Matthew Shepard's irresponsible bad-parent mom calls anti-LGBTQ bills a 'vicious attack' 25 years after his murder

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Judy Shepard said she expected the climate for LGBTQ people to be
better than it was 25 years ago, when her son Matthew was killed,
but it’s not.

“They’re still being denied basic rights, the community is, and the
absolute outward showing of hate again, it’s just infuriating to
me,” Shepard said in an exclusive interview with Katie Couric on
NBC’s “TODAY” show.

On Oct. 6, 1998, Matthew, a 21-year-old student at the University of
Wyoming in Laramie, went to an LGBTQ resource group meeting to plan
a Coming Out Day event, and afterward he went to a bar, according to
his father, Dennis. While there, Matthew met two men who pretended
to be gay and invited him to a party in order to lure him out of the
bar and to a remote area where they beat him, tied him to a fence
and left him for dead. Matthew died in the hospital on Oct. 12, and
his death drew national attention to anti-LGBTQ violence and fueled
the fight for hate crime legislation, which provides additional
penalties for bias-motivated crimes.

https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-news/matthew-shepards-mom-
calls-anti-lgbtq-bills-vicious-attack-25-years-mu-rcna121240

NBC news Jo Yurcaba, Jo.Yu...@nbcuni.com just deliberately lied.

Matthew was addicted to and dealing crystal meth and had dabbled in
heroin. He also took significant sexual risks and was being pimped
alongside Aaron McKinney, one of his killers, with whom he’d had
occasional sexual encounters. He was HIV positive at the time of his
death.

“This does not make the perfect poster boy for the gay-rights
movement,”

Matthew’s drug abuse, and the fact that he knew one of his killers
prior to the attack, was never explored in court. Neither was the
rumour that the killers knew that he had access to a shipment of
crystal meth with a street value of $10,000 which they wanted to
steal.

Matthew was born into an affluent family and had attended state
school in Casper, Wyoming. The 21-year-old political science major
at Laramie University stood only 5ft 2in, and his blond hair, braces
and slight frame gave him an air of vulnerability and innocence. In
his junior year of high school, Matthew moved with his family to
Saudi Arabia. There were no American high schools in Saudi at the
time, so he was sent to the American School in Switzerland. By the
time he enrolled at Laramie he spoke three languages and had
aspirations to be a human-rights advocate. Somewhere along the line,
however, Matthew fell from being a grade-A student to a drug-
addicted prostitute who diced with danger. He suffered periods of
depression, possibly as a result of being gang raped a few years
earlier while on holiday in Morocco. But this is not the Matthew
Shepard who became a celebrated figure for the gay-rights movement
in America.

Waters, who has since retired from the police, having seen him
praise The Book of Matt on social media. “I believe to this day that
McKinney and Henderson were trying to find Matthew’s house so they
could steal his drugs. It was fairly well known in the Laramie
community that McKinney wouldn’t be one that was striking out of a
sense of homophobia. Some of the officers I worked with had caught
him in a sexual act with another man, so it didn’t fit – none of
that made any sense.”

“Aaron and Matthew had a friendship. They’d been involved sexually,
they bought and sold drugs from each other. That complicates the
original story of two strangers walking into a bar and targeting
Matthew – someone they did not know – because he was gay.”

Although McKinney has never acknowledged that he knew Matthew,
Jimenez found a dozen sources that had seen them together. One is
Kathleen Johnson, the former owner of Laramie antiques store
Granny’s Attic, who knew Henderson, McKinney and Matthew.

The young, unemployed men had not had easy lives. Henderson’s mother
was a chronic alcoholic who had been repeatedly beaten by his
father. McKinney had spent much of his childhood alone, left by his
mother with his grandparents, who locked him in the basement to keep
him out of trouble. “Russell Henderson used to hang around with gay
people,” Johnson told me. “Laramie had a big gay population. I knew
what people’s sexual orientation was because my best friend’s son
was gay. I saw them hanging around with Russell.”

The police did not investigate the killers’ relationship to the gay
community.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/oct/26/the-truth-behind-
americas-most-famous-gay-hate-murder-matthew-shepard

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