Father and Son In February 2000 I went to Laramie, Wyoming, to begin work on a story whose essence I thought I knew before boarding the plane in New York. What I expected to find in the infamous college town was an abundance of detail to flesh out a narrative I had already accepted as fact. I went to research a screenplay about the October 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard -- a crime widely perceived as the worst anti-gay attack in US history. At the time I was teaching screenwriting at New York University and producing documentary films. Like millions of others who followed the news of Matthew's beating and the subsequent trials of his assailants, I was appalled by the grotesque violence inflicted on this young man. According to some media reports, Matthew was burned with cigarettes and tortured while he begged for his life. As journalist Andrew Sullivan later recalled, "A lot of gay people, when they first heard of that horrifying event, felt punched in the stomach. It kind of encapsulated all our fears of being victimized . . . at the hands of people who hate us." By the time I arrived in Laramie I was a Johnny-come-lately. For more than a year the story of Matthew Shepard's savage beating and "crucifixion" on a remote prairie fence had been told again and again in the national media. The murder trials had ended by early November 1999 and Matthew's killers, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, both twenty-two, had been sentenced to two consecutive life terms with no chance of parole. As far as the media was concerned, the story was finally over. From the very first reports of the October 6, 1998, attack, major news organizations provided a generally uniform account of the crime and the motives behind it. A sampling of newspaper and magazine stories painted a harrowing picture:  Shepard, 22, a first-year student at the University of Wyoming, paid dearly . . . allegedly for trusting two strangers enough at the Fireside Lounge to tell them he is gay. What followed was an atrocity that . . . forced the stunned community [of Laramie] to painfully confront the festering evil of anti-gay hatred, as the nation and its lawmakers watched. -- The Boston Globe [Police] investigators turned up the following sequence of alleged events . . . Sometime Tuesday night, Shepard met Henderson and McKinney while at the Fireside Bar and Lounge. Shepard told them he was gay. They invited him to leave with them. All three got into McKinney's father's pickup, and the attack began. -- The Denver Post Hungry for cash, perhaps riled by Shepard's trusting admission that he was gay, they drove to the edge of town, police say, pistol-whipped him until his skull collapsed, and then left him tied like a fallen scarecrow -- or a savior -- to the bottom of a cross-hatched fence. -- Newsweek Albany County Sheriff Gary Puls, who suggested . . . that the beating was being investigated as a hate crime, said . . . the investigation . . . is "aggressively continuing" . . . Laramie Police Commander Dave O'Malley told the Associated Press that while robbery was the main motive, Shepard was targeted because he was gay . . . -- The Washington Post What people mean when they say Matthew Shepard's murder was a lynching is that he was killed to make a point . . . So he was stretched along a Wyoming fence not just as a dying young man but as a signpost. "When push comes to shove," it says, "this is what we have in mind for gays." -- Time magazine While some gay leaders saw crucifixion imagery in Mr. Shepard's death, others saw a different symbolism: the Old West practice of nailing a dead coyote to a ranch fence as a warning to future intruders. -- The New York Times The chilling ordinariness of McKinney's and Henderson's small-town backgrounds reminded me of Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the murderers in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood . In glaring contrast, Matthew Shepard was characterized as "well educated" and "well traveled." He was "a slight, unassuming young homosexual," Newsweek said, "shy and gentle in a place where it wasn't common for a young man to be either . . . [he was] sweet-tempered and boyishly idealistic." I was curious about who Matthew was as a person, just as I was bewildered by the warped motives of his killers. But what compelled me as a writer and a gay man to go to Wyoming was neither the brutality of the murder nor its suddenly iconic place in the national landscape. I first began to feel a visceral pull to Matthew's story when I read the words of his father in a New York Times report on Aaron McKinney's sentencing. Excerpted from The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths about the Murder of Matthew Shepard by Stephen Jimenez All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.