‘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