i had interviewed aaron mckinney and russell henderson asked tentatively. i've interviewed chris price in chastity peace be extensively. all four admitted to me that the story about matthew making an advance was really essentially an alibi. aaron told kristen and in my opinion anyway this was kind of a defend but it was a story at aaron and christine decide it was some kind of a defensive nails who enlisted the help of russell henderson in chastity paisley telling that story that decide to do this matthew making a unwanted tape advance. i want to read you one short -- this is a short letter and this was at least obvious to you at the time early in the case. this came out later. when i was through my research at the courthouse, this really struck me very much. i kept looking at it, examining it. this was a letter that aaron mckinney wrote, a handwritten letter part of the official record that aaron smuggled to wrestle at the albany county detention center. this was after they were arrested and aaron was essentially rising russell about the scenario they shoul

as one of aaron mckinney's friends. after eight months of work and on the screenplay, i was in a quandary that ultimately decided to put the screen play aside and to begin to look at the case as a journalist. while my experience was and is a journalist, as a documentary filmmaker who attend longform stories in several stories to crime and law and justice. so briefly, i put the screenplay aside and i began doing some investigation of my own. i would say, you know, quite a bit of that for about a year. when i had gathered enough information, took the story to "the new york times" magazine and pitched it to them. they send what i brought to come at the commissioned me to write an article for "the sunday times" magazine. i worked on that story on and off. i was doing a couple other things, but i worked on it over a period of two years. this was from 2002 until early 2004. and in 2004, the story was killed at "the new york times" magazine. they did not criticize the reporting. that should set the reporting is really good, we

in contrast aaron mckinney had a reputation around laramie for his volatile temper as well as a long juvenile record. as a void mckinney had allegedly abused animals for the fun of it. after henderson's arrest for an in 1998 attack his landlord sherry adamson described him to a reporter as quote quiet, polite, just your average male and the most american kid you could get. i have a hard time imagining him coming up if anything like this on his own she stated. it seems extremely out of character. skipping ahead a little bit here by the time of the first face-to-face interview in the spring of 2003, before that we did letters and i also did a number of recorded phone interviews with both russell and aaron. by the time of our first face-to-face interview in the spring of 2003 russell had been transferred from wyoming state penitentiary to an austere prison and make the data desert. he was then and the fifth year of his double-life sentence. one purpose of of the interview was to find out how involved russell really was in the violence inflicted on matthew shepard. matthew had been beaten