The Book of Matt (37 page)

Ted Henson said he, too, was at the hospital when the Shepard family arrived. He remembered feeling lost in a haze of grief, not only from “seeing how bad Matt looked,” but also from realizing “Matt isn’t going to make it.”

Tina, who had visited Matthew the previous night with her husband Phil and two other friends of Matthew — newlyweds who had just returned from their honeymoon and gotten the news — remembered feeling “like I was in some surrealist environment.”

“It’s something nobody wants to see,” Tina said, “… it [was] pretty overwhelming. And then on the other hand it was kind of bizarrely comforting.

“… I had a chance to say good-bye to Matt. And that’s something I feel fortunate about. Because I think on some level, even
though he was brain dead and not really connected with his body … his spirit was able to hear me say good-bye … There was so much I wanted to still tell him and there was so much he would have been able to tell me.

“… I felt like … nothing was really real.”

On Cal’s instructions, Rob DeBree met the Shepards at Poudre Valley Hospital on Friday night and remained at their side for the next couple of days, serving as a buffer between the family and a growing number of reporters and camera crews outside.

Over that weekend, spontaneous candlelight vigils were held outside the hospital and began to crop up at locations around the country.

President Bill Clinton also phoned the hospital to express his sympathy and support to the Shepard family, and to promise his administration’s assistance in bringing Matthew’s assailants to justice.

As Matthew lay in a coma and it was all but certain that he wouldn’t survive his injuries, the president made an impassioned statement urging Americans to support the federal hate crime bill then stalled in Congress. He likened Matthew’s beating to the racially motivated lynching of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper, Texas, four months earlier.

“There is nothing more important to the future of this country than our standing together against intolerance, prejudice, and violent bigotry,” Clinton said. “We cannot surrender to those on the fringe of our society who lash out at those who are different.”

However well-intentioned the president may have been, he spoke up prematurely, before law enforcement agents on the ground in Laramie had completed a thorough investigation of the crime and its circumstances.

News of the alleged hate crime also became an instant flashpoint that further polarized liberals and conservatives, who were already pitted against each other in so-called culture wars.

During the previous summer, then Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had made comments on national television suggesting that gays are “sinners,” according to his reading of the Bible.

“You should try to show them a way to deal with [homosexuality] just like alcohol … or sex addiction … or kleptomaniacs,” Lott said.

Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network had warned, “The acceptance of homosexuality is the last step in the decline of Gentile civilization.”

Now, in the aftermath of the attack on Matthew, each side took turns pointing the finger at the other about who was to blame for the violence, and why hate crime legislation was either desperately needed or altogether unnecessary.

As soon as Lewis Macenze, Matthew’s lover and friend from North Carolina, received word of the almost-fatal beating, he immediately booked a flight to Denver and then drove to Fort Collins, desperate to see Matthew while he was still alive. Unbeknownst to many, he and Matthew had been in close contact recently, and according to Lewis had talked seriously of getting back together. Their plan was to live in Denver, where both of them could go to school, Lewis said.

But an official at Poudre Valley Hospital wouldn’t allow him to see Matthew, presumably due to a stricter visiting policy for non-family-members and despite Lewis’s explanation of his close relationship to Matthew. Lewis said he tried not to take it personally, yet suddenly he found himself adrift in a large crowd of strangers outside the hospital. The majority of those who had come to pay tribute to Matthew and demonstrate their anger and grief over the attack had learned about him on TV.

By the time Matthew died at 12:53
AM
on Monday, October 12, the Laramie attack had already become the most widely publicized event in Wyoming’s 108-year history as a state. But despite the outpouring of public interest and media attention, Cal Rerucha sat quietly in his living room and wept for several minutes after DeBree called him with the news.

He thought about the repeated blows Matthew had endured; of his lonely suffering and his family’s anguish and the pain that Cal knew would always be with them. He was also overcome by the same incomprehension he’d experienced when fifteen-year-old
Daphne Sulk had been found, her fragile body riddled with stab wounds.

But mostly he kept thinking about his sons Luke and Max, safely asleep in their beds down the hall. Cal was reminded that Matthew’s parents had also raised two boys. He prayed silently for all of them.

Later that morning Cal’s phone began to ring incessantly. At the courthouse and at home, the phones wouldn’t stop ringing.

Within less than a week the political stakes had been raised immensely in a case that continued to grip the nation. Memorial gatherings were organized in New York, Denver, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta. In San Francisco one demonstration turned violent when protesters clashed with police. Dozens of other vigils and protests were being planned in cities and towns nationwide, while in Laramie, a thousand people held candles aloft and sang “We Shall Overcome” outside the University of Wyoming.

Hours after Matthew’s death, Cal changed the attempted murder charges he had filed against Aaron and Russell to three new counts: kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and murder in the first degree. Kristen and Chasity were also facing more serious charges now as accessories after the fact.

Sworn to before Judge Robert Castor on October 12 and filed on October 13, Count I of the new charges against Aaron and Russell stated:

After Mr. Shepard confided he was gay, the subjects deceived Mr. Shepard into leaving with them in their vehicle to a remote area near Sherman Hills Subdivision in Albany County, Wyoming. En-route to said location, the Defendant(s) struck Mr. Shepard in the head with a pistol, and upon arrival at said area, both subjects tied their victim to a buck fence and continued to beat and terrorize him while he was begging for his life.

Initially, as the Clinton administration conducted its own discreet inquiry into the case under the direction of Attorney General Janet
Reno in Washington and the local supervision of the US attorney for Wyoming, Dave Freudenthal, it was unclear whether Cal would actually prosecute the case or a federal prosecutor in Cheyenne would take over those duties. But in the meantime Cal’s role as county attorney was instantly — and unofficially — redefined to include crisis management around the clock.

A couple of days after Matthew died, President Clinton made another statement about the presumed motives behind the crime.

“The public outrage in Laramie and all across America echoes what we heard at the White House Conference on Hate Crimes last year,” he told reporters before boarding a helicopter for a fund-raising trip. “There is something we can do about this. Congress needs to pass our tough hate crimes legislation. It can do so even before it adjourns, and it should do so … One thing must remain clear: Hate and prejudice are not American values.”

Judging from the turnout of five thousand people at a candlelight vigil on the steps of the US Capitol on Wednesday evening that week, many shared the president’s view that the Laramie attack was an unqualified hate crime. Gay activists, human rights advocates, and politicians expressed their outrage and sorrow over Matthew’s killing and demanded stronger protection against hate crimes. But no one expected the large number of senators and members of the House that showed up — from both sides of the aisle.

Senator Ted Kennedy spoke eloquently. “The crime against Matthew Shepard has shocked the conscience of the country, and a powerful response is clearly required,” he said. “… Hate crimes are on the rise, and we need to send the strongest possible signal as a nation that these crimes will not be tolerated in the United States of America.”

Actresses Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche were also among the speakers, as were Matthew’s friends Walt Boulden and Alex Trout.

“I can’t stop crying,” Ellen confessed to the crowd. “You know, I just — I think — I mean, I know we all feel the same way, and I’m here … he’s got his two close friends here — I don’t even know him, and I’m thinking this is just really selfish of me … And then it just hit me why I am so devastated by it. It’s because this is what I was trying to stop. This is exactly why I did what I did [came out publicly].”

The words of Anne Heche, Ellen’s girlfriend at the time, were more pointedly political. “Mr. Trent Lott, Mr. Newt Gingrich, Mr. Jerry Falwell, how many Christs must bear the crosses until we learn that we are all children of God?” she stated. “You have witnessed a demonstration of what your ignorant teachings about gays and lesbians breed. You preach in support [of] groups that encourage me to change who I am, to become more like you. I do not want to be like you.”

Just as quickly, however, forces on the Religious Right were mobilizing to defend their anti-gay positions, while insisting they had done nothing to create an atmosphere in America that encouraged hatred or condoned violence.

When Bill Clinton later compared Matthew’s murder to genocide in Bosnia, I admired him for telling what I thought was an unvarnished truth. At the time, I never gave it a second thought that Matthew’s accused assailants had already been found guilty of a hate crime in the court of public opinion — even before they were arraigned for the murder. The president also let it be known that he favored the death penalty for both men.

Furthermore, I had no reason to question the hate crime theory then, nor did I take notice of the timing of Clinton’s statements.

A few days before the October 6 attack on Matthew, the House Judiciary Committee had released thousands of pages of material from special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s investigation, including damaging grand jury testimony and transcripts of the Monica Lewinsky–Linda Tripp tapes. Then, on October 8 — the day after Matthew was found at the fence — the House of Representatives authorized a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry on the president on a 258–176 vote. Thirty-one Democrats joined Republicans in supporting the move toward impeachment.

Surely it isn’t difficult to imagine Bill Clinton, a consummate political strategist, doing everything in his power to save his presidency, including shoring up key constituencies in his hour of crisis. Clinton also has a peerless gift for plucking our collective heartstrings at just the right moment. Symbolically if nothing else, the apparently random attack on Matthew revived, however briefly, a mythic
American innocence that may have been preferable to the tawdry sex scandal threatening to bring down the president.

On the weekend before Matthew died, gay activist Cathy Renna, then the director of community relations for GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation), was quoted in the
Laramie Boomerang
:

[Matthew] seemed kind of defenseless. He presented a very safe image of gay people. That’s what affected people,” she said. “He could have been the boy next door. He looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, and the media jumped all over that.

But this safe image of “the boy next door” was also more politically expedient than coming to terms with the troubled young man that Matthew really was and the complexities surrounding the crime, including his well-hidden relationship with Aaron.

Years after Matthew was killed, Judy Shepard was asked by a reporter why there had been such a huge media frenzy following the attack on her son.

“There are probably a dozen reasons why the story got so big,” she said. “Maybe people were sick of Clinton and Monica.”

In truth, however, Bill Clinton may have had several reasons of his own for making the Shepard case a personal cause célèbre. According to Cal Rerucha, the Clinton administration and Attorney General Janet Reno were worried that the Laramie situation was volatile and “could turn into another catastrophe like the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing,” which claimed 168 lives. (During the 1993 siege at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which also occurred during the Clinton administration, seventy-six lives were lost.)

Another factor that apparently worried government officials was Matthew’s HIV infection. At the time of the 1998 attack, it was potentially explosive news and they did their best to conceal it — especially since it wasn’t totally clear what had triggered Aaron’s violent outburst.

When it leaked out in a March 1999
Vanity Fair
article that Matthew had AIDS, his parents stated that he had been unaware of it. But others who had been close to Matthew knew differently, yet they refrained from discussing it with the media.