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 th
rough 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.
In reality, the hospital physician who examined Matthew found no physical evidence that he had been sexually assaulted. And by the next morning Matthew withdrew his complaint and stated he had been too drunk to remember what happened.
Some would try to explain the episode in psychological shorthand, speculating that Matthew had experienced “flashbacks of Morocco,” which caused him to make false accusations that he had been raped again. Yet the available evidence from that evening suggests a very different story from the one Matthew originally told — and the media repeated.
According to Chris Hoogerhyde’s testimony in Aaron’s 1999 trial and my own interview with Hoogerhyde by phone — both of which confirmed what police had been told by Leslie Surber, a witness who worked at the Silver Dollar — Matthew made persistent sexual overtures to Hoogerhyde, who is straight, as they sat with friends by the lake. Hoogerhyde said he had repeatedly declined Matthew’s offers to take a walk around the lake and to join him behind a parked vehicle for oral sex. But it was not until Matthew grabbed his arm that he lost his temper and punched him in the face, Hoogerhyde said.
A previously sealed police report also appears to substantiate Hoogerhyde’s account. At 4:38 AM on August 19 police received a phone call from the Holiday Inn in Cody regarding “a male guest in the lobby who is bloodied [and] says he was assaulted.” The report by Officer Scott Steward states:
I responded to the West Park Hospital to take a report of an assault. I was met at the hospital by Officer Barry Ivanoff. Ivanoff informed me that there was a male subject in the E.R. that is claiming to have been raped by three male subjects. I talked to Dr. Polley, the physician examining the victim, Matthew Shepard.
Polley indicated that he did not see any evidence of a sexual assault.
I spoke with Shepard and he stated that he had met this lady and three guys at the Silver Dollar and had left with them and went to a lake. Shepard stated that one of them told him to pull his pants down and when he did the man stuck his penis in him. Shepard had a swollen jaw and split lip. I asked Shepard what happened to his face. He stated, “I think I got hit when I tried to resist.”
Shepard continued on to say, “Things are real sketchy because I had been drinking.” I asked Shepard to describe the people. Shepard stated that he couldn’t describe them. I asked Shepard what happened after he was sexually assaulted. He responded saying, I think they took me back to my motel at the Holiday Inn.
I asked Shepard to fill out a statement and I would talk to him later.
… On 082198 Shepard came into the office and stated that he had talked to a lady named Leslie and found out that she was the one that drove him out to the lake … Shepard informed me that he did not wish to press charges as he did not remember the night very well.
… At approximately 14:40 hrs I met with [Leslie] Surber and a male subject identified as Chris Hoogerhyde … Surber stated they went out to Newton Lake after closing the Silver Dollar. She stated that Matthew was whining and said he didn’t have any friends and wanted to go with them.
… I asked about the assault and Hoogerhyde stated, “Yes I hit him and I’m sorry.” I asked Hoogerhyde to tell me what happened.
He stated as follows: We were out at the lake and Matthew started talking about being gay and how he liked men. He just kept talking about it and wouldn’t leave it alone. I don’t mind gays, I live with two lesbians. Matthew asked me to take a walk around the lake with him and I told him no. He then said, what are you afraid of do you think I might try something. I told him that I thought I could probably take care of myself, besides that, it’s a big lake and I don’t want to walk around it. We sat there for awhile and he kept asking me to walk around the lake. He then asked me to walk behind the van with him. I told him that I was not going anywhere with him and he grabbed my arm so I hit him. I felt bad for hitting him, but he wouldn’t leave me alone. We then took him back to his motel.
… Hoogerhyde and Surber both said that Matthew had stated several times that he had been raped 6 times in Morocco.
No further action taken.
Evidently, after Aaron’s defense attorneys learned of the Cody incident and other instances in which Matthew had apparently acted in a sexually aggressive or antagonistic manner, they thought they’d found credible support for their theory of “gay panic.”
In addition to Hoogerhyde, a different trial witness who had been present at the Fireside bar on the night Matthew was attacked, Mike St. Clair — also straight — would testify for the defense that Matthew, a total stranger, had solicited him sexually. Matthew “said something about ‘head’ … and licked his lips” suggestively, which St. Clair found “really offensive,” though he reacted less ve
hemently than Hoogerhyde had.
A thorny subject like this one is difficult to bring up in any forum, let alone attempt to analyze. But quite apart from the reprehensible strategy of the McKinney defense team, it does seem useful to explore whether Matthew did, in fact, exhibit a pattern of deliberately — or perhaps unconsciously — provoking confrontations that had a potential to turn violent. This is not a matter of “blaming the victim” but rather a conscientious attempt to understand the complex relationship that sometimes exists between victims and perpetrators.
Were the incidents with Hoogerhyde and St. Clair examples of Matthew’s inclination to combat his fears by inviting danger — that is, a “counterphobic” reaction — that came from being sexually assaulted in Morocco?
Or did Dennis Shepard’s notion of his son as “The Bad Karma Kid” hint at a different — or perhaps parallel — dynamic at work?
Along with Hoogerhyde and St. Clair, I also interviewed a former Laramie bar owner, Jason Palumbo, who had known Matthew as a patron at his bar, Club Retro. I was surprised to hear from Palumbo that he had “permanently banned Matt from coming into my place” after an altercation he had with “a very large bouncer who worked at the door.” According to Palumbo, “Matt grabbed the bouncer’s crotch and made some wise-ass remark … We were just lucky the guy didn’t explode.”
After Matthew’s camping vacation ended on a depressing note — his shattered jaw was now being held in place with a wire — he joined his parents and younger brother, Logan, for a family reunion in Minnesota. They also dropped Logan off at the boarding school he was attending and then tackled the next thing on his parents’ agenda before they returned to their home in Saudi Arabia: “settling Matt in Laramie” for his first semester at the University of Wyoming.
The Book of Matt Page 8