A life story.

A gay inmate in Wyoming tells what prison will be like for Shepard's killers

Few people can understand what Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson face spending the rest of their lives in prison. But David McNeill knows what their lives are like from firsthand experience. McNeill is a gay man who met McKinney and Henderson in 1998 at the Albany County jail and is now incarcerated with them at Wyoming State Penitentiary.

Serving the second year of a four- to six-year sentence for check fraud, the 49-year-old McNeill befriended Matthew Shepard's killers soon after the murder. At the time, McNeill says, he comforted Henderson, whom he describes as "distraught, clingy, and buggy." McNeill also took library books to McKinney, whom he describes as marching around the jail exclaiming, "Do you know who I am? I'm the one who killed that fag!"

Now at the state penitentiary in Rawlins, a dusty, windswept town about 100 miles west of Laramie, the three live a "boring, mundane existence," McNeill says. He and Henderson, who works about six hours a day in the prison's law library, live in the same medium-security yard. "I talk with him every day," McNeill says. "He's been contacted on numerous occasions by MTV and other people about them wanting to do a movie and all this other stuff, and he won't do it. He says that when he comes up for parole in 2009 he wants [his role in the murder] to be downplayed. He wants it out of people's minds."

McNeill hasn't seen McKinney since the newly sentenced prisoner was transferred to the penitentiary but says he most likely is in an orientation unit or in maximum security. "You're called a `fish' when you first come here," he says. "They won't tell you anything. You have to learn from the inmates. They don't give you a rule book."

But as the newest members of a prison population that paid close attention to the Shepard trial, Henderson and McKinney are armed with the notoriety of their crime. "People gel respect based on the crimes they commit," McNeill says. His fellow inmates were afraid of Henderson before they met him, but McNeill says that afterward, "They came up to me and said, `He's a really nice guy. He's really small.' What did they expect him to be? Ten feet tall and made out of iron?" Inmates also were surprised to see how attracted they were to Henderson. "They said, `He's so cute,'" McNeill says, estimating that more than 90% of the men in the slate penitentiary have a same-sex relationship al one time or other. McKinney and Henderson, in particular, will be especially noticed because they are young and attractive, he says.

Life in prison is a long lime, though, and Henderson and McKinney won't be prison celebrities forever. "It will die out after a while," McNeill says. "Somebody else will come along."

RELATED ARTICLE: Romaine Patterson: angel in America

Matthew Shepard left a guardian angel behind in Romaine Patterson. The 21-year-old, who had been a friend of Shepard's since the two studied at Casper College in Wyoming, was so upset by the Rev, Fred Phelps's protest at Shepard's funeral, she planned a heavenly response for his next appearance in Laramie, On the morning of April 5, Patterson and a dozen other activists--dressed in angel costumes Patterson created--circled and, without a word, silenced the Phelps clan. It took $300--almost all she had in savings--to make the costumes, says Patterson, who now lives with her girlfriend in State College, Pa. "But I would have spent four times that for the same experience."