Late on
the night of October 6, 1998, Matthew Shepard, a twenty-one-year-old gay
college student, left a bar in Laramie, Wyoming with two alleged “strangers,”
Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson. Eighteen hours later, Matthew was found
tied to a log fence on the outskirts of town, unconscious and barely alive. He
had been pistol-whipped so severely that the mountain biker who discovered his
battered frame mistook him for a Halloween scarecrow. Overnight, a politically
expedient myth took the place of important facts. By the time Matthew died a
few days later, his name was synonymous with anti-gay hate.
Stephen
Jimenez went to Laramie to research the story of Matthew Shepard’s murder in
2000, after the two men convicted of killing him had gone to prison, and after
the national media had moved on. His aim was to write a screenplay on what he,
and the rest of the nation, believed to be an open-and-shut case of bigoted violence.
As a gay man, he felt an added moral imperative to tell Matthew’s story. But
what Jimenez eventually found in Wyoming was a tangled web of secrets. His
exhaustive investigation also plunged him deep into the deadly underworld of
drug trafficking. Over the course of a thirteen-year investigation, Jimenez
traveled to twenty states and Washington DC, and interviewed more than a
hundred sources.
Who was
the real Matthew Shepard and what were the true circumstances of his brutal
murder? And now that he was larger than life, did anyone care? The Book of Matt
is sure to stir passions and inspire dialogue as it re-frames this misconstrued
crime and its cast of characters, proving irrefutably that Matthew Shepard was
not killed for being gay but for reasons far more complicated — and daunting.
Get more details @ http://www.ypcart.com/buy/the-book-of-matt-hidden-truths-about-the-murder-of-matthew-shepard-1586422146/
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