Matthew Shepard has touched many people's lives.

Exactly a decade ago, Matt Galloway and Aaron Kreifels both touched his life in ways that have continued to haunt them.

Galloway was the last person to talk to Shepard, a 21-year-old University of Wyoming student, before he was fatally beaten by two men on the outskirts of Laramie shortly after midnight on Oct. 7, 1998.

Galloway was the bartender at the Fireside, a popular downtown lounge. He watched as Shepard, one of his favorite customers, walked out of the bar with Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, two men he'd never seen before. When the duo had reached in their pockets for dimes and quarters, Shepard had offered to pay for their pitcher of beer.

Eighteen hours later, Kreifels was riding his mountain bike by a buck-and-rail fence west of the city when he spotted what looked like a scarecrow tied near the bottom of it. "At first I thought it was a joke," Kreifels said over the weekend from his home in Omaha, Neb. Upon closer examination, he realized it was a human being whose face was covered with blood. Kreifels rode to the nearest house to get help, and police arrived.

Shepard was taken to Ivinson Memorial Hospital in Laramie, then transferred in critical condition to Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colo., where he died five days later.

The day after Kreifels found him, the sheriff told the media it was believed that McKinney and Henderson - who were under arrest - had targeted Shepard because he was gay. As the story quickly spread around the world, the attack was labeled a hate crime - even though Wyoming didn't have any hate crime law on the books, and still doesn't.

In death, Shepard became a lasting symbol of the need for tolerance, no matter what a person's sexual orientation is. The crime and its aftermath led to three TV movies, several books and a play, "The Laramie Project," that is performed all over the world.

Galloway and Kreifels are both characters in the play, which casts them as two young men struggling to make sense of a vicious, brutal crime and their respective roles in the story.

Ten years later, they've clearly gotten on with their lives. But they are still struggling for answers they now realize may always be beyond their grasp.

'It doesn't end'

Galloway, 33, worked at the Fireside for almost two years before it closed, not long after Shepard's death.

"Things really deteriorated at the bar after that. I don't think it was because of what happened to Matthew; I think it was coincidental," he said. "In college towns, bars go hot and cold."

Galloway said things deteriorated for him personally, too. "I just lost my taste for it," he said of his job. "I just couldn't do it anymore."

He continued to study at the University of Wyoming, earning his master's in business administration in 2002. After a short time bartending in Colorado, he returned to his hometown of Casper to help his brother run their father's bar, Galloway's, at the El Mark-O Lanes bowling alley.

Galloway usually wears a good-natured smile, but on Saturday he was also wearing something else: fresh scars on his face from trying to break up a fight the previous night. "Hazard of the business," he explained.

He agreed to talk about the 10th anniversary of the crime against Shepard because he said it's important to keep the story alive.

"In tragedies, you must pull some sort of element of goodness out of it," Galloway said. "In this case, I think it was the ability to realize we're all human beings and we deserve to be treated equally.

"People think it ended with civil rights for race and creed, but it doesn't end there," he added. "There's sexual orientation awareness, all the way to political awareness."

Galloway said he was raised in an "accept-all environment," so he didn't have to learn about tolerance. He won't condone intolerant behavior around him, and said everyone who knows him knows that.

Immediately after Shepard's death, Galloway said he was too "hypersensitive" about intolerance. "I just wouldn't allow it around me. I would argue with people and get in their face about it, and that's not the way to approach it either. Don't approach hate with hate."

Galloway said he always looked forward to Shepard dropping by the bar, because he liked to talk about politics. He said he was overwhelmed by guilt because he didn't stop his young friend from leaving the bar with his killers.

"You just replay it a thousand times in your head, but you just never know what's going to happen," he said. "I've come to terms with it, but I will never fully - I still replay it and think about it."

Galloway said he was helped by the silent march through Laramie during the University of Wyoming's homecoming parade, while Shepard was in a coma in Fort Collins. He called the event "without a doubt one of the neatest experiences of my entire existence."

The parade started with about 25 people, but their ranks swelled to more than a hundred as people along the route joined them. "People left their lawn chairs and their coolers behind, and joined the march. It was cool," he recalled.

Galloway vividly remembers a couple with a young son. He said the woman started to join the march, but the husband "kind of tugged on her shirt, like, 'No, don't go.' She jerked her arm away, grabbed her son and joined the march and left him behind."

Also helping to ease his mind was a conversation he had with Shepard's mother, Judy, a few weeks later.

"She called me, because she'd heard I'd been having problems," Galloway recalled. "We talked for quite some time. We laughed and we cried. She wanted to make sure I wasn't blaming myself and told me it wasn't my fault.

"It meant a lot to me," he said, "because I really was beating myself up pretty bad."

'Meant to find him'

Kreifels, who earned his degree in environmental science in May, is painting houses in Omaha, biding his time until he can find a job in his field. He liked living in Laramie, he said, but has no plans to move back. "I can't take the weather," he said.

He's dating a woman who was once in a high school production of "The Laramie Project." He doesn't talk to people much about what happened, and didn't realize it was 10 years ago until a reporter pointed it out.

"If I meet someone who becomes important in my life, I let them know about it," Kreifels said.

He said he's long thought about his role in Shepard's story. He's wondered why he took that route that day, and why he didn't turn back when the trail started getting sandy. He'd thought about it, but something kept pushing him on.

Now, he said simply, "I just think that I was meant to find him."

Kreifels certainly doesn't regret it, but admitted, "It's made my life more trying." He didn't have to testify in Henderson's case, as the killer accepted a plea bargain that spared his life in exchange for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. But he did go to court when McKinney went on trial a few months later.

"Here was this guy who'd turned my whole world upside-down," Kreifels said. "I just wanted to look him in the eye. But he wasn't having any of that."

Kreifels said he probably would never do it, but there's a part of him that would like to visit McKinney in prison.

"I'd like to sit down and ask him why he did it," he said. "Was it because he was gay? Did he need more money to buy some meth? But I know you couldn't believe whatever he'd tell you."

He doesn't feel sorry for McKinney in any way. "I'm sure life sucks for him in prison," Kreifels said. "But that's where he deserves to be for what he did."

Galloway said testifying at the McKinney trial was "the hardest thing in the world to do." He said the prosecutor, then-Albany County Attorney Cal Rerucha, was worried that the bartender would try to physically confront McKinney in the courtroom.

"I'm a no-nonsense kind of guy; I don't take anyone's crap," Galloway said. "(Rerucha) said, 'Do not engage the defendant.' Let me tell you, I wanted to - but what would that do, besides screw up everything even more?"

He described McKinney's attitude as arrogant, showing no remorse at all. "You'd think he'd be sitting there awe-struck, thinking, 'Oh, my God, what have I gotten myself into?'" Galloway said. "He didn't come across like that at all. It makes you wonder if there really is real evil in the world."

Kreifels said finding Shepard "kind of opened my eyes about the real world, that this kind of violence happens every day all over the world. Until then I didn't realize that someone could hurt another person that much."

"Everybody encounters death as part of life, but when death is encountered in such a horrific way, I don't think you can truly heal," Galloway said. "There is no justice that can come out of that."

Galloway is glad neither McKinney nor Henderson will face execution.

"It seems peculiar to me - the 'eye for an eye' - I don't get that kind of justice," he said. "I would rather see them have to suffer for a lifetime. That's punishment."

'Still talking about it'

Both Galloway and Kreifels are glad they were interviewed by the Teutonic Theatre Project and playwright Moises Kaufman for "The Laramie Project," because the play has taught so many people about the need for tolerance. Still, it came with some unique problems.

Kaufman gave Galloway tickets to a preview of the show in Denver, before it opened in New York City. "I went in with butterflies, it was just terrifying," he recalled. "There's nothing more difficult than watching someone portray you."

While Galloway was watching the play, he said, Kaufman was two rows behind him, observing him. "He knew the performers would nail it," Galloway said. "He said the only way to know if he did it right was to watch me, not the actors."

Kaufman also flew Galloway and several other real-life characters from Laramie to Los Angeles for the premiere of the HBO version of the play. "We flew first class, got picked up in a limo, and thousands of media were there taking pictures," he said. "I mean, you talk about a whirlwind.

"But the worst part of it was knowing I was experiencing one of the neatest experiences of my life at the cost of another person's life," Galloway added. "And that's what I grappled with, extensively."

He has watched the movie and play several times, including when it was performed in Casper two years ago by Stage III, the community theater group that Shepard belonged to as a youth. He said he's never made it through the show without crying.

Galloway said it was a privilege to know Shepard, and that the college student changed his life in many ways. What's changed his life the most, though, has nothing to do with Shepard's sexual orientation.

"When I see someone now, I always think twice … I never take a moment for granted," he said. "I try to express my feelings; I carry my heart on my shoulder. I make sure people know how I feel about them at all times, because I don't want them to go a day without knowing."

Galloway also said he's learned that people can't control everything that's happening around them, as much as they'd like to do so. Still, he said he always worries about people's safety when they leave his bar.

And though he doesn't talk about it much, he still thinks a lot about Shepard and his message of tolerance for everyone.

"I can't tell you how much it means to me that 10 years later we're still talking about it," Galloway said. "It should be talked about in schools - especially in schools. Hit them while they're young … I hope we'll be talking about it in 10 more years."

Kerry Drake, now the Star-Tribune's opinion editor, covered the Shepard case for the newspaper 10 years ago. Reach him at 266-0619 or kerry.drake@trib.com.