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It took 18 hours.

After Matthew Shepard’s killers drove him to a quiet development on the eastern edge of Laramie, Wyoming, repeatedly struck him with a .357 Magnum pistol, robbed him and left him to die, it took 18 hours for someone to find him.

Details from that Oct. 7, 1998, discovery would sear themselves into memories across the globe.

How at first a mountain biker, Aaron Kreifels, thought Matthew’s limp, battered form was a scarecrow — until he noticed tufts of his hair.

How Matthew’s head and torso were so caked in dried blood that every inch was covered except for two strips under his eyes — tracks left by his tears.

How he had been left like that — slumped on his side in the Wyoming dirt, his hands tethered behind him to a wooden buck fence — because he was gay.

Soon, Shepard's name would be splashed across newspaper pages, from the Laramie Daily Boomerang to the New York Times. His picture would run across TV screens in living rooms around the world.

“Gay Man Beaten and Left for Dead; 2 Are Charged,” headlines roared in bold type. “Call for tougher laws after attack on (University of Wyoming) student.”

An entire world and nine time zones away, a phone rang in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where Matthew's father, Dennis, worked in the oil industry. It was so early — 5 a.m. on Thursday, Oct. 8, 1998 — that it jolted Matthew's mom, Judy, awake.

The call was from an emergency room doctor in Laramie, telling them Matthew had been beaten. His injuries were so severe he had been transferred from Ivinson Memorial Hospital to Fort Collins' Poudre Valley Hospital, which was better equipped to treat him.

Knowing little else, the couple started securing the string of car rides and connecting flights it would take to travel the 8,000 miles from Saudi Arabia to Fort Collins, where Matthew languished in a hospital bed.

The blows to his skull had fatally damaged his brain stem.

As he lie there the next evening — broken and breathing through a ventilator — they played him Tracy Chapman and John Fogerty CDs. They spritzed him with his favorite cologne and perfume.

Dennis even drove six hours round trip to the family's home in Casper, Wyoming, to try to find Matthew’s favorite childhood stuffed animal, a plush rabbit named Oscar, Judy recalled in her 2009 book, "The Meaning of Matthew."

Just after midnight on Oct. 12 — five days after his brutal attack — they stayed by his side as Matthew Wayne Shepard succumbed to his injuries.

He was 21 years old.

Letters, emails and cards poured in for the grieving Shepards. According to Judy, easily half of them were from the straight community saying that — like she and Dennis — they had no idea anything like Matthew’s murder could happen in this country.

“We were totally ignorant of the vast amount of discrimination that was being dealt to the gay community,” Dennis Shepard told the Coloradoan in September. “We just assumed that Matt would just be a citizen with the same equal rights that his straight brother had.”

That assumption proved naive.

More than a decade passed after Matthew’s murder before the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act was passed in 2009 — expanding federal hate crime law to include crimes motivated by a person’s sexual orientation, gender or disability.

Five states — including Wyoming — still don’t have criminal hate crime laws. In another 14, hate crime laws don't protect individuals for their sexual orientation. And still in 27 states, you can legally be fired from your job for being gay.

The Shepards never imagined any of it — the vigils, the marches, the media response, or the slow march toward change — when they arrived at his bedside.

But 20 years ago, on Oct. 7, 1998, Matthew Shepard became America’s wake-up call.

When a world watches

There it was — Matthew's bench.

Dwarfed by the building it faces — an imposing stone structure built for the University of Wyoming's College of Arts and Sciences — the bench is small and simple, made of faux wood slats affixed with a plaque.

“Matthew Wayne Shepard,” it states in gold lettering. “Beloved son, brother and friend. He continues to make a difference. Peace be with him and all who sit here.”

Holding my phone up to the plaque for a picture one recent September afternoon, I heard a voice call out from behind.

“Hey!” the young man half yelled as he sprung up the building’s steps. He was short, with blonde hair and couldn’t have been older than 20 — maybe a sophomore.

“What’s that bench?” he asked. “Why are you taking a picture of it?”

I explained that I was a reporter writing a story about a man named Matthew Shepard. He went to school here 20 years ago, I say. He was gay. He was murd...

“Oooh,” he said, recognition flashing across his face.

“I know what you’re talking about,” he continued, before turning down the building’s steps and into the fold of students off to evening labs and study groups.

“That was f---ed up.”

In the 20 years since Matthew Shepard was found barely breathing on that buck fence in east Laramie, his murder has become an enduring symbol of hate and hope.

“It was one of the most notorious or iconic homophobic crimes probably since Harvey Milk,” Graham Baxendale estimated, referring to the public response and the space it still retains in the public consciousness.

Baxendale, who now teaches sociology, criminology and social policy at England's University of Southampton, was a visiting lecturer teaching a hate crimes and hate groups course at the University of Wyoming in the fall of 1998.

Matthew's murder spurred features in national magazines and re-tellings in novels and plays.

It prompted groups like Westboro Baptist Church to descend on Wyoming, where they picketed Matthew’s funeral and displayed homophobic posters for national news cameras.

It led Elton John to co-write “American Triangle,” a song for Matthew, likening him to a deer felled by two coyotes on a windy Wyoming prairie.

Headlines, naturally, swirled about the nation's latest hate crime.

“The adage for the newspaper world — or the news world anywhere — is ‘if it bleeds, it leads,’ ” Judy Shepard said. “And we understood that from the beginning.”

But this felt different.

News organizations remained fixated on Matthew’s murder and its implications beyond that October — into increased pushes for new legislation and continued coverage of his killers’ trials.

“We had absolutely no clue that this would be a story with any kind of lasting importance or memory for anyone,” Judy Shepard said of Matthew’s murder.

“But 20 years later still to be sort of the touchstone for hate crimes or even the awakening to the situation in the gay community was just beyond our scope of thinking then.”

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'Two lives ruined, one life spent'

Two days after Matthew’s death, tearful politicians and celebrities took to the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, where they spoke in front of a vigil of thousands.

The most notable speaker was Ellen DeGeneres, who had come out as lesbian on a Time Magazine cover the year before.

“I am so pissed off,” DeGeneres said to the crowd, her breath catching, her eyes puffy and red. “I can’t stop crying.”

Baxendale remembers watching DeGeneres’ televised speech from his dorm room at the University of Wyoming.

He and his friends, many of whom were part of the local LGBTQ community, would attend vigils, local marches and discussions before returning to watch the national response glow from Baxendale’s tiny dorm room TV.

And as news spread across the country, details of the crime were solidifying in Laramie.

According to reports from the time, the attack that killed Matthew started on Oct. 6, 1998.

After attending a LGBT+ group meeting and dinner with friends that night, Matthew went alone to The Fireside Bar & Lounge — a squat, electric-blue dive bar with red and yellow flames painted up its sides in downtown Laramie.

He had a few beers, according to the bartender, and eventually migrated to the bar’s pool table area where two other men were hanging out.

Shortly after midnight, the men — 21-year-old local roofers Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson — offered Matthew a ride home. They lured him to McKinney’s truck by telling Matthew that, like him, they were gay, according to a complaint filed in the following days by an Albany County prosecutor.

Then they robbed him, drove him to the eastern edge of town, deep inside a development of newer homes, and dragged him out of the truck.

McKinney later told police that he started beating Matthew because Matthew had hit on him in the truck — part of a "gay panic defense" that Laramie Judge Barton R. Voigt would reject when McKinney was on trial for Matthew's kidnapping and murder the following year.

After beating Matthew, McKinney ordered Henderson to tie his hands to a nearby buck fence with a swatch of white clothesline. At some point, after watching Matthew beg for his life as McKinney kicked and punched him, Henderson reportedly asked his friend to stop. He didn’t.

Instead, he pulled off Matthew’s shoes and threw them in the back of his truck. In total, he struck Matthew in the face and head between 19 and 21 times with the butt of his 8-inch barrel .357 Magnum pistol, including three final, and fatal, skull-crushing blows.

Leaving him unconscious and barely alive, McKinney and Henderson climbed back in the truck and headed toward town with what they’d taken: an ATM card, a pair of shoes and $20.

Henderson would later plead guilty to kidnapping and murder for his role that night. He was sentenced to two life terms in prison in April 1999. McKinney was convicted of two counts of felony murder, second-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery. He, also, is serving two life terms.

Today, McKinney and Henderson are in prison in Wyoming. Neither responded to the Coloradoan's requests for comment.

“I think that it was the iconography of it,” Baxendale said when asked why Matthew’s murder — why this hate crime — became a turning point for many Americans.

In the photo largely distributed of Matthew after his attack, showing him posing in a crew neck sweater and solemnly looking into the camera with a swoop of sandy blonde hair dusting his face, he looked “angelic,” Baxendale said.

And, though Judy Shepard writes in her book, “The Meaning of Matthew,” that her son was found slumped on his side with his body in the dirt and his hands tied behind him to the fence, an almost religious image of Matthew tethered to the fence as if it were a cross persisted instead.

“... left alone on his own Calvary overlooking the town,” Baxendale said.

People were captivated by Matthew’s murder — this unspeakably brutal attack set along the wild vastness of a largely ignored flyover state.

The soundtrack was sung by Elton John himself.

"Somewhere that road forks up ahead," the “American Triangle” lyrics go.

"To ignorance and innocence/ Three lives drift on different winds/ Two lives ruined, one life spent."

Hearts and minds

If Matthew Shepard were alive today, he'd be 41 and laughing at his mom, a woman whom Dennis describes as a "15, on a 10-scale, introvert."

The couple threw themselves into human rights activism and founded the Matthew Shepard Foundation just a few months after their son's murder. Judy speaks at events and in public service announcements, preaching a message of acceptance, not just tolerance. They still live in Casper.

They also continue to push for more legal protections for the LGBTQ community.

"... to see her out there speaking instead of him, who should be doing it ... He'd be getting a real hoot out of it," Dennis said.

Largely referred to in cursory articles as “quiet” and “gentle,” Matthew was instead spirited and outgoing, Judy wrote in her 2009 book.

After years abroad, including boarding school in Switzerland — the Shepards moved from Wyoming to Saudi Arabia for Dennis’ job in 1993 — Matthew loved to meet new people from new places.

He always took an opportunity to bend a stranger’s ear over coffee, his mother wrote. He had a restless spirit and was constantly on the move.

Forbidden by his father from getting piercings or tattoos, he found ways to express himself with his clothing and hair — the color and style of which were always changing, his mother wrote.

When he wanted to talk to his parents, he’d call — sometimes at all hours of the night, time difference be damned.

“Did you hear what happened to Princess Diana?” he yelled over the phone to his mom nine hours away one August day. “She’s dead!”

But when the phone rings now, it’s not Matthew.

There are no more late-night calls, no more silly arguments over cellphone bills. Matthew was never able to join the Peace Corps or work for the foreign service like he’d dreamed.

Instead, he lives on elsewhere — in his parents’ foundation, in Judy’s speeches about inclusiveness and acceptance, in their efforts to increase legal protections for marginalized communities and in laws like the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act.

“We were blessed with two sons, one straight and one gay,” Dennis said. “If Matt was alive today, he would (still) not be equal to his straight brother.”

Until 2015, Matthew wouldn’t have been able get married in certain states. Until last year, some states didn’t even allow same-sex couples to adopt children. Today, he would still be able to be fired based on his sexuality depending on where he lived in America.

“Why (is) a segment of the American population not allowed to have the same equal chance and privileges as any other part of American society?” Dennis asked. “The straight community can do all these things the gay community can’t. Why is that?”

Together, Judy and Dennis envision a world with legal protections that are lasting — rights that can’t be overturned with a change in the Oval Office, in Congress or on the Supreme Court.

They want comprehensive state and national job discrimination protections and mandatory reporting procedures for all hate crimes.

“The road I took in moving forward was to try to get laws in this country that would protect the gay community that could not be changed on a whim,” Judy said. “…Things that are indelible forever.”

But their path has also included a more grassroots movement of “changing hearts and minds,” Judy said.

“We should be taking care of each other,” Judy told the Coloradoan, “not demonizing or denigrating or putting down other human beings.”

Coming from a generation where those in the LGBTQ community largely hid their sexualities — “you just didn’t talk about it ... nobody talked about it,” Judy said — she wants to see the opposite.

She wants to see people in the LGBTQ communities and their allies share their stories over and over again "so everyone with no direct knowledge or experience with the community understands that they’re just people," Judy Shepard said.

"Just people."

People who like to chat up strangers over coffee.

People who like their Tracy Chapman and John Fogerty CDs.

People who still have a childhood stuffed animal boxed up at their parents’ house.

People who call their moms with international gossip.

People like Matthew.

What is a hate crime?

A hate crime is a criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

A timeline of Matthew Shepard's murder

Oct. 6, 1998

Evening: Shepard attends a LGBT+ group meeting, followed by dinner with friends at a Village Inn. He's dropped off at home by a friend, Kim Nash, according to Laramie (Wyoming) Daily Boomerang reports.

10:30 p.m.: He arrives at the Fireside Bar & Lounge in downtown Laramie. Bartender Matt Galloway chats briefly with Matthew, who orders a beer.

Oct. 7, 1998

Shortly after 12 a.m.: Shepard leaves the Fireside with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Instead of giving Shepard a ride home, the two begin to rob and beat him. They drive out to the eastern side of Laramie, into a new housing development and onto a dirt path.

12:30 a.m.: The men beat Shepard, tie him to a buck fence with clothesline and take off his shoes. McKinney brutally beats Shepard on the head with the butt of a .357 Magnum pistol, dealing three ultimately fatal blows to his skull. The men leave Shepard and drive back toward town.

12:45 a.m.: Once back in town, McKinney and Henderson get into a street fight with two other men near Seventh and Harvey streets in Laramie. When police arrive, McKinney and Henderson run. Police find Shepard's credit card, shoes and the blood-covered pistol in the bed of McKinney's truck.

6 p.m.: Mountain biker Aaron Kreifels spots Shepard tied to the fence near Snowy Mountain View Road. He runs to a nearby house and calls 911. Albany County Sheriff's Deputy Reggie Fluty arrives shortly afterward.

9:15 p.m.: Shepard is admitted into Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, after being transferred from Laramie's Ivinson Memorial Hospital.

Oct. 8, 1998

Morning: Russell Henderson is arrested and charged with attempted first-degree murder. Kristin Price, McKinney's girlfriend, and Chastity Pasley, Henderson's girlfriend, are also arrested and charged as accessories after the fact.

4:30 p.m.: The three arrests are announced, and one more is said to be pending, according to Albany County Sheriff Gary Puls.

Oct. 9, 1998

10:40 a.m.: McKinney confesses and is arrested. He, Henderson, Price and Pasley make their first appearance in court.

7 p.m.: Shepard's parents and brothers arrive in Fort Collins.

October 12, 1998

12:53 a.m.: Shepard dies of his injuries.

4:30 a.m.: His death is announced in a press conference at Poudre Valley Hospital.

Oct. 16, 1998

Shepard's funeral is held in Casper, Wyoming.

Sources: The Laramie Daily Boomerang, The Casper Star-Tribune, The Matthew Shepard Foundation