The Fireside Bar & Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming, was just the kind of redneck saloon you’d expect to find in the frontier ranch town whose very name evoked a lawless, Wild West past.
Posters of busty pin-up girls advertising foaming beer adorned the walls, and, above the DJ’s booth, smoke curled through the nostrils of a huge mounted buffalo head.
It was a Tuesday night and the popular locale was crowded with raucous men in baseball hats and jeans, downing pitcher after pitcher of cut-price beer and playing pool. The atmosphere when Matthew Shepard walked in around 10.30 p.m. on 6 October 1998, was rowdy, with a hint of menace in the air. Trouble was just a glance in the wrong direction.
The slightly-built, twenty-one-year-old student at the University of Wyoming was openly gay in a state where God and the gun ruled the high, flat plains. According to his friends, Matthew had been attacked in the past for his homosexuality and bore the physical and mental scars.
Wyoming was also a state where legislators had for three years in a row failed to enact hate-crime laws for fear of a backlash from right-wing voters steeped in the church, conservative politics and ‘traditional family values.’
Matthew’s mother, Judy Shepard, later summed up the demeanour of her vulnerable, troubled son. ‘He had the posture of a victim,’ she recalled. ‘He was the kind of person whom you just look at and know if you hurt him that he’s going to take it – that there’s nothing he can do about it. When he walked down the street, he had the victim walk.’
As Matthew sat drinking at 11.45 p.m., two friends, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, both aged twenty-one, pushed their way to the bar, where they threw down handfuls of loose change for beer.
They were edgily dangerous that night, having spent a week bingeing on highly addictive ‘crank’ – methamphetamine – and were in search of more money to buy more drugs. A plot to rob a drug dealer of $10,000 had backfired and they were looking for an easy mark.
They found it in Matthew Shepard. Meek and diffident, but well dressed, he was wearing a smart sports coat – and possibly carrying a lot of cash. He was also so small as to be almost childlike. On a mere whim, Henderson and McKinney retired to the toilet together, hatching a plot to rob Matthew Shepard after he recklessly confided to them he was homosexual. Gleefully, they realised he was so scrawny that any resistance would be useless.
‘We’ll pretend to be gay, come onto him and then jack the faggot,’ McKinney said in a whispered conversation.
Sex was dangled as a bait and Matthew, his caution loosened by drink mixed with antidepressant and anti-anxiety prescription drugs, agreed to take a ride in the pickup truck with his new-found buddies.
Once inside the vehicle, McKinney struck the first blow with his gun. A brutal blow that was just a taste of the nightmare that was to unfold for Matthew.
Instead of heading home, the men drove down a sandy dirt track to a remote location near a housing complex in Sherman Hills, where Matthew – a 5-foot-2-inch political-science student who weighed barely more than seven stone – was hogtied to a rough-hewn pine fence, pistol-whipped with a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum and beaten and terrorised as, in tears, he begged for his life.
The assailants battered their victim in a crazed frenzy – smashing him at least twenty times – the ferocity of their attack fuelled by their hatred of homosexuals. Matthew’s arms were burned with cigarettes and he was kicked repeatedly in the groin.
When they finished torturing him, Henderson and McKinney left Matthew tied to the fence, with his hands bound behind his back, and his bloodied head and body slumped almost to the ground. They took his wallet containing just $20 cash and a handful of credit cards. They even stole his size-seven shoes, before speeding off to burgle his home and take whatever else they could find.
Sixteen hours later, at 6.30 on Wednesday evening, a college student cycling past spotted a ‘scarecrow’ pinioned to the fence. Hallowe’en was approaching and the passerby thought at first it was a spooky dummy drenched in fake blood.
Tragically, the dummy was only too real. Matthew was unconscious, barely alive, having been left out all night exposed to the clear, starlit sky as the temperature plummeted to near-freezing. He had suffered a massive skull fracture and severe brain damage, which affected the body’s ability to regulate heart rate and body temperature.
Tracks of the tears he had shed ran in clean, white lines through the grimy, bloodied pulp of his face.
So severe were his injuries that doctors at Poudre Valley Hospital in neighbouring Fort Collins, Colorado, to which he was rushed, decided he was past any medical intervention and, shaking their heads, summarised that any operation would be fruitless.
Matthew, comatose and dying, was hooked up to a ventilator while police contacted his parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard, who were abroad in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where Dennis had worked as an oil safety engineer for the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration for five years.
It was four o’clock in the morning when they got the fateful call. ‘Please God, let Matt be all right,’ Judy prayed as the phone rang out in the silence of their bedroom. Stunned by the news of her son’s imminent death she knew her prayers had not been answered. Frantically, Matthew’s parents made arrangements to rush to his hospital bedside but had to wait an agonising twenty hours for a flight to Amsterdam, where they boarded a connecting flight to Minneapolis to collect Matthew’s younger brother Logan before arriving exhausted in Colorado on Friday.
What Dennis and Judy did not – could not – anticipate was the firestorm that erupted as news of Matthew’s attack spread around America.
It acted as a lightning rod for the raw tensions festering between the country’s pro- and antigay lobbies. On the one hand, outspoken activist groups adopted Matthew as their new poster boy for gay rights – the battered victim of deadly gay-bashing. On the other hand, the church-led antigay lobby decried him, hinting that he had brought his fate on himself with his decadent lifestyle.
Dennis and social studies teacher Judy Shepard, aged forty-six, had raised their sons in Wyoming, where they had met and married before travelling overseas. Then, for a time, Matthew had been enrolled as a boarder in the prestigious American School in Switzerland, studying German and Italian and joining the drama group.
Wealthy and middle-class, the couple were hardworking, dependable and liberal in their outlook, although Dennis honestly admitted he took some time to come to terms with his son’s homosexuality, before finally accepting him for what he was.
Judy, meanwhile, instinctively understood her son. She remembered, ‘He said he didn’t choose to be gay. Nobody would choose to be gay. It’s a very hard life: you’re lonely, you’re scared, you’re discriminated against.
‘He was searching for a way to be happy with it. He was worried we’d be embarrassed or shamed. I told him to quit putting words in my mouth. He would feel guilty, an extra burden, but he knew we would be there for him, no matter what. There was never any question of that.’
Nothing, however, prepared them for the grotesque carnival that rolled into town. While the media maelstrom engulfed Dennis and Judy Shepard, they kept vigil at their son’s hospital beside, his last seconds counted down by the metronome wheezing of the respirator.
Judy recalled, ‘We heard the machine helping him breathe, we saw the screen monitoring his signs, his face swollen. His right ear had been reattached. I was not sure this was even Matt. But when I approached the bed I saw it was my precious son. I could see the colour of his blue eyes, but the twinkle of life was not there any more.’
Logan wept as he looked down on his beloved brother’s brutalised body. ‘I’ll never forget Logan’s look of terror when he first saw Matt,’ said Judy, choking back her own tears. ‘Logan was trembling, tears streaming down his face. He put his hand to Matt’s cheek. He asked if they could be alone.’
All they wanted to do was lock out the world, to be at peace with their son in his final hours. But there was no escape from all those who felt they could add their own cruel, heartless chapters to the Matthew Shepard story.
Glancing out of the window of the hospital, Judy and Dennis drew comfort from a familiar sight, a homecoming parade by Colorado State University, the colourful floats wending their way through the streets.
Minutes later the heartbroken parents gasped in horror when they spotted in the middle of the noisy carnival procession, the Wizard of Oz-themed float. It bore a scarecrow figure on which had been scrawled in spray paint I’M GAY and across its straw back the obscenity UP MY ASS.
At 12.53 a.m. on Monday 12 October, five days after Matthew was fist found pinioned to the fence, he died without ever regaining consciousness, slipping away in the hospital where so many bouquets of flowers had arrived from supporters that, once the lobby was filled to capacity, many other rooms had to be requisitioned to house the overflow. A website set up by the hospital administrators tracking Matthew’s condition took 800,000 hits before crashing.
National hysteria engulfed the Shepard family, who remained a small, still voice of calm in the eye of a storm of emotions unleashed by the murder of their son. It seemed to them that there would be no end to the hijacking of their son’s memory by those with political and religious agendas to promote.
To gays, Matthew Shepard was a Christ-like figure, his death likened to a crucifixion, tormented and tortured before dying in his own Calvary, his cross a simple country fence. The ugly face of an intolerant America had shown itself in all its unbridled rage.
Yet to many in Laramie, and many, many more across the American nation, gripped by the hysterical outpourings in the media, Matthew Shepard had paid the ultimate price for the ultimate sin of cruising for sex with men.
In the turbulent days after Matthew’s death, more than fifty candle-lit vigils were held all over the country where strangers wept and embraced. In Washington, the lesbian comedienne and top TV personality Ellen DeGeneres presided over an emotion-charged memorial.
President Bill Clinton made a personal telephone call to the Shepards from the White House, pledging to extend federal hate-crime legislation to include gays and lesbians.
Show-business celebrities expressed their own feelings of anger. Melissa Etheridge penned a song called ‘Scarecrow’, featured on her album Breakdown, and Elton John and his lyricist Bernie Taupin later paid their own musical tribute to Matthew on the album Songs from the West Coast.
Throughout Wyoming – ironically called the Equality State – flags were lowered at half-mast. The fence where Matthew died became an instant shrine.
Small, yellow stones were formed to make a cross. Pilgrims, motivated by compassion and morbid curiosity, left flowers, notes and trinkets – and, bizarrely, even a pair of rubber medical gloves said to have touched Matthew’s body.
The days were also riddled with fear. Tensions were running so high that, when Dennis Shepard attended Matt’s funeral, he wore a bulletproof Kevlar vest under his suit.
Rifle-toting SWAT teams crouched on the roof of the church while below demonstrators waved placards with slogans such as MATT SHEPARD ROTS IN HELL, AIDS KILLS FAGS and GOD HATES FAGS. The music and hymns soaring from St Mark’s Episcopal church in Matthew’s childhood home town of Casper, Wyoming, where he had been baptised, were drowned out by shouts and jeers from the baying mob.
In an address to the congregation, Matthew’s godfather, Steve Ghering, a pilot, drew on a religious analogy.
‘There is an image seared upon my mind when I reflect upon Matt on that wooden crossrail fence,’ he intoned. ‘However I have found a different image to replace that with, and that is the image of another man, almost two thousand years ago. When I concentrate on the Son of God being crucified, only then can I be released from the bitterness and anger I feel.’
Meanwhile, homicide detectives were quick to make arrests. Behind them, McKinney and Henderson had left a bold and unchallengeable trail of eyewitnesses, and blood and documentary evidence linking them to the crime.
As the enquiry gathered pace, the killers’ girlfriends, Kristen Price and Chastity Paisley, both aged twenty, conspired at every turn to thwart the police investigation. At first, they gave alibis for Henderson and McKinney, falsely claiming they were at home with them at the time of the killing.
They then went further to compromise the case, driving 50 miles from the trailer park home Paisley shared with Henderson to dump his bloody clothes. His blood-soaked shoes were secreted in a storage shed at Paisley’s mother’s house. At McKinney’s home, police discovered Matthew’s wallet wrapped in a dirty nappy discarded in a rubbish bin.
McKinney and Henderson were both charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery, crimes punishable with death.
In a bid to save his skin and avoid the death sentence, Russell Henderson pleaded guilty on 5 April 1999 to the murder and kidnapping of Matthew Shepard and, in return for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty, agreed to testify against McKinney at his separate trial.
Outside the courtroom an antigay zealot preacher, the Rev. Fred Phelps of the independent Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, took to the public stage with a dozen followers, waving placards reading GOD HATES FAGS and SAVE THE GERBILS – a reference to a hoary old legend concerning a Hollywood star rumoured to have inserted a rodent in his rectum to give himself sexual pleasure.
A full-colour blow-up picture bore the caption MATTHEW IN HELL.
Henderson told the court that McKinney was the main perpetrator and it was he who came up with the idea of robbing Matthew. As they neared the isolated, windswept spot chosen to batter the defenceless student, McKinney demanded Matthew’s wallet and hit him with the butt of the gun when he didn’t comply.
Rope was taken from the back of the truck to tie their terror-stricken victim to the fence where, Henderson claimed, it was McKinney who continued to beat him. He maintained he merely stood idly by, making no attempt to intervene, and his only role was to drive the truck and help tie Matthew to the fence.
Before sentencing, Henderson faced Dennis and Judy Shepard and begged them for forgiveness. ‘I hope that, one day, you will be able to find it in your hearts to forgive me. I know what I did was wrong. I’m sorry for what I did, and I’m ready to pay my debt for what I did.’
In a hushed courtroom, Judy Shepard, prior to the sentencing, looked directly into the face of Henderson, seated only 5 feet to her right.
‘At times, I don’t think you’re worthy of my recognising your existence,’ she said. ‘You murdered my son. I hope you never experience a day or night without experiencing the terror, humiliation, the hopelessness and helplessness that he experienced that night.’
Head bowed, Henderson stood to his feet as judge Jeffrey Donnell handed down a sentence of two consecutive life terms, condemning him to spend the rest of his days behind bars.
‘The court does not believe you feel real remorse,’ pronounced the judge. ‘This vile, senseless crime victimised Matthew, his family, your family, your community. Matthew Shepard’s murder was a heinous crime, savage and brutal in its nature, and evidencing a total disrespect of the dignity of human life.
‘I wonder, Mr Henderson, whether you fully realise the gravity of what you’ve done, even as you stand here today. The pain that you caused here, Mr Henderson, will never go away, never. It will always be here.’
It took another eight months of waiting for the Shepard family until Aaron James McKinney stood trial.
Unlike his co-defendant, McKinney - sporting a shaved, military-style haircut, his face already a jailhouse pallor - decided to fight the charges. His attorney, Jason Tangeman, sparked outrage by submitting to the court a ‘gay panic’ defence strategy – that McKinney’s attack was triggered by the fear and horror of a homosexual pass made by Matthew Shepard, brought on by flashback memories of childhood abuse.
He suggested McKinney was scarred by a homosexual predator as a child, a factor that explained the ferocity of the attack.
‘He responded with five minutes of rage and chaos,’ Tangeman told the disbelieving judge and the equally dubious panel of jurors. ‘He had some sexually traumatic and confusing events in his life, including being preyed on by a neighbourhood bully who forced the then seven-year-old to perform oral sex on him and commit sexual acts with other children.
‘When Matthew Shepard approached Aaron McKinney in the Fireside Bar, he was looking for a sexual encounter, and, when they were in the truck, Shepard reached over and grabbed his genitals and licked his ear.
‘In his statements to police, he said, “I don’t know what happened. I blacked out. I felt possessed. It was like I left my body.”’ Tangeman stressed his client did not intend to kill Matthew, but had just ‘hit him too hard’.
Cunningly, while on remand in jail awaiting trial, Aaron McKinney wrote two letters to his cellmate’s wife, which appeared to underpin the ‘gay panic’ defence.
Anticipating this strategy, the prosecuting District Attorney, Cal Rerucha, told the jurors, ‘This case will not be about the life of Matthew Shepard: it will simply be about the pain, suffering and death of Matthew Shepard at the hands of Mr McKinney.’ Seven defence witnesses were called, including two men who said Matthew had made unwanted sexual advances to them. But the ploy cut no ice with the judge, Barton Voigt, who ruled the gay-panic defence out of court, saying it had no standing in Wyoming law.
Prosecutor Rerucha declared in his opening address, ‘McKinney and Henderson had picked the 105-pound Shepard as an easy mark. Matt Shepard begged for his life. Matt Shepard negotiated for his life. But McKinney gave him blow after blow. His death was the result of a cold-blooded, savage, premeditated attack.’
As the week-long trial wound up, there came a piece of theatre that was to leave the courtroom in stunned silence, the kind of hush usually found only in church during prayers. Cal Rerucha paused for sixty seconds to let jurors reflect in silence on the beating inflicted on Matthew.
‘Think what sixty seconds was to Matthew Shepard,’ Rerucha told the jury. ‘It’s a short time if you are eating an ice-cream cone. It’s a long time if you’re descending into hell not knowing what fate will meet you there.’
As he was convicted of felony murder, aggravated robbery and kidnapping, McKinney’s fate lay in the hands of Matthew’s parents, Dennis and Judy Shepard. For eleven months, their lives had been dominated by the cold night in October when their son was left hanging on a fence, a dreadful and lonely end to a tragically short life.
They had it in their power to recommend that McKinney be executed, as the prosecuting attorneys desired. Instead, showing the kind of mercy never granted to their son, they asked that, as a punishment, McKinney spend the rest of his life behind bars, so that, every day he rotted inside a fortified jail cell, he could reflect on the pain and loss they would never escape from.
Dennis Shepard was allowed to deliver his victim impact statement to the court before sentencing. Such was its simple power and soaring eloquence that the jury were reduced to tears. What he said was a testament to a father’s love, one that echoed long after the courtroom dispersed and people went back to their daily lives.
Pausing occasionally to wipe his eyes, Dennis Shepard was given the chance to tell his son’s killer exactly what he had taken from them.
My son Matthew did not look like a winner. After all, he was small for his age – weighing at most a hundred and ten pounds and standing only five feet two inches tall. He was rather unco-ordinated, and wore braces [on his teeth] from the age of thirteen until the day he died.
However, in his all too brief life, he proved that he was a winner. My son, a gentle caring soul, proved that he was as tough as, if not tougher, than anyone I have heard of or known.
It’s hard to put into words how much Matt meant to family and friends and how much they meant to him. Everyone wanted him to succeed because he tried so hard. The spark that he provided to people had to be experienced. He simply made everyone feel better about themselves. Family and friends were his focus. He knew that he always had their support for anything that he wanted to try.
Matt’s gift was people. He loved being with people, helping people, and making others feel good. The hope of a better world, free of harassment and discrimination because a person was different, kept him motivated. All his life he felt the stabs of discrimination because he was sensitive to other people’s feelings. He was naïve to the extent that, regardless of the wrongs people did to him, he still had faith that they would change and become ‘nice’. Matt trusted people perhaps, too much. Violence was not a part of his life until his senior year in high school. He would walk into a fight and try to break it up. He was the perfect negotiator. He could get two people talking to each other again as no one else could.
Matt loved people and he trusted them. He could never understand how one person could hurt another, physically or verbally. They would hurt him and he would give them another chance. This quality of seeing only good gave him friends around the world. He didn’t see size, race, intelligence, sex, religion or the hundred other things that people use to make choices about people. All he saw was the person. All he wanted was to make another person his friend. All he wanted was to make another person feel good. All he wanted was to be accepted as an equal.
I loved my son and, as can be seen throughout this statement, was proud of him. He was not my gay son. He was my son who happened to be gay. He was a good-looking, intelligent, caring person. There were the usual arguments and, at times, he was a real pain in the butt. I felt the regrets of a father when he realises that his son is not a star athlete. But it was replaced with a greater pride when I saw him on the stage. The hours that he spent learning his parts, working behind the scenes and helping others made me realise he was actually an excellent athlete, in a more dynamic way, because of the different types of physical and mental conditioning required by actors. To this day, I have never figured out how he was able to spend all those hours at the theatre, during the school year, and still have good grades.
Because my job involved lots of travel, I never had the same give and take with Matt that Judy had. Our relationship, at times, was strained. But whenever he had problems we talked. For example, he was unsure about revealing to me that he was gay. He was afraid that I would reject him immediately, so it took him a while to tell me. By that time, his mother and brother had already been told.
One day, he said that he had something to say. I could see that he was nervous so I asked him if everything was all right. Matt took a deep breath and told me that he was gay. Then he waited for my reaction. I still remember his surprise when I said, ‘Yeah? OK, but what’s the point of this conversation?’ Then everything was OK. We went back to being a father and son who loved each other and respected the beliefs of the other. We were father and son but we were also friends.
How do I talk about the loss that I feel every time I think about Matt? How can I describe the empty pit in my heart and mind when I think about all the problems that were put in Matt’s way that he overcame? No one can understand the sense of pride and accomplishment that I felt every time he reached the mountaintop of another obstacle. No one, including myself, will ever know the frustration and agony that others put him through, because he was different. How many people could be given the problems that Matt was presented with and still succeed, as he did? How many people would continue to smile, at least on the outside while crying on the inside, to keep other people from feeling bad?
Impact on my life? My life will never be the same. I miss Matt terribly. I think about him all the time – at odd moments when some little thing reminds me of him; when I walk by the refrigerator and see the pictures of him and his brother that we’ve always kept on the door; at special times of the year like the first day of classes at UW [University of Wyoming] or opening day of sage-chicken hunting. I keep wondering almost the same thing I did when I first saw him in the hospital. What would he have become? How would he have changed his piece of the world to make it better?
Impact on my life? I feel a tremendous sense of guilt. Why wasn’t I there when he needed me most? Why didn’t I spend more time with him? Why didn’t I try to find another type of profession so that I could have been available to spend more time with him as he grew up? What could I have done to be a better father and friend? How do I get an answer to those questions now? The only one who can answer them is Matt. These questions will be with me for the rest of my life. What makes it worse for me is knowing that his mother and brother will have similar unanswered questions.
Three weeks before Matt went to the Fireside Bar for the last time, my parents saw Matt in Laramie. In addition, my father tried calling Matt the night that he was beaten, but received no answer. He never got over the guilt of not trying earlier. The additional strain of the hospital vigil, being in the hospital room with Matt when he died, the funeral services with all the media attention and the protesters, as well as helping Judy and me clean out Matt’s apartment in Laramie a few days later, was too much. Three weeks after Matt’s death, Dad died. Dad told me after the funeral that he never expected to outlive Matt. The stress and the grief were just too much for him.
Impact on my life? How can my life ever be the same again?
Matt officially died at 12.53 a.m. on Monday, October 12 1998, in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died on the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence that Wednesday before when you beat him. You, Mr McKinney, with your friend Mr Henderson, killed my son.
By the end of the beating, his body was just trying to survive. You left him out there by himself but he wasn’t alone. There were his lifelong friends with him – friends that he had grown up with. You’re probably wondering who these friends were. First, he had the beautiful night sky with the same stars and moon that we used to look at through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him one more time – one more cool, wonderful autumn day in Wyoming. His last day alive in Wyoming. His last day alive in the state that he always proudly called home.
And through it all he was breathing in, for the last time, the smell of Wyoming sage brush and the scent of pine trees from the Snowy Range. He heard the wind – the ever-present Wyoming wind – for the last time. He had one more friend with him. One he grew to know through his time in Sunday School and as an acolyte at St Mark’s in Casper as well as through his visits to St. Matthew’s in Laramie. He had God. I feel better, knowing that he wasn’t alone.
Matt became a symbol – some say a martyr, putting a boy-next-door face on hate crimes. That’s fine with me. Matt would be thrilled if his death would help others. On the other hand, your agreement to life without parole has taken yourself out of the spotlight and out of the public eye. It means no drawn-out appeals process, no chance of walking away free due to a technicality, and no chance of a lighter sentence due to a ‘merciful’ jury. Best of all, you won’t be a symbol. No years of publicity, no chance of a commutation, no nothing – just a miserable future and a more miserable end. It works for me.
My son was taught to look at all sides of an issue before making a decision or taking a stand. He learned this early when he helped campaign for various political candidates while in grade school and junior high. When he did take a stand, it was based on his best judgement. Such a stand cost him his life when he quietly let it be known that he was gay.
He didn’t advertise it but he didn’t back away from the issue either. For that I’ll always be proud of him. He showed me that he was a lot more courageous than most people, including myself. Matt knew that there were dangers to being gay but he accepted that and wanted to just get on with his life and his ambition of helping others.
Matt’s beating, hospitalisation and funeral focused worldwide attention on hate. Good is coming out of evil. People have said, ‘Enough is enough.’ You screwed up, Mr McKinney. You made the world realise that a person’s lifestyle is not a reason for discrimination, intolerance, persecution and violence.
This is not the 1920s, 30s and 40s of Nazi Germany. My son died because of your ignorance and intolerance. I can’t bring him back. But I can do my best to see that this never, ever happens to another person or another family again. As I mentioned earlier, my son has become a symbol – a symbol against hate and people like you; a symbol for encouraging respect for individuality, for appreciating that someone is different, for tolerance. I miss my son but I’m proud to be able to say that he is my son.
‘Mr McKinney, one final comment before I sit, and this is the reason that I stand before you now. At no time since Matt was found at the fence and taken to the hospital have Judy and I made any statements about our beliefs concerning the death penalty. We felt that would be an undue influence on any prospective juror. Judy has been quoted by some right-wing groups as being against the death penalty. It has been stated that Matt was against the death penalty. Both of these statements are wrong. We have held family discussions and talked about the death penalty. It was his opinion that the death penalty should be sought and that no expense should be spared to bring those responsible for this murder to justice.
Little did we know that the same response would come about involving Matt. I, too, believe in the death penalty. I would like nothing better than to see you die, Mr McKinney. However, this is the time to begin the healing process. To show mercy to someone who refused to show any mercy. To use this as the first step in my own closure about losing Matt.
Mr McKinney, I am not doing this because of your family. I am definitely not doing it because of the crass and unwarranted pressures put on us by the religious community. If anything, that hardens my resolve to see you die.
Mr McKinney, I’m going to grant you life, as hard as it is for me to do so, because of Matthew. Every time you celebrate Christmas, a birthday or the Fourth of July, remember that Matthew isn’t. Every time you wake up in that prison cell, remember that you had the opportunity and the ability to stop your actions that night. Every time that you see your cellmate, remember that you had a choice and now you are living that choice. You robbed me of something very precious and I will never forgive you for that.
Mr McKinney, I give you life in the memory of one who no longer lives. May you have a long life and may you thank Matthew every day for it.
In September 2007, the nationwide campaign for tolerance spearheaded by Judy Shepard finally bore fruit. In the decade since her son’s murder, Judy had spent months of every year lecturing to college students, pressurising politicians, spreading the word to anyone who would listen of the need to ensure gays got the same protection as others victimised by hate crimes.
Congress eventually passed the Matthew Shepard Act, extending the same protection to homosexuals as that afforded to minority races. For Judy, it was a bittersweet moment. It had taken the callous slaying of Matthew to make people wake up to the hatred in their midst.
Her tireless efforts to bring about change, which had led her to set up the Erase Hate Foundation in her son’s name, finally forced the US government to accept that greater levels of government funding were required to investigate and prosecute the crime of gay bashing.
She had spoken to more than a million people in her crusade to right what she saw was a festering wrong. She was to become an unlikely celebrity, fêted by politicians and pop legends such as Elton John, who handed her $75,000 to continue banging on the doors of Capitol Hill. She pledged to burn her son’s memory into the public consciousness.
‘We have become a SIC society – silent, indifferent and complacent,’ she told one audience. ‘A hate-crime Bill is not just about protection from violence: it is about the protection of basic civil liberties. For everyone.’