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"When I left Cheyenne for Laramie," Korhonen remembers, "my father said, 'I know you're very proud of who you are, but please, please watch yourself because there are people who will want to destroy you simply because of who you are.' I gave him a big hug and said, 'I know.' And then the first thing I saw when I got to Laramie was a bumper sticker that said HATRED IS A FAMILY VIRTUE."
That was in August. In September his roommate, head of the gay-activities club on campus, was attacked. And then on Oct. 7 the roommate, Jim Osborne, called with the news about Matt Shepard. Osborne had not yet come out to his entire family, but that was taken care of as he eulogized his friend Matt on national television.
"I hate to say it, but it affirmed my worst possible nightmares of what was possible. I just never felt comfortable here," says Korhonen, who had never met Shepard. "When I walked out of the apartment to my car, it was, 'Oh, my God.' This could have happened to any one of us. It could have been me. It was the most terrifying moment. You know this is real; you go out into the dark; and it's everything adding up."
He loves Wyoming, as Shepard did, as Osborne does, because it's beautiful and it's home. But when the semester's done in December, Korhonen will be gone. He's moving to Denver, where it's easier to be gay.
Travis Brin, a 24-year-old welder, remembers being at parties with Aaron McKinney, who was like a lot of people who talk a lot. He had nothing to say.
"A total redneck," says Brin. "He'd say crazy, stupid stuff about black people and gay people... One time he said we ought to get all these people with AIDS, stick them in an airplane and blow it up. But if you got up in his face, he'd back down, because he was a punk, like any other young punk you see on the street."
Police say it was McKinney, 22, and his quiet-man pal Russell Henderson, 21, both high school dropouts, who met Shepard in Laramie's Fireside Lounge. "After Mr. Shepard confided he was gay, the subjects deceived Mr. Shepard into leaving with them in their vehicle," reads the Albany County court filing of first-degree murder, kidnapping and aggravated robbery charges against McKinney and Henderson.
In addition to being an unspeakably gruesome crime, it was a profoundly dumb one. After allegedly leaving Shepard hanging on the fence on that rocky ridge just outside of town, McKinney and Henderson drew attention to themselves by getting into a fight with two other men. It was then, police say, that they found a bloody .357 Magnum in the pickup truck, and Shepard's wallet in McKinney's house. McKinney, by the way, was awaiting sentencing for burglarizing a Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Laramie, along with the rest of the nation, found itself wondering what dark hole this kind of ugliness bubbles up out of. But some of that mystery was cleared up when McKinney's father Bill opened his mouth. The media, he said in an interview with the Denver Post, "blew it totally out of proportion because it involved a homosexual."