Matthew Shepard was a gay American student at the University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and left to die by two assailants, Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, on the night of October 6, 1998. McKinney and Henderson offered to give Shepard a ride home from a bar in Laramie, Wyoming, but instead drove him to a remote rural area, robbed, pistol-whipped, and tortured him, and tied him to a split rail fence where he was left to die. Shepard was found 18 hours later by a cyclist who initially mistook him for a scarecrow. Shepard was taken to a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, where he remained in a coma until he died on October 12, 1998, at the age of 21.

The men responsible for Shepards death were convicted of first-degree murder and given two life sentences. Shepards death drew national attention to anti-LGBTQ violence and fueled the fight for hate crime legislation. In 2009, President Obama signed the Matthew Shepard Act, a law which defined certain attacks motivated by victim identity as hate crimes.

In 2014, investigative journalist Stephen Jimenez published a book called "The Book of Matt," which challenged the widely accepted narrative that Shepard was killed solely because he was gay. Jimenezs book suggested that Shepards death was the result of a drug deal gone wrong, and that Shepard was involved in the drug trade. However, the Matthew Shepard Foundation maintains that Shepards murder was fueled by homophobic hatred.