When Matt Mickelson, the owner of the Fireside, heard of the arrests of McKinney and Henderson, his first reaction "was like: Where did those bastards come from? Where are they from? Then I found out they were from here." He thinks "Russell's a trailer-trash kid. His mom's a drunk broad" who has "had some random dudes."

On January 3, Russell's mother, Cindy Dixon-a 40-year-old alcoholic and battered wife who was last seen staggering out of a bar-was discovered frozen to death on a snowy, rural road eight miles north of town.

Mickelson recalls Russell's mother coming into the bar a few weeks after the slaying with Russell's stepfather, Charles Dixon. They bought a couple of dollar beers, and then Charles Dixon approached Mickelson to apologize for any trouble the attack may have caused to his business. "He says Russ and Aaron were coming off a four-day bender, doing crank [methamphetamine]. I was like: What can I say? Sorry your kid tied someone to a fence and beat him to death?" He throws up his hands. "It's over my head, man."

The national press typed Aaron and Russell as rednecks-a characterization which angers many Laramie residents. Mickelson, whose family came to the area in 1862 and has included generations of cowboys, says that "rednecks aren't ignorant or narrowminded-you get a red neck from working in the sun. These kids aren't rednecks; they're lazy little crankheads-rather than getting a job, they're out trying to rob someone. They're not cowboys-they're cowardly. To have to tie someone up to beat them... " he adds, a detail for which he has particular contempt.

There is a grim narrative similarity among the stories of Aaron McKinney, Russell Henderson, Kristen Price, and Chasity Pasley-lives both chaotic and dull, the details numbingly interchangeable. Aaron's parents, Bill and Denise McKinney, divorced when Aaron was young. Aaron spent much of his childhood alone; according to the Associated Press, his mother left him with his grandparents or locked him in the basement to keep him out of trouble. He often got into fights in school and did poorly, flunking seventh grade. At 14 he stole a cash register and was placed in a youth-detention center. When he was 16 his mother died unexpectedly following surgery. He quit school and began working.

A couple of years ago, he met Kristen Price, who moved into the trailer Aaron shared with a bunch of other guys. When Aaron inherited some money after his mother's death, he reportedly went on a binge, buying drugs, jewelry, and a Camaro with a vanity plate inscribed DOPEY.

Aaron soon ran through the money, and last December, along with two accomplices, broke into the local KFC, stealing $2,500 and some desserts. After the robbery, Aaron and Kristen moved to Pensacola, Florida, where Kristen's mother, Kim Kelly, lives. Aaron got a job as an apprentice pipe fitter, but the police caught up with them and they returned to Laramie so that he could face the robbery charge. Last summer their son, Cameron, was born.

Doc recalls that Kristen and Aaron were "always lovey-dovey when I saw them. I never saw Aaron hit her or get in her face." He saw Kristen as "a happy-go-lucky gal." They'd occasionally hire his limousine and for $60 an hour ride around, drinking and watching TV. Doc liked them: they "always tipped well, were well mannered-once in a while McKinney got shitfaced, but he wasn't that hard to handle." McKinney liked rap music. "Weird stuff," Doc says, "like: 'Nancy, give me head, head, dead, dead'-I never heard that type of stuff before." Sometimes they'd pick up Russell, whom Doc recalls as "a mild-mannered fellow." He says that sometimes "Aaron would ride around in the limousine with other girls." Doc thought Kristen knew and didn't care.

Aaron's friend Odius, a 22-year-old African American manual laborer who goes by a single name ("Like Prince," he says) saw Aaron as having "a lot of anger-more than most kids. I could imagine him beating someone, but not like that." Aaron used drugs, but, Odius says, "so do 93 percent of kids in this town." People remember Aaron once "flipping out" at a Laramie bar upon seeing the doctor he believed responsible for his mother's death. Bill McKinney tried to explain Matthew's death as his son's reaction to Matthew's alleged sexual overture. Aaron, he said, doesn't like to be embarrassed in front of other people.

Odius first met Aaron in a crisis center in Laramie when they were teenagers. Aaron's mother had to leave him there for periods of time when she found him too difficult to manage; Aaron hated being trapped there, subject to strict regulations. Odius has trouble formulating what he liked about Aaron: "He played practical jokes on me. Once he put honey in my shampoo." Questioned about Aaron's life, he responds, "We didn't talk about his favorite movie, favorite things. It seems like you come from a nice place-a world where people have favorite things. If you're asking me if we ever got deep-deep, we never did." When asked if Aaron had any close friends--people who really knew him-he wrinkles his nose: "Who does?"

He remembers when Kristen was pregnant with Cameron: "He was happy and proud; his baby was on the way. He had that cocky attitude, 'I got a woman.'"

Aaron's friend Christina Tyser recalls, "It wasn't like a good relationship or anything. But after she got pregnant, I think he felt like he had to stick with her." Christina hasn't "known anybody who's had an abortion-at my high school half the girls are pregnant."

"After his mom died, Aaron didn't really care about anything; he said he didn't feel like he had anything to do or anywhere to go-or any future," Christina says. Odius says Aaron was "just kind of floating. Not everyone has hopes and dreams these days-some people just want to make it through and still be able to smile. Not everyone wants to be an astronaut or a movie star." Long before Cindy Dixon was found in the snow, people assumed Russell Henderson's parents were dead. He never knew his father, and at age 10 he had been taken from his mother's house, after reportedly having been abused by various of his mother's boyfriends. He was raised by his strict Mormon grandparents and became an honor student and a member of Future Farmers of America. He completed the requirements for the rank of Eagle Scout by cleaning a local cemetery, and had his picture taken with the governor and printed in the Boomerang. Then he started hanging around with guys like Aaron, quit school, and got a series of menial jobs, the last of which was repairing roofs. He acquired a police record for drunken driving and fighting with a police officer.

He and his girlfriend, Chasity Pasley, lived in a $340-a-month trailer in southwest Laramie. Their landlady, Sherry Aanenson, remembers Russell as "quiet, polite, just your average male.... He does what most guys do-hunt, fish, drink beer, there was a car he worked on." She saw him as "pretty neutral-a follower." A neighbor, however, complained about his rowdy behavior. Chasity was a freshman studying art at U.W. at the time of the arrest. Her parents had split when she was young; her father had moved to Alaska following a custody battle in which he had unsuccessfully argued that her mother, Linda Larson, should lose custody because, he alleged, she was gay. Russell and Chasity spent a lot of time with Aaron and Kristen. The four of them considered each other "best best friends."

Tuesday, October 6, was the birthday of Matthew's old friend Walt Boulden, and they had planned to go to a movie. At 6:30, however, Matthew called and canceled, telling Walt he had to study for his French class. Then Matthew went to the weekly L.G.B.T.A. meeting, where plans were being finalized for the campus Gay Awareness Week, which would begin the following Monday.

Jim Osborn, the association chair, told the group that he had just been harassed; he was walking across campus when a guy came up to him and said, "You're one those faggots, aren't you?" But Jim-a large man-punched his accoster in the face, and the guy ran away. After the meeting, the group went to the Village Inn, where Matthew ate cherry pie. He then tried to persuade each of the members to accompany him to the Fireside, but no one wanted to, and Kim Nash, a member of the L.G.B.T.A., drove him home. She watched until he went into his house. She thought he was in for the night.

No one knows why Matthew was determined to go to the Fireside that night, or why he left with Aaron and Russell. It was karaoke night, which would not ordinarily have interested him. There was some speculation that he was buying drugs from Aaron and Russell, but his friends find that implausible. A close friend thinks that depression may have weakened his judgment, and wonders if he had taken a heavy dose of Klonopin before he went to the bar. "When he was depressed," she says, "he would just grab a handful." Romaine Patterson remembers how in the coffee shop where she worked Matthew "would just talk to anyone-people no one else would talk to, like this weird old man.... He had no discrimination in his person."

Matthew's friends also find it hard to picture him being sexually drawn to Aaron or Russell. Nor do they think that Matthew was interested in a threesome.

But what if he was? The denials in the press seemed to suggest-as in the old rape ethos-that Matthew had to have had no sexual intent in order not to be complicit in his own killing. Judy Shepard thinks that night, like the Cody incident, was an example of Matthew's "counterphobia." Moreover, getting rides with strangers in Laramie is not an unusual or perilous thing to do.

The Fireside is a rough bar, but not a menacing one. Big pinup beer girls pop out of the walls, and a sign for the Western Athletic Conference reads, THE NEW WYOMING COWBOYS-READY TO KICK SOME WAC BUTT! A huge buffalo head in front of the D.J.'s booth blows smoke through its nostrils. The atmosphere is rowdy and friendly.

Matt Galloway, a U.W. junior who was bartending that Tuesday, tells the story with the perfect contrasts of a Passion play. He started his shift at 10 P.M.; Matthew Shepard came in half an hour later. Matthew-dressed in jeans and a sport coat-sat at the bar drinking a Heineken and a mixed drink and talking to Galloway.

Around 11:45, Aaron and Russell came in and ordered a pitcher of cheap beer, counting out the $5.50 in quarters and dimes. One of them had noticeably dirty hands; Galloway remembers wanting to count their change out himself so as not to have it handled by them. "It was 'Gimme this, gimme that'-no 'Thank you's', no politeness at all. The opposite of Matt."

Galloway describes Matthew as "amazingly polite-soft-spoken, but well spoken. A person you can tell is kind-who would love to listen or be listened to."

Aaron and Russell disappeared in the direction of the pool table, but then returned to the bar. "They were here for [a while], out of beer, hanging out. They were coming in with dimes," Galloway says. "Here's this little kid, dressed very nice. Maybe they've seen him before and thought he was gay."

Matthew's last beer cost %2.50. "I went ahead and said, 'Just give me two bucks. He gave me three," says Galloway.

Shortly after midnight, the three of them left. As Matthew walked out the door, the D.J., Shadow, handed him what would be his last cigarette.

"You got to smoke it while you have it," Mickelson later comments reflectively, shaking his head.

At 1:30 in the morning on October 7, Aaron McKinney came home disoriented and covered in blood, Kristen Price explained to the media after the murder. "He was crying and he kept throwing up. He just came in and hugged me and said, 'I've done something horrible. I deserve to die.'" She asked what he had done and he said he wasn't sure. "He said he thought maybe he killed somebody."

After she had cleaned him up, given him a glass of water, and laid him down, Aaron told her that "a guy walked up to him and said that he was gay and wanted to get with Aaron and Russ," Kristen said. "He got aggravated with him and told him that he was straight and didn't want anything to do with him and he walked off. Then later Aaron and Russ said, 'Let's pretend like we're gay and we can-we'll rob him and take his money.'

"They just wanted to beat him up bad enough to teach him a lesson," Kristen explained, "not to come on to straight people and don't be aggressive about it anymore."

According to the police, in his confession Aaron said that during the car ride Matthew had put his hand on his leg and asked, "When are we going to get to where you live?" and Aaron told him, "Guess what? We're not gay, and we're going to jack you up." Aaron asked for Matthew's wallet, which he gave to him, but they began to beat him anyway, with the butt of a gun.

Heading out of town, they drove about a mile east, and then turned just past the WalMart into Sherman Hills-a housing development where Aaron had lived as a child. They continued down a sandy dirt road, through sagebrush, until the road dead-ended at a rough-hewn wooden buck fence, at the border of a property where a new house was under construction.

They bound Matthew's hands together, behind his back, and then tied them to the fence, leaving his head and body crumpled near the ground (not in a crucifixion position). While Russell tied the rope, Aaron took Matthew's shoes because he thought his captive would be able to free himself and walk back to town. Then, according to the police, Aaron continued to beat him, while Russell stood back, laughing.

In his confession, Aaron said that Matthew had not made a pass at them in the bar, but did concede that he and Russell had made a plan to rob him. The reason they beat him after he was tied up was that they thought Matthew had seen their license-plate number. When they left, Aaron said, they assumed he was dead.

Aaron and Russell had planned to burglarize Matthew's house, but they got distracted by a fight with two Hispanic teenagers. Jeremy Herrera and Emiliano Morales, both high-school dropouts, were walking downtown near where Aaron and Russell parked their truck. Jeremy and Emiliano were bored; Jeremy had slashed a car tire "for shits and giggles," he explained to me. They bantered with Aaron and Russell, who "started talking trash--'Fuck you,' calling us bitches and stuff," Jeremy says-and then, according to the teenagers, Aaron hit Emiliano with a gun, bashing his skull. Next, Jeremy hit Aaron in the head with a big stick he had hidden inside his coat. When the police showed up, Aaron and Russell ran away, leaving their truck, in which the police discovered Matthew's credit card and small patent-leather shoes, along with a .357 magnum covered in blood.

The afternoon after Aaron's return to the apartment he shared with Kristen, the two men and their girlfriends allegedly began to coordinate the version of events they would give to police. Then Kristen took Aaron to the hospital, where he was admitted with a hairline fracture to the skull. Then, according to police, she and Chasity decided to get rid of the evidence. They drove the 50 miles to Cheyenne to dispose of Russell's bloody clothes. For some reason, they hid Russell's bloody shoes separately, in a storage shed at Chasity's mother's house.

As it happened, the construction crew that was working at the new house on the property where Matthew clung to life was off that day. Although the police had Matthew's personal effects, they had not yet put the crime together. Thus it was not until the following evening that Matthew was seen by the cyclist, a U.W. freshman, Aaron Kreifels, who stopped because he had fallen off his bike.

At the Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, Matthew lay in bed down the hall from Aaron McKinney. Matthew was comatose; his brain stem which controls heartbeat, breathing, temperature, and other involuntary functions--was severely damaged. He also was suffering from hypothermia and had a red welt on his back, a red mark on his left arm, bruised knees, cuts on his head, neck, and face, and bruising in his groin.

Tina and Phil arrived at the hospital Thursday morning. Matthew's aunt Roxanne and R. W Eaten, her boyfriend, were there from Denver, along with some journalists. "There was going to be a press conference," Tina says, and R.W. "was so frantic; he said he didn't want word getting around that Matthew was gay.... R.W. and Roxy threatened us that if we talked about it we wouldn't be allowed to see Matt."

When Tina was let into Matthew's room, "it was bittersweet to see what he looked like," she says. "He had stitches, bad cuts, welts, bruises on his face. I had never seen anything that severe. There was a big white bandage on his head with tubes coming out of it. Because of the respirator his breathing sounded very mechanical. His heart on the monitor sounded very loud-haunting. It re minded me of the incident [in the limousine] where he listened to my heart. It was also a comforting sound-metronome-like. I could feel his essence, his spirit in the room. It was like I could feel angels, very positive comforting spirits in the room-I thought he was going to be O.K., he's being comforted by all the angels. I could feel that kind of comfort reaching out to him."

Judy and Dennis Shepard arrived from Saudi Arabia on Friday night. The phone call had come at four in the morning; they had waited 20 hours for a flight to Amsterdam, and then flown on to Minneapolis to pick up their son Logan before continuing on to Colorado. The doctors told them that Matthew would never emerge from the coma, but, Judy says, "we needed to see him and we were afraid he would die before we got there."

In their son's room "there was a sense of peace," she continues. "He looked so little. There were all these cuts on his face. I felt he was with us-but not in the shell. Logan said this must be Matt's destiny. Everything must have led to this point. This must be part of a larger plan."

"Perhaps God took him home to heal him," a friend of Judy's told her.

Matthew was not the first gay victim of an attack that year, or that week. The most recent F.B.I. statistics on hate crimes in the U.S. showed more than 1,400 attacks on gays in 1997. A 1996 study showed that such attacks resulted in 21 fatalities. Moreover, studies show their deaths are often particularly vicious; many victims are brutalized beyond recognition. In 1996, Dennis Phung was beaten to death with the claw end of a hammer in his Hollywood apartment by two teenagers who left a mask on his head with the words "gay bash" scrawled across it, and Leeanne Keith of Downey, California, was shot and paralyzed by her father-in-law be cause she was contemplating leaving her husband for a close female friend. Although convictions were obtained, outside the gay press the cases disappeared.

Matthew's torment, however-from the first reports-evoked an extraordinary response. Across the country, the story drew front-page coverage for days. Time magazine's cover, which was headlined THE WAR OVER GAYS, was a photograph of the fence. "He wanted to find love. But as he lay near death, Matthew Shepard, through no choice of his own, had found martyrdom," the article said. The fence had become the crossroads of a civil-rights movement, and Matthew the most significant symbol of violence against gays in the history of the country.

President Clinton spoke about the death, urging Congress to approve the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, which would give federal agencies jurisdiction over bias incidents. More than 50 candlelight vigils were held around the country, huge events where strangers wept and embraced one another. The Poudre Valley Hospital lobby was so crowded with flowers that employees began putting them in other patients' rooms.

When the Shepards discovered that the beating was a national news story, Judy went to the bathroom and threw up. She couldn't believe that "something so private had become so public-it was just stolen from us." She "didn't want it to be exploited," and she was worried about the press "going after us in an ugly way."

When the hospital received calls, Judy felt, "Why should we leave our son in order to talk to a stranger?" They were reluctant even to take a call from President Clinton, but they did, and were glad they had. He was warm, and the conversation seemed to help Logan. They told the president that Matthew had campaigned for him twice, which seemed to startle him.

The Internet played a crucial role in connecting people to the tragedy. Poudre Valley Hospital received so many calls about Matthew that twice-daily updates on his condition were posted on a Web site; more than 800,000 hits were logged.

Matthew lay comatose for five days. Shortly after midnight on October 12, the first day of National Gay Awareness Week, his heart stopped. Throughout Wyoming, flags were lowered to half-mast. "The family expressed gratitude that they did not have to make a decision about removing life support," Rulon Stacey, the hospital C.E.O., told the press, his voice choked with emotion. "They said that like the good, caring son he was he removed from them the guilt and stress of making that decision."

Parents throughout the country felt that Matthew could have been their son, an idea many had never contemplated before about a gay person. In part, this may have been a result of the fact that while he was described as gay, the press-in unwitting collusion with homophobia-did not portray Matthew as a sexual adult. He was depicted as having parents, rather than partners-loving, affluent, married American parents. He had an allowance; he wore braces. He was a member of the U.W. Episcopal Canter- bury Club. He had a fragile, childlike look-a look of pale purity, the translucent beauty favored in religious art.

In the midst of the national grief, there were a few who applauded Aaron's and Russell's actions, and it was these voices that created the controversy which made the death a political cause. On Saturday afternoon, a few blocks from the hospital bed where Matthew's parents were keeping vigil, a Colorado State University homecoming parade passed by. On a Wizard of Oz float sponsored by the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity and Alpha Chi Omega sorority, the scarecrow character had been defaced. Scrawled in black spray paint was I'M GAY, as well as anti-homosexual obscenities. The detail that the cyclist who discovered Matthew had first mistaken him for a scarecrow had been particularly chilling. Even dying was not enough to make Matthew human to some of his peers.

Hours after his death, two gay organizations received the message "I hope it happens more often." At Matthew's funeral in Casper, protesters from Reverend Fred Phelps's Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, stood in the snow and rain, carrying signs and chanting, "Fags die, God laughs." Mourners blocked them and sang "Amazing Grace." Inside St. Mark's Episcopal Church, where Matthew had been baptized as a teenager and became an acolyte, his god-father, Steve Ghering, a pilot for Northwest Airlines, spoke. "There is an image seared upon my mind when I reflect upon Matt on that wooden crossrail fence," he said. "However, I have found a different image to replace that with and that is the image of another man, almost 2,000 years ago.... When I concentrate on the Son of God being crucified, only then can I be released from the bitterness and anger I feel."

Imitatio Christi--the paralleling of Matthew's life with Jesus's-was a dominant motif in the memorial services of many faiths. For many Laramie churchgoers, reconceiving the homosexual (the outsider to the church) as the true Christian, and the Reverend Mr. Phelps and his ilk as the Pharisees, was a radical idea. At the memorial service in the Laramie Episcopal church, the Reverend Dr. Chuck Denison told mourners that gay Christians had nothing to ask forgiveness for. Meesha Fenimore, Matthew's friend, recalls that it was the first time that she had ever heard that message in church: "It was so amazing-I realized I could walk into the church holding Hauva's [her girlfriend's] hand."

As soon as news of the beating broke, Tiffany Edwards made her way to Kristen and Aaron's address in North Laramie. Unsure which apartment in the dingy building was theirs, she went into a dark hallway and knocked on the first door she came to; a girl emerged in a cloud of stale smoke. "It was a dump," the reporter says. "The smell was so disgusting-it was like going into a bar on Sunday morning." She could hear a baby whimpering. Tiffany told the girl she was looking for Kristen Price, and the young woman said she didn't know her. "She looked like a cute little high-school girl, but hardened-with a bad attitude."

The morning of Kristen's arraignment, Tiffany saw the young woman again and realized who she was. Kristen was dressed in a short pistachio-green skirt and high heels-"looking like a cheap floozy, all dolled up to go to jail. I was like: Girlfriend, get a clue." A short time later Tiffany saw her in the courthouse, in the regulation orange jumpsuit. Kristen's mother stood next to her, holding her grandson. When Kristen was led off in handcuffs, Tiffany noticed that she didn't kiss her baby good-bye-or even look at him. She fears that baby "will be part of the vicious cycle."

Kristen and Chasity were charged as accessories to murder after the fact (a crime that carries a penalty of up to three years in jail), and Aaron and Russell were charged with kidnapping, aggravated robbery, and first-degree murder, punishable by death. "The news has already taken this up and blew it totally out of proportion, because it involved a homosexual," Aaron's father, Bill McKinney, told the Denver Post. "Had this been a heterosexual these two boys decided to take out and rob, this never would have made the national news."

Tiffany had been shocked by the indifferent expressions on the faces of Aaron and Russell. At a recent court appearance she noted how Aaron's grandmother waved to him, and he turned, grinned, and winked.

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