Stephen Jimenez is an award-winning journalist, writer and
producer. He was a 2012 Norman Mailer Nonfiction Fellow and has
written and produced programs for ABC News 20/20, Dan Rather
Reports, Nova, Fox, Court TV and others. His accolades include the
Writers Guild of America Award, the Mongerson Award for
Investigative Reporting, an Emmy, and fellowships at the Ucross
Foundation in Wyoming. A graduate of Georgetown University, he has
taught screenwriting at New York University's Tisch School of the
Arts and other colleges. He lives in New York and Santa Fe.
Join the conversation- www.facebook.com/bookofmatt
Watch the C-Span Book-TV athor event from Laramie-
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From the Hardcover edition.
Law Enforcement Officers with Firsthand Knowledge of the Matthew
Shepard Case: "Methamphetamine was a huge part of this case . . .
It was a horrible murder driven by drugs." -- Prosecutor Cal
Rerucha, who convicted Matthew Shepard's killers "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 itself." -- Former Laramie Police Department
Sergeant Mark Beck "There were two enormous tragedies that stemmed
from this case. The first obvious tragedy is that a young man lost
his life. Regardless of the criminal activity that Matthew Shepard
was involved in, no human being deserves to be treated in the same
fashion that he was. The second tragedy was how pathetic and how
poorly the media handled this case. It has been painfully obvious
to me for many years now that the media had absolutely no interest
in learning or reporting the facts of this case. The media simply
wanted to sensationalize this homicide as a hate crime instead of
reporting it for what it really was about: DRUGS." -- Former
Laramie Detective Ben Fritzen, a lead investigator on the Matthew
Shepard murder "Many people have called this a hate crime . . . The
Court does not find this matter to be so simplistic, for it is
quite clear that a number of motives and emotions were involved."
-- Former District Court Judge Jeffrey Donnell, who presided over
the sentencing of one of Matthew Shepard's assailants "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." -- Former Laramie
Police Sergeant Mitch Cushman "[The Book of Matt] documents the
original failure of the media, the community and the criminal
justice system to find the real truth." -- Former Laramie police
officer Flint Waters, who captured one of Matthew's assailants and
recovered the murder weapon Additional Praise for national true
crime bestseller The Book of Matt "An award-winning journalist
uncovers the suppressed story behind the death of Matthew Shepard.
. . . As Jimenez deconstructs an event that has since passed into
the realm of mythology, he humanizes it . . . Investigative
journalism at its relentless and compassionate best." -- Kirkus
Reviews "A gripping read." -- People magazine "Be prepared to
encounter a radically revised version of the life and death of
Matthew Shepard . . . This riveting true crime narrative will
appeal to readers of books such as Norman Mailer's The
Executioner's Song." -- Library Journal (★ Starred Review) "The
extensive interviews and dogged investigative research conducted by
Jimenez make The Book of Matt a model for journalistic inquiry. . .
. Jimenez is revealing today what we should have read fifteen years
ago. In the meantime, the media continues to report on some
anti-gay hate crimes while completely ignoring others, and
thousands go completely unreported out of fear of retaliation.
Perhaps the main takeaway from The Book of Matt is that we should
challenge ourselves to demand the truth from our media at all
times, even if it costs us a tidy narrative." -- Rachel Wexelbaum
in Lambda Literary Review "Mr. Jimenez's book is most useful in
illuminating the power of the media to shape the popular conception
of an event. It shows how a desire for Manichaean morality tales
can lead us to oversimplify the human experience. . . . Mr.
Jimenez's findings cast doubt on what he calls the Shepard story's
function as latter-day 'passion play and folktale.'" -- The Wall
Street Journal "Fifteen years ago . . . Aaron McKinney swung his
.357 Magnum for the final time like a baseball bat into the skull
of Matthew Shepard. Shepard was tied low to a post, arms behind his
back, in a prairie fringe of Laramie, Wyoming. . . . The murder was
so vicious, the aftermath so sensational, that the story first told
to explain it became gospel before anyone could measure it against
reality. That story was born, in part, of shock and grief and the
fact that gay men like Shepard have been violently preyed upon by
heterosexuals. It was also born of straight culture and secrets. .
. . Now comes Stephen Jimenez with The Book of Matt, and this most
detailed effort to rescue the protagonists from caricature is, with
a few exceptions, being coolly ignored or pilloried for 'blaming
the victim.' . . . Jimenez does not polemicize or tread deeply into
the psyches of the main figures. Rather, he explores the
drug-fueled world they inhabited, and evokes its thick air of
violence. . . . Jimenez spent thirteen years to tell his story. . .
In this story, Shepard and McKinney were neither lamb nor wolf;
they were human commodities, working for rival drug circles to
support their habits, and occasionally forced to pay their debts in
sex. The Matthew Shepard Foundation, the whole machinery that
benefited from the story of a desexualized Bad Karma Kid but
otherwise happy-in-his-skin Matthew, that used his horrid death as
a banner for hate crime laws, have slammed the book. Kinder
reviewers have said Jimenez has made the case less political. On
the contrary. What impelled McKinney to loathe his desires, and
Shepard relentlessly, dangerously to test himself, and Henderson to
follow orders? Violence lacerated these young men long before the
murder, and it will not be diminished or resisted by myths and
vengeful laws." -- JoAnn Wypijewski in The Nation "Jimenez is
careful to point out that his goal is to understand Shepard as a
complex human being and make the fullest possible sense of his
murder, not to suggest in any way that he deserved his horrific
fate. . . . Jimenez's problem is that he has trodden on hallowed
ground. America, as John Ford cannily observed in his western The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, is a country that likes to build up
its heroes and villains and rarely appreciates having the record
corrected to restore them to the stature of ordinary, fallible
human beings. By now, Shepard's story has been elevated close to
legend, and Shepard himself to a near-messianic figure who suffered
for the ultimate benefit of the rest of us. . . . Many of Jimenez's
central contentions are shared by the prosecutor in the case, Cal
Rerucha, and by police officers who investigated the murder." --
The Guardian "Jimenez takes pains to note throughout the book that
no matter what led up to the murder, the event was still horrific.
And the end result of his retelling is not to demonize Matthew
Shepard--Jimenez is himself gay--but to point out that he was
human." -- Yasmin Nair, In These Times "I will never view the death
of Matthew Shepard in the same way. After finishing The Book of
Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard . . . it is
no longer possible to believe the myth that has grown up around the
death of this young man in Laramie 15 years ago." -- Wyoming
Tribune Eagle "It's been 15 years to the month since a dying
Matthew Shepard was found tied to a fencepost outside Laramie,
Wyoming. The narrative that quickly emerged -- which Stephen
Jimenez spends 360 pages debunking in The Book of Matt -- was that
Shepard had told two strangers he was gay, provoking the savage
attack. . . . Jimenez acknowledges that the national revulsion to
Shepard's murder actually helped the gay community, creating more
awareness, legal protections, and a trend toward true equality. But
The Book of Matt finds nothing positive in the media's handling of
that case." -- Seattle Weekly "There are numerous hagiographies on
the Matthew Shepard murder. [Fifteen] years after Shepard's murder,
they're being challenged. Are we ready for the tale investigative
journalist Stephen Jimenez, himself gay, spins? . . .Jimenez's
message in The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of
Matthew Shepard, upends a canonized narrative we all have grown
familiarly comfortable with. . . .And now with Jimenez's
incontrovertible evidence that Shepard's murderers were not
strangers -- one is a bisexual crystal meth addict who not only
knew Matthew, but partied, bought drugs from and had sex with
Matthew. With this 'new' information a more textured but troubling
truth emerges. This truth shatters a revered icon for LGBT rights,
one deliberately chosen because of race, gender and economic
background. . . . The anointing of Matthew Shepard as an iconic
image for LGBT rights not only concealed from the American public
the real person but also it hid the other varied faces of hate
crimes in the 1990's. . . . In reading Jimenez's book we shockingly
learn that Matthew Shepard, Gay Icon story is a fictive narrative.
. . . The cultural currency of the Shepard narrative's shelf life,
might now after nearly two decades be flickering out, or it's now
of no use to its framers and the community it was intended to
serve. . . . I read Jimenez's The Book of Matt as a cautionary tale
of how the needs of a community trumped the truth of a story." --
Rev. Irene Monroe, Out in New Jersey "In the tradition of In Cold
Blood and The Executioner's Song, this is a work of literary true
crime that reaches far beyond the case itself to probe deep and
troubling recesses of the American psyche." -- Hampton Sides,
bestselling author of Hellhound on His Trail
"The Book of Matt provides us for the first time with the real
story of an American tragedy." --Kevin Baker, author of Strivers
Row "No one should be afraid of the truth. Least of all gay
people... Shouldn't we understand better why and how?" --
Journalist Andrew Sullivan "Jimenez does a masterful job of
unspooling this haunted narrative like a puzzle, giving you
seemingly disparate pieces that take a while to form a larger
picture... Anyone interested in the Matthew Shepard case needs to
read this book." - Jeff Walsh, Oasis Magazine, an online
publication for LGBT youth "What if nearly everything you thought
you knew about Matthew Shepard's murder was wrong? What if our most
fiercely held convictions about the circumstances of that fatal
night of October 6, 1998, have obscured other, more critical,
aspects of the case? . . . None of this is idle speculation; it's
the fruit of years of dogged investigation by journalist Stephen
Jimenez, himself gay. In the course of his reporting, Jimenez
interviewed over 100 subjects, including friends of Shepard and of
his convicted killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, as
well as the killers themselves. . . . In the process, he amassed
enough anecdotal evidence to build a persuasive case that Shepard's
sexuality was, if not incidental, certainly less central than
popular consensus has lead us to believe." -- Aaron Hicklin,
Editor-in-Chief of Out magazine, in The Advocate
"What's truly remarkable about this book is not that, like many
before it, it exposes the truth behind a useful myth. It is the
reaction of the gay establishment to these difficult truths. The
Book Of Matt insists on the horrifying nature of the crime; it had
no pre-existing agenda; it's written by an award-winning reporter
who is also a gay man. (The Wyoming Historical Society also gave it
an award.) What it does is expose a real problem in the gay male
world - especially at the time of the murder: the nexus of sex and
meth that destroyed and still destroys so many lives." -- Andrew
Sullivan, The Daily Dish "Stephen Jimenez makes a compelling case
that this horrific murder was not a hate crime at all. . . . No
doubt Jimenez will face criticism for his powerful book. Why did he
have to dig around and stir things up? Won't people who are opposed
to equal rights for LGBT people use his exposé for their
reactionary purposes? How do these revelations harm those who built
programs teaching tolerance based on the Shepard murder? How will
Shepard's family feel? . . . The movement for equality for gay
people is important, not because of what happened to Matthew
Shepard on an October night 15 years ago, but because no one should
be less valued as a human being because of who they are or who they
love. . . . When combating hatred and bigotry, the truth is always
important." -- The Jewish Daily Forward "This is not a left-wing or
a right-wing thing. It is not a gay or straight thing, it is not a
religious versus atheist thing. It's a human thing. . . . I admire
Stephen Jimenez so much for the courage it took to stick with this
story for 13 years, and to report facts that apparently destroy the
narrative that he expected to find when he first went to Wyoming to
look into the Shepard case. There will be a number of people who
will hate him for what he's done, especially because he himself is
a gay journalist. May we all find the courage to follow the truth
and to deal with it, no matter where it leads. I aspire to be as
brave in my work as Jimenez has been in his. All of us should learn
a lesson from his book. It is important to stand up for what we
believe is right. But it is more important for us to stand up for
the truth.." -- Rod Dreher, author of The Little Way of Ruth
Leming, in The American Conservative "I am persuaded by The Book of
Matt that we will learn more that is more valuable if we demand the
facts, and not a case that is cut to fit a particular agenda... We
need a Steve Jimenez to take up the [Trayvon Martin case, to which
the book is compared] and devote to it the energy and attention
that he devoted to the Shepard murder, to enrich us with the
truth." -- Marci A. Hamilton, Justia "The popular image of this
event as one where two drug-using homophobic thugs murdered Matthew
because he was gay is overly simplistic. . . Matthew Shepard's
memory is ill served by those who wish to present him as a saint
and who urge us not to read this book. The narratives are
contradictory; read the book and make your own mind up. What is
clear is that Matthew was as complicated and flawed an individual
as we all are - and that in no way invalidates his humanity, his
right to life or the reaction to his murder." -- The James Morgan
Brown Review
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