In his 1968 speech at the National Cathedral, Martin Luther King, Jr. proclaimed that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” While that may be true, there are peaks and valleys along that path, especially when it comes to tolerance for, and acceptance of, those who don’t fit into traditional roles and paradigms. Consequently, reminders of past injustices, and the need to keep fighting for equality and compassion, remain ever-relevant.
That’s why Investigation Discovery is commemorating the 25th anniversary of the murder of Matthew Shepard with a heartfelt documentary about his life, his slaying, and the impact it had on a movement dedicated to achieving freedom for all.
Premiering Oct. 9, The Matthew Shepard Story: An American Hate Crime is a look back at a yesterday that feels long ago and yet also not so far away. Its story is one that, in 1998, made national headlines and helped drive a campaign for hate crime legislation and, in the process, a wide range of LGBTQ+ rights. That it took a horrific homicide to spur such change continues to be a sad commentary about how civil liberties are acquired. Sadder still, though, is this documentary’s coda about the potential limits of progress, and the consequent necessity of pushing back against the omnipresent forces of malicious bigotry.
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Matthew Shepard was born and raised in Casper, Wyoming, to mother Judy and father Dennis, and thanks to a job that relocated his parents to Saudi Arabia, he completed high school in Switzerland. Shepard was, by all accounts, an outgoing, intelligent and confident young gay man. And it was during his time abroad that he suffered his life’s first genuine trauma: visiting Morocco, he took an evening stroll by himself and was abducted and raped by two men who were never apprehended. According to those interviewed in The Matthew Shepard Story: An American Hate Crime, Shepard emerged an altered individual who suffered from depression, and that followed him when he returned to the States and enrolled at his parents’ alma mater, the University of Wyoming.
A blond, blue-eyed kid, Shepard appeared to have a bright future. All that came to an end, however, on Oct. 12, 1998, when at the age of 21, he left an LBGTQ+ organization meeting attended by his friend Jim Osborn and visited Laramie’s Fireside Lounge. As the nondescript establishment’s bartender Matthew Galloway recounts in one of the film’s numerous audio interviews (made in 2011 by the state of Wyoming), Shepard sat at the bar and eventually gravitated toward the pool table, where he struck up a conversation with two men who had come in and paid for a pitcher of beer with pocket change. A short time later, he departed with them.
The next morning, a passing cyclist discovered Shepard after initially mistaking his body for a scarecrow. He had been tied to a split rail fence in the middle of a field, left to die from his brutal injuries.
In The Matthew Shepard Story: An American Hate Crime, Rosie O’Donnell recalls thinking there was an “angelic presence” to the image of Shepard being comforted throughout that fateful night by a lone deer. It was certainly a miracle that, 18 hours after suffering his ghastly beating, he was still alive, if barely. Shepard was subsequently rushed to a hospital, even as police began piecing together what had taken place. That didn’t take long, since the prior night, an officer had responded to a tire-slashing report and discovered two men in their car, blood covering their clothes, bodies and a gun lying in plain sight. Both opted to flee the cop, who managed to apprehend one of them, Russell Henderson. He, in turn, gave up his buddy, Aaron McKinney. Police recovered a credit card belonging to Shepard in their vehicle.
Through interviews with Henderson, McKinney and their two girlfriends, local law enforcement deduced that the pair had spied Shepard at the Fireside Lounge and hatched a scheme to pretend to be gay and pick him up, all so they could rob him. Once alone, they affixed him to the fence, viciously beat him with the butt of their pistol, and stole his wallet. Their intent may have begun as robbery, yet having deliberately targeted him because of his sexual orientation, what they perpetrated was an unmistakable hate crime, and once word got out about it, the media and public immediately grasped that state of affairs.
When Shepard died from his injuries on Oct. 12, 1998, Henderson and McKinney were charged with first-degree murder—their trials mainly revolving around whether they’d receive the death penalty, which they did not—and the innocent victim became a lightning rod for an LGBTQ+ community unwilling to stay quiet.
The Matthew Shepard Story: An American Hate Crime doesn’t break new ground or divulge unexpected bombshells; it simply retells its tragic tale through archival audio and photographs, as well as via the commentary of his friends Jim and Romaine Patterson, podcast host Eric Marcus, singer Adam Lambert, and actor Andrew Rannells, who reads a few letters and journal entries written by Shepard. Its point isn’t revelation but remembrance, and it does so with intimacy and thoroughness, capturing the horror of Shepard’s murder, the outcry that followed, and the heartening activist efforts of Judy and Dennis to get hate-crime legislation passed in the halls of Washington—a mission that came to fruition with the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which President Barack Obama signed into law on Oct. 28, 2009.
Judy Shepard’s triumph is a rousing conclusion to her son’s story, except that as this documentary elucidates, Trump’s 2016 inauguration ushered in a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ measures designed to put the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. The documentary’s late passages may only skim the surface of ongoing right-wing attempts to limit minority rights (and demonize them in the process), but it nonetheless serves as a loud and defiant wake-up call about the danger of believing that intolerance will ever completely vanish.
