The Final Days And Nights Of A Gay Martyr

On Monday afternoon, Shepard called O'Connor from Lovejoys, a Laramie bar and grill, to get a ride home. Shepard asked if he could eat dinner with O'Connor, and the two men talked over Subway sandwiches. ""He would tell you anything,'' O'Connor says. ""He didn't give a damn. We're just talking, and I said, "So what do you do in college besides being gay?' '' Shepard laughed and told him about his passion for politics and human rights and his interest in computers. He also talked candidly about his homosexuality--about a lover he had overseas and two incidents in which, Shepard confided, he had been punched by angry straights. Then they got back in the limo for a drive around Laramie. By eerie coincidence, O'Connor says, their route took them past the place where Shepard was later found tied to the fence.

The circumstances of Shepard's death were especially shocking to O'Connor. By one of the strange happenstances of small-town America, two of the limousine driver's other frequent passengers were McKinney and Henderson, the two men charged with Shepard's murder. The three men were friends, and McKinney, his girlfriend and their young son had recently lived rent-free in an apartment O'Connor owns. Despite O'Connor's affection for Shepard and his horror at the murder, he is still fond of the men accused of killing him and believes the death was a robbery gone wrong, not a premeditated hate crime.

And yet O'Connor is still haunted by the memories of his last ride with Shepard on the Monday before his death. Riding down the highway, the younger man turned philosophic. ""If I could get two people--one straight, one gay--who hate each other to be respectful of each other, I would have done something good,'' O'Connor remembers Shepard saying. The irony is that a man who will be remembered as a symbol of hate crimes was trying to do just that.

© 1998