HOW MATTHEW SHEPARD’S DEATH BECAME AMERICA’S WINDOW INTO HATE
Savage murder shocked a nation into awareness of the poison within
It took 18 hours. ❚ After Matthew Shepard’s killers drove him to a quiet development on the eastern edge of Laramie, Wyoming, repeatedly struck him with a .357 Magnum pistol, robbed him and left him to die, it took 18 hours for someone to find him. ❚ Details from that discovery Oct. 7, 1998, seared themselves into memories across the globe. ❚ How at first, a mountain biker, Aaron Kreifels, thought Shepard’s limp, battered form was a scarecrow – until he noticed tufts of his hair. ❚ How Shepard’s head and torso were so caked in dried blood that every inch was covered except for two strips under his eyes – tracks left by his tears. ❚ How he had been left like that – slumped on his side in the Wyoming dirt, his hands tethered behind him to a wooden buck fence – because he was gay. ❚ Soon, Shepard’s name would be splashed across newspaper pages, from the Laramie Daily Boomerang to The New York Times. His picture would run across TV screens in living rooms around the world. ❚ “Gay man beaten and left for dead; 2 are charged,” headlines roared in bold type. “Call for tougher laws after attack on (University of Wyoming) student.”
An entire world and nine time zones away, a phone rang in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where Shepard’s father, Dennis, worked in the oil industry. It was so early – 5 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 8, 1998 – that it jolted Shepard’s mom, Judy, awake.
The call was from an emergency room doctor in Laramie, telling them Shepard had been beaten. His injuries were so severe he had been transferred from Ivinson Memorial Hospital to Fort Collins’ Poudre Valley Hospital, which was better equipped to treat him.
Knowing little else, the couple started securing the string of car rides and connecting flights it would take to travel the 8,000 miles from Saudi Arabia to Fort Collins, where Shepard languished in a hospital bed.
The blows to his skull had fatally damaged his brain stem.
As he lay there – broken and breathing through a ventilator – they played him Tracy Chapman and John Fogerty CDs. They spritzed him with his favorite cologne and perfume.
Dennis even drove six hours round trip to the family’s home in Casper, Wyoming, to try to find Shepard’s favorite childhood stuffed animal, a plush rabbit named Oscar, Judy recalled in her
2009 book, “The Meaning of Matthew.” Just after midnight on Oct. 12 – five days after his brutal attack – they stayed by his side as Matthew Wayne Shepard succumbed to his injuries.
He was 21 years old.
Letters, emails and cards poured in for the grieving Shepards. According to Judy, easily half of them were from the straight community saying that – like she and Dennis — they had no idea anything like Matthew’s murder could happen in this country.
“We were totally ignorant of the vast amount of discrimination that was being dealt to the gay community,” Dennis Shepard told The Coloradoan in September. “We just assumed that Matt would just be a citizen with the same equal rights that his straight brother had.”
More than a decade passed after the murder before the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed in 2009 – expanding federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a person’s sexual orientation, gender or disability.
Five states – including Wyoming – don’t have criminal hate crime laws. In
14, hate crime laws don’t protect individuals for their sexual orientation. In
27 states, a worker can legally be fired for being gay.
The Shepards never imagined any of it – the vigils, the marches, the media response or the slow march toward change – but 20 years ago, Matthew Shepard became America’s wake-up call.
When a world watches
Dwarfed by the building it faces – an imposing stone structure built for the University of Wyoming’s College of Arts and Sciences – Shepard’s bench is small and simple, made of faux wood slats affixed with a plaque.
“Matthew Wayne Shepard,” it states in gold lettering. “Beloved son, brother and friend. He continues to make a difference. Peace be with him and all who sit here.”
Shepard’s murder has become an enduring symbol of hate and hope.
It spurred features in national magazines and retellings in novels and plays.
It prompted groups such as Westboro Baptist Church to descend on Wyoming, where they picketed Shepard’s funeral and displayed homophobic posters for national news cameras.
It led Elton John to co-write “American Triangle,” a song that likening Shepard to a deer felled by two coyotes on a windy Wyoming prairie.
News organizations remained fixated on Shepard’s murder and its implications beyond that October – into increased pushes for legislation and coverage of his killers’ trials.
“We had absolutely no clue that this would be a story with any kind of lasting importance or memory for anyone,” Judy Shepard said. “But 20 years later, still to be sort of the touchstone for hate crimes or even the awakening to the situation in the gay community was just beyond our scope of thinking then.”
‘Two lives ruined, one life spent’
Two days after Matthew’s death, tearful politicians and celebrities took to the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, where they spoke in front of a vigil of thousands.
Among the speakers was Ellen DeGeneres, who had come out as a lesbian on a Time magazine cover the year before. “I am so pissed off,” she said to the crowd, her breath catching, her eyes puffy and red. “I can’t stop crying.”
Graham Baxendale, who was a visiting lecturer teaching a hate crimes and hate groups course at the University of Wyoming, said he watched DeGeneres’ televised speech from his dorm room.
He and his friends, many of whom were part of the LGBTQ community, attended vigils, marches and discussions before returning to watch the national response glow from Baxendale’s tiny dorm room TV.
As news spread across the country, details of the crime solidified in Laramie.
The attack that killed Shepard started Oct. 6, 1998.
After attending an LGBT+ group meeting and dinner with friends that night, Shepard went alone to the Fireside Bar & Lounge – a squat, electricblue dive bar with red and yellow flames painted up its sides in downtown Laramie.
He had a few beers, according to the bartender, and migrated to the bar’s pool table area where two men were hanging out.
Shortly after midnight, the men – 21year-old roofers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson – offered Shepard a ride home. They lured him to McKinney’s truck by telling Shepard that, like him, they were gay, according to a complaint filed in the following days by an Albany County prosecutor.
They robbed him, drove him to the eastern edge of town, deep inside a development of newer homes, and dragged him out of the truck.
McKinney later told police that he started beating Shepard because Shepard had hit on him in the truck – part of a “gay panic defense” that Laramie Judge Barton Voigt rejected when McKinney was on trial for Shepard’s kidnapping and murder the following year.
McKinney ordered Henderson to tie Shepard’s hands to a nearby buck fence with a swatch of white clothesline. Shepard begged for his life as McKinney kicked and punched him.
Shepard was struck in the face and head 19 to 21 times with the butt of an
8-inch-barrel .357 Magnum pistol, including three final, and fatal, skullcrushing blows.
Leaving him unconscious and barely alive, McKinney and Henderson climbed back in the truck and headed toward town with what they’d taken: an ATM card, a pair of shoes and
$20. Henderson pleaded guilty to kidnapping and murder. He was sentenced to two life terms in prison in April 1999. McKinney was convicted of two counts of felony murder, second-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery. He also is serving two life terms.
McKinney and Henderson are in prison in Wyoming. Neither responded to the Coloradoan’s requests for comment.
“I think that it was the iconography of it,” Baxendale said when asked why Shepard’s murder – why THIS hate crime – became a turning point for many Americans.
In the photo of Shepard distributed after the attack he looked “angelic,” Baxendale said.
People were captivated by Shepard’s murder – this brutal attack among the wild vastness of a state nicknamed for equality.
“Somewhere that road forks up ahead,” the lyrics to Elton John’s “American Triangle” go.
“To ignorance and innocence / Three lives drift on different winds / Two lives ruined, one life spent.”
Hearts and minds
If Matthew Shepard were alive today, he would be 41 and laughing at his mom, a woman Dennis Shepard describes as a “15, on a 10-scale, introvert.”
The couple threw themselves into human rights activism and founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation a few months after their son’s murder. Judy Shepard speaks at events and in public service announcements, preaching a message of acceptance, not just tolerance. They still live in Casper.
They continue to push for more legal protections for the LGBTQ community.
“To see her out there speaking instead of him, who should be doing it. ... He’d be getting a real hoot out of it,” Dennis said.
Judy painted Matthew as spirited and outgoing in her 2009 book.
After years abroad, including boarding school in Switzerland, Matthew loved to meet new people from new places.
He always took an opportunity to bend a stranger’s ear over coffee, his mother wrote. He had a restless spirit and was constantly on the move.
Forbidden by his father from getting piercings or tattoos, he found ways to express himself with his clothing and hair – the color and style of which were always changing, his mother wrote.
When he wanted to talk to his parents, he’d call – sometimes at all hours of the night, time difference be damned.
“Did you hear what happened to Princess Diana?” he yelled over the phone to his mom nine hours away one August day. “She’s dead!”
When the phone rings now, it’s not Matthew.
There are no more late-night calls, no more silly arguments over cellphone bills. Matthew was never able to join the Peace Corps or work for the foreign service as he’d dreamed.
Instead, he lives on elsewhere – in his parents’ foundation, in Judy’s speeches about inclusiveness and acceptance, in their efforts to increase legal protections for marginalized communities and in laws such as the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.
“We were blessed with two sons, one straight and one gay,” Dennis said. “If Matt was alive today, he would (still) not be equal to his straight brother.”
Until 2015, Matthew wouldn’t have been able to get married in certain states. Until last year, some states didn’t allow same-sex couples to adopt children. Today, he could still be fired based on his sexuality, depending on where he lived in America.
“Why (is) a segment of the American population not allowed to have the same equal chance and privileges as any other part of American society?” Dennis asked. “The straight community can do all these things the gay community can’t. Why is that?”
Judy and Dennis envision a world with lasting legal protections – rights that can’t be overturned with a change in the Oval Office, in Congress or on the Supreme Court.
They want comprehensive state and national job discrimination protections and mandatory reporting procedures for all hate crimes.
“The road I took in moving forward was to try to get laws in this country that would protect the gay community that could not be changed on a whim … things that are indelible forever,” Judy said.
Their path has included a more grassroots movement of “changing hearts and minds,” Judy said.
“We should be taking care of each other,” Judy told the Coloradoan, “not demonizing or denigrating or putting down other human beings.”
Coming from a generation where those in the LGBTQ community largely hid their sexuality – “you just didn’t talk about it. ... Nobody talked about it,” Judy said – she wants to see the opposite.
She wants to see people in the LGBTQ communities and their allies share their stories over and over again, “so everyone with no direct knowledge or experience with the community understands that they’re just people,” Judy Shepard said.
People who like to chat up strangers over coffee.
People who like their Tracy Chapman and John Fogerty CDs.
People who still have a childhood stuffed animal boxed up at their parents’ house.
People who call their moms with international gossip.
People like Matthew.
“We just assumed that Matt would just be a citizen with the same equal rights that his straight brother had.”
Dennis Shepard Father of Matthew Shepard