Matthew Shepard

• 1. Introduction

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  Matthew Shepard was a 21-year-old student at the University of Wyoming when a cyclist riding near Laramie mistook his body for a scarecrow. The cyclist, Aaron Kreifels, had no reason to expect a person. What lay against that fence was a young man who had been beaten, tortured and abandoned. It was the autumn of 1998, and Shepard did not survive the week.

  His name would soon be attached to a federal law, a foundation, a play, a memoir and a debate that has never fully settled. Who was he before that fence? How did two strangers in a bar turn into his killers? Was the crime driven by hatred, by robbery, by drugs, or by some mixture of all three? And how did one death in a small Wyoming city end up rewriting what the United States government counts as a hate crime?

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• 2. Before Laramie

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  Casper, Wyoming, is where Matthew Wayne Shepard was born on the 1st of December 1976. He was the first of two sons of Judy and Dennis Shepard. His brother, Logan, arrived in 1981, and the two boys stayed close. Matthew grew up Episcopalian and once served as an altar boy. Classmates found him friendly, but he was teased for his small stature and lack of athleticism. He also showed an early taste for politics.

  A job offer from Saudi Aramco, the oil and natural gas company, moved the family overseas during his high school years. They lived in the company's residential camp in Dhahran. Matthew finished school in Switzerland, at the American School in Switzerland, known as TASIS. There he acted in theater and studied German and Italian.

  A school trip to Morocco in 1995 brought a far darker experience. Shepard was abducted, beaten and raped. According to his mother, he afterward lived with depression and panic attacks. He was hospitalized several times for clinical depression and suicidal thoughts. One friend feared the depression had pushed him toward drugs once he reached college.

  He graduated in May 1995. Catawba College in North Carolina came next, followed by Casper College in Wyoming and a stretch in Denver, Colorado. He ended up at the University of Wyoming in Laramie as a first-year political science major with a minor in languages. He was also chosen as the student representative for the Wyoming Environmental Council.

  Dennis Shepard later called his son "an optimistic and accepting young man" with a passion for equality. A friend, Michele Josue, described him as "a tenderhearted and kind person." Josue would later make a documentary about him, titled Matt Shepard Is a Friend of Mine.

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• 3. Night at the Fence

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  Two men in their early 20s, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, approached Shepard at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie on the night of the 6th of October 1998. Shepard was close to them in age. They offered him a ride home. Instead they drove him to a remote rural area, where they robbed him, pistol-whipped him and tortured him. They then tied him to a split-rail fence and left him there.

  News reports wrongly said the fence was made of barbed wire. Many reports dwelt on the pistol-whipping and the fractured skull. One widely repeated image described his face as covered in blood except where tears had partly washed it clean.

  The two attackers drove back into town. They testified that they had learned Shepard's address and meant to rob his home as well. Then McKinney attacked two other men, 19-year-old Emiliano Morales and 18-year-old Jeremy Herrara. Both Morales and McKinney came away with head wounds. Police officer Flint Waters reached the scene of that fight and arrested Henderson. A search of McKinney's truck turned up a blood-smeared gun, Shepard's shoes and his credit card.

  The girlfriends of both men testified that neither had been drunk or high that night. Afterward, the men tried to persuade the women to give them alibis and to help get rid of evidence.

  By the time Kreifels found Shepard, eighteen hours had passed and Shepard was in a coma. Reggie Fluty, the first police officer on the scene, found him alive and covered in blood. The medical gloves issued by the Albany County Sheriff's Office were faulty, and her supply ran out. She cleared an airway in his bloody mouth with her bare hands.

  The next day, Fluty learned that Shepard was HIV-positive and that cuts on her hands might have exposed her. She took an AZT regimen for several months and then tested negative. Judy Shepard later wrote that she learned of her son's HIV status while he lay dying in the hospital.

  Shepard went first to Ivinson Memorial Hospital in Laramie. He was then moved to the more advanced trauma ward at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. His skull was fractured behind the head and in front of the right ear. Severe brainstem damage had disrupted his heart rate, body temperature and other vital functions. About a dozen small cuts marked his head, face and neck. Doctors judged the injuries too severe to operate on.

  He never woke and stayed on full life support. During those days, candlelight vigils took place in countries around the world. Shepard died at 12:53 a.m. on the 12th of October 1998, aged 21.

  Both attackers were already in custody, and the question now was what charges would follow.

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• 4. Two Trials

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  Attempted murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery were the first charges against McKinney and Henderson. After Shepard died, prosecutors upgraded the attempted murder count to first-degree murder, which made both men eligible for the death penalty. Their girlfriends, Kristen Price and Chasity Pasley, were charged as accessories after the fact.

  At McKinney's pretrial hearing in November 1998, Sergeant Rob Debree described an interview from the 9th of October. According to Debree, McKinney said the pair had picked Shepard as a robbery target and pretended to be gay to lure him to their truck. McKinney said he attacked after Shepard put a hand on his knee. Detective Ben Fritzen testified that Price had told him McKinney linked the violence to his feelings about gay people.

  Pasley pleaded guilty in December 1998. On the 5th of April 1999, Henderson avoided a trial by pleading guilty to murder and kidnapping. To escape the death penalty, he agreed to testify against McKinney. District Judge Jeffrey A. Donnell gave him two consecutive life terms. Henderson's lawyer argued at sentencing that Shepard had not been chosen because he was gay.

  McKinney's trial ran through October and November 1999. Prosecutor Cal Rerucha said the two men had pretended to be gay to win Shepard's trust. Price testified to the same effect. McKinney's lawyer tried a gay panic defense, claiming that alleged advances by Shepard had driven McKinney to temporary insanity. The judge rejected that argument. The lawyer fell back on a claim that the pair meant to rob Shepard, not kill him. Rerucha countered that the killing was premeditated and driven by "greed and violence" rather than by Shepard's sexual orientation.

  The jury cleared McKinney of premeditated murder but convicted him of felony murder, then turned to the question of the death penalty. Shepard's parents brokered a deal. McKinney received two consecutive life terms with no possibility of parole. Both men were held at the Wyoming State Penitentiary in Rawlins and were later moved elsewhere because of overcrowding.

  Price pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge of interfering with a police officer. Five years later, she would tell a television camera something very different from what she had told the court.

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• 5. The Contested Motive

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  Elizabeth Vargas, a television journalist, anchored a 2004 report on the ABC News program 20/20 that challenged the story most Americans knew. It quoted McKinney, Henderson, Price, Rerucha and a lead investigator. Together their statements said the murder was mainly a drug-related robbery that turned violent. Price said she had lied to police about an unwanted advance provoking McKinney. "I don't think it was a hate crime at all," she said. Rerucha put it this way: "It was a murder that was once again driven by drugs."

  The reaction was sharp. GLAAD said the report leaned on speculation and on unreliable people who had changed their stories. Judy Shepard's lawyer called it an oversimplification. Michael Adams of Lambda Legal accused it of trying to "de-gay the murder."

  Stephen Jimenez, who produced that 20/20 segment, expanded his argument into a book. The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard appeared in September 2013. Jimenez wrote that Shepard and McKinney had been occasional sex partners and that Shepard dealt methamphetamine. He also reported that Fritzen told an interviewer Shepard's sexual orientation "certainly wasn't the motive in the homicide."

  Commentators split. Some called Jimenez's account sensational and misleading, and others defended it. Law enforcement officials who worked the case were divided as well. Some rejected his conclusions, while others said evidence pointed to drugs as an important factor.

  McKinney himself offered a different statement in a 2009 interview. "The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals," he said. "He was obviously gay. That played a part. His weakness. His frailty."

  Activist John Stoltenberg raised a separate objection. He argued that casting Shepard only as a victim of anti-gay violence ignored the harder parts of his life. Stoltenberg named young men who are "sold for sex, ravaged by drugs, and generally exploited."

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• 6. Angels and Pickets

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  Fred Phelps led members of the Westboro Baptist Church to Shepard's funeral, where they won national attention by picketing with homophobic slogans. One sign read "Matt in Hell." The church also turned up to protest during the court proceedings against Henderson and McKinney.

  Romaine Patterson, one of Shepard's friends, decided to answer them without shouting. She organized a group that gathered in a circle around the protesters. Its members wore white robes and enormous wings, like angels, which blocked the signs from view.

  The wings could not block sound. Shepard's parents still heard the protesters yelling anti-gay remarks, some aimed at the family. Police stepped in and formed a human barrier between the two groups.

  Patterson turned the idea into an organization. She founded Angel Action in April 1999.

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• 7. Writing the Law

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  Wyoming and the federal government both lacked a hate crime charge for attacks based on sexual orientation in 1998. Within hours of Shepard's discovery, two of his friends, Walt Boulden and Alex Trout, began phoning media organizations to say he had been attacked for being gay. Rerucha later recalled that they called the County Attorney's office and the press, insisting his sexuality not go unnoticed. Another close friend, Tina Labrie, said the pair wanted to make Matt a poster child for their cause. Boulden tied the attack to the missing hate crime statute in Wyoming.

  In the next Wyoming legislative session, a bill defined certain attacks motivated by sexual orientation as hate crimes. It failed on a 30-30 tie in the state House of Representatives.

  President Bill Clinton pushed to extend federal hate crime law to cover gay people, women and people with disabilities. The Senate alone passed a Hate Crimes Prevention Act in July 1999, after its reintroduction that March. In September 2000, both houses passed such legislation, but a conference committee stripped it out.

  On the 20th of March 2007, the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act arrived in Congress as bipartisan legislation. Democrat John Conyers sponsored it, with 171 co-sponsors, and Shepard's parents attended the introduction. The bill would widen the federal definition to cover gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. It would also require FBI reporting on those crimes. The House passed it on the 3rd of May 2007, and similar legislation passed the Senate on the 27th of September 2007.

  President George W. Bush then signaled a veto. Conservative groups opposed the measure, and attaching it to a defense bill cost it support among antiwar Democrats. Leaders dropped it. On the 10th of December 2007, congressional leaders attached hate crimes language to a Department of Defense Authorization bill, but that effort also failed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she remained committed to passing the act. Barack Obama, once elected president, made the same pledge.

  The House took up the issue again on the 29th of April 2009. Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina called the hate crime label on Shepard's murder a "hoax." She later described her wording as "a poor choice of words." The House passed the act 249-175.

  Ted Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and a bipartisan group had introduced the bill in the Senate the day before. By the 17th of June 2009 it had 43 cosponsors. The Senate adopted it as an amendment to S.1390 by 63-28 on the 15th of July. On the 22nd of October, the Senate passed the act 68-29. Obama signed it on the 28th of October 2009.

  At a reception celebrating the law, Judy Shepard stood with two sisters of James Byrd Jr., Louvon Harris and Betty Byrd Boatner.

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• 8. Remembrance

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  In December 1998, Judy and Dennis Shepard founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Judy became its main force and a national advocate for LGBTQ rights, especially for gay youth. In 2009 she published The Meaning of Matthew: My Son's Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed. The book follows the family through the days at their son's bedside and the vigils held for him. It also covers their struggle to navigate the legal system.

  On the 26th of October 2018, just over twenty years after his death, Shepard's ashes were interred in the crypt of Washington National Cathedral. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, presided alongside the Bishop of Washington, the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde. The Gay Men's Chorus of Washington, D.C., GenOUT and Conspirare performed. Conspirare sang Craig Hella Johnson's Considering Matthew Shepard. No national figure's ashes had been interred there since Helen Keller's, fifty years before.

  In June 2019, Shepard joined the first 50 inductees on the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall National Monument in New York City. The monument is the first national monument in the United States dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history. The unveiling was timed to the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots.

  Creative work followed in every form. The Laramie Project began as a play in 2000 and became a film in 2002. Tori Amos often dedicated her 1998 song "Merman" to Shepard, at the request of fans on her tours. In 1999, Melissa Etheridge released "Scarecrow" from her album Breakdown. Basketball player Jason Collins wore the number 98 in the 2012-13 season with the Boston Celtics and the Washington Wizards, then came out as gay. After he joined the Brooklyn Nets in 2014, NBA marketing reported strong interest and high sales of his "98" jersey.

  The metal band Trivium added another tribute in 2006 with "And Sadness Will Sear," written as a reminder of the murder.

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