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