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McKinney's girlfriend, Kristen LeAnn Price, did no one but prosecutors any favors when she said Shepard had pushed himself on McKinney in the bar, and it embarrassed him in front of his friends. Price and Henderson's girlfriend, Chastity Vera Pasley, were charged with being accessories for offering alibis for their boyfriends and disposing of Shepard's bloody clothes.
Those who squirm over Shepard's life-style might have felt more righteous last week when it was reported that he'd made a pass at a bartender in Cody last summer, got punched in the face and falsely reported to police that he'd been raped. (No charges were filed.) If only a punch in the face were the stiffest penalty for making a pass.
There's a touch of homophobia in the Wyoming legislature, state representative Mike Massie of Laramie tells you. It's a religious thing, he says. God has apparently channeled his thoughts on gays through a few good ole boys in Cheyenne.
Four times this decade, Massie has co-sponsored antibias bills; four times they've died. There's no problem with enhanced penalties for crimes against race, religion or ethnicity, he's been told, but if he doesn't drop sexual orientation from the list, there's not a chance in hell. Other opponents argue against special legislation for any group or contend that existing laws are sufficient.
"I am so angry over the fact that it never passed," Massie says, because now the nation can wonder whether, "gee, maybe Wyoming tolerates this kind of thing."
And that, for all the legalistic hand wringing, is the most compelling reason for such a bill. The symbolism. Politics is at least half symbolism anyway.
"You know the quote: The only prerequisite for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing," said Graham Baxendale, an Englishman who came to America in August to study, of all things, hate groups. He teaches a University of Wyoming class on "the implications and ramifications of hate crimes." "Unfortunately," he said at a teach-in last week, "my job just got easier." There's no telling how long it will last, Baxendale says, but there is a dialogue in Laramie where there wasn't one before, and it has spread through Wyoming and beyond.
Shepard's body was taken home last week to Casper, where he once played Little League and acted in local theater and was always the littlest kid. Annie Spitzer, a Shepard family friend known as Sister Annie at a Pentecostal ministry, remembers a trip downtown with Matt when he was in elementary school. "He saw a flag at half-staff, and he asked me, 'What's wrong with that flag? Why isn't it all the way up?'" And she told him, "Oh, that means that someone very important has died." As she explained mourning, Matt hugged her legs.
Snow fell Friday at Shepard's funeral in Casper, where the flags flew at half-staff and hate groups demonstrated not far from St. Mark's Episcopal Church. Winter, beautiful and wicked, is coming to Wyoming.
--With reporting by Maureen Harrington/Casper and Richard Woodbury/Denver