LARAMIE - After Matthew Shepard died, Laramie, with its tree-lined boulevards and stone university buildings, was described in terms usually reserved for serial killers: it seemed like a nice, quiet place that kept to itself, particularly on issues of sexuality.

On the night of Oct. 6, 1998, Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney, two local men, left the Fireside Bar with Shepard, a University of Wyoming student from Casper. They robbed him, beat him with a gun and tied him to a fencepost outside of town, where he stayed until he was found the next night.

"Laramie did not expect this to happen here, Wyoming did not expect this to happen here," said Jim Osborn, a leader of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Association on campus at the time of Shepard'92s death.

After Shepard was found, barely alive, news of the crime spread quickly.

Dave O'92Malley, then a detective commander with the Laramie Police Department, said a reporter from Chicago or New York called and asked if it was possible that Shepard was killed because he was gay.

"Certainly, but …" O'92Malley, who is now the chief of police, recalls saying. The reporter thanked him and hung up before he could finish saying it was just one motive investigators were considering.

"The national media had concluded it was a hate crime the day after it occurred," said University of Wyoming President Phil Dubois.

Shepard died on this day five years ago.

Since then, there have been thousands of media interviews and one play, "The Laramie Project," that has high school children around the world acting the role of Philip Dubois. This makes the otherwise staid president chuckle.

The brutality of the crime and its apparent motive - hatred for gays - revealed, to some, a backward, cowboy town. The town's residents have since struggled to shake this image.

Laramie was "under a microscope," according to O'92Malley, particularly in the two years following the murder.

Two separate versions of Laramie emerged from the scrutiny and now comprise the dominant views of the town.

One is the town that drew together after the murder to seek out and eradicate all vestiges of discrimination, particularly against gays and lesbians. This is the favored version of those who have invested themselves in a hate-free Laramie.

The other version holds that citizens of Laramie - and, for that matter, Wyoming - endorse hatred with their quiet avoidance of gay issues and refusal to take a definitive stand against discrimination.

"I wouldn't say there's a whole lot since the murder to prevent the blossoming of hate crimes," said University of Wyoming English Professor Beth Loffreda, who wrote a book about Shepard.

Many feel frustrated because there is no bias crime law in Wyoming - a point mentioned by almost everyone interviewed for this story - that would serve, if not as a substantive deterrent to hate, then as a symbol of the state'92s commitment to gay rights.

Laramie remains torn between these two versions of its reality.

The Rainbow Resource Center on the university campus is often cited as a positive step toward institutional acceptance of the gay community.

The center, which opened after Shepard'92s death, is in a small, unremarkable office on the university'92s main campus. Its bookshelves contain what may be the largest collection of gay and lesbian literature in the state - with titles like "Epistemology of the Closet," "The Mammoth Book of Gay Short Stories" and "Alan Turing: The Enigma," which cannot be found, for example, in the Natrona County Public Library .

Nicole Rintamaki is the 27-year-old graduate student from Casper who runs the facility.

An undergrad when Shepard was killed, Rintamaki has avoided talking to the media about the incident. She feels Osborn, Loffreda and Shepard'92s friend Romaine Patterson already articulate important points about the crime and Shepard'92s life.

In the center, the everyday concerns of being a gay student often take precedence over the abstract notions of equal rights for gays and freedom from hate for which Shepard is a symbol.

"People want to come and look for a place to hang out," said Rintamaki. "People, who might be gay or lesbian, who want to talk about changing their major."

On Tuesday morning, Rintamaki fielded a number of drop-ins.

One woman came by to worry aloud about her Spanish test and to talk about a domestic violence awareness vigil.

A young student from a rural Wyoming town sat in the corner flipping through copies of gay magazines. Rintamaki cautioned him not to identify himself because he has not yet come out as gay at the university.

There is pressure to be active in the gay community, Rintamaki said, but many students are just looking for friends, not an activist lifestyle.

Her goals for the center are similar to those of most campus organizations. She'd like to make it bigger. She would like to see regular courses on gay issues and queer theory at the university. She wants the university to make an effort to retain its gay students.

" I'd like to see in Laramie being able to walk down the street holding your partner'92s hand," she said, and then quickly added. "To some extent you can do that in Laramie, but you can'92t do that in Casper and Thermopolis."

Prominent figures in the university and the gay community point to these incremental changes in the climate as proof there has been progress.

Osborn, who now works in the university'92s information technology department and is still involved with the lesbian and gay group, now called Spectrum, said "before Matt'92s death people didn'92t talk much about LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) issues."

Now there are freshmen at Spectrum meetings, a rarity in the past since many students did not come out until later.

To some extent, the group is also moving beyond the morbid circumstances that brought it exposure.

"We'92ve taken the stance that it'92s important for us to celebrate Matt'92s life and celebrate the things that have happened since his death," Osborn said.

To be sure, it is still not easy to be out in small, rural communities, Dubois said.

He said the Shepard murder moved the discussion of gay issues along, albeit at a slow pace.

"You don't issue a memo from the president's office that says 'social attitudes will now change.'"

He noted the school, and the town itself, did not have to be brought out of the Dark Ages on gay issues. To an extent, that view was a media perception that concluded anti-gay violence was "what Wyoming must be like."

"As Judy Shepard will tell you, Matthew Shepard was here because he perceived it to be a safe place," Dubois said.

Almost all of the bars in small university towns could be divided into "student" bars and "townie" bars.

Since the murder, the Fireside Bar has become a townie bar.

A light blue, sun-faded "for sale" sign is pasted in the window and has been there for almost five years. The covered courtyard area, where there is a barbecue pit, smells damp and mildewy.

Inside, the space is lit mostly by beer company promotional items. On Tuesday, exactly five years after Shepard was found, a few patrons sat at the bar or played pool.

The compactly built, animated owner Matt Mickelson is eager to talk about what Shepard'92s murder has done to his family'92s business and to correct what he sees as misunderstandings about the murder.

He believes the question of whether Laramie has changed in its attitudes toward gays since the death is a moot point; the murder, he says, was never about Shepard's sexuality.

Mickelson was in Fort Collins visiting his girlfriend when Shepard was killed.

"I got back the next afternoon, turned on the television and they were like, 'We take you live to the Fireside,'" he says. "From then on, there was a steady stream of news crews."

Overnight, Mickelson's business disappeared.

To confirm this fact, he turns to a sales rep from Coors who is finishing a visit and asks, "What happened to my beer sales after Matthew Shepard was killed?"

The rep gives a thumbs down.

After the crime, someone took the lug nuts off Mickelson's truck's tires. Vandals sprayed "DIE FAGS" on his wall, thinking the Fireside was a gay bar.

Gay clientele were always welcome at The Fireside because, "You don'92t offend anybody here," Mickelson claims.

At the same time, other people would mutter under their breath epithets that amounted to "crazy, redneck, cowboy gayslayers."

Mickelson says he wishes he had a dollar for every time a person drove by his bar, took a picture and demeaned the establishment and its employees.

The Fireside Bar is now known as the spot Matthew Shepard was last seen before he was beaten.

Like many in Laramie, Mickelson found the media attention perplexing, especially since he knew of Henderson, McKinney and Shepard. He is annoyed by the idea of Shepard as the innocent victim, an icon of persecuted gay America.

Mickelson'92s version of the murder is common, if not widely accepted. All three were engaged in what he calls "deviant" activities. Henderson and McKinney, he speculates, were themselves bisexual. Beth Loffreda has also wondered about the murderers' sexuality.

He maintains all three of the men were drug users and dealers. Shepard's own drug use was suggested, though never substantiated, in various media, including a Vanity Fair article called "The Crucifixion of Matthew Shepard."

It was a drug deal gone wrong that led Henderson and McKinney to kill Shepard, he says.

While the death was "tragic" he cannot understand the television specials and constant attention. "People die every day," he says.

In her book, "Losing Matt Shepard," Beth Loffreda ridiculed the notion, perpetuated in one particularly erroneous national Associated Press story, that Laramie itself created the killers.

She wrote most residents told her Laramie "is friendly and easygoing and safe …"

"I don'92t think you could ever draw a direct line from Laramie to the murder," Loffreda said Tuesday.

The rest of Wyoming looks to Laramie to be progressive in its attitudes - "the Boulder of Wyoming," Chief O'Malley calls it. But Laramie itself still does not know what to make of the murderers who were raised there.

If anything, Henderson and McKinney harbored the biases found everywhere in America, said Loffreda, who is not from Laramie. She went to school with guys like that.

"They feel very familiar to me," she said of the murderers.

The persistent fiction is that Shepard was crucified. But the murder itself, while notably violent, had no symbolic intent and was what bias crime usually looks like, she said.

What was fascinating to the media, she said, was Shepard appeared the perfect victim, small in stature and boyish in photographs.

The bartender from the Fireside Bar told O'92Malley that Shepard was well-mannered, a big tipper.

"Then you get the other side of the spectrum, McKinney and Henderson come in," O'92Malley, whose moustache remains dark even as his hair is going to gray, paused and turned his head to the side. He said quietly, "Well, I won'92t even go there."

Oddly, McKinney had lived next to O'92Malley for a time when he was growing up. The neighborhood was perfectly nice and O'92Malley has some regard for McKinney'92s father. Henderson'92s grandmother is well known in the community and has "a heart of gold."

These facts lead the chief to believe it was something besides Laramie itself that turned the men into murderers.

"Wyoming, like any other state, is going to have people that are just damn mean," he said.

Laramie residents offered this explanation of the criminals and their crime in various forms.

Dubois would not say whether the climate has changed at the university and in Laramie to the point where another crime, similar to Shepard'92s murder, would not happen again.

The question, he said, presupposes attitudes in the town had something to do with the killing.

At the time, Dubois said he "was placed in the role of having to say this was just one of thousands of hate crimes in the country."

So ordinary was the crime, in some respects, that O'92Malley wonders aloud, "I still don'92t know, why Laramie and why Matt?"

With those questions still outstanding, Laramie's image shifts like a hologram according to who is talking and who might be listening.