Matthew Shepard and the Fence Outside Laramie

On the night of October sixth into the seventh, nineteen ninety-eight, twenty-one-year-old Matthew Shepard left a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, with two men he had met there. His name is in the public record and his family has made it so: he was a University of Wyoming student, a political science major, openly gay, and known to his friends as someone who wanted to work in foreign service. The two men drove him to a field east of the city, tied him to a fence post in near-freezing temperatures, and left him there.

He was found eighteen hours later by a cyclist who initially mistook him for a scarecrow.

Matthew Shepard died at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October twelfth, nineteen ninety-eight, six days after he was found. He was twenty-one years old.

His two attackers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, were arrested within days. Both were convicted of murder. McKinney was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to two consecutive life terms; Henderson pleaded guilty and received the same sentence. No federal hate-crime statute existed at the time that covered sexual orientation. That was the legal gap Matthew Shepard's death made visible.

His parents, Judy and Dennis Shepard, established the Matthew Shepard Foundation and worked for eleven years toward passage of a federal hate-crimes law. The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Junior Hate Crimes Prevention Act was signed by President Barack Obama on October twenty-eighth, two thousand nine. It was the first federal law to include sexual orientation as a protected category.

In two thousand eighteen, Shepard's ashes were interred at the Washington National Cathedral in Washington, at the family's request, in part because his parents feared vandalism at a local grave site.

The fence post has never been formally marked. People leave things there anyway.