Matthew Shepard

Based on Wikipedia: Matthew Shepard

A Scarecrow in the October Cold

On October 7, 1998, a cyclist named Aaron Kreifels was riding through the high prairie outside Laramie, Wyoming, when he spotted what he thought was a scarecrow tied to a split-rail fence. It wasn't. It was the body of a twenty-one-year-old college student named Matthew Shepard, beaten so severely that his face was unrecognizable—covered entirely in blood except where his tears had washed clean tracks down his cheeks.

He had been there for eighteen hours. The temperature had dropped near freezing overnight.

Matthew Shepard's murder would become one of the most significant hate crimes in American history, sparking a national reckoning about violence against gay Americans and eventually leading to federal legislation that bears his name. But to understand why his death resonated so deeply—why it still echoes more than twenty-five years later—you have to understand who Matthew was before that October night, and the strange, contested, deeply American story of what happened to him.

A Boy from Wyoming

Matthew Wayne Shepard was born in Casper, Wyoming, in 1976, the first of two sons in what by all accounts was a loving, close-knit family. His younger brother Logan arrived five years later, and the two remained close throughout their lives. Matthew was raised Episcopalian—he served as an altar boy—in a state where the landscape is vast and the population sparse, where everyone knows everyone and difference can feel dangerous.

From early on, Matthew stood out. He was small, unathletic, and friendly with everyone—a combination that made him a target for teasing even as a child. He developed an early interest in politics, which is perhaps unsurprising for a kid who seemed to understand, even then, that the rules governing who belongs and who doesn't are made by people, and can be changed by people.

When Matthew was in high school, his father took a job with Saudi Aramco, the massive Saudi Arabian oil and natural gas company, and the family relocated to the company's residential compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Matthew finished high school not in Wyoming but in Switzerland, at the American School in Switzerland, known as TASIS. There he threw himself into theater and studied German and Italian—a young man hungry to see the world beyond the prairie.

But something happened during those years abroad that would shadow him for the rest of his short life.

The Weight of Trauma

In 1995, during a high school trip to Morocco, Matthew was abducted, beaten, and raped. His mother later said this assault triggered severe depression and panic attacks that haunted him for years afterward. He was hospitalized multiple times for clinical depression and suicidal thoughts. Friends worried that his psychological struggles drove him toward drug use during his college years.

This is a crucial piece of Matthew's story, and one that complicates the simple narrative that would later emerge. Matthew Shepard was not just a symbol. He was a real person—wounded, struggling, trying to find his way. He carried invisible scars long before the visible ones were inflicted.

After graduating in May 1995, Matthew bounced between schools: Catawba College in North Carolina, then Casper College back in Wyoming, then a period in Denver, Colorado. He eventually landed at the University of Wyoming in Laramie as a first-year political science major with a minor in languages. He was chosen as the student representative for the Wyoming Environmental Council—a position that suggests he never lost that childhood interest in how the rules get made and who makes them.

His father would later describe him as "an optimistic and accepting young man who had a special gift of relating to almost everyone." A friend who later made a documentary about him called him "tenderhearted and kind." These descriptions feel important to hold onto, because what happened next was so brutal, so devoid of tenderness, that it's easy to lose sight of the human being at the center of it.

The Night of October 6th

The Fireside Lounge in Laramie was the kind of bar you find in college towns everywhere—nothing special, nothing remarkable. On the evening of October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard was there, as were two other young men in their early twenties: Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson.

What happened next has been told and retold, investigated and reinvestigated, contested and defended. The basic facts are not in dispute. McKinney and Henderson offered Shepard a ride home. Instead of taking him home, they drove to a remote area outside town. There, they robbed him, beat him savagely with the butt of a pistol, and tied him to a fence post. Then they left.

The medical details are difficult to read. Matthew suffered fractures to the back of his head and in front of his right ear. The brainstem damage was so severe that his body lost the ability to regulate basic functions like heart rate and body temperature. There were about a dozen lacerations around his head, face, and neck. The injuries were so extensive that doctors at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado—where he was airlifted after being found—determined they could not operate. There was nothing to be done.

He never regained consciousness.

While Matthew lay on life support, candlelight vigils were held around the world. On October 12, 1998, at 12:53 in the morning, he died. He was twenty-one years old.

The Investigation and the Question of Motive

McKinney and Henderson were arrested almost immediately. When police searched McKinney's truck after responding to an unrelated fight later that night—McKinney had attacked two other men, apparently unable to stop his violence—they found a blood-smeared gun, Shepard's shoes, and his credit card. The case was not hard to solve.

The question of why they did it proved far more complicated.

At McKinney's pretrial hearing, a police sergeant testified that McKinney claimed he and Henderson had identified Shepard as a robbery target and pretended to be gay to lure him to their truck. McKinney said he attacked Shepard after Shepard put a hand on his knee. His girlfriend told police he was motivated by anti-gay sentiment—a statement she would retract six years later.

The prosecutor, Cal Rerucha, argued that the murder was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney's defense team attempted what's known as a "gay panic defense"—the claim that McKinney was driven to temporary insanity by alleged sexual advances from Shepard. The judge rejected this defense. The defense then shifted to arguing that McKinney and Henderson had only intended to rob Shepard, not kill him.

Henderson pleaded guilty to avoid trial and agreed to testify against McKinney in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. He received two consecutive life sentences. At his sentencing, his lawyer argued that Shepard had not been targeted because he was gay.

McKinney went to trial in late 1999. The jury found him not guilty of premeditated murder but guilty of felony murder—meaning they believed he killed Shepard in the course of committing another felony (robbery) but had not planned in advance to kill him. When the jury began deliberating on whether to impose the death penalty, Matthew's parents brokered a deal: McKinney would receive two consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. The Shepards did not want another death.

The Contested Narrative

In the years after the trial, the story of Matthew Shepard became a kind of national parable about anti-gay violence in America. But parables are simple, and reality rarely is.

In 2004, the ABC news program 20/20 aired a report suggesting that the murder might have been primarily drug-related rather than a hate crime. McKinney's girlfriend recanted her earlier statement about anti-gay motivation, telling the reporter, "I don't think it was a hate crime at all." The prosecutor himself said, "It was a murder that was once again driven by drugs."

This report was sharply criticized by LGBTQ advocacy groups. GLAAD, the media monitoring organization whose acronym stands for the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, called it reliant on "speculation and statements by unreliable individuals changing their story." Judy Shepard's lawyer called it an oversimplification. An attorney from Lambda Legal, a prominent LGBTQ rights organization, described it as an attempt to "de-gay the murder."

The producer of that 20/20 segment, Stephen Jimenez, went on to write a book in 2013 called The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard. Jimenez claimed that Shepard and McKinney had been occasional sexual partners and that Shepard dealt methamphetamine. Some law enforcement officials supported the idea that drugs played a significant role; others rejected Jimenez's conclusions entirely.

What are we to make of these competing narratives?

Perhaps this: motives are rarely singular. A murder can be about drugs and about hatred. A killer can rob someone and despise them for who they are. The gay panic defense may have been legally rejected, but that doesn't mean anti-gay animus played no role. And a young man can be both a victim of a hate crime and a person with his own complicated history, his own struggles with drugs and mental health and trauma.

The truth is usually messier than the story we tell about it.

The Protests at the Funeral

If you want to understand how Matthew Shepard's death crystallized a particular moment in American culture, consider what happened at his funeral.

Members of the Westboro Baptist Church—a small Kansas congregation led by Fred Phelps that had made a name for itself through virulently anti-gay protests—showed up with signs bearing slogans like "Matt in Hell" and "God Hates Fags." They would continue protesting throughout the trials of Henderson and McKinney.

The Westboro Baptist Church is what scholars of religion might call an outlier institution—a group so extreme that it is rejected by virtually every mainstream religious organization, including other conservative evangelical churches. They have protested at the funerals of soldiers, children killed in mass shootings, and countless others. Their presence at Matthew Shepard's funeral was designed to provoke, to wound, to draw attention.

It worked, but perhaps not in the way Phelps intended.

A friend of Matthew's named Romaine Patterson organized a counter-protest. Her group dressed in white robes with enormous wings—angel costumes designed to physically block the Westboro protesters from view. They called themselves Angel Action, and Patterson would continue the organization for years, deploying angels wherever Westboro showed up to spread their particular gospel of hatred.

The image of those angels, standing silent and enormous between grieving parents and screaming protesters, became iconic. It suggested that love could physically interpose itself between hatred and its targets. It also demonstrated that Matthew Shepard's death had become something larger than one murder—it had become a battleground in an ongoing American war over who belongs and who doesn't.

The Long Road to Legislation

Within hours of Matthew being discovered, his friends began calling media organizations and the county attorney's office to ensure that his sexual orientation wouldn't be overlooked in the coverage. They understood, in that immediate awful moment, that Matthew's death could mean something—could change something—if people knew who he was and why he might have been targeted.

At the time, neither federal law nor Wyoming state law allowed crimes committed on the basis of sexual orientation to be prosecuted as hate crimes. The very concept of "hate crimes" is relatively recent in American jurisprudence. The idea is that certain crimes carry additional social harm when they target victims because of their membership in a particular group—when the violence is intended not just to hurt one person but to terrorize an entire community.

In the legislative session following Matthew's death, Wyoming lawmakers introduced a bill that would have defined certain attacks motivated by a victim's sexual orientation as hate crimes. It failed on a 30-30 tie in the state House of Representatives. Half the legislators could not bring themselves to offer this particular protection to gay and lesbian Wyomingites.

But the effort didn't stop there.

President Bill Clinton had already been pushing for federal hate crimes legislation, and Matthew Shepard's murder gave that effort new urgency and visibility. It would take more than a decade, but in October 2009—almost exactly eleven years after Matthew's death—Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

James Byrd Jr. was a Black man who was murdered in Texas in June 1998, just a few months before Matthew. Three white supremacists chained him to the back of a pickup truck and dragged him for three miles until his body was torn apart. The pairing of their names in the legislation was deliberate: two victims, two communities, two forms of American hatred bound together in law.

President Barack Obama signed the act on October 28, 2009. It expanded federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim's actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability. For the first time, the federal government could prosecute hate crimes that local authorities were unwilling or unable to address.

Legacy and Memory

Matthew Shepard's death generated an extraordinary amount of art. The playwright Moisés Kaufman and the Tectonic Theater Project traveled to Laramie to interview residents about the murder and its aftermath; the result was The Laramie Project, a documentary theater piece that has been performed thousands of times around the world and was adapted into an HBO film in 2002. Matthew's mother Judy wrote a memoir called The Meaning of Matthew. Films, novels, songs, and poems have taken up his story, trying to make sense of it, to find meaning in meaningless violence.

Judy and Dennis Shepard channeled their grief into activism. They founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation in December 1998, just two months after their son's death. Judy became a prominent advocate for LGBTQ rights, particularly focusing on gay youth. In June 2019, Matthew was inducted onto the National LGBTQ Wall of Honor at the Stonewall Inn in New York City—part of the Stonewall National Monument, the first national monument dedicated to LGBTQ rights and history. His name was unveiled during the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall riots, the 1969 uprising that launched the modern LGBTQ rights movement.

But not everyone is comfortable with how Matthew has been remembered.

Gay rights activist John Stoltenberg has argued that portraying Matthew solely as a victim of gay-bashing presents an incomplete picture. "Keeping Matthew as the poster boy of gay-hate crime and ignoring the full tragedy of his story has been the agenda of many gay-movement leaders," he wrote. "Ignoring the tragedies of Matthew's life prior to his murder will do nothing to help other young men in our community who are sold for sex, ravaged by drugs, and generally exploited."

This critique points to something important. Symbols are useful, but they can also flatten. Matthew Shepard was a real person—a person who had been sexually assaulted in Morocco and struggled with depression, who may have used drugs, who was HIV-positive (his mother learned this only while he lay dying), who was trying to put together a life in a world that could be cruel to people like him. Turning him into a pure symbol of anti-gay violence might serve political purposes, but it also erases the complicated human being he actually was.

The Fence Post and the Cathedral

For years, the fence where Matthew was found became an unofficial memorial. People left flowers, notes, mementos. The fence itself eventually deteriorated and was removed, but by then the image had seared itself into American consciousness: a young man tied to rough wood in the Wyoming night, left to die because of who he was or who someone thought he was.

In October 2018—twenty years after his death—Matthew Shepard's ashes were interred at the Washington National Cathedral. It was a remarkable choice of resting place. The cathedral, officially called the Cathedral Church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, is one of the most important religious buildings in America, the site of presidential funerals and national prayer services. For a gay man who was killed in part because of his sexuality to be laid to rest there felt, to many, like a kind of national reconciliation.

The Reverend Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, presided. He had known the Shepard family and had been involved in LGBTQ advocacy within the church for decades. In his remarks, he spoke of Matthew not as a symbol but as a person—someone who had been loved, who had struggled, who deserved to be remembered in his full humanity.

Dennis Shepard gave a eulogy. "We're finally going to be able to visit Matt," he said. After two decades of their son's ashes sitting on a shelf in their home—too dangerous to place them anywhere public because of ongoing threats and the specter of Westboro protesters—they could finally lay him to rest.

What Remains

More than a quarter century after Matthew Shepard's death, the United States has changed in ways that might have seemed unimaginable in 1998. Same-sex marriage is legal nationwide. Openly gay people serve in Congress, in the military, in professional sports. Public opinion on LGBTQ rights has shifted more rapidly than on almost any other social issue in American history.

And yet violence against LGBTQ people continues. Hate crimes based on sexual orientation remain among the most common categories reported to the FBI. Transgender individuals, particularly transgender women of color, face rates of violence far exceeding the general population. The gains are real, but so is the backlash, and so is the ongoing reality that being visibly queer in America still carries risks.

Matthew Shepard's story endures because it captures something essential about how hatred works and what it costs. A young man who had already survived so much—assault, depression, the daily toll of being different in a place that didn't always welcome difference—was killed by two other young men who may have hated him for being gay, or may have seen him as an easy target, or may have been high on methamphetamine, or some combination of all three. The motives were probably as tangled as human motives usually are.

What is not complicated is what was done to him. What is not complicated is that he died alone and cold, tied to a fence in the Wyoming night, beaten so badly his face was unrecognizable. What is not complicated is that his death broke his parents' hearts and galvanized a movement and changed American law.

The cyclist who found him thought he was a scarecrow. That image has never left our collective consciousness—the idea that a human being could be reduced to something less than human, displayed like a warning. It is an image that demands a response. Twenty-five years later, we are still figuring out what that response should be.