Matthew Shepard: The murder that changed America.

A collection of his personal effects - donated by his family - has just gone on display at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History in the US capital.

His school work, theatre scripts, photos and sandals are among the exhibits.

On Friday, his remains were interred at Washington National Cathedral, spiritual home of the nation.

Shepard now rests in the crypt of the neo-Gothic edifice, alongside the likes of former President Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, the pioneering deaf-blind academic, and George Dewey, the 19th Century naval officer for whom the rank of admiral of the navy was created.

It is a momentous honour not even accorded to another prominent gay martyr, Harvey Milk, the San Francisco politician assassinated in 1978.

Reverend Fred Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church and his flock, who included children, held placards daubed with homophobic slurs and shouted to mourners that the dead student was burning in hell.

Dennis Shepard, 69, remembers law enforcement making him wear a bullet-proof vest to step outside the Episcopal church, which had been scoured by bomb-sniffing dogs.

Swat teams were positioned at the front and back of the building, police snipers on surrounding rooftops.

The couple have kept their son's urn of ashes at home until now, partly out of concern any memorial might be desecrated.

Judy says: "This is a huge relief to us to know that he'll be safe and protected forever."

She recalls that as a boy Matt always asked her: "Do you think I'll be famous someday?"

"I guess he got there," she adds.

The couple remember how they shrugged it off when he came out to them as a teenager, since they had already guessed.

At the time of his death, Judy says, he was just putting his life back together after being sexually assaulted on a high school trip to Morocco. Shepard was gang-raped there by some locals.

His mother says: "We just felt like he was finally coming around to being himself again. And uh, um, and then this happened."

Shepard was studying political science and dreamed of working as a diplomat for the Department of State.

His family have mixed feelings about his secular sainthood.

They believe he would be uncomfortable with his consecration as some sort of "perfect icon".

Judy points out that her son was not found on the fence in a crucifixion pose, as was wrongly reported at the time.

 

 

 

Matthew Shepard laid to rest in Washington, 

Wyoming - which has almost as many pronghorn antelope as people (half a million or so residents) - is a rural, conservative heartland.

Shepard's murder stoked the perception of Cowboy Country and flyover states in general as a danger zone for gay people.

But at his office in the city of Cheyenne, McKinney trial lawyer Dion Custis maintains it was a robbery gone bad, even while he accepts sexual orientation was a factor.

"They [McKinney and Henderson] basically were just kind of two lost kids," he says, "that were using meth daily, at least weekly for a long period of time.

"People who use meth, chronic meth users, they lose the ability to rationalise, and [have] all kinds of problems mentally."

However, McKinney's own gay-bashing rhetoric damns him in the eyes of many.

During a police confession, he said he began to attack Shepard because the student had put his hand on his leg during the car ride.

McKinney said he replied: "Guess what? We're not gay, and we're going to jack you up."

Yet in another statement to police, he said Shepard simply looked like he was about to grope McKinney.

From the jailhouse after his arrest, McKinney reportedly wrote to another inmate's wife: "Being a verry [sic] drunk homophobic [sic] I flipped out and began to pistol whip the fag with my gun, ready at hand."

At trial, McKinney's lawyers argued that Shepard had made their client fly into a rage by touching his leg.

But the judge dismissed this "gay panic" claim.

Such a legal strategy - where criminal defendants in cases of violent assault argue they were provoked by an unwanted same-sex sexual advance - is still admissible in all but three US states, according to the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.

Sheriff O'Malley rejects any attempt to downplay the anti-gay element in the murder.

"We have never discounted ever that the initial motivation was robbery," he says. "The robbery motive stopped really early in that contact.

"In my opinion, it was a hate crime."

Both killers are serving two consecutive life terms for kidnapping and murder.

Neither would agree to interview requests, said the Wyoming Department of Corrections.

The court proceedings are also remembered for a counter-protest that is commemorated by a mural in Laramie, just a few blocks from where it unfolded.

When Westboro Baptist Church returned as Henderson pleaded guilty in April 1999, Shepard's friends were not prepared to let them steal the limelight again.

"We had this idea for big ass angel wings that would block out the signs," says Jim Osborn, who was chair of University of Wyoming's LGBT association at the time of the student's death.

Wearing outfits made of white sheets, duct tape and PVC piping, they stood in front of Phelps and his congregants, turning the other cheek to their bigotry.

Osborn recalls the minister and his flock saying: "You're a disgrace. We can smell the whiff of brimstone about you."

Another counter-protester, Nichol Bondurant, says she could literally feel Phelps' breath on the back of her neck.

The moment was re-enacted as a climactic scene in 2002 HBO movie The Laramie Project.

Dubbed the angel action, it was replicated two years ago in Orlando, Florida, when Westboro Baptist Church tried to disrupt the funerals of gay people killed in a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub.

Shepard's death would go on to inspire plays, a musical and poetry. Elton John penned a song, American Triangle, comparing the slaying to a deer run down by two coyotes.

The dead student's family set up the Matthew Shepard Foundation, which helped expand federal hate crime law to include offences motivated by sexual orientation, gender or disability.

Judy and Dennis were at the White House with then-President Barack Obama in 2009 to see the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr Hate Crimes Prevention Act signed.

James Byrd Jr, a black man, was murdered in Texas in June 1998 by three white supremacists who dragged him behind a pick-up truck.

The Shepards have travelled the US and more than two dozen countries advocating for LGBT rights.

The cause has made a quantum leap in the last two decades in America. When their son died, same-sex marriage was banned in every US state.

Now it's the law of the land.

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But activists say their battle for equality is not over.

Wyoming is among five US states that have no criminal hate crime law.

In another 15 states, hate crime laws do not expressly cover a victim's sexual orientation, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

It also says LGBT Americans can be fired for their sexuality in 29 states.

Judy feels gay rights "took a U-turn" under the Trump administration.

"All of them are in that circle of familiarity of extreme right-wing religious attitudes," she says of the president's cabinet, "in particular to the gay community, to anybody who's not straight white Christian."

Wyoming is celebrated as the home of train robbers Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

With its air of Western romance and cult of the outlaw, it is a place where the line between hero and villain can blur.

Many residents of Laramie - they call themselves Laramigos - believe their town has been unfairly tarnished by the Shepard case.

Some think media coverage was classist - the victim was educated at a Swiss alpine boarding school; the culprits were labelled "trailer trash" and "rednecks".

A number of townsfolk assert the murder was actually a drug deal gone bad, as the court heard Shepard - like many a student - had dabbled in illicit substances.

However, Sheriff O'Malley makes clear that theory is not supported by the evidence.

The Old Buckhorn Bar & Parlor in Laramie has a mirror pocked by a bullet hole, and walls that bristle with mounted antelope, buffalo and bobcat.

One patron, Justin Brummet - who proudly describes himself as "third class white trash" - says US progress on gay rights since Shepard's death is to be commended.

But he and his friend Bryce, a lumberjack, are sceptical the murder was ever a hate crime.

"That's the thing about Wyoming," 29-year-old Brummet, a carpenter, says outside the pub as he smokes a cigarette, "is that it's just all about myth and stories and tall tales.

"Who really knows what happened, you know? You have one side of the divide that thinks it was a hate crime, and I think they needed it to be a hate crime.

"Then the other side is the kind of shit that happens in the state all the time."

Across town is a different world - in the middle of the University of Wyoming's impressive $1bn sandstone campus stands the state's only public memorial to Matthew Shepard: a bench.

His family had to be persuaded to agree to that dedication, fearing it might be vandalised. It hasn't.

Some LGBT students gathered by the seat say they generally feel safe in Laramie, though tend to be more vigilant when venturing beyond college safe spaces.

Jess Fahlsing, from Rock Springs, Wyoming, says she would not dare walk around town holding hands with a partner.

Gem City, as it is known, has no gay bar, though its second annual PrideFest last summer was deemed a success.

"There's this notion [in Wyoming] that you can live your own lifestyle," says 22-year-old Fahlsing, who identifies as queer and came out a year ago, "and be whoever you are as long as you don't shove it into someone's face."

Back at the end of the last millennium, many Wyomingites apparently thought gay people were as rare on the high plains as jackalopes, the state's mythical antlered rabbit.

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Shepard's murder - together with the 2005 gay cowboy love story Brokeback Mountain - helped dispel that misconception.

Cathy Connolly, a University of Wyoming gender and women's studies lecturer, explains.

"I think 20 years ago some people in Wyoming honestly didn't believe they had met anyone who was gay or lesbian," she says.

"Today that isn't the case. Everyone understands that there are gays and lesbians in their communities.

"That being said, it doesn't mean that everyone believes gays and lesbians are welcome or wanted in Wyoming."