Almost 20 years after the brutal and very public death of her son, Matt, who had been the victim of one of the most notorious anti-gay hate crimes in US history, Judy Shepard had managed to change history.

After years of fighting and lobbying, she’d seen hate crimes laws expanded to include attacks on LGBT people; her work was instrumental in establishing the Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009.

Then Trump was elected, Jeff Sessions was named attorney general, and everything changed.



In the eight years since the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 came into effect (Byrd was a black man dragged to his death behind a truck by racists in Texas), it’s been notoriously difficult to prosecute crimes under it because of the high burden of proof lawyers faced in showing a defendant was motivated by bias.

In addition, state agencies are not required to report hate crimes to the Department of Justice – it’s optional.

With no mandatory reporting, Judy and Dennis, her husband and Matt’s father, fear many hate crimes go unnoticed and uncounted. They wanted to see the law expanded but Judy says with the election of Trump, together with the ascents of Jeff Sessions and Vice-President Mike Pence (“who have been very vocal against us”), her hope is fast diminishing.

Pence has voted against same-sex marriage, opposed laws that would prohibit discrimination against LGBT people, opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and been accused of supporting “conversion therapy” (although he denies he has ever supported this).

Sessions, meanwhile, voted to ban same-sex marriage, and when the supreme court ruled it was constitutional he issued a statement saying the court had “redefined a sacred and ancient institution”. He has also voted against expanding hate crimes to include sexual orientation.



“My plan got blown to smithereens,” Judy says. “Now we have to work back at the grassroots level, which is right where we were all those years ago.”

•••

To say Matt Shepard’s death shocked America barely captures the outrage that followed.

When he was 16, Matt moved to Saudi Arabia with Judy, Dennis and Shepard’s brother, Logan. They were following his dad, who got a job as a safety engineer in the oil industry. Later, after a short, unhappy stint at university in Colorado, he transferred to Laramie – a town with a population at the time of around 27,000 – to study at the University of Wyoming. Matt was interested in politics and talked about becoming a diplomat.

Matthew Shepard in 1998. Photograph: AP

On 6 October 1998, the 21-year-old decided to get a drink at the Fireside Lounge, a bar in the heart of the small downtown area. That’s where he met Russell Henderson, also 21, and Aaron McKinney, 22, two high school dropouts who would pose as gay men before luring Matt into their truck to rob him.



McKinney apparently told him “we’re not gay and you’re going to get jacked” before stealing $20 and hitting him repeatedly with a .357-calibre pistol. McKinney and Henderson then drove a mile down the road before Henderson tied Matt to a wooden fence post and began beating him again.

After his attackers fled, Matt remained there, unconscious, for 18 hours in below-freezing temperatures. He was discovered at 6pm the next afternoon by a mountain biker. He had suffered 18 blows to the head and face, including four skull fractures and a damaged brain stem.

Matt was transferred to the intensive care unit of a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. Police, meanwhile, called Dennis and Judy in Saudi Arabia to tell them what had happened and that their son might not live. Walking into the hospital, Dennis said it was the most devastating thing he had ever seen.

Matt died of his injuries five days after the attack.

•••

I meet Judy at a hotel in downtown Austin, Texas, where she’s come to see a private performance of Considering Matthew Shepard, a new work by the choral ensemble Conspirare – the latest in a line of creative projects inspired by her son’s death that include four books, two films, three documentaries, as well as poetry, plays and songs.



Even his funeral was a public event, giving Judy, Dennis and Logan little space to grieve. The family had to issue tickets to ensure only people who knew him were allowed into the church. Other churches in Casper, the family’s hometown, offered space to accommodate the overflow. In addition, it was picketed by members of the notorious Westboro Baptist church, who held signs that read “God Hates Fags” and “Matt In Hell”.

Judy says she never saw them. “They took us through a door in the back of the church, and at the trial they led us through underground tunnels into the courtroom.” Police asked Dennis to wear a bulletproof vest under his shirt when he spoke at Matt’s funeral service, and deployed snipers on surrounding rooftops.

For some, Shepard’s death was almost sacrificial. Vanity Fair’s Melanie Thernstrom described the barren land where he was found as conjuring “thoughts of Golgotha” where “small yellow stones have been arranged to form a cross”. Dennis himself would publicly question whether there was some kind of purpose to his son’s death. “Maybe it was meant to be. He was meant to change the world,” he said.

The trials of Henderson and McKinney were a media circus.

McKinney’s girlfriend, Kristen Price, told jurors he had told her “a gay guy had been hitting on him”, and that he and Henderson had “decided in the bathroom to pretend they were gay, get him in the truck and rob him”.

Once in the truck, the court heard Shepard had made a sexual advance towards McKinney who in turn began hitting him, continuing the beating on a remote stretch of road a mile outside Laramie.

Addressing McKinney before his sentencing, Dennis told him that although he didn’t oppose the death penalty, he was “going to grant you life, as hard as that is for me to do, because of Matthew. Every time you celebrate Christmas, a birthday, or the Fourth of July, remember that Matt isn’t … You robbed me of something very precious, and I will never forgive you for that … May you have a long life, and may you thank Matthew every day for it.”

In one letter, sent by McKinney from prison and replete with spelling errors, he wrote: “Being a verry drunk homofobic I flipped out and began to pistol whip the fag with my gun, ready at hand.”

A tribute to Matthew Shepard hangs from the fence where he was tied and beaten near Laramie, Wyoming. Photograph: Ed Andrieski/Associated Press

George W Bush was president until 2009 – 11 years after Shepard died – and during his administration, Judy knew there was little chance of seeing hate crime legislation expanded to include LGBT people. When he was governor of Texas, Bush let a hate crimes bill die in the state’s senate committee.



“From the very beginning he made it very clear he would never do anything to promote or help or defend gay and lesbian folks,” Judy says.

Bush and his allies argued that legislation would harm freedom of speech, she adds. “Words didn’t kill Matt. Actions did,” Judy says. “To them it was about the first amendment. To us it was a civil rights issue.”

At the same time, the civil rights organisation the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was leading the fight to see hate crime laws expanded. “People felt like if we could use Matt’s story to explain why we needed this expansion that it would make sense to people,” Judy says. “The most brilliant thing they did in my opinion was name the bill after Matt and James Byrd Jr so it’s not some ubiquitous Hate Crime Prevention Act.

Despite some opposition, the bill was signed into law by Obama in October 2009, establishing a new federal offence of causing injury to a person because of their “actual or perceived race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or disability”, giving the justice department the power to investigate and prosecute hate crimes, and providing funding to state and local law enforcement. Judy and Dennis were at the White House that day to witness the event.

Judy says it became clear quite quickly, aside from the fact that there was no mandatory requirement for state agencies to report hate crimes, that the forms they needed to fill in were onerous. She also says prosecuting cases was taking an inordinate amount of time – something that was discouraging to the communities in which these crimes happened and to victims. What’s more, “if you live in a state where you can be fired for being gay, you’re not going to report a hate crime. So that had to change.”

Russell Arthur Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, right, 22, in Albany County court in Laramie. Photograph: Ed Andrieski/AP

For Judy, expanding the Hate Crimes Prevention Act is now on the back burner. She points out that Pence signed a religious freedom bill into law while he was governor of Indiana, interpreted as state-sanctioned discrimination against LGBT people.

What’s more, the attorney general, Jeff Sessions, actually spoke out against the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act on the Senate floor, arguing that federal prosecution was unnecessary because there was no evidence that such crimes weren’t being prosecuted adequately at the state and local levels.

“I just hope it’s a very short blip,” Judy says, referring to Trump’s term in office. “In all seriousness, there is the possibility of impeachment but then that leaves us with the devil. Not the stupid one but the devil, who is mean in his heart.”

•••

Judy’s fear isn’t that there will be an attempt to repeal the act, but that federal officials just won’t pay attention to hate crimes any more – “which will then give licence to community police to not pay attention to them either”.

At present, according to Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, compliance with reporting hate crimes varies wildly.

“Hawaii doesn’t participate at all because it doesn’t want to. And to make matters more confusing, some states come out with individual hate crimes reports that don’t match the FBI statistics. In 2015, Maryland, for example, recorded 203 hate crimes. But the FBI reported 41 for the state.”

There’s something else, perhaps even more disturbing.

Levin says the Hate Crimes Prevention Act specifically requires the US attorney general (or his hand-picked designee) to approve of each prosecution under the act. “And we’re getting an AG who tried to block the act multiple times, and even went on the floor of the Senate to argue against it,” Levin says. “He was arguably its most vehement opponent. I’m very concerned that lack of enforcement will eviscerate the statute’s effectiveness.”

•••

Judy was born raised in Wyoming and she still loves the state she calls home. I ask why. “Because nobody lives there,” she says. “And I love that you can just see forever; that the sky is so blue and there are four seasons.”

But it will always be associated with the brutal murder of her child. “And that’s their own fault, in my opinion,” she says; if the state truly wanted to show it had learned from what happened it would have passed its own hate crimes legislation. The legislature was meeting that same year Matt died and they could have done anything to show they understood the dangers of being in a state where those things happen to their gay citizens. But instead they turned around and ran.”

To this day, Wyoming still hasn’t passed its own hate crime legislation.

Dennis is back working an oil contract in Saudi Arabia while Judy works full time for the Matthew Shepard Foundation, the organisation they founded in 1998 to help foster acceptance of LGBT people through community outreach.

Some days, she says, it feels like a hundred years since her son’s death; others like it was yesterday. “I’m not really much for introspection but I miss him like crazy. We all do. And we still talk of the things about him that pissed us off, too, which I think is healthy. It does seem strange though that our life is now devoted to the memory of our son. You never really picture that to be your future.”

I ask if she still has the fight in her. She smiles.

“I think I’m angrier now than I ever was. People still don’t get it, after all the accomplishments we have made and the exposure and discussion and people coming out and telling their stories. The violence and the discrimination that we still hear about makes me very angry.”