20 Years Later, The True Story of the Murder of Matthew Shepard---Not the Politically Correct Narrative---Makes Slow But Sure Progress Into the Real World

I HAVE JUST RETURNED FROM FOUR INTENSE DAYS WITH STEVE JIMENEZ, AUTHOR OF THE BOOK OF MATT IN LARAMIE, WY. It is the 20 year commemoration of the horrendous beating murder of Matthew Shephard in October, 1998, outside Laramie.  No one denies the undeserved violence of this crime.

Jimenez was headlining a Community Forum Tuesday on the real story of the life and death of Shephard based on over ten years of investigative research and reporting on the case. He asked me to come and speak on the panel. Way above my pay grade, but I did it anyway. As a former newspaper reporter and journalist, I became involved in this ongoing story with Jimenez, a gay man, in 2013 after reading his amazing book and meeting the author and several of the story's main characters in Laramie in the winter of 2014.

Here's an editorial I wrote for the Casper Star Tribune.
 
Matthew Shepard's family and The Shephard Foundation continue to vehemently deny and reject Jimenez's work while propagating the Myth of Matt's tragic death as a totally innocent gay man, targeted in a bar for being gay by two redneck strangers who hated gays and wanted to take him out.  He was a man who had no responsibility whatsoever in his murder.

Nothing could be further from the truth. This murder was not about gay hate between strangers, but rather about meth addiction and drug dealing between two addicted young men---Matt Shephard and Aaron McKinney who knew each other intimately.

The fake myth was far from the real story. Yet the quick myth became the rock solid narrative and fake news story of the decade pushed by the Shepards, the MSM and the radical LGBT community. The Shephard Foundation has raised millions and millions of dollars martyring Matthew over the past 20 years and don't want the flow of money and accolades to dry up. No one can deny some good has come from this narrative. Yet the good is based on a false story of Shepherd's life and death.

Today as the Shepards donate Matthew Shephard's ashes to the crypt at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. as a martyr and global icon of gay hate, the voices of reality are slowly speaking up in Laramie and elsewhere for the truth. It is not to make Matt look bad.  It is to make him look human.

 Make no mistake, these people hate Jimenez's decades long work and decry him as a liar and worse.

 Here below, Jimenez gives a radio interview today on this ongoing story with Glenn Woods in Cheyenne, Wyoming.