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 hewas 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
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 hewas 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
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