By Wil Haygood
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 13, 2003; Page D01

Judy Shepard is exhausted and resilient and haunted by those college kids in the Bible Belt. They'll sidle up to her and whisper how they want to tell their parents, but are afraid. Gay students, just like her Matthew. State to state she goes, chasing men and women in suits, the politicians, trying to get them to pass hate-crime legislation. If only she could change some minds, she says, in her own Wyoming. Which is where the blood spilled on that darkening night.

Which is where the unimaginable beating that led to her son's death took place.

It happened nearly five years ago. Eighteen blows to the head. Tied to a fence post, hands behind his back. Cursed at because he was gay. It seemed feral and ritualistic all at once. More Edgar Allan Poe than Louis L'Amour. In an ever-widening and whiplashed moment, Laramie, Wyo., had a resonance, though it wasn't the kind the folks over at the Chamber of Commerce relished. But by the time justice had been handed down, and the celebrities had weighed in, and the White House had commented, and the media had come and gone, and the Wild West mythology had been chewed over, and the last cowboy had stomped snow from his boots in that winter of 1998, Matthew Shepard, a dead 21-year-old, had become an iconic figure. Someone sacrificed for a cause -- that cause being gay rights.

And all of those swirling winds, the agony and the words and the meetings, did something else: They propelled Judy Shepard out onto a stage. She was a mother who had lived miles and miles from her son in another country. But the voices beckoned and she went toward them in spite of not being, as she puts it, "a podium-pounder." She knew little of gay America. But with her son gone, murdered, suddenly there was a whole America to get to know. Hungry groups wanted to talk about Matthew and the killing and how it left a gash across the land. Judy Shepard didn't have any gay friends -- at least none she knew of. Matthew changed all that. It was as if he were whispering to her:

Come on home, Mom.

To his world, to his America.

Matt's Legacy
"Matt's become a touchstone for them," she says of those she meets out on the hustings. "He was who he was and was not afraid. And what happened to Matt has spurred activism."

She's sitting in a sunny hotel room, wearing a lime green top and dark slacks, the light glinting off her bracelet. She's come to Washington to talk to a group at the State Department and to lobby for federal hate-crimes legislation. The mother as symbol: She confesses it is a life unimaginable during her own quiet Wyoming upbringing.

She carries a single picture of Matthew, small enough to fit in a palm. He's looking away from the camera, smiling. He looks ethereal and cloud-light. His skin appears smooth and scrubbed. Just a little snapshot taken in San Francisco.

This is Judy Shepard giving a narrative account of her past month: "I did Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. The board of trustees were trying to eliminate nondiscrimination in regards to gays. Then there was Middle Tennessee State. In Nashville the city council was trying to establish a nondiscrimination policy regarding gays and lesbians. It failed. The next day, Rutgers University. They were having a weeklong series of events to encourage diversity. After that event, I flew to Las Vegas for a gay rodeo. Then I came back to New York City for a GLAAD [Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation] award dinner. The next day I did a book signing at the Gay & Lesbian Center in New York City. The [Matthew Shepard] foundation has published a book called 'A Face in the Crowd,' and its positive pictures of the gay community -- couples, families. Then I did the University of Eastern Connecticut. Then I went to Northfield, Massachusetts, the next day. Then I did Amherst College. Then I was in Providence, Rhode Island, for a conference on public and community service. Then I did James Madison University in Virginia."

She catches her breath. Then the mother of Matthew Shepard -- robbed of 20 bucks that night, his face covered in blood save for two streaks of white skin from the tears -- goes on:

"Then I went home for a few days. Then I did the University of Texas in Austin, where the state legislature issued a proclamation honoring me for my advocacy. Then the next day they passed DOMA, the Defense of Marriage Act, saying that marriage is a man and a woman and should a marriage become legal anywhere else between same-sex couples it would not be recognized in Texas. Then I went to the University of North Texas. Then to Plymouth State College in New Hampshire. The day after that I did Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania."

Come on home, Mom.

On the campuses the students sit in rapt attention, then glide up to her afterward. They'll stand in a line with their backpacks on. They'll stare at her from several feet away as if they're already holding a conversation with her. As if they knew Matt. "The kids come up to me and say, 'I'm gay. How can I tell my mom?' It's heartbreaking."

Shepard stands and listens. And tries to comfort and soothe. She was never a yakker. She was a lapsed schoolteacher who lived a low-key life on the high plains before going abroad with her husband, who worked for an oil company. Then she's face to face with students and listeners who want to know about that night, that horror, her son.

Even now, expressing feelings is difficult for Shepard. "She's not someone who would come to this kind of activism naturally," says Cathy Renna, a GLAAD official who attended the trial of Matthew's killers in Wyoming and befriended the Shepards. "They were very private people," she says of the family.

Matt's only sibling, Logan, is a college student. Judy Shepard says Logan struggled in the aftermath of the death, wondering how to react when strangers would ask him if he were kin to Matthew Shepard. "They were so different. Logan's an athlete, Matthew wasn't." Her husband, Dennis, remains overseas.

Judy, who heads the Matthew Shepard Foundation from Wyoming, asks a reporter not to contact them. "I think he's doing well," Shepard says of her husband. "I think he'll do better when he comes home to stay -- so he'll know what Matt's legacy really is."

Family History

The mother who is now the activist was born in Glenrock, Wyo. Her dad was the postmaster, her mother a senior clerk at the post office. A decade that shoved itself right into the American psyche slid right over Wyoming. "It was the '60s and Wyoming was hardly touched by what was going on in the rest of the country," she says. "It was easy."

Pause.

"If you fit in."

By her junior year at the University of Wyoming in Laramie she had met and married Dennis Shepard. Dennis had a job with OSHA, so they moved to Casper. Matthew was her firstborn.

He was always sickly and slight. He suffered from milk allergies. He had ear infections.

The Shepard family moved to Saudi Arabia in 1993. Matt was 16 then and went to boarding school in Switzerland. Home was somewhere on the telephone wires. "We'd talk maybe five minutes at a time because the calls were so expensive," Judy Shepard says. "I think the hardest thing for him is he had no place to go back to in his head."

While a high school senior, Matthew was robbed and sexually assaulted while traveling on vacation in Morocco. He'd been moseying around a marketplace. It was nighttime. No one was ever arrested. He went into a deep depression, she says, and sought counseling.

His curiosity amazed his friends and family. He picked up languages easily. He never minded travel. He seemed mighty quiet about his intimate feelings. Mother's wit led Judy Shepard to wonder if her son was gay. Secretly she read articles. "I sort of tried to educate myself what that would mean for him and us. I hoped he wasn't because I feared for his future." The words are coming out softly. "I think I had it figured out in my mind if he was gay, he wouldn't stay" in Laramie after college. "This was way back when the American Psychiatric Association still felt homosexuality was a mental illness."

In 1995 he went off to Catawba College in Salisbury, N.C. That's where he was when he made the phone call to his mom, who was in Saudia Arabia. He told his faraway mother he was gay, just blurted it out. "I don't think he came out to himself until then," she believes.

He found it difficult to adjust to life in North Carolina. "He hated North Carolina," Judy says, "because he encountered a racism he didn't know was so prevalent." His college roommate was a military vet "and a homophobic," she adds. Matthew got another roommate after two months.

In 1996, Judy moved back to Casper for a year, then went back to Saudi Arabia. "She talks about the challenges of all of this, the things she wasn't there with Matt for," says Renna.

In the aftermath of the murder, much came out about Matthew. He could be ornery. He could be aggressive with friends. He would announce to certain individuals that he was gay and stare at them angrily, as if asking for a fight. But then people would shake their heads and try to imagine a boy tied to a fence post, begging for life, a young man who wanted to be himself, who had a mom, a dad, a brother, grandparents, and 105 pounds of flesh on his slight body, and far too many cities in his short life. And who was looking for things in the world, not least love.

A mother sitting in a hotel room, a mother who came home, will say this: "He was not a perfect child. He made mistakes, but those mistakes hurt no one but himself."

"He had no fear," says Romaine Patterson, who knew Matt when he briefly attended Casper College in Wyoming. "He figured the worst things in life had already happened to him." Patterson, who attended the trial and now hosts a radio talk show in New York City that discusses gay issues, has kept in touch with Judy Shepard. She marvels at her energy. "Early on I used to think it was the guilt that drove her. But she should be over that now."

By the spring of 1996 Matthew left North Carolina. By 1998 -- there had been a brief spell living in Denver -- he had returned to Wyoming, the place where his mom and dad had roots, to the place where his godparents resided. Where his mother had temporarily returned. Where the clear air spills like champagne. Where, despite all that, he was a stranger.

One Night in Laramie

This is what happened on a clear night in the college town of Laramie on Oct. 6, 1998:

Matthew Shepard strolled into the Fireside Lounge, a bar that attracted a cross section of townsfolk. He was alone. He met two locals, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. After chatting with Shepard, the two left to go to the bathroom.

"We found out they had gone into the bathroom and hatched their plan," recalls Lt. Rob DeBree, who served as lead investigator on the case and to whom McKinney confided the details of the attack shortly after it happened. "They went back up to him after coming out of the bathroom and pretended to be gay and lured him into the truck. Once inside the truck they started calling him 'faggot.' Then they started beating him."

On the outskirts of town, the attack became more vicious. Shepard was herded over to a fence. One of the men took a .357 magnum from the truck and hit him on the forehead. Once, twice, a third time, a fourth time, on and on, at least 18 blows in all.

No one would have heard his cries. Or seen his tears.

Hours later a college student, out on his motorcycle, came across a figure slumped on the ground, tied up, leaning against a fence. Halloween was coming. The student at first imagined a scarecrow. Then he saw what he saw and fled for help.

At the hospital they found Matthew's ID and a phone number for his godparents. Then the call was made to the Shepards overseas. Judy remembers it being 5 in the morning. The doctors were honest: "They did not feel he would survive."

He was transferred to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colo. When Judy and Dennis got to his hospital room, he was unconscious, never to revive. "He was so disfigured you were not even sure it was Matt," she says. But there he lay, a symbol in the making.

He was 21 when he died. He looked much younger. "Like a child," remembers investigator Rob DeBree, recalling what he first thought when he saw Matthew in the hospital, hooked to machines.

President Bill Clinton phoned. Elton John too. Many, many others. "It all seemed so surreal," she says, "that that many people would be concerned."

He died in the wee hours of Oct. 12, less than a week after the assault. The charges -- the two who assaulted him had already been arrested -- were upgraded to murder.

The funeral was at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Casper. She remembers the snowflakes. They kept coming. Tree limbs snapped from the heavy snow. "It was beautiful, so much snow."

There were SWAT teams on the roof and anti-gay protesters in the snow, including someone by the name of Fred Phelps from Topeka, Kan. "They have a Web site," she says, straight-faced, "called 'God Hates Fags.' "

A previous generation had Stonewall -- that famous New York City bar where police and gay patrons clashed. Another generation had the murder of Harvey Milk -- the gay member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors -- to remember. Now, a new generation had a world-traveled, slightly built college student to encapsulate its activism. There would be a TV movie. There would be a play, "The Laramie Project," that would be adapted for an HBO production. There's a shot in the HBO movie that takes place in the bar where Matt was picked up. Near the door there's an American flag. "These Colors Don't Run," it says beneath the flag. The camera just lingers.

There have been many, many awful murders, some motivated by hatred, some by money, some by jealousy, others seemingly senseless from any perspective. That very summer of the Shepard killing, James Byrd, a black man, had been dragged to his death behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Tex., a white man at the wheel. But the Shepard killing opened a floodgate. "The country nationwide was jolted," says David Smith, a senior strategist for the Human Rights Campaign, who attended part of the trial. "Crimes of this nature had happened before. And there are a number of theories why this was brought to the nation's attention: One, he was tied to a fence -- as if he was crucified."

One of the accused, Henderson, pleaded guilty. The other, McKinney, stood trial and was convicted. The two men received consecutive life sentences, one for the murder and one for kidnapping. Two young women, Chastity Vera Pasley and Kristen Leann Price, were convicted of lesser crimes related to the killing. One served a few months, the other was given probation. Judy Shepard, activist, turns now to mother: "There's hope for those girls. They believed in the men they were in love with. They were so young. All of them."

No one in the Shepard case was charged with a hate crime -- no such laws exist in Wyoming. "The impact of Matt Shepard's murder was cultural, but it launched a national conversation about inclusive hate crimes legislation," says Cathy Renna of GLAAD.

Judy Shepard was astounded at "the depth of the hate" at the trial, she says. But there was something else: "We learned how desperate people were after Matt's death. People were saying, 'Please use this platform to inform people.' " There is something else she would come to realize: "What happened to Matt sent many people back into the closet for awhile."

The crime unleashed new appeals for a federal hate crime statute based on sexual orientation. While 46 states (though not Wyoming) have passed some form of hate crime law, only 29 states, plus the District of Columbia, have hate crime laws that cover sexual orientation, according to the Anti-Defamation League. A federal hate-crimes bill, for which Shepard has been lobbying, once passed the Senate Judiciary Committee, but never made it to the floor. It hasn't come up for a vote in the House.

The legislation calls for enhanced penalties for crimes motivated in part by race, religion, gender or sexual orientation. Federal funds would be allotted to help local jurisdictions deal with a hate-crime trial, which often requires more extensive resources than local jurisdictions might have for high-profile crimes. Opponents of the proposed legislation believe that existing laws do the job well enough and that creating federal hate crimes would only bring federal intrusion into the responsibilities of local governments.

Shepard believes otherwise. "Hate crimes need to be recognized as a class alone," she says, "because they don't affect one person. They affect thousands of people. When Matt was murdered, thousands of people said: 'That could be me.' " She goes on: "The level of violence is much more violent in a hate crime. They didn't need to hit Matt 18 times to get him to hand over his wallet."

Judy Shepard takes a sip of a soda. "The final blow," she says of the .357 magnum, "was the one they believed crushed his brain stem."

Speaking to the Choir

Shepard is walking up to a podium at the State Department. An 11-year-old group, Gays and Lesbians in Foreign Affairs Agencies, has invited her to give a midday speech. Before her talk she is treated to a concert by a Canadian choir.

We are gentle-angry people

And we are singing for our lives . . .

At the end of the performance, each singer approaches Shepard, who is sitting in the front row, and hands her a rose.

"Thank you," says one.

"Thank you, Mrs. Shepard," says another.

"Thank you for coming," another offers.

Then the lady who never wanted to be center-stage goes up on stage.

A near full audience rises to its feet. For a mother, and a son left in the cold.

"He was not a perfect child," she says.

She tells them of the $20 taken from Matthew: $20 for a life.

She says this all -- the righteousness of people, the looks in the eyes of the haters -- has taught her so much. She's met so many people she might not otherwise have met. "A friend of mine from the East Coast came out to Wyoming and he said, 'Judy, I love you, but your state is whiter than a bag of marshmallows.' " She howls with laughter.

Come on home, Mom.

"If you live in Turkeyneck, Indiana -- I'm not making that name up -- you're afraid to come out at night if you're gay."

She says if only the politicians would use "common sense" they'd get hate-crimes legislation passed.

She talks of not really wanting to do what she does, the activism, but confesses: "How could I not? He was my son."

"The kids out there talk to me," she says. "I'm just a mother."