Stephen Jimenez - The book of Matt: The Real Story of the Murder of Matthew Shepard

PRAISE FROM LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS WITH FIRSTHAND KNOWLEDGE OF THE MATTHEW SHEPARD CASE

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 Matthews killers and recovered the murder weapon

Methamphetaminewas the root cause of the horrific murder of Matthew ShepardThat 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 crimeThe 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 trial of Matthew Shepards killer Aaron McKinney

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

MORE PRAISE FOR THE BOOK OF MATT

What if nearly everything you thought you knew about Matthew Shepards 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; its the fruit of years of dogged investigation by journalist Stephen Jimenez, himself gay.

The Advocate

The Book of Matt 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.

The Wall Street Journal

I will never view the death of Matthew Shepard in the same way. After finishing The Book of Mattit 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

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.

In These Times

Stephen Jimenez didnt set out to be the most dangerous journalist on earth. Or, more to the point, the most dangerous gay journalist. But Jimenez unearthed a story that few people wanted to hear. And it calls into question everything you think you know about the life and death of one of the leading icons of our age.

New York Post

Jimenez acknowledges that the national revulsion to Shepards 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 medias handling of that case.

Seattle Weekly

The extensive interviews and dogged investigative research conducted by Jimenez make The Book of Matt a model for journalistic inquiryJimenez 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.

Lambda Literary Review

Fifteen years agoAaron 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, WyomingThe 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 secretsNow comes Stephen Jimenez with The Book of Matt, and this most detailed effort to rescue the protagonists from caricature.

JoAnn Wypijewski, who covered the Shepard murder and trial for Harpers Magazine, 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 fateJimenezs 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, Shepards 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 usMany of Jimenezs central contentions are shared by the prosecutor in the case, Cal Rerucha, and by police officers who investigated the murder.

The Guardian

Jimenezs message in The Book of Matt upends a canonized narrative we all have grown familiarly comfortable withAnd now with Jimenezs incontrovertible evidence that Shepards murderers were not strangers one is a bisexual crystal meth addict who not only knew Matthew but also partied with, 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 backgroundThe anointing of Matthew Shepard as an iconic image for LGBT rights not only concealed from the American public the real person but also hid the other varied faces of hate crimes in the 1990sIn reading Jimenezs book we shockingly learn that the Matthew Shepard, Gay Icon story is a fictive narrativeThe cultural currency of the Shepard narratives shelf life might now after nearly two decades be flickering out, or its now of no use to its framers and the community it was intended to serveI read Jimenezs The Book of Matt as a cautionary tale of how the needs of a community trumped the truth of a story.

Out in New Jersey

Stephen Jimenez makes a compelling case that this horrific murder was not a hate crime at allNo doubt Jimenez will face criticism for his powerful book. Why did he have to dig around and stir things up? Wont people who are opposed to equal rights for LGBT people use his expos for their reactionary purposes? How do these revelations harm those who built programs teaching tolerance based on the Shepard murder? How will Shepards 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 loveWhen combating hatred and bigotry, the truth is always important.