There, he participated in theater, and took German and Italian courses. During that time, Shepard attended the American School in Switzerland (TASIS), from which he graduated in May 1995. Saudi Aramco hired his father in the summer of 1994, and Shepard's parents subsequently resided at the Saudi Aramco Residential Camp in Dhahran. He developed an interest in politics at an early age.
As a child, he was "friendly with all his classmates", but was targeted and teased due to his small stature and lack of athleticism. Shepard attended Crest Hill Elementary School, Dean Morgan Junior High School, and Natrona County High School for his freshman through junior years. The two brothers had a close relationship.
His younger brother, Logan, was born in 1981. Matthew Shepard was born in 1976 in Casper, Wyoming he was the first of two sons born to Judy (née Peck) and Dennis Shepard.
Significant media coverage was given to the murder and what role Shepard's sexual orientation played as a motive for the commission of the crime. Suspects Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson were arrested shortly after the attack and charged with first-degree murder following Shepard's death. He was taken by rescuers to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he died six days later from severe head injuries received during his beating. Then she waited some more,” Taddeo said.Matthew Wayne Shepard (December 1, 1976 – October 12, 1998) was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die near Laramie on the night of October 6, 1998. Then she waited for another man to leave his wife. The spousal support laws in Indiana were not a reality that was available to her. “Lina, a housewife in Indiana who hadn’t been kissed in years, waited to leave her husband because she didn’t have the money to exist apart from him. She hooked up with an old high school boyfriend, usually in his car. Then there was Lina whose husband had withdrawn affection. She’d alleged having a secret affair with her former high school teacher, a man who would later be named the state’s Teacher of the Year. I would order toast and coffee and read the local paper. Mostly I would land somewhere like Medora, North Dakota. “To find these stories, I drove across the country six times. To protect their identities, she gave them aliases. From thousands of hours of interviews, she found her way to the stories of three of her subjects. She had talked to dozens of women across the United States about sex and desire. She was reporting, but she wasn’t sure where it was going.