20 years later: How Matthew Shepard’s murder became America’s window into hate – By Erin Udell (Fort Collins Coloradoan) / Oct 4 2018
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 Oct. 7, 1998, discovery would sear themselves into memories across the globe.
How at first a mountain biker, Aaron Kreifels, thought Matthew’s limp, battered form was a scarecrow – until he noticed tufts of his hair.
How Matthew’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 Matthew’s father, Dennis, worked in the oil industry. It was so early – 5 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, 1998 – that it jolted Matthew’s mom, Judy, awake.
The call was from an emergency room doctor in Laramie, telling them Matthew 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 Matthew languished in a hospital bed.
The blows to his skull had fatally damaged his brain stem.
As he lay there the next evening – 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 Matthew’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.”
That assumption proved naive.
More than a decade passed after Matthew’s 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 – still don’t have criminal hate crime laws. In another 14, hate crime laws don’t protect individuals for their sexual orientation. And still in 27 states, you can legally be fired from your job for being gay.
The Shepards never imagined any of it – the vigils, the marches, the media response, or the slow march toward change – when they arrived at his bedside.
But 20 years ago, on Oct. 7, 1998, Matthew Shepard became America’s wake-up call.
