[6][page needed][7] The Shepard murder was approaching its first anniversary and was getting renewed national attention, coupled with updates on pending hate crime legislation.

Dirkhising had stayed with the two men at their apartment on weekends only to work at the salon to make money to rebuild his car for two months prior to his death.

[2][16][17] Police found in Carpenter's home material of a pedophile nature, including instructions on how to sedate a child, and a diagram of how to tie up and position the boy, as well as other notes of fantasies of molesting children.

[1] Dirkhising's case initially was reported regionally by "news organizations in Arkansas and also covered by newspapers in Oklahoma and Tennessee," yet almost no national press.

[6][page needed] A LexisNexis search revealed only a few dozen articles that appeared only after The Washington Times story on the lack of coverage on October 22, 1999, a month after Dirkhising's death.

"[9] After The Washington Times article, the lack of coverage of Dirkhising's case was noted by conservative commentators and was attributed to the homosexuality of the perpetrators as well as the nature of the crimes.

[10] Conservative political commentator Pat Buchanan noted that showing gay men as sadistic barbarians does not fit the "villain-victim script of our cultural elite.

Essentially, Shepard was lynched; taken from a bar, beaten and left to die because he was the vilified "other" whom society has often cast as an acceptable target of abuse; Dirkhising was just "another" to a pair of deviants.

[6][page needed] In a November 4, 1999, Time magazine article, Jonathan Gregg opined that accusations of liberal media bias were not justified because the two cases varied with the Dirkhising murder offering "no lessons," whereas the Shepard murder "touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons.

"[6][page needed][8] Commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote an article in The New Republic accusing the liberal media of political correctness and using Dirkhising's death to attack the Human Rights Campaign for its support of hate-crime legislation.

"[27] Sullivan also criticized some aspects of the conservative coverage of the Dirkhising case equating gay sex with child molestation as "ugly nonsense".

[26] In November 1999, E. R. Shipp, ombudsman at The Washington Post, noted that "readers, prodded by commentators who are hostile to LGBTQ people and to what they view as a 'liberal' press" had raised questions about the Dirkhising case.

"[6][page needed] Shipp also noted that the Shepherd story was newsworthy because of the debate it fostered on hate crimes and the level of intolerance towards LGBT people in the United States.

[6][page needed] Jonathan Gregg, in a November 9 Time magazine editorial, asserted that "[the killing of Dirkhising] was the kind of depraved act that happens with even more regularity against young females and, indeed if the victim had been a 13-year-old girl, the story would probably never have gotten beyond Benton County, much less Arkansas.

[8] The same editorial also said: "A red herring worth addressing at the outset is the failure to distinguish between homosexuality and pedophilia, which creates a false parallel at the core of The Washington Times argument.

[6][page needed][8] Shepard's murder touches on a host of complex and timely issues: intolerance, society's attitudes toward gays and the pressure to conform, the use of violence as a means of confronting one's demons.

"[6][page needed][8][28] Davis Don Carpenter and Joshua Brown were each charged with capital murder and six counts of rape, and they faced the death penalty in Arkansas for the crimes.

"[21] The Arkansas state prosecutor "maintained that the older man had mapped out the assault and watched a portion of it" so chose to send Brown to trial first.

[16][17] Carpenter's court-appointed attorney, criminal defense lawyer Tim Buckley, sought a change of venue from Benton County citing excessive pretrial publicity.