKinney drank a few pitchers of beer at a bar near
the University of Wyoming campus before moving on to another bar,
The Fireside Lounge, where they bought one more pitcher and met
Shepard. It was McKinney who wanted to rob the student, he said.
He made no mention of Shepard's homosexuality or how McKinney had
convinced the student to leave with them; during McKinney's
arraignment last fall, Rerucha said that the two had pretended to
be gay to earn Shepard's trust.
Other than that key issue, the events Henderson described fit the
chronology investigators had compiled last October: Henderson
drove the pickup truck McKinney had borrowed from his father out
of town, with McKinney and Shepard as passengers. As they neared
the spot where Shepard was about to be tortured, McKinney asked
for Shepard's wallet and hit him with the butt of a handgun when
he didn't comply.
When they got to an isolated spot and got out of the truck,
McKinney continued the beating, Henderson said, asking him at one
point to get some rope out of the back of the truck to tie
Shepard to a fence. Henderson got the rope and tied Shepard up,
he confessed, saying McKinney then resumed the beating.
Henderson admitted he did nothing to stop his friend until near
the end of the episode.
"Matthew looked really bad, so I told him to stop hitting
him,'' he said. "At that time, he hit me with the gun''
above the mouth.
"I hope that, one day, you will be able to find it in your
hearts to forgive me,'' Henderson said, facing Shepards' parents
during a statement he made later in the hearing. "I know
what I did was wrong. I'm sorry for what I did, and I'm ready to
pay my debt for what I did.''
In addition to Judy and Dennis Shepard, members of Henderson's
family also were present for Monday's proceeding. Both Shepards
and Lucy Thompson, Henderson's grandmother, addressed the court,
describing the impact the murder has had on their lives.
In an emotional plea for leniency in the sentencing of her
grandson, Thompson acknowledged the Shepard family's pain and
thanked them, implying that they may have had some say in
approving the plea bargain that spared Henderson the possibility
of landing on death row.
"We are so sorry for the tragic loss of your son and
brother, Matthew,'' she said. "You have shown us such mercy
and we are so grateful.''
In their comments, the Shepards described their son as a caring,
generous young man.
"There's a hole in my life that I can never fill,'' Dennis
Shepard said. "When we eat dinner, there's a place set for
Matt that we know will never again be filled by his laughter, his
bad puns and his stories.
"Remember this for the rest of your life,'' he told
Henderson. Judy Shepard described their arrival at her son's room
at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, where he was kept
alive for five days after the beating. There, the Shepards found
an "emotionless, unaware young man'' whom Judy Shepard said
she could only identify as her son by a bump on his left ear and
the clear blue pupil of one of his partially opened eyes.
"But the twinkle of life wasn't there anymore,'' she said.
At the end of her statement, Shepard turned and addressed
Henderson, seated only five feet to her right, directly.
"At times, I don't think you're worthy of my recognizing
your existence,'' she said. "You murdered my son. ... I hope
you never experience a day or night without experiencing the
terror, humiliation, the hopelessness and helplessness that he
experienced that night.''
When asked after the hearing whether or not justice had been
served, Rerucha said that was an impossible goal in a murder
case.
"You tell me how we could ever make that right,'' he said.
"We can't. We're human beings. We do the best we can.''
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