More tidbits, few answers

ABC’s newsmagazine “20/20” pitches its hour on Matthew Shepard, airing tonight at 10, as an unflinching, demystifying look at the grisly killing of the gay University of Wyoming student whose death became a symbol of hate and homophobia in contemporary America.

The details are stark enough: On Oct. 6, 1998, the 21-year-old Shepard was beaten and left tied to a split-rail fence for 18 hours in the frigid plains outside Laramie. He died five days later.

If the circumstances and meaning surrounding Shepard’s death, already explored in the acclaimed play and HBO movie “The Laramie Project,” are still up for grabs, the purpose of the “20/20” piece, correspondent Elizabeth Vargas keeps reminding us in moments of journalistic self-aggrandizement, is to go beyond the politics and the symbolism and into the heart of that night. Was Shepard’s killing the hate crime heard ‘round the world or a less metaphorical instance of a drug-addled mugging that raged out of control?

“20/20” tips its investigation toward the latter portrayal. The hour includes the first interviews with the two men since they were sentenced to consecutive life terms for the slaying: Aaron McKinney, who says he pistol-whipped Shepard into bloody submission, and Russell Henderson, his accomplice. According to news reports, McKinney and his defense team agreed never to speak to the media about the case in a plea bargain that spared McKinney the death penalty. That deal raised questions about its 1st Amendment implications

The “20/20” piece doesn’t examine any of this (a network spokesperson says producers gained clearance to interview McKinney and Henderson from the Wyoming Bureau of Prisons). Nor does it tell us why Shepard’s father didn’t give an interview, while his mother, appearing as though she’s done a fair bit of crying off camera, did.

McKinney betrays a smile at the fame suggested by the lights and the cameras as he sits down for his prison interview. “Did you kill Matthew Shepard because he was gay?” Vargas asks him, but the producers tease it, not showing his answer until later in the program. “I would say that it wasn’t a hate crime,” McKinney tells Vargas finally. “All I wanted to do is beat him up and rob him.”

The template here is “In Cold Blood” -- a reconstruction, with flashbacks, of the lives that conspired to bring this horrific event to fruition. Shepard the saint-in-death is brought back onstage to be humanized as a fragile, lost boy drawn to the same methamphetamine subculture in Laramie as his killers. The redneck, gay-bashing killers are brought back to be shown as the victims of childhood neglect and worse.

As adults, “the main characters didn’t live in such different worlds,” Vargas tells us. McKinney and Shepard, the show suggests, might even have crossed paths before. This, I suppose, is some of the “stunning new information” that ABC boasts of uncovering. “20/20” also interviews a limo driver who claims McKinney engaged in a three-way with the limo driver and his girlfriend, furthering the notion that gay shame fueled his violence.

Details pile onto details, stereotypes swapped for others. “You may think you know what happened next,” Vargas coos before a commercial, “but you haven’t heard the whole story.”

It’s that kind of sophomoric TV news writing (combined with a few cheesy reenactment shots) that undercuts what is often a compelling hour. Compelling, that is, provided you want to relive that night outside Laramie, with further tidbits.

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‘20/20 -- Matthew Shepard’

Where: ABC

When: 10 to 11 tonight

Elizabeth Vargas... Co-anchor

Executive producer David Sloan.