Matthew Shepard
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Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998.[1] He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during his beating.
Matthew Shepard
Born
Matthew Wayne Shepard
December 1, 1976
Casper, Wyoming, U.S.
Died October 12, 1998 (aged 21)
Fort Collins, Colorado, U.S.
Cause of deathMurder (Blunt force trauma)
Resting placeWashington National Cathedral
Alma mater
University of Wyoming
Parent(s)
Dennis Shepard
Judy Shepard
Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard's death. Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard's sexual orientation played as a motive for the commission of the crime.
The prosecutor argued that McKinney's murder of Shepard was premeditated and driven by greed. McKinney's defense counsel countered by arguing that he had intended only to rob Shepard but killed him in a rage when Shepard made a sexual advance toward him. McKinney's girlfriend told police that he had been motivated by anti-gay sentiment but later recanted her statement, saying that she had lied because she thought it would help him. Both McKinney and Henderson were convicted of the murder, and each of them received two consecutive life sentences.
Shepard's murder brought national and international attention to hate crime legislation at both the state and federal level.[2] In October 2009, the United States Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (commonly the "Matthew Shepard Act" or "Shepard/Byrd Act" for short), and on October 28, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law.[3]
Following her son's murder, Judy Shepard became a prominent LGBT rights activist and established the Matthew Shepard Foundation. Shepard's death inspired films, novels, plays, songs, and other works.
Background
Murder
Arrests and trial
Subsequent reporting
Anti-gay protests
Legacy
Last edited 10 days ago by EdJohnston
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Matthew Wayne Shepard was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. Wikipedia
Born: December 1, 1976, Casper, WY
Died: October 12, 1998, UCHealth Poudre Valley Hospital, Fort Collins, CO
Date of burial: October 26, 2018
Place of burial: Washington National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.
Movies: Dear Jesse
Parents: Judy Shepard, Dennis Shepard
Siblings: Logan Shepard
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Matthew Shepard - Wikipedia

Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, ...
Cause of death: Murder (Blunt force trauma)
Died: October 12, 1998 (aged 21); Fort Collins, Colorado, U.S
Cultural depictions of Matthew...
Hate Crimes Prevention Act
Matthew Shepard Foundation
Judy Shepard
Dennis Shepard
Romaine Patterson
Violence against LGBT people
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Our Story - Matthew Shepard Foundation

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Parents: Judy, Dennis Shepard
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1998
Matthew Shepard died on October 12, 1998, five days after being brutally attacked in one of the most notorious anti-gay hate crimes in American history.
Remembering Matthew Shepard | GLAAD
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1976
Matthew Shepard was born on December 1, 1976 in Casper, Wyoming, USA as Matthew Wayne Shepard.
Matthew Shepard ‑ IMDb
Imdb.com
1988
In October 1988, Matthew Shepard was abducted by two men in the dark of night. The then 21-year-old was tied to a fence, beaten with a pistol and left for dead.
Town where Matthew Shepard was murdered passes LGBT ...
Msnbc.com
1995
However, in 1995, during a high school trip to Morocco, Matthew Shephard was beaten and raped. This attack began his gradual withdrawal into himself; he began losing contact with his close associates and experiencing severe panic attacks, as well as becoming noticeably depressed.
Misunderstood: The Matthew Shepherd Hate Crime and its ...
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1993
In 1993, Aramco, the oil company for which Dennis Shepard worked, transferred him to Saudi Arabia, and the rest of the Shepard family moved with him.
Shepard Case Chronology
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1997
After stays at North Carolina's Catawba College and Casper College in Wyoming, he moved in the spring of 1997 to Denver, where he worked selling vitamins by telephone.
Matthew Shepard: Read PEOPLE's 1998 Story on His ...
People.com
1981
His younger brother Logan was born in 1981. He attended Crest Hill Elementary School, Dean Morgan Junior High School, and Natrona County High School for his freshman through junior years.
Matthew Shepard News | Quotes | Wiki ‑ UPI.com
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Matthew Shepard Foundation: Home
The Matthew Shepard Foundation empowers individuals to embrace human dignity and diversity through outreach, advocacy and resource programs.
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The truth behind America's most famous gay-hate murder

Oct 26, 2014 — The horrific killing of Matthew Shepard in 1998 is widely seen as one of the worst anti-gay hate crimes in American history.
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Matthew Shepard: The murder that changed America





Oct 26, 2018 — The death of a gay student, tortured and tied to a prairie fence in Wyoming two decades ago, shocked America. As Matthew Shepard's ashes are ...
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Matthew Shepard | Biography, Death, Legacy, & Facts | Britannica
7 days ago — Matthew Shepard, American college student who was severely beaten because of his sexual orientation and was left to die in 1998.
Date of death: October 12, 1998
Born: December 1, 1976, Casper
Education: the American School in Switzerland, University of Wyoming
apnews.com
Matthew Shepard's murder still haunts Wyoming after 20 years

Oct 12, 2018 — But two decades after Matthew Shepard was bludgeoned, tied to a rail fence and left to die on the cold high prairie, the ...
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Matthew Shepard, victim of anti-gay hate crime, dies - HISTORY
University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard dies after a vicious anti-gay attack. After meeting Shepard in a Laramie, Wyoming, gay bar, The Fireside ...
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Matthew Shepard: The legacy of a gay college student 20 years after ...
Oct 26, 2018 — Matthew Shepard was abducted, beaten and killed 20 years ago because he was gay. ... The 21-year-old college student was savagely beaten by Aaron ...
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Read PEOPLE's 1998 Story on Matthew Shepard's Murder: Student Recalls Finding Dying Mathew Tied to Fence — 'Oh My God, It's a Person!'
Read PEOPLE's 1998 Story on Matthew Shepard's Murder: Student Recalls Finding Dying Mathew Tied to Fence — 'Oh My God, It's a Person!'
Matthew Shepard's murder on Oct. 12, 1998, raised awareness about violence against LGBTQ people
By Thomas Fields-Meyer
October 12, 2018 10:28 AM
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Matthew Shepard
CREDIT: COURTESY OF MATTHEW SHEPARD FOUNDATION
Editor's note: Twenty years have passed since Matthew Shepard, a 21-year-old gay college student, died after being robbed, beaten and left tied to a fence in the cold outside Laramie, Wyoming, five days before. The night he was attacked, he left a bar with the two men who who would later murder him.
Shepard's Oct. 12, 1998, death shocked the nation, drawing long-delayed attention to violence faced by LGBTQ people. The advocacy of Shepard's friends and supporters helped lead to the creation of the 2009 Shepard-Byrd Act, a federal anti-hate crimes prevention law that extended existed hate crimes laws to include gender and sexual orientation.
Recently, the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which advocates for gay young people, announced Shepard's ashes will be interred at the Washington National Cathedral on Oct. 26, giving his remains a final resting place after two decades.
Here is PEOPLE's original story on Shepard's brutal murder, published on Nov. 2, 1998, which honors his life and points forward to the fact that his death would not be in vain.
It was not the sort of funeral people are accustomed to in the prairie town of Casper, Wyoming, or, for that matter, anywhere else. Some 400 mourners overflowed the pews of St. Mark's Episcopal Church, while 500 more listened on speakers in adjoining rooms and in a Presbyterian church next door, and uncounted others tuned in on the radio. And then there were the protesters — more than a dozen flew in from Kansas and Texas–standing outside in the season's first snowfall, one holding a hand-scrawled placard reading God Hates Fags.
Judy and Dennis Shepard had appealed publicly for a "peaceful, dignified" service for their son Matthew, 21, a slight, 5-foot-2 college student who had met his grisly fate, police say, at the hands of two young men who brutally beat him, tied him to a fence and left him for dead, at least in part because he happened to be gay. By the time of his Oct. 16 funeral, Matthew had become something more than his parents' son, a martyr whose slaying served as a brutal reminder of the human capacity for hatred and violence. "For a small person, Matt had great personal presence," his cousin's wife, Anne Kitch, a Poughkeepsie, New York, Episcopal priest, told the congregation of the 115-lb. Shepard. "He struggled to fit into a world that is not always kind to gentle spirits."
Certainly it wasn't kind to him. Late on Tuesday evening, Oct. 6, he had stopped at a Laramie bar called the Fireside Lounge, near the University of Wyoming, where he had just begun his freshman year. Having failed to enlist some schoolmates to join him, he found himself in conversation with Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, both 21 and high school dropouts, who were sharing a pitcher of beer. After Shepard confided that he was gay, police say, the two men lured him outside and into McKinney's father's truck.
Then things turned ugly. Police say Shepard was beaten with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol as they drove to a remote bluff east of town, where they tied Shepard to a buck fence and, as he pleaded for his life, bludgeoned him, stole his wallet and black patent-leather shoes and left him for dead. Some 18 hours later, UW freshman Aaron Kreifels took a spill on his mountain bike outside of town. Standing up, he saw what he thought was a scarecrow hanging on a fence — until he noticed the human hair. "I realized, 'Oh, my God, it's a person!' " recalls Kreifels. Hospitalized in Fort Collins, Colorado, Shepard died five days later from his head injuries.
The older son of oil-company employee Dennis Shepard and his wife, Judy, Matthew, born prematurely, had always been small for his age. But at age 5, growing up in Casper, he found confidence while acting in community theater. "He was much older than he looked, so that gave him depth," says Brenda Simpson, 46, who led a local theater program. And he had an infectious enthusiasm. "He was so bubbly," says Leo Sanchez, 63, who taught Shepard history in junior high. "He literally used to bounce down the hallway."

From left: Judy and Phillip Shepard, Matthew's parents
CREDIT: LARAMIE DAILY BOOMERANG/ANDY CARPENEAN/AP
Matthew had just completed his sophomore year in high school when his parents relocated to Saudi Arabia, where his father worked as an oil-rig inspector, and enrolled him at a boarding school in Lugano, Switzerland. It was there, newly independent, that he began coming to terms with his homosexuality, friends say. After stays at North Carolina's Catawba College and Casper College in Wyoming, he moved in the spring of 1997 to Denver, where he worked selling vitamins by telephone. "He was always looking for a place to kind of set his roots," says his friend Romaine Patterson, 20, who works in a Denver coffee shop. "He wanted a place to call home."
Ultimately, that impulse brought him back in June to his home state, where he enrolled for the fall semester at his father's alma mater, the University of Wyoming. He was majoring in political science, and friends say he hoped to pursue a public service career, perhaps working for human rights causes. In Laramie, Shepard also found acceptance in a group called the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendering Association, whose meeting he attended on Oct. 6, the last night of his life. After a session to plan for Gay Awareness Week — just five days away — he went to dinner with four women from the group, but couldn't persuade anyone to join him for a beer. "We were all so tired and didn't want to go for drinks on a school night," says Meesha Fenimore, 18, the group's secretary.
Bartender Matt Galloway remembers Shepard arriving around 10:30 that night and ordering a Heineken. "He was definitely a shy kid," says Galloway, 23, a UW senior, who recalls seeing Shepard at the bar on several earlier occasions. "He was just here to have a beer and kick back." Around midnight, Henderson and McKinney stepped to the bar and asked for a pitcher of beer, then ponied together the $5.50, mostly in dimes.

Flowers hang from the fence where Matthew Shepard was left tied and beaten in Wyoming in 1998
CREDIT: GETTY
It remains a mystery, particularly to his friends, why the neatly dressed Shepard would have hooked up with the two men, whom Galloway described as looking "grungy." Perhaps it was just youthful naiveté. Says Romaine Patterson: "He went to meet anyone thinking, 'This is a good person. This is someone worth meeting.'"
At one time, that optimistic description might have fit Russell Henderson, a former Eagle Scout who had once been an honor roll student at Laramie Junior High. But his parents split up when he was young; he dropped out of high school and took to working as a gas station attendant and roofer. Known as polite and considerate, Henderson frequently pitched in to help his grandmother, who runs a home daycare center. "Russell's about the most American kid you can get," says Carson Aanenson, who rented a trailer home to Henderson and his girlfriend, Chasity Pasley, 20. "He's a pizza-eating, beer-drinking, fishing, hunting, work-on-your-car type of kid — just regular."
On the night of Oct. 6, Henderson was in the company of McKinney, a 5-foot-7 high school dropout known around Laramie for his vicious temper and bigoted attitudes. "Aaron kind of had a Napoleon syndrome," says an acquaintance, Shawna Helling, 18. "He had to be a little big man." McKinney had reportedly also been troubled by the 1993 death of his mother, Denise Timothy, from an infection she contracted after an operation. In 1995 his stepfather received a wrongful death settlement and nearly $100,000 of the money went to McKinney. Yet he apparently squandered the money on partying and a Mustang with a cutting-edge sound system. "During the day, he'd sleep, get high, read hot-rod magazines and listen to rap," says Gabe Martinez, 21, who hung out with him in 1995. McKinney had been in trouble with the law more than a dozen times, mostly for minor offenses. Last December he burglarized a Kentucky Fried Chicken, stealing $2,500. Authorities caught up with him last spring in Pensacola, Fla., where he was living with girlfriend Kristen Price, 18, who in May gave birth to the couple's son Cameron. (Sentencing is still pending.) "Aaron had anger in him," says Martinez, a musician. "And once he gets mad and gets started, there's no stopping him."
Still, it remains a mystery what might have moved McKinney to the kind of violence that killed Shepard. Kristen Price told The Denver Post that McKinney claimed Shepard had "pushed himself onto" McKinney, embarrassing him in front of his friends. Eyewitness Galloway, however, says, "I refute 100 percent that Shepard approached them." To teach him a lesson, Price said, McKinney and Henderson told Shepard they were gay and lured him into the truck. "It wasn't meant to be a hate crime," she said. "They just wanted to rob him." Yet once their blood was up, they didn't stop. After disposing of Shepard, they returned to town around 1 a.m. and reportedly picked a fight with two Hispanic teenagers, one of whom was hospitalized after McKinney allegedly hit him on the head with a pistol butt. When McKinney finally came home, Price told ABC's 20/20, "He just came in and hugged me and said, 'I've done something horrible. I just deserve to die.'"
He may yet. Police have charged McKinney and Henderson with first-degree murder, which in Wyoming can carry the death penalty. Their girlfriends, Pasley and Price — who allegedly hid Henderson's bloody clothes and failed to report the crime — are charged as accessories to murder after the fact, which is punishable by up to three years in prison. County court Judge Robert Castor has imposed a gag order forbidding their lawyers and the prosecution from talking about the case.

Matthew Shepard's ashes will be interred in the Washington National Cathedral
CREDIT: MICHAEL WEBER/IMAGEBROKER/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The sheer brutality of the crime sent shock waves across America, prompting President Bill Clinton to decry Shepard's attackers as "full of hatred or full of fear or both," and igniting numerous vigils and protests. (A web site set up by Shepard's friends drew more than a million hits.) "I am so p—ed off, I can't stop crying," Ellen DeGeneres said at an Oct. 14 gathering at the U.S. Capitol. The president and others called on Congress to broaden federal hate-crimes legislation — which now covers offenses perpetrated because of racial, religious and ethnic status — to include victims attacked on account of their sexual orientation. Wyoming legislators have tried for years to enact antibias laws, only to be defeated by opponents concerned that such a law would give minorities special rights. "This year," says Democratic Rep. Mike Massie of Laramie, "I think we will be standing in line to reintroduce that bill."
Yet it hardly seems likely that words in a law book would have defended Matthew Shepard against the beating that cost him his life. His friends can only speculate about what might have happened if someone had gone with him that night to the Fireside. Romaine Patterson is still haunted by a call she got from Shepard less than 24 hours before the attack, at 2 a.m. that Tuesday. It was their first conversation in a while, but he had sounded as buoyantly hopeful as ever. "He told me, 'My goal right now is to do what I can, in any way, shape or form, to better humanity,' " she recalls.
Ironically, Shepard's aim in life may have been achieved in part by his death, which has prompted deep soul-searching and an emotional outpouring from so many people he never knew. "Judging from the world's response over the last several days," Reverend Kitch told the mourners in Casper, "Matt will have made a difference in the lives of thousands."
• With VICKIE BANE and ELIZABETH LEONARD in Wyoming
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