The Book of Matt (10 page)

Judy Shepard, Matthew’s mother — a blond-haired introvert from small-town Wyoming who transformed her grief into a career as a dedicated gay rights activist to honor her son’s memory — appeared to agree. In a speech to a national conference of journalists one year after the murder, she stated that the biggest flaw in the media’s coverage was its portrayal of Matthew.

“I try very hard to take away that saintlike persona that you have given him, and I hope that everybody sees that he was just a young man in search of his life,” she said. “He was depicted as being tied to the fence in the manner of Christ, which really didn’t happen. But nobody seems to want to write about how it really did happen …”

Wypijewski’s illuminating
Harper’s
account, while inconclusive, seemed to invite further digging into the murder’s complexities; it also served as an inspiration for my own subsequent reporting. Describing her attempts to find out more about Matthew, she wrote,

Ask around [in Laramie] for impressions of Matthew Shepard and you find as many characters as there are speakers: a charming boy, always smiling and happy; a suicidal depressive who mixed street drugs and alcohol with Effexor and Klonopin; a good listener who treated everyone with respect; “a pompous, arrogant little dick” who condescended to those who served him; a bright kid who wanted to change the world; a kid you’d swear was mentally defective; a generous person; a flasher of money
 … a sexual seeker; a naïf; a man freaked by his [positive] HIV status or at peace with it; a “counterphobic” who courted risk rather than live in fear; a boy who, his father said, “liked to compete against himself,” entering races he couldn’t win and swimming contests he’d finish “dead last by the length of the pool” just to prove he could do it; a boy never quite sure of his father’s approval …

My curiosity and my questions about Matthew only multiplied with time. Along with media accounts, I examined police reports, court documents, trial transcripts, and the poignant “victim impact statements” written by Matthew’s parents — all with the aim of piecing together a more truthful and complete biographical portrait. But it was not until I became well acquainted with several of Matthew’s close friends that I began to appreciate the intricacies and subtleties of his personality.

Matthew Wayne Shepard was born in Casper, Wyoming, the capital of Wyoming’s oil belt, on December 1, 1976.

More than two decades later, in a statement he wrote in preparation for the murder trials of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, Dennis Shepard summoned up his earliest memories of Matthew, who was born prematurely after a long labor. Reminiscing about the first time he was able to lift his son’s head and the thrill he felt in the maternity ward as he gazed through a window at his firstborn son sleeping in a bassinet, he wrote, “I was so proud that I could have exploded!!”

He remembered “Matt’s first steps” and the “first bug” that had captured his curiosity. Matt had responded, his father said, by spending “two hours watching a caterpillar crawl through the grass and up a tree.”

“His nickname was ‘Dandelion Head,’ ” Dennis added, “because his hair looked just like a dandelion after it has gone to seed and is waiting for the wind or a child to pick and wave around to watch the seeds float through the air.”

Dennis and Judy Shepard also acknowledged that their son’s life
had been burdened with difficulties from the beginning. In addition to being a “preemie,” Matthew had often been sick as a child. He was given hormone treatments for delayed puberty; he suffered from attention deficit disorder; and for several years prior to his death he’d experienced severe depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. (The Shepards have a second son, Logan, who was born four years after Matthew.)

After attending Crest Hill Grade School and Dean Morgan Junior High in Casper, Matthew went on to Natrona County High School, where he was a sophomore when his life — and his family’s — underwent big changes. In 1993 Dennis, who worked for Aramco, the world’s largest oil company, was transferred to Saudi Arabia. The Shepard family promptly moved their home to Dhahran on the Persian Gulf.

Lean with rugged good looks, Dennis Shepard was later described by
People
magazine as “a roughneck oil rigger turned construction-safety engineer.”

“I come from trailer trash, traveling construction workers,” Dennis stated unassumingly.

Strangely, some of the other media coverage on Matthew’s attack characterized Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson similarly as “rednecks” and “trailer trash,” yet it was also reported that Matthew and his assailants came from utterly disparate worlds, “from two different sides of the tracks.”

Since there was no American school in Dhahran, a largely Western enclave of about sixteen thousand, Matthew’s parents sent him to TASIS — a boarding academy in Lugano, Switzerland, near the Italian border — for his last two years of high school.

In retrospect Dennis and Judy Shepard may have had other reasons as well. With each passing year, Saudi Arabia was becoming a less and less secure place for Americans to live. In June 1996, while the Shepards continued to make their home there, a US Air Force base near Dhahran was the site of a terrorist attack. Nineteen people were killed and more than five hundred Americans were wounded.

At the time of the attack, Matthew was in Raleigh, North Carolina, undergoing psychiatric treatment for depression and other
unspecified symptoms. He had already completed the first semester of his freshman year at Catawba College, also in North Carolina, but had been forced to withdraw from classes during his second semester.

The media would later offer a variety of explanations regarding Matthew’s depression. According to the version repeated most frequently, his emotional troubles stemmed from a violent episode he had suffered in 1995 while he was in Marrakech, Morocco, on a senior class trip with schoolmates from Switzerland. In the early-morning hours he reportedly ventured out from a hotel on his own and was attacked by a gang of young men in the city’s Old Quarter. Helpless to defend himself, Matthew was brutally raped six times and robbed.

Both family and friends said the attack had left him traumatized and that he’d never really recovered. Some speculated that the incident might have created a “counterphobia,” or a subsequent tendency for Matthew to counteract his fears by courting danger.

But in a television interview with Katie Couric on the
Today
show a few months after his son’s murder, Dennis Shepard described Matthew’s history of difficulties more opaquely.

“I called him ‘The Bad Karma Kid,’ ” he told Couric. “Because if you were sitting right here, and I was sitting right here and a piano was coming down on top of my head, for some reason the wind would blow and it would land on him.”

“He would take the blow so you didn’t have to,” Couric responded.

“Yes,” Matthew’s mother agreed.

“Yeah,” his father said. “It seemed like he took the blow on a lot of things like that.”

Matthew Shepard left behind a few insights of his own into how he saw the world as a boy and young man, notably in autobiographical assignments he wrote for school when he was a teenager, but also in letters he wrote as a nineteen-year-old college freshman at Catawba.

“Dad travels a lot,” Matthew remarked tersely at age fourteen, more than a year before the family’s move to Saudi Arabia. Next he recorded highlights of a road trip the family had taken around the West in the summer of 1991: They visited Mount Rushmore and
Devils Tower; stopped at the Custer Battlefield (“Little Bighorn”) and Medicine Wheel; and drove to North Dakota to see the Badlands.

Matthew also touched blithely on the medical condition that was said to account for his diminutive size. “Last year, I received 4 hormone shots as a part of a growth study group,” he wrote. “They hope to learn more about delayed puberty as well as diabetes.” (“Delayed puberty” describes the condition when an organism has passed the usual age of onset of puberty with no physical or hormonal signs that it is beginning.)

But in a classroom essay earlier that year, shortly after he turned fourteen, Matthew revealed a side of himself that was both reflective and restless. He wrote about his fascination with theater, which had first taken hold of him in the fifth grade:

The theater provides me with an escape from everyday living and, at the same time a different perspective [on] that life …

Acting allows me the opportunity to escape the daily peeves and enter a world where I know who I am and what the future holds. As I struggle daily to define the seemingly never ending question of “Who am I,” theater helps to answer that question not only by being a defining characteristic of my personality and interest but by allowing me to live someone else’s life on stage.

Whether acting in local theater productions or just working on a stage crew, Matthew was often surrounded by adults and college students, with whom he apparently felt right at home. For the next six years, until the family moved to Saudi Arabia, he was actively involved with both the Casper College theater group and an adult community theater in town.

“Theater was an escape for Matt,” Dennis Shepard agreed.

“I felt the regrets of a father when he realizes 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 realize that he was actually
a better athlete than a person playing sports … I have never figured out how he was able to spend all those hours at the theater 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,” his father acknowledged. “Our relationship, at times, was strained. But, whenever he had problems, we talked …”

Dennis also spoke admiringly of the “special bond” Matt and his mother seemed to have. “Judy was mother, father, nurse, teacher, cook, counselor and anything else that was needed …” he said. “[She] was Matt’s anchor through all his problems.”

Mother and son enjoyed movies, theater, their home church of St. Mark’s in Casper, and “a good joke.” The two spent hours together talking about politics, Hollywood gossip, or the latest fads; Judy also helped Matthew with homework, worked with him on his physical therapy, nursed him when he was sick, and drove him to and from the theater when he was working on a play.

“He was always worried he might do something to disappoint her [but] he seldom did,” Dennis recalled.

“At the same time, he would aggravate her to death. [Matt] was a typical son. There were good days and bad days with him. Arguments, mistakes and punishments were made. He was constantly being told to pick up his clothes and clean up his room, even at college. It seemed that he would start an argument just to see how much he could get away with before getting in trouble. In the end and through it all, was his love for her. Judy wasn’t just his mother; she was a friend. Judy was his confidant. When he had problems or just needed a shoulder to cry on, she was there. When he had good news, she was the first to hear.”

In victim impact statements like those excerpted above or in his words spoken aloud in court, Dennis Shepard also shared tender reminiscences about their family camping and fishing vacations; the love of Wyoming’s outdoors that he shared with his two sons and their paternal grandparents; and the final hours he’d spent with Matthew washing his red-and-black Ford Bronco in Laramie.

Looking back on the summer of 1998 when he was home from Saudi Arabia and they spent their last vacation together, Dennis described himself as his son’s “hero worshipper.”

“I once told Matt that I was jealous of him,” he remembered.

But regarding those final hours together, Dennis said, “I told Matt that he was my hero and … the toughest man I had ever known,” and he praised his son’s ability “to continue to smile and keep a positive attitude during all the trials and tribulations he had gone through. I also told him how proud I was because of what he had accomplished …

“The last thing I said to Matt was that I loved him and he said he loved me. That was the last private conversation that [we] ever had …”

One of Matthew’s lesser-known “trials and tribulations” occurred near the end of that summer vacation, during the family’s last camping trip together — in northwestern Wyoming. On the evening of August 18, 1998, Matthew went by himself to the Silver Dollar Bar in the town of Cody. A violent incident took place that night that was not only fraught with complications but also misrepresented in later media stories about the Laramie attack.

While drinking at the Silver Dollar, Matthew asked several times if he could join a few bar employees — including a bartender named Chris Hoogerhyde — for an after-hours trip to nearby Newton Lake where they planned to drink beer and look at the stars. Although Matthew had just met Hoogerhyde and the others, they agreed to let him tag along. After they got to the lake, however, Matthew and Hoogerhyde had an angry confrontation. Matthew had apparently expressed some interest in Hoogerhyde, who rebuffed his overture and punched him in the face.

When I first read about the Cody incident, I was disgusted by its brutality and the apparent homophobia behind it, not to mention the obvious parallels with what befell Matthew in Laramie less than two months later.

According to a report in
Time
magazine, “Shepard said his jaw had been broken by a man in a bar who decked him when he realized he
was gay.” A few months later, an article in
Vanity Fair
stated similarly, “Later the bartender told the police that Matthew had made a pass at him and that he had therefore been compelled to hit him.” These and other stories — together with accounts of Matthew’s traumatic rape in Morocco — accentuated the impression that he was a perpetual victim of gay bashing.

Several first-person reports, including police and hospital documents, courtroom testimony, and my own subsequent interviews, verified that Matthew had, indeed, been punched by Hoogerhyde at the lake — so severely that he had to be treated in a hospital emergency room. But Matthew also filed a complaint with local police stating he had been “raped” by three men. He said he wanted to press charges.