Newsweek

Dec. 21, 1998

The Final Days and Nights of a Gay Martyr

Lonely and depressed, Matthew Shepard feared someone would kill him

By Mark Miller

Tom (Doc) O'Connor vividly remembers the first time he met Matthew Shepard. It was Friday, Oct. 2, and Shepard wanted a limo to take him down to Ft. Collins, Colo., for a night on the town. O'Connor, who owns Doc's Class Act Limousine Service in Bosler, Wyo., showed up in downtown Laramie in a 25-foot white stretch Lincoln. Shepard was blunt from the moment the two met. "I want you to know right now I'm gay and we're going to a gay bar," he said. Did O'Connor have a problem with that? "How are you paying?" the driver shot back, laughing. O'Connor didn't drop Shepard back home until nearly dawn. An unlikely friendship began that evening, and over the next four days Shepard called O'Connor several times for rides and conversation. Shepard, often lonely and eager for human contact, confided his hopes and fears--including, O'Connor says, a premonition that he would be killed because he was gay. A few days later that grisly fear would come true.

On Oct. 7 Shepard--comatose and savagely beaten--was found tied to a fence on the outskirts of Laramie, and he died five days later. The two young men charged with his murder, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both 21, allegedly told Shepard they were also gay in order to lure him out of a Laramie bar and rob and assault him (both men have pleaded not guilty). His death prompted nationwide outrage and renewed the debate over hate crimes against gays.

From the moment Shepard's body was discovered, those who knew him wondered how he might have been gullible enough to go off in a pickup truck with two strangers. Though sweet-tempered and boyishly idealistic, Shepard, a University of Wyoming freshman, was hardly naive. Well traveled and sophisticated, at 21 he had already had several encounters with anti-gay violence.

One answer, according to some who knew him well, is that Shepard was a troubled young man. Exclusive interviews with some of his closest friends suggest that in the weeks before he died, Shepard was drinking more and fighting a slow slide into despair, even though he was taking prescription drugs to control depression. Friends fear that his impaired state may have clouded his judgment, making him an easy target. This dark mood is precisely why Shepard decided to treat himself to that night at Tornado in Ft. Collins, the region's only gay bar. Tina LaBrie, a close friend, says she and her husband, Phil, were well aware that he was struggling to maintain his emotional equilibrium. She went along to the club because she was worried. She believes there were family tensions and, more important, that Shepard was suffering from something like posttraumatic stress syndrome caused by a sexual assault years before, during an excursion to Morocco while Shepard was attending private school in Switzerland. "He was having nightmares," she says. "He was waking up screaming and sweating."

LaBrie says Shepard sounded depressed before the 90-minute trip to Ft. Collins--and that he was fretting about the extravagance of hiring a limo even as they drove out of Laramie. "He said, 'Do you think this is selfish of me? People are starving all over the world, and here I am spending money on a limo service'." You care so much about other people, she told him. You can pamper yourself once in a while. They spent a long evening at Tornado and wound up taking a group to Denny's for after-hours food. "He seemed to have a pretty good time until we were driving home," LaBrie says. "Then he slumped back into depression. He said he was bummed out about his family and the nightmares." O'Connor heard Shepard "whimpering like a puppy, crying."

Arriving back in Laramie about 6 a.m., Shepard had O'Connor drop them at his apartment. With two young children and a husband waiting for her, LaBrie wanted to go home. But she was concerned about Shepard's mental state--he had been talking about death and suicide during the ride home--and she decided to stay a while and let him talk it out. "I was very worried about him," she says. He talked about how he had an ultimate escape plan--"taking all his meds," a potentially lethal overdose. "I didn't know if he really intended to do it, but I didn't want to take any chances," she says. Hours later he began to calm down and LaBrie finally went home.

On Monday afternoon, Shepard called O'Connor from Lovejoys, a Laramie bar and grill, to get a ride home. Shepard asked if he could eat dinner with O'Connor, and the two men talked over Subway sandwiches. "He would tell you anything," O'Connor says. "He didn't give a damn. We're just talking, and I said, 'So what do you do in college besides being gay?'" Shepard laughed and told him about his passion for politics and human rights and his interest in computers. He also talked candidly about his homosexuality--about a lover he had overseas and two incidents in which, Shepard confided, he had been punched by angry straights. Then they got back in the limo for a drive around Laramie. By eerie coincidence, O'Connor says, their route took them past the place where Shepard was later found tied to the fence.

The circumstances of Shepard's death were especially shocking to O'Connor. By one of the strange happenstances of small-town America, two of the limousine driver's other frequent passengers were McKinney and Henderson, the two men charged with Shepard's murder. The three men were friends, and McKinney, his girlfriend and their young son had recently lived rent-free in an apartment O'Connor owns. Despite O'Connor's affection for Shepard and his horror at the murder, he is still fond of the men accused of killing him and believes the death was a robbery gone wrong, not a premeditated hate crime.

And yet O'Connor is still haunted by the memories of his last ride with Shepard on the Monday before his death. Riding down the highway, the younger man turned philosophic. "If I could get two people--one straight, one gay--who hate each other to be respectful of each other, I would have done something good," O'Connor remembers Shepard saying. The irony is that a man who will be remembered as a symbol of hate crimes was trying to do just that.