I have driven this winding, two-lane county road on the north side of Laramie dozens of times since this book was first published. By day the views are starkly beautiful — rolling high-desert prairie and rugged hills, a smattering of ranch-style houses and barns, and big Wyoming skies. The Snowy Range on the western horizon and the herds of antelope that roam free in these open spaces complete a picture that is soothingly pastoral. This wind-beaten land and the creatures living here momentarily restore my sense of balance and quiet hope: hope that we may yet pull through the ecocide and other emergencies looming before us; that we Americans will do much, much more to halt our headlong plunge toward the abyss of climate catastrophe.
But when I drive Rogers Canyon Road alone at night — returning to my friends’ home on a steep hillside near the mouth of the canyon — I replay a litany of obsessive thoughts about one of the mysterious killings that happened two decades ago. There is no way he drove her all the way out here with positive intentions, I tell myself reflexively. Just past the turnoff to my friends’ long driveway, nearly eight miles from Laramie, this curving, paved road turns to dirt.
My conviction is strongest on winter nights when the temperature has dropped below zero and a dusting of fresh snow whips across the prairie. If he was hungry for sex, or if they both were, this is the last place they would go for a tryst on a freezing January night. How could anyone believe the two were out for a casual, late-night drive when things suddenly turned bad?
By the time I park in my friends’ gravel driveway and walk under a vault of stars to their back door, I’m all but certain: The killer had a plan.
On the night of January 2, 1999 — according to the narrative pieced together by law enforcement — Cindy Lee Dixon, a forty-year-old motel housekeeper, was crossing a downtown Laramie street when an alleged stranger, Dennis Leroy Menefee, twenty-eight, pulled up at a stop sign and asked if she needed a ride. Dixon said yes and got into his car. Menefee later claimed he’d been on his way to the grocery store to buy milk for his wife and child.
The following morning, Dixon’s body was discovered on a desolate stretch of Rogers Canyon Road, about nine and a half miles from town. She was clad in a pink nylon jacket, t-shirt, and jeans when she was found. According to a statement of “essential facts” filed by the county prosecutor after Menefee’s arrest some three months later:
The Defendant [Menefee] admitted to a third party that he had picked up Ms. Dixon while she was walking down the street, and had taken her to the Rogers Canyon area to have sexual intercourse. The Defendant stated that Ms. Dixon did not want to participate in the sexual encounter and told him no, they argued, and the Defendant forced his victim to have sexual intercourse. Ms. Dixon called the Defendant a rapist, and the Defendant kicked her out of his car and left the area, abandoning Ms. Dixon…The temperature at the time of the above incident was approximately thirty degrees below zero, and approximately forty degrees below zero with the wind chill. Ms. Dixon died as a result of the above act, and her frozen body was discovered at approximately 8:30 A.M. on January 3, 1999.
Cindy Dixon’s killing could be considered unremarkable if only for the plague of violent crimes America faces daily. However, this one occurred in the infamous town where, just three months earlier, the fatal beating of Matthew Shepard drew international media attention and became a lightning rod in the struggle for gay rights. When news spread locally that Dixon’s body had been found in Rogers Canyon, many believed it was an ill-fated coincidence that Dixon was the mother of Russell Henderson, then in the county jail awaiting trial for Shepard’s murder. Officially, investigators made no connections between the two homicides. Shepard prosecutor Cal Rerucha told me in interviews that he and police initially “thought it was [Cindy’s] husband, Charlie Dixon, who [killed her].” Others in law enforcement had long assumed that Dixon’s life would not end well. It was only a matter of time, they’d remarked privately.
In retrospect, it seems hardly surprising that the national media reported ravenously on the Shepard case for more than a year, while the rape-murder of Cindy Dixon went virtually unreported. Dennis Menefee was arrested in Florida and returned to Laramie in mid-April 1999, barely a week after Russell had been coerced into a last-minute plea bargain in exchange for two life sentences. A few months later, Menefee’s first-degree murder charge was dropped, and he was quietly allowed to plead guilty to manslaughter. Then, in another shrewd move, prosecutors waited until after Aaron McKinney had been convicted in a jury trial and sentenced to two life terms in November 1999 before they meted out justice to Menefee. By that time, the national media had left town and were unlikely to probe further into Dixon’s killing.
Menefee was a previously convicted felon (robberies in 1990 and 1994) who was deeply involved in the Laramie drug trade, both as a dealer and an addict. According to Menefee, his drugs of choice in the late 1990s were “cocaine, acid, and weed,” and he sold “crank” (methamphetamine). A self-described “born again Christian” who later held a union job in Ohio “putting down natural gas pipeline,” he said that he had only turned to meth after the death of his father, to help dull the pain. Meth also helped him to stay awake during long shifts. He insisted that he’d never cared for meth (“I always preferred cocaine”), but he quickly became addicted to the drug, started selling it, and eventually manufactured his own.
Earlier, while living in Laramie, Menefee had been a friend of Aaron McKinney and others in McKinney’s circle. Those who knew Menefee’s history were puzzled by his four-to-nine-year prison sentence for Dixon’s murder, especially when they later learned that he’d been released in less than five years. Some suspected he’d become a snitch in exchange for a lesser sentence. How else could one explain Menefee’s relatively short prison term when compared to that of Russell Henderson, who was punished with a double life sentence despite having no previous felony record?
Two decades after Shepard and Dixon were murdered, new interviews suggest that the crimes may have had more in common than many knew or were willing to talk about at the time. Menefee was not only a friend of McKinney’s, whom he had affectionately nicknamed “Squirrel,” but he was also an integral part of a network of drug dealers that included several of McKinney’s friends: Rod Becker, Eric “Tex” Siegrist, Cory Warpness, “Little Jake” Voogd, and others. All four men have stated that they left the drug world behind years ago, yet confirm having sold drugs for the same suppliers for whom McKinney worked during the period leading up to Shepard’s murder.
But there’s another new piece to the puzzle surrounding the Shepard and Dixon murders: Dennis Menefee was well acquainted with Matt Shepard and had first met him in 1997, a year before the murders. The two were introduced by a mutual friend who worked at the University of Wyoming.
Although I’d long been aware that McKinney and Shepard were not strangers when they met up on the night of Shepard’s attack, the new revelation of an association between Menefee and Shepard forced me to rethink the complicated motives behind both murders.
Since publication of the first paperback edition of The Book of Matt in 2014, I’ve continued to interview new sources with firsthand knowledge of the Shepard case. Some contacted me initially on social media or through my publisher, and one element has been consistent: many who lived in Laramie when the murder occurred remain perplexed, even offended, that it has taken so long for the real motives and circumstances behind the tragedy to be discussed openly.
After being smeared repeatedly for daring to question how the media and self-interested parties constructed a false narrative of the murder — I’ve been called everything from a tool of the Far Right to a “conspiracy theorist” and “self-hating gay man” — I’m no longer surprised that some Americans prefer a tidy, sanitized fable of Matt Shepard as a gay martyr and human rights hero than to grapple with the more genuinely tragic circumstances surrounding his killing. More alarming are the growing number of corporate media organizations, academic institutions, and special interest groups that have become intensely focused on opinion-making, self-serving social and political agendas, and so-called identity politics, while pushing fact-based research and knowledge to the margins.
Even in Laramie where the majority of long-time residents are aware that drugs played a central role in the Shepard murder, the administration of the University of Wyoming has steadfastly refused to allow candid discourse about the tragedy, out of fear that a small minority of staff and students may be offended. On three separate occasions, faculty and staff have invited me to speak on campus about The Book of Matt, only to have the invitations rescinded or postponed to some indefinite date in the future. It’s a curious phenomenon at a public, taxpayer-funded university in a state that has long had some of the highest rates of meth abuse and meth-related crime in the nation. More than twenty-one years after the murder, the corrosive drug epidemic — and its irrefutable role in Shepard’s death — is still the elephant in the room that some refuse to address.
During my earliest research in Laramie, beginning two decades ago, the exploding crisis of meth abuse and meth-related crime was a shameful secret that few were willing to talk about. Some were simply afraid to discuss what they knew about the hidden personalities and circumstances surrounding Shepard’s murder. But the state of Wyoming was already in the throes of a devastating meth crisis at the time he was killed. This same epidemic ripped through other economically vulnerable rural communities, Native American reservations, and — as my colleague Andrew Sullivan discussed in his introduction to this new edition — urban gay enclaves, beginning with San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, and gradually spreading to other cities and towns, including Denver, where Matt’s addiction took hold.
Though times have changed and addiction to heroin and opioids has lately garnered more attention, Wyoming still carries the stigma of rising rates of meth abuse and meth-related crime. Regrettably, two law enforcement officers in the Shepard case adamantly denied the role of meth in Shepard’s 1998 murder, not to mention the drug motives behind a rash of other homicides and violent crimes in the Laramie area. One of the officers, Rob DeBree, is now deceased. The other one, Dave O’Malley, has little support when he claims drugs played no role in Shepard’s life. An official police report contradicts the claim. The 1998 report, by Sergeant Jeff Bury, recounts an interview he, O’Malley, and DeBree conducted with Matt’s close friends, Alex Trout and Walt Boulden — the same friends who spread news of a gay bashing: Trout and Boulden “stated that…when [Shepard] was in Denver…he had gotten into some cocaine use and had also participated in methamphetamine use.”
In a 2004 interview with New York’s Gay City News, Judy Shepard also contradicts O’Malley. Mrs. Shepard was asked, “Did Matt seek treatment for his crystal meth use? Were you aware of Matthew’s crystal meth use?” She responded, “I was. I only know that he did meth, but I don’t think he did it in Laramie. He went there to get away from that. He had lived in Denver and I know he was using there but I don’t know how much. He left Denver to get away from it.”
Tragically, Matt did not get away from meth when he left Denver for Laramie. More than nine law enforcement officers have spoken on the record about the role of meth in his murder. Three came forward publicly for the first time after The Book of Matt was published. In a statement dated October 24, 2018, former Laramie Police Sergeant Mitch Cushman wrote:
During the initial investigation [of the homicide], the predominant discussion was centered around drugs as a motivation for the murder. Since I had a stake in this investigation, I had conversations with detectives and other officers involved as the investigation progressed. I had some personal knowledge of Aaron McKinney and knew he had gone through a considerable amount of money he received from a settlement from the death of his mother. My educated opinion at the start of the investigation was that drugs were the motive behind the murder and that opinion was bolstered by conversations with other officers and detectives during and at the conclusion of the investigation. The more information I gather now, the more that conclusion becomes unchangeable.
Cushman was referring to the wrongful-death settlement of nearly $100,000 that Aaron McKinney received in 1995 and the well-known fact that McKinney squandered most of the money on drugs and partying. Local law enforcement officers were quite familiar with McKinney’s drug history between 1995 and October 1998, when he attacked Shepard.
Another former sergeant in the Laramie Police Department, Mark Beck, who recorded (along with county sheriff’s detective Rob DeBree) the only complete statement from Russell Henderson, stated unequivocally: “Methamphetamine was the root cause of the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard. That people continue to deny that meth had a major role in this tragedy is a tragedy in itself.”
Along with former Albany County prosecutor Cal Rerucha, two of Rerucha’s former deputy prosecutors, Ken Brown and Richard Bohling, agree that meth was the driving force behind the murder, not anti-gay hate.
Are these veteran law enforcement officers with firsthand knowledge of the case “conspiracy theorists” as well?
For a small glimpse into the magnitude of the drug crisis in the Laramie community since Shepard’s 1998 murder, consider this sampling of loosely connected facts:
In 2016, Aaron Kreifels, the mountain biker who at age eighteen had discovered Shepard severely beaten and tied to a fence post, was convicted in Lincoln, Nebraska on charges of drug trafficking and unlawful possession of a firearm. Law enforcement officers confiscated $18,000 in drug proceeds in Kreifels’s apartment. He had also been convicted previously of a drug-related felony in California.
On October 10, 2017, Russell Henderson’s former girlfriend, Chasity Pasley, age thirty-nine, was found dead from a drug overdose in her car in a Salt Lake City parking lot. Pasley, who had struggled with meth addiction at the time of the Shepard murder, had seemed to turn her life around after spending a year in prison for helping to conceal evidence in the case. She attended college, began a professional career, gave birth to a son, and then succumbed to addiction again — this time to heroin and opioids.
Ryan Bopp, a friend of McKinney’s who traded his .357 Magnum (which became the murder weapon) in exchange for meth a few days before the attack on Matt, died in 2010 at the age of thirty-five. A mechanic and father of two young sons, Bopp had moved back to rural Pennsylvania where he’d grown up and struggled for years to put the drug world behind him. After battling meth addiction he turned to smoking crack, and from crack he moved on to oxycontin. Family members said that “he was trying to get clean” and “was going through a bad withdrawal” when he succumbed to heart failure.
Mike Hopkins, the sixty-nine-year-old co-owner of the Buckhorn, Laramie’s most popular and longest-running bar (frequented by Aaron McKinney, Matt Shepard, Doc O’Connor, and many of their friends and associates), was killed in a car crash on April 27, 2019, on Highway 487, north of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. Hopkins was driving to Casper in his Ford Ranger when his vehicle veered into the southbound lane and collided head-on with a Subaru Forester. Both Hopkins and the Subaru’s driver, fifty-seven-year-old Jonathan Schmidt, died from injuries sustained in the crash.
According to news reports, “the Wyoming Highway Patrol is investigating driver’s fatigue on the part of Hopkins as a contributing factor in the crash.” Sources close to Hopkins, whom I’d met at the Buckhorn in the early years of my investigation, have indicated that his meth addiction had gotten the best of him in recent years. They said toxicology reports following the crash had revealed “a huge amount” of meth in his system.
The Buckhorn has a long, colorful history, including a wealth of anecdotes about the shady personalities and illicit activities witnessed on the premises — from a homespun meth lab run out of the basement to former bartender and convicted meth trafficker, Jason Spencer, who, by his own reckoning, may have been the first person to bring meth to Laramie, circa 1993. After he closed the bar some nights in 1998, Spencer joined a group of friends for after-hours revelry at the Fireside Lounge a few blocks away — a group that included Shepard and others from his Denver “family.” When the law caught up with Spencer in the early 2000s, his fellow meth trafficker, “Mark K” Rohrbacher, was arrested and convicted as well. Rohrbacher, a friend of Shepard’s from Denver, confessed to transporting meth from Denver to Laramie during the five-year period from 1997–2002. Rohrbacher was also well acquainted with Aaron McKinney from the same circles.
In the years following Matt’s murder, former limousine driver “Doc” O’Connor, who had been both an intimate friend of Matt’s and an occasional sex partner of McKinney’s, fell in love with a strapping young local man named Dennis Welsbacher. The feelings were mutual, but Welsbacher — like McKinney before him — began having chronic problems with the law. While incarcerated for meth-related felonies Welsbacher exchanged love letters and a ring with Doc, and the two pledged to marry. Welsbacher even began signing his last name “O’Connor.” Eventually their romance fizzled and Welsbacher wound up with a female partner, but not before he allegedly had a cellblock affair with Albert Castaneda, a gay former cell mate of McKinney’s in the county jail. (Castaneda, who has since died, is one of many gay and bisexual men who said they saw no indication that McKinney was homophobic.)
My extensive reporting found that McKinney was mostly closeted around his homosexual and bisexual activities, with the exception of occasional threesomes and sex for money or drugs. Kristen Price, his former girlfriend and the mother of his child, said that he tried to convince her on several occasions to have a threesome with him and “one of his guy friends.”
Doc O’Connor, on the other hand, has been frank about his bisexuality since my first encounter with him in the early 2000s. The caricature-like portrayal of Doc in the stage version of The Laramie Project has little in common with the wily, bawdy, hard-bitten man whom I’ve interviewed countless times.
On September 26, 2015, Doc sent me a text message accompanied by grisly selfies of his bloodied and bruised face. He said he’d been assaulted by a guy staying at his home outside Laramie, John Schnitker. That night in Laramie, Schnitker, age thirty, got into a fight with another friend, fifty-nine-year-old Clint Gartman, and stabbed him to death with a “Chicago Cutlery” knife.
At Schnitker’s murder trial the following year, his defense attorney offered a terse description of the friendship between the two men: “Clint Gartman was a methamphetamine dealer, and John Schnitker was a methamphetamine addict.” According to the attorney, Schnitker had given Gartman “several hundred dollars” for meth earlier that day, but Gartman hadn’t provided Schnitker with any drugs in return. Aspects of the case appeared to echo Matt’s murder seventeen years earlier.
Doc, who took the witness stand in Schnitker’s trial, later acknowledged to me that he’d been sexually intimate with Schnitker. “John went both ways,” he said, “just like Aaron [McKinney] and Dennis [Welsbacher].”
John Schnitker’s criminal and drug history, much like McKinney’s and Welsbacher’s, had begun during his teen years. And like McKinney, Schnitker was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison — minus the politically charged media spectacle that accompanied the 1999 convictions of McKinney and Henderson.
In April 2019, I traveled to Belmont Correctional Institution in St. Clairsville, Ohio, to interview Dennis Menefee, then forty-nine. My interest in speaking with Menefee stemmed not only from his role in the mysterious death of Cindy Dixon but also from what I had learned about some of his activities in the years since. He was now serving two life terms “plus an additional 26 years” for raping a nine-year-old girl and for a related weapons charge.
Prior to our interview, Menefee stipulated that he would not talk about his Ohio rape conviction because he was still exploring his legal options. Yet public records of the case, including his guilty plea, had left me feeling queasy — in part because I had been a sexual abuse victim myself, beginning when I was ten. My decision to continue investigating the Shepard and Dixon murders was undoubtedly influenced by my knowledge of the sexual abuse Shepard had suffered as a boy, and the lasting impact of that trauma in his chronic self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. Russell Henderson had also been a victim of childhood trauma, having experienced and witnessed many varieties of domestic violence and abuse. Knowing what I’ve learned about Henderson’s background — from multiple sources, including regular face-to-face conversations with him that have spanned more than seventeen years — I am no longer surprised that he felt paralyzed with fear and grew numb after he had tried to stop the beating of Shepard, only to have McKinney strike him across the face with the murder weapon.
Sadly, there’s a tragic symmetry in the overlapping fates of both victims and perpetrators in the Shepard and Dixon murders. Henderson, for one, was a perpetrator (an accomplice in the circumstances that led to Shepard’s death) and a victim (the rape/killing of his mother, Cindy Dixon). It could also be argued that Henderson was deprived of his constitutional right to a fair trial through the deliberate concealment of essential facts about the preexisting relationship between Aaron McKinney and Matt Shepard.
With the passage of time, new sources and evidence that support my conclusions continue to accrue. For nearly three decades the Laramie community has been in the throes of a corrosive drug crisis that many locals have openly acknowledged, while a handful of others still seek to deny it for political reasons. But it is only within this larger context that the complexities of both murders — and their parallels to other drug-related violence — can be grasped in a meaningful way.
In the 1980s and well into the ’90s, the drug of choice in Laramie for those who could afford it was cocaine. By the late 1990s, meth had begun to replace it, because meth was cheaper and more readily available. Eventually, as government controls were put in place to curb the meth crisis nationwide, a new epidemic of heroin and opioid addiction arose. Instead of being a town infected with rampant homophobia, Laramie, like many other communities across America, is a microcosm of the failed decadeslong “War on Drugs” and a revealing case study in how addiction and drug-related crime continue to destroy individuals, families, and our collective social fabric on a massive scale.
By the time I arrived for my prison interview with Dennis Menefee, I’d long been aware that Menefee had been involved in drug dealing and counterfeiting in Wyoming prior to his convictions for manslaughter and the rape of a child. Because he had dropped tantalizing hints in a letter to me, I felt compelled to meet him face to face. After admitting in a letter that he had been a friend of Aaron McKinney, he added, “One thing you were right about was the fact I did sell drugs in [Laramie]…I did know Mathew Sheperd [sic]…I can also tell you about the mexican mafia.”
Even before probing into the specifics of Menefee’s relationship with McKinney — and how he knew Shepard — I was already on edge knowing the cold facts surrounding Menefee’s 2017 rape conviction in Stark County, Ohio. On September 26, 2016, he had abducted and sexually assaulted a nine-year-old girl who was walking home from the Massillon Public Library. According to the victim, “[Menefee] pulled up to me. He said he was a cop and said people were calling the police saying I was a runaway…He was too close and he grabbed me. He threw me in the truck and drove off to a parking lot behind a [restaurant]. I…tried pushing him off and fighting him. But he was too heavy and started punching me.” The girl also told investigators that Menefee had been wearing a traffic vest.
An Ohio news outlet that covered the court proceedings, CantonRep.com, reported that “Menefee raped her and threatened to kill the girl if she told anybody. The victim described the black eyes and bruises she suffered, and her favorite outfit being ruined with blood.” In her court statement the girl said she still had nightmares.
Just as he had pled guilty to manslaughter for the 1999 death of Cindy Dixon in Laramie, Menefee pled guilty to rape and other charges in the Ohio case. But there was no lenience this time: he was sentenced to two life terms with no chance of parole on each of the rape counts. A kidnapping charge was dismissed as part of his plea agreement.
According to CantonRep.com:
Given an opportunity to address the court, Menefee stood up, bracing his hands on a table. Hunched over, [he] spoke in a low voice, sometimes mumbling before his voice trailed off with emotion. He said he was “ashamed” and “sorry”…“I feel like a monster,” he said, sobbing. “…I just hope that anybody using any drugs…and not seeking help for it, I’d like to be able to talk to them…and help them get help and avoid making a mistake like I made, and I deserve every minute I spend in prison.”
The sentencing judge agreed with Menefee’s self-assessment. “You’re the bogeyman,” she told him.
When I learned that Menefee had also been indicted on charges involving the rape of a fifteen-year-old girl in June 2015 in another Ohio county, I wondered again how and why he had served less than five years for killing Cindy Dixon. In this earlier case in Port Washington, Ohio, Menefee had been charged with rape, sexual battery, unlawful sexual conduct with a minor, and sexual imposition. But the prosecution was dropped, “dismissed without prejudice,” after Menefee’s conviction in the Massillon case. According to an assistant county prosecutor, the victim and a key witness saw no benefit in disrupting their lives with the anguish of a trial since Menefee was already in prison for the rest of his life. Still, the child rape charges could potentially be filed again.
As I write these words, I’m all too aware of the post-trauma that these and uncountable other victims of childhood sexual assault will most surely face. As a sixty-six-year-old survivor who only recently gained the right to file a civil lawsuit against the Catholic Church for the years of sexual and physical abuse I endured as a boy, I’ve long been aware that the path to survival is fraught with the impulse to self-medicate. Matt Shepard, Aaron McKinney, Cindy Dixon, Russell Henderson, Dennis Menefee, the aforementioned rape victims in Ohio — how might their lives and fates, and those of their families, have followed a different course had substance abuse not been involved?
When Dennis Menefee was shown into a quiet conference room next to the warden’s office and we began the interview, witnessed by an Ohio corrections official, I could sense his wariness — not so much distrust in me personally, but something more fundamental, perhaps ancient. Could he trust anyone in the world?
I was surprised nonetheless by his earnest personality and weathered good looks, nothing like the strung-out mug shots in my research file. He didn’t come across as the “monster” and “bogeyman” I’d been expecting. As he grew more comfortable, he spoke of his longtime passion for boxing and his work as a trainer in a Pittsburgh gym. He also told me about his rock-solid Christian faith, which he had alluded to in letters. “I’m a saved man,” he said.
Having interviewed many inmates over several decades, I’ve heard many “come to Jesus” stories. I’m not naive about the inclination of hardened convicts to spin their violent exploits into tales of sudden redemption. But I did feel Menefee was hungry, even desperate, for someone, anyone, to finally ask him to recount how, when, where, and why his life had gone off the rails. Perhaps he hoped to reconstruct, through my questions, a narrative different from those he had previously constructed for himself, or different from the testimony he was used to giving at prison prayer meetings or during private conversations with a counselor or social worker. Then again, maybe he was just looking for another opportunity to deceive and manipulate? Or all of the above?
As someone who was assaulted between the ages of ten and thirteen, by a beloved male teacher in his fifties, I felt a range of contradictory emotions sitting across the table from a sexual predator whose rape victims included a nine-year-old child and interrogating him about his crimes. At one point, as we were speaking about Cindy Dixon, Menefee’s eyes welled up, and he asked if I had any contact with her family. When I replied that I still maintained contact with Russell Henderson, her son, he asked me to convey to him his deep remorse for what he had done. “Please tell Russ how sorry I am,” he said unabashedly.
According to Menefee, he had “never met” Dixon prior to the night in January 1999 when he raped her, pushed her from his car, and left her by the side of the road in a remote canyon where she froze to death. However, I’m not prepared to accept at face value that this was his “first” encounter with Dixon; that they were “strangers.” McKinney had made similar statements about Shepard — that they’d never met before — when, in fact, the two men had a complicated personal relationship.
Dixon, who was also a regular meth user, had been heard making boisterous conversation in local bars, along with her husband, Charlie Dixon, swearing that the Shepard murder was “all about meth.” Some in Laramie believe her abduction was intended as a warning to Russell to keep his mouth shut about the drug traffickers who were involved in the sequence of events that led to the attack on Matt. The traffickers’ names never surfaced during the Shepard case, due mainly to McKinney’s strict adherence to a code of silence but also to the very practical awareness that those same traffickers had “long arms” that could reach a snitch in prison. Henderson, for his part, had not been dealing drugs and didn’t have the same long-term relationship with the unidentified parties that McKinney had. Still, rumors circulated in Laramie that a clear message had been delivered to Russell through his mother’s death: If you don’t keep your mouth shut, your grandmother will be next.
As a result of delving into Matt’s murder for nearly twenty years, I’d gradually stumbled into a labyrinth of well-kept secrets involving both the local drug trade and the interstate trafficking of meth and other drugs. During those two decades, my findings were repeatedly confirmed by city, county, state, and federal law enforcement officers. What I could not anticipate was the emergence of several new sources — from both sides of the law — following the initial publication of The Book of Matt. One of the sources was Menefee, a confessed rapist and drug dealer who was also a police informant.
Menefee’s story about the death of Cindy Dixon goes like this: Late on the night of January 2, 1999, he had just left his girlfriend and the mother of his two children, Kimberly Hernandez, then twenty, at the Ranger bar on North 3rd Street in downtown Laramie. He had gotten into his car outside and moments later seen Dixon crossing the street by herself. Because of the cold weather he’d offered her a ride, he said, and Dixon had accepted. Menefee also claimed that he had been stoned on a potent mix of drugs — “I was on acid, weed” — and that he had hoped to have sex with Dixon. “We were going to Rogers Canyon to mess around.” Yet he insists that “Cindy’s death was never my intention.”
Before I met Menefee in person, though, he had written in a letter to me that “I can also tell you about the mexican mafia. I can tell you about drug wars…Behind the scenes of the Ranger Barr [sic] + hotel.” After the phrase “drug wars” he identified two males whose names I won’t report here as I’ve been unable to interview them. But two additional sources have corroborated Menefee’s close association with one of the men he named. During our interview, Menefee also admitted that “a Ranger bartender sold drugs for me.”
When I asked him why he had driven Dixon to a deserted canyon far from town on a frigid night if their intention was “to mess around,” he said they’d been smoking weed and he didn’t want to draw the attention of police since he was on probation in Ohio. (Menefee was, in fact, on probation after receiving a three-to-fifteen-year suspended sentence in his home state.)
Nevertheless, I remain skeptical of Menefee’s account. After Dixon’s body was discovered, Menefee fled to Florida. Police were able to track and arrest him there only because a confidential informant revealed his identity. According to the informant, he had been at a Laramie party where he’d heard Menefee “brag” that he was the guy who had dumped Cindy Dixon in Rogers Canyon. Like Menefee, the informant was well acquainted with the drug trade.
Menefee said he had been a heavy user of “cocaine, acid, and weed” during that period in Laramie, but he wasn’t using “crank” then. His meth addiction came later, after he’d served his term for manslaughter in Wyoming and returned to Ohio. Yet he admitted to selling meth in Laramie regularly, along with coke and weed: “I sold a quarter of a pound of coke, five pounds of weed, an ounce or two of crank.” He went on to describe matter-of-factly how things had worked in the late 1990s with his “mexican mafia” supplier, known locally by the nickname “Jerry Garcia.” Garcia later died from a drug overdose, according to Menefee.
Given the extent of his involvement buying, selling, and using hard drugs, not to mention his later child rape conviction, it seemed improbable to me that Menefee would drive Dixon nine and a half miles to a no-man’s-land because he was afraid of being caught smoking pot. His claim that he had simply offered Dixon a ride was also eerily similar to the scenario that preceded the robbery and fatal beating of Shepard three months earlier, when McKinney allegedly offered him a ride home.
The Ranger, which Menefee had just left before he met Dixon on the street, includes a bar, a package store, and a motel. The previous summer, Aaron McKinney and Kristen Price had lived with their baby at the Ranger motel. McKinney, Shepard, Shepard’s close friend Alex Trout, and others from their circle had frequented the Ranger bar.
When I pressed Menefee about activities that had gone on “behind the scenes” of the Ranger, he stated that a prostitution ring had operated from the motel. This was hardly surprising given what I’d uncovered about McKinney’s forays into gay male hustling — and that Shepard had also gotten involved with “escort services” well before he moved to Laramie. The escort activities were confirmed by Matt’s close friends, Ted Henson and Alex Trout, and by Mike Jones, who knew Matt from the Denver party scene that revolved around crystal meth. (Jones, who later became known nationally for his role in outing evangelical pastor Ted Haggard, received prestigious awards from the LGBTQ community, including the Harvey Milk Lifetime Achievement Award.)
By the end of my three-hour interview with Menefee, what surprised me most was hearing how he’d first met Matt Shepard and what their relationship had entailed. According to Menefee, they had been introduced in 1997 by a mutual friend who worked at the University of Wyoming — a woman Menefee had occasionally “dated.” Although Matt had not yet moved to Laramie to begin his studies at UW, he had visited the town frequently and stayed at the home of his friend Walt Boulden, who also worked at the university. Menefee stated bluntly that when his Mexican supplier was temporarily “dry” and couldn’t provide him with cocaine to sell, he had bought from Matt, who sold him “quantity.” He explained that he had “dealt with Matt for four or five months on and off,” but then stopped dealing with him.
Again, I was skeptical of Menefee’s claims. In the presence of a corrections official I showed him photos of Shepard. Twice he confirmed that Matt was the person who had sold him cocaine. “Five or six times we went to Matt for coke,” he said.
Menefee was quite specific in his description of the woman who had introduced him to Matt at the university, and in which department she worked. I later received confirmation that this woman did, indeed, know Shepard. Two additional sources independently confirmed Menefee’s relationship with her.
Along with some fifteen other sources already on the record, Menefee stated that he knew for certain that “Aaron [McKinney] and Matt knew each other.” He described one particular occasion when “Aaron was going to get drugs from Matt” at a Laramie park.
What has haunted me most from this April 2019 interview with Dennis Menefee — peppered repeatedly with his regrets for his victims — is an offhanded remark he made about the circumstances surrounding Shepard’s death. “He got stopped for cutting it [the drugs] and ripping people oft,” Menefee said flatly.
His words brought back a conversation I’d had with a source in a parked car off the interstate in Rock Springs, Wyoming. The source, who had been a sequestered witness in the Shepard case but, curiously, had never been called to testify, warned me: “You don’t know who you’re dealing with.” At that point two cars surrounded us, underscoring the message without a word from the men driving them.
Just moments earlier I had acknowledged to the source what I’d recently learned about Shepard’s dealing activities. He stared at me and snarled, “Yeah, and he was taking stuff away from the rest of us.”
My attempts over two decades to untangle the all-too-human underpinnings of Matthew Shepard’s murder, and now Cindy Dixon’s — and there is a chain of other, equally grotesque, drugs-and-sex killings in the Laramie area that came before and after them — are not an exercise in salaciousness or prurience, nor a collection of conspiracy theories invented by the many protagonists who lived these tragedies as they happened.
When I first set out to investigate Shepard’s murder, I could not have foreseen the societal forces and online tools that would emerge to embolden and empower those wanting to cast doubt about hard facts. It’s not enough to recall the often-quoted words of the late philosopher George Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” We must be willing to accept inconvenient truths, to think critically, and to deliberate honestly and civilly. Only then can we apply the lessons of the past to improving the present and safeguarding the future.
Stephen Jimenez
Brooklyn, New York
February 2020