“It still resonates”
Activism and life 20 years after Matthew Shepard’s murder
Twenty years ago, Dennis and Judy Shepard were not activists.
Twenty years ago, they were parents frantically traveling to Colorado after learning their 21yearold son, Matthew, had been beaten and left for dead outside Laramie.
Twenty years ago, they were parents staring at a man in a Fort Collins hospital bed — beaten so badly they did not immediately recognize him as their firstborn son — and trying to reconcile the image of the broken body with memories of their smiling boy.
They were the couple on the front pages of newspapers across the globe the day of their son’s funeral: Dennis in a blue suit and bulletproof vest speaking to reporters gathered outside to hear their statement, Judy sobbing as she leaned her forehead against her husband’s shoulder.
After Matthew Shepard’s death on Oct. 12, 1998, Dennis and Judy endured a torrent of hateful letters cursing them because their son was gay, the same reason his killers gave for attacking him. Protesters with the Westboro Baptist Church picketed Matthew’s funeral, screaming that he was burning in hell. Reporters across the globe picked apart Matthew’s life and the family’s history. Conspiracy theories and misinformation abounded. It was a whirling hell, a crucible of publicity upon a crucible of loss.
They could have shrunk away from it all and tended to their grief in private. Who would’ve blamed them?
But fading back into some semblance of the lives they had before Matthew died simply wasn’t an option.
“How could we deny that we had two wonderful sons and go back to Saudi Arabia (where the family lived at the time) and say we had one son?” Dennis Shepard said last week, while wearing a blue and red tie that once belonged to his eldest son. “Could we pretend that Matt didn’t exist?”
Instead, they strode directly into public life.
Over the past 20 years, Dennis and Judy Shepard have flown more than 2 million miles and visited 25 countries and 49 states advocating for LGBTQ rights and stronger hatecrime laws. They have spoken to schoolchildren and presidents on behalf of their Denverbased Matthew Shepard Foundation. They have successfully lobbied for the creation of a federal hate
crimes law named after their son. The work is deeply fulfilling for the Shepards, but it comes at a personal cost.
“Something very precious”
On Oct. 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard got in a truck with two men whom he had met at a Laramie bar. The men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, drove to the outskirts of Laramie and robbed Shepard. They beat him so badly with the butt of a pistol that part of his ear had to be reattached. Then the men tied Matthew to a buckrail fence and left him unconscious in the dirt and the cold prairie wind.
Eighteen hours later, a cyclist found him, barely alive. The cyclist first mistook Matthew for a scarecrow.
Matthew, a political science student at the University of Wyoming, was whisked to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins. Authorities said his assailants targeted him because he was gay. The attack soon attracted international media attention. The Denver Post ran frontpage stories about Matthew and the attack for a week straight. Millions of strangers waited to see if he would live.
Six days later, Matthew’s heart failed and he died with his family by his side. The nation mourned. Candlelight vigils lit up town squares and parks across the country. Lawmakers and activists called for more hatecrime laws. Parents with gay children held their kids a little closer.
In 1999, McKinney and Henderson were convicted of murder for killing Matthew and sentenced to life in prison. At McKinney’s sentencing hearing, Dennis recounted memories of his son: singing in the shower together, watching him perform in plays, telling fishing stories. Dennis explained why he and Judy did not ask that McKinney be sentenced to death.
“Every time you celebrate Christmas, a birthday, or the Fourth of July, remember that Matt isn’t,” Dennis said to McKinney, seated nearby in the Laramie courtroom. “Every time that you wake up in that prison cell, remember that you had the opportunity and the ability to stop your actions that night. Every time that you see your cellmate, remember that you had a choice, and now you are living that choice. You robbed me of something very precious, and I will never forgive you for that. Mr. McKinney, I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives.”
Progress, regression
Now, as the 21st Christmas without Matthew approaches, McKinney and Henderson remain in prison. The fence where Matthew was beaten is gone, swallowed by a private subdivision outside Laramie. Most of this year’s batch of freshmen at the University of Wyoming were not born yet when Matthew died. Besides a memorial bench tucked away on campus, there is little physical reminder that Matthew had been there at all, that he died such a horrific death for his identity, that his death sparked a generation of activism in his name.
But there is Dennis, who returned to Laramie last week for a slate of events commemorating the 20th anniversary of his son’s death. The trim man with silver hair and quickwitted jokes sat on panels and shook hands. He spoke with warmth to student actors who are playing him in “The Laramie Project,” a play about Matthew’s life and death. He gave deep hugs to old friends and strangers alike.
The town is a regular stop on the couple’s seemingly endless calendar of speaking engagements.
After Matthew’s death, the Shepards educated themselves on the challenges the LGBTQ community faced and the rights they did not have. On what would have been Matthew’s 22nd birthday, they created the Matthew Shepard Foundation with the money strangers had sent them for their son’s medical expenses.
They thought they would speak for five years maximum, until the world moved on to the next horrible thing and forgot their son, Dennis said.
That never happened. Requests for speaking have kept coming, so Judy and Dennis have kept speaking. In the early years, they spoke about the need for equal rights for LGBTQ people. More recently, they have focused on advocating for more laws that specifically address hate crimes and require law enforcement to report statistics about those crimes.
“For some reason, 20 years later it still resonates,” Dennis said. “He seemed to be the kid next door to everybody.”
They helped pass a 2009 law named after Matthew that expanded the definition of federal hatecrime statutes to include crimes motivated by the victim’s sexuality, gender identity or disability. The couple felt the country was making great progress from tolerance of the LGBTQ community to acceptance, inclusion and equality, Dennis said.
Then President Donald Trump was elected. The Shepards watched as the progress they helped create slid backward, Dennis said.
The president and his administration have attempted to ban transgender people from the military, purged references to the LGBTQ community from the White House’s website and rescinded guidelines that said schools had to respect the gender identities of transgender students. The Department of Justice doesn’t invite the Shepards to speak at conferences anymore, Dennis said. The State Department no longer helps fund the couple’s international speaking engagements.
“We’re supposed to be the leader of the world in equality, equal rights and protection of those rights,” Dennis said. “And we’re going the other way.”
The regression has only focused the couple and doubled their dedication. Judy and Dennis are 66 and 69 years old, respectively, but they have no solid plans to retire from their work. They will keep traveling and speaking until people stop requesting them, Dennis said.
“Our goal is to shut down the foundation because we’re no longer needed,” he said.
The anger and grief has never faded, Dennis said last week. Although their work as activists has helped them process Matthew’s death, putting words to their loss day in and day out is a painful, public kind of healing.
“How do you hear these stories and still sleep?”
For years after Matthew’s death, the family was separated. Dennis returned to Saudi Arabia, where the family had lived since 1993 for his work as a safety engineer with an oil company. The couple’s younger son flew back to boarding school. And Judy moved to Casper full time to work with the foundation.
They never had a chance to truly grieve as a family, Dennis said. The distance strained their marriage.
The work in the first years was especially exhausting for Judy, who Dennis describes as an extreme introvert. All anybody wanted to talk about was Matt. But soon she found catharsis in the process. It helped her grieve, Dennis said.
“That was her job, to take care of her kids,” he said. “Everyone in that audience became her kids.”
Thousands of people have shared their stories with Judy and Dennis, about how they were rejected by their parents, how they were bullied or abused. They have hugged thousands of young people who see in them the loving, accepting parents they wish they had. They both absorb the hurt of the young people who share their experiences with them.
“It’s hard to not take that back with you,” Dennis said. “How do you hear these stories and still sleep?”
The couple are generally home in Casper only about half the year and sometimes spend weeks apart, though Dennis has moved back to Casper. Judy wasn’t available for an interview for this story because of her busy schedule. Between October and midDecember this year, the couple will be home for only 10 days. They rarely spend the anniversary of Matthew’s death at home. This year they will be in London, accepting an award. Next week, they will be in Juneau, Alaska, to speak — the only U.S. state Judy has yet to speak in, Dennis said. Hotel room after hotel room, restaurant meal after restaurant meal.
“It can be mentally draining, going from one place to another,” Dennis said.
The miles are worth it, Dennis said. Speaking about Matthew keeps Dennis’ memories of his slight, opinionated son from fading. He misses the chances he should have to hug him, to yell at him. To sit at a family dinner and chat about their days. He can still hear Matthew’s voice in his head.
But also, he said, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if people didn’t know his son’s name, if it’s eventually lost to time.
“I’ll be happy if they don’t know who Matt is,” he said. “That means we’ll have equal protection and equal respect across the board.”
Dennis cherishes the multitude of songs, poems, plays and movies dedicated to Matthew. Dennis wants people to know the fullness of his son as a flawed human, especially as time passes and Matthew becomes more of a symbol than a person.
He particularly cherishes the interviews with Matthew’s friends featured in the documentary “Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine.” It allowed Dennis to know his son as his friends knew him, the way he might have known Matthew had their relationship been able to mature.
But even the documentary is bittersweet. The last seconds of the film show a home video of Matthew in a striped shirt and jeans, sitting on a fountain and smiling at his dad behind the video camera. Matthew waves as Dennis tells him to say goodbye.
“Then the documentary ends,” Dennis said last week. “And you’ve lost him again.”