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