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I don't have a good source for this offhand, but I'd heard that the deal is, the rival dealers' defense lawyer convinced them to argue that the attack was a homophobic hate crime because he thought it would get them a lesser sentence than a drug deal gone wrong. Not sure if that was a good idea then, but apparently the story got legs and next thing you know, it's the Standard Accepted Truth.
Both the standard and Jimenez's counterstandard histories seem... more than a little fuzzy, if you start digging into them.
((The trial court blocked the 'gay panic' defense before it was presented; a lot of the assumptions of anti-gay animus derive from it being presented at all, as well as some pretty pathetic sequences from Aaron McKinney during questioning.))
McKinney claimed years after the trial that he did not know Shepard, and was just looking to rob someone, and that the gay panic defense was partly something he came up with and partly his defense attorney, but at best that's the jailhouse word of a self-admitted meth-raging liar. Most of the claims that Shepard and either attacker had previously had sex come from 'Doc' O'Connor, the operator of a 'limo' service (coughcough: with a lot of sex work ties), but Jimenez's actual quote is that "Matt may have been one of the guys in back with Aaron... I can't say for sure", where the same man previously claimed to have only met Shepard once only days before the attack (and longer after the supposed car hookup), and if you start digging into other media coverage for O'Connor he alternates between knowing nothing and having been deeply involved in the personal lives of not just Shepard but also McKinney and his wife, and many of the stories are contradictory.
There's pretty strong evidence (if second-hand) that Shepard used drugs, including pretty hard drugs like meth, and some evidence that he was at least in a few degrees of contact with people who moved the drug through Colorado, but it's not clear where he fell on the lines for selling or reselling. A lot of people game-of-telephone Jimenez's account into certainty that Shepard was moving ten thousands of dollars in meth (cfe Reason here), but the actual claim in the book is a little different.
The implication is that Shepard actually had or could get access to that much meth, but Jimenez never really ties it down further than one of McKinney's methhead friends boasting on the matter, and said friend, while never naming who that "another dealer" was, later points to a married man, ie not Shepard. Instead there's just insinuations about some regularly scheduled run from Denver, where someone would move ten thousand bucks of meth and be paid a few hundred dollars in meth, and it could have been Shepard. The quotes claiming genuine knowledge of Shepard selling anything, rather than mere belief, instead point to stuff that could be courier, small-scale resale, or even (heavy) personal use, not of knowing or long-term control.
On the flip side, investigators didn't test either attacker for recent drug use, so the alternative story of a meth-rage is pretty hard to prove or disprove, either. The official story conveniently places McKinney's last binge just long enough ago to remove even withdrawal as a motivator, and it seems to be based on little more than whatever an investigator could pull out of their ass. And there was little contemporaneous attention paid to how deep shit McKinney seemed to be in with his own suppliers, or even investigation of those suppliers. Jimenez points regularly to the possibility of either intentional ignorance or even outright assistance by police in the drug trade, and there's enough gaps in the official investigation that it doesn't look wrong, either, and that's knowing the extent that vice tends to be compartmentalized. Shepard seems to have gotten set on a bit of a pedestal, post-mortem, and while part of that's trying to avoid blaming-the-victim, part of it does seem focused around presenting a nearly perfect innocent for the story.
My gutcheck points more to something messier in the mix.
A lot named people in Jimenez's book claim McKinney was at least gay4pay, and that's a lot of other quotes that point to him as also self-closeted or genuinely doing it out of addiction. And there's pretty strong evidence that McKinney and co were looking for cash or drugs in anyway or form, not least of all that they did steal Shepard's wallet. McKinney was almost certainly desperate enough to fuck or fight someone for a hit, probably expected people at the particular bars he scoped out to be more likely have cash or drugs, and might (if we're trusting O'Connor) have suspected Shepard to have some cash or drugs, and targeted him specifically because of that, though in turn we have little reason to believe he had good reason to believe Shepard had drug-dealer amounts of cash.
But someone who's gay4pay isn't exactly immune for homophobia, especially if they genuinely were doing it for the cash (or drugs) or self-closeted, including violent homophobia -- especially at the time, there were a lot of hangups over what 'really' makes someone queer, many esoteric even within the gay world. But even were a methhead to turn a plan for a seduction or a 'simple' robbery or into a fatal beating because the methhead didn't bottom, it's hard to separate that from a methhead being a methhead who might have gotten set off for any of a thousand other things.
But that is just me pulling it from my gut.
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