Judy & Dennis Shepard
doesn’t repeat itself. And so they take me back to the beginning of the events that led up to Matthew’s death.
Judy and Dennis are living in Saudi Arabia, where the latter was working as a safety engineer, when they receive a call in the middle of the night. It is the hospital telling them that Matt has been seriously hurt. No other details are given and they assume that he has been involved in a car accident.
It isn’t until they fl y out and touch down, some 36 hours later, with younger son Logan in tow, that the grim reality of the situation sinks in. “We get off the plane and see a newspaper,” Judy says. “The headline is Gay Wyoming Student Hanging On For His Life, and there’s a picture of Matt.”
Arriving at the hospital, neither mum nor dad recognise their boy, who is on life support and hooked up to multiple machines, due to the severity of his injuries.
“His head was completely swathed in bandages, there were stitches closing wounds all over his face, his right ear had been torn away… he was so swollen and distorted, and already in the comatose position with his fingers and toes curled,” Judy recalls. “But one of his eyes was still open, so I could see the blue and the long lashes, then the braces on his teeth.”
Dennis adds: “I still think about the first time I walked in: the shock, then the fear that we were going to lose him, which eventually, of course, we did.”
Doctors inform the family that Matt’s brain stem has been irreparably damaged, eff ectively crushed during the savage attack, and that if he was to wake up — the chances of which are very slim — that he would be in a vegetative state for the rest of his life.
The Shepards are sure that is not what
Matt would want, so they sign a DNR ( Do Not Resuscitate) order.
He died soon after, on 12 October, surrounded by the sounds of his favourite music and the familiar scent of the perfume that he had recently bought for his mother.
“There is reason to believe that they are somewhat aware,” Judy muses. “We just wanted him to know that we were there.”
High school drop- outs Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney — aged 21 and 22, respectively, at the time of the crime — are each serving two life sentences for Matt’s murder. With no chance of parole, they’ll spend the rest of their days behind bars.
I ask if Judy or Dennis even thinks about Matt’s killers, the names of whom they seem to make a conscious point of not mentioning. “As far as I’m concerned they don’t exist. They had a chance to take the high road, instead they decided to be judge, jury and executioner on somebody who was diff erent,” Dennis says.
Justice has been served in terms of prison sentencing, but a sticking point is that the men were never charged with a hate crime, for preying on and lynching Matt because of his sexuality. “In the state of Wyoming, there are no hate crime laws whatsoever,” Judy explains. “It was an attack, an assault, [ the fact] they did it because Matt was gay was perhaps, in quotation marks, a peripheral reason, they couldn’t say that he was murdered because of that, even after the two gentlemen made statements indicating as much.”
That lit one of many fires inside Judy and Dennis. After being fl ooded with messages of support, particularly from other parents of gay children, they decided to channel their anger and grief into decisive action, to distil their unimaginable pain and suff ering into something meaningful: activism.
Two months after Matt’s death — on his birthday, 1 December — they formed The Matthew Shepard Foundation. “We had an opportunity to help his peers, his friends and other young people,” explains Judy, who threw herself into galvanising an entire movement, from the grassroots, aimed at challenging and changing laws.
Funds were plunged into education programmes to teach the next generation about embracing diff erence and diversity, not to mention the creation of an online platform called Matthew’s Place, a safe space for LGBT+ youth. “It’s for young people by young people, where they can blog about their shared experiences of transitioning and coming out, or the issues that they have faced, to let other kids know that they are not alone. It also gives suicide hotline numbers and the contact details for health- care and finance organisations, off ering help of all kinds,” Judy continues.
The Shepards didn’t stop there and, in October 2009, after 11 long years of lobbying, they joined thenpresident Barack Obama for the passing of The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
The legal milestone — also in response to the murder of African- American Byrd Jr. by three white supremacists in 1998 — expanded the federal hate crime law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. “It’s massive,” Judy says, “the FBI were grateful because they now had the wherewithal to prosecute crimes that they would not, or could not, before.”
So much good has come from something so heinous, including The Laramie Project, one of the most- performed plays in America, but Matt’s legacy came under threat a few years ago when journalist Stephen Jimenez published The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths
About The Murder Of Matthew Shepard, which spun an alternative version of events. He controversially proposed that the slaughter was not a hate crime, that Matt knew his assailants and that blood was spilled over a secret stash of crystal meth.
While Judy doesn’t reference the book directly, she appears to allude to it: “We’re constantly vigilant of all conspiracy theories that pop up,” she says. Not that the Shepards want people to think that their son was as perfect as the posters would have you believe. Far from it. He had issues, which were brought up in the 2013 family- sanctioned documentary Matt Shepard is a Friend of Mine, an intimate portrait directed by his close pal Michele Josue which shed light on a dark hour of Matt’s life when he was beaten, robbed and raped during a vacation to Morocco in his senior year.
“He was a normal kid with dreams and hopes, but he was also a kid with problems,” Dennis notes. “He suff ered from depression.” This is why any martyrdom of Matt, has always sat uncomfortably with them. “I wrote a book, The Meaning of Matthew, about 10 years ago because this icon, this person they were creating was not Matt any more, it was somebody else,” Judy maintains.
“We bought into this idea with every understanding that using Matt’s photos, using Matt’s story was going to somehow change people’s perceptions of who he was, but we also understood the importance of having a story to tell about the issues of hate crime and inequity directed at the gay community. Matt would have wanted us to do it.”
Currently trying to push through legislation to make the reporting of a hate crime mandatory — we are supposed to believe that Miami has had just one case since 2000 — the Shepards’ fight is fuelled by a desire to see a bigotry- free world filled with acceptance, a world best summarised by Dennis’s touching reaction to his son’s coming out.
“We were back in the States for a family reunion and during the get- together Matt said, ‘ Dad, when this is over, can I get some private time with you? I need to tell you something that’s really important’.
“Everybody went to bed. He said, ‘ Sit down I need to tell you something’. He took a deep breath and added: ‘ Dad, ‘ I’m gay’.
“I looked at him, then I looked at my watch and said, ‘ You know, it’s really late, tell me what’s so important so I can to bed’.
“You saw the wind just go out him because I think he thought that I was going to yell and scream, throw chairs around, break open the door, and the next thing he’s in a blizzard pushing a shopping cart down the road!”
Dennis adds: “That was it. I just gave him a hug and said, ‘ If you remember what’s important, let me know’.”