Matthew Shepard was not openly gay. He was just himself. If people asked and he felt comfortable in their presence, he'd say, "I'm gay." There was no flaunting it. After all, he was a freshman at the University of Wyoming in the Cowboy State, a campus where real men were supposed to love football and all-night parties. Shepard, barely 5-ft. 2-in. tall and on a good day 105 lbs., preferred political debate and languages (German and Arabic) to the stereotypical masculine pursuits of his father's alma mater. Shepard said his jaw was recently broken by a man in a Cody, Wyo., bar who decked him when he realized he was gay. There are no gay bars in Wyoming. The closest gay nightclubs to Shepard's college are a 1 1/2-hr. drive away and across the Colorado border. Still, Shepard was comfortable enough to join his school's gay organization, comfortable enough knowing that some people were aware of his sexual orientation and most suspected it. Perhaps, despite his quiet caution, he was too comfortable.

Last Tuesday night, at the Fireside Lounge, a campus watering hole where he was a favorite regular, Shepard, 21, was enough at ease to strike up a conversation with two tall, muscular men, Russell Henderson, 21, and Aaron McKinney, 22, both high school dropouts. In fact, Shepard was comfortable enough to get into a pickup truck with them at about midnight. According to the police in Laramie, Wyo., the pair had apparently led him to believe that they too were gay. But all pretense vanished as the journey got under way. Police say the three were barely a half-mile on Grand Avenue, Laramie's main street, when McKinney abruptly pulled over and, apparently taking turns with Henderson, began pounding Shepard on the head with a .357 Magnum revolver. The pair then drove about a mile east of town and, on Snowy Mountain View Road, they dragged Shepard out of the car. "They tied him to a post," says police commander Dave O'Malley, and as he begged for his life, they "beat him and beat him." Perhaps as an afterthought, police say, the pair took Shepard's wallet and his shoes. The back of his head bashed to the brain stem, his face cut, his limbs scorched with burn marks, Shepard hung spread-eagled on a rough-hewn deer fence through a night of near freezing temperatures, unconscious and losing more and more blood. On the evening of the next day, 18 hours after he was abandoned, two bicyclists saw him. At first, they thought they were looking at a scarecrow. On seeing his nephew's near lifeless body hooked up to a respirator, Robert Eaton told a reporter, "It's like something you might see in war."

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