Laramie and the World:
10 Years Later
“The crime certainly does not define Laramie. How we react to the crime, how we talk about it, and
if we do or don’t do anything to prevent this from happening again does define Laramie.”
- Jonas Slonaker, Laramie Rancher
The Laramie Project: 10 Years Later, an Epilogue, photo by Tim Chesnut. Courtesy, Tim Chestnut.
On September 12, 2008, nine years and 11 months after the murder of Matthew Shepard, members of
Tectonic Theater Project returned to Laramie, Wyoming, to conduct new interviews and create The Laramie
Project: Ten Years Later. Their aim was to examine how the town had changed since Aaron McKinney and
Russell Henderson brutally murdered openly gay University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard. With the
exception of the 2001 Laramie Project interviewees, many citizens of Laramie were reluctant to speak to
members of Tectonic, just as they had been 10 years before. Tectonic, in the words of acclaimed Colombian
novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “returned to this forgotten village, trying to put the broken mirror of memory
back together from so many scattered shards.”
The fence where McKinney and Henderson tied Matthew, once a flower-strewn memorial for Shepard,
had been taken down by the owner. A bench at the University of Wyoming was dedicated as a permanent
memorial. The Symposium for Social Justice became the Shepard Symposium for Social Justice, and a
Rainbow Resource Center, providing support and services to the LGBT community in the University and the
town of Laramie, had opened on campus. Wyoming elected Catherine Connolly as the first openly gay member
of the Wyoming state legislature. It would seem that Laramie had moved forward, committed to preventing such
a tragedy from occurring ever again.
Memory, however, is imperfect and influenced by the desire to control one’s own history, or the history of
one’s community. Children who were five years old at the time of Matthew Shepard’s death were teenagers
when Tectonic returned to Laramie. Facts from the trials of McKinney and Henderson, such as McKinney’s
professed hatred of gay people, easily slipped through the cracks of memory’s broken mirror and were replaced
by urban myths. As members of Tectonic interviewed citizens of Laramie, they found that many people had
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