The attack on Matthew Shepard

On the evening of 6 October 1998, Matthew Shepard was sitting in the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, a small town in Wyoming. The twenty-one-year-old University of Wyoming student was openly gay and had only been in town for a few months. At the bar he met two young men, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. They offered to drive him home. Shepard got in.

He never made it home. The two drove him to the edge of town, robbed him and beat him brutally with a revolver. Then they tied him to a wooden fence on the cold prairie and left him there. Only about eighteen hours later did a cyclist find him, at first mistaking the motionless figure for a scarecrow. Shepard lay in a coma with a fractured skull. He was taken to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, and died there six days later without regaining consciousness.

The perpetrators were quickly caught and sentenced to life imprisonment. They had pretended to be gay to lure their victim into the car. At the time, Wyoming had no hate crime law.

The case shook the United States far beyond the queer community. Vigils were held across the country, and the play "The Laramie Project" turned the town into a symbol. Shepard's parents, Judy and Dennis, set up a foundation that still campaigns against hate today. Eleven years after the crime, President Barack Obama signed a federal hate crimes law that bears Shepard's name, together with that of James Byrd Jr., an African American murdered in Texas in the same year.

Twenty years after his death, Matthew Shepard's ashes were interred in Washington National Cathedral. His parents had long hesitated to give him a grave. They feared it might be desecrated.