ANOTHER MOTHER'S STORY.

Recalling her own son's murder, Dorothy Hajdys-Holman reflects on the Shepard killing

Dorothy Hajdys-Holman has never met Judy Shepard, but she knows what she would tell her if she did: "[She should] do everything she can to get the guys who killed her son convicted and to serve ... as long as they can. And, if they offer her the death penalty, to give it to them."

Hajdys-Holman speaks from experience. Her son Allen Schindler, a sailor, was brutally beaten to death at age 22 by two shipmates in Japan in October 1992. Schindler's murder gave a face to the contentious debate about the military's ban on homosexuals. In the process Hajdys-Holman, a bookkeeper from Chicago Heights, Ill., was transformed into an unlikely gay rights activist. Six months after her son's death, Hajdys-Holman (who remarried in 1995, hyphenating her last name) delivered a heartfelt speech at the 1993 march on Washington.

"If you would have told me I would have been at the march on Washington standing before a million people and being seen all over the world, I would have told you you were nuts," she says. Since then, Hajdys-Holman has spoken at rallies, marched in parades, and lobbied legislators. She was even the subject of the 1997 cable TV movie Any Mother's Son.

For Hajdys-Holman, it was impossible to hear the news of Matthew Shepard's murder and not think of her own son. "My heart just went out to them," she says of the Shepard family. "When I first heard about it, I couldn't believe that something like this could happen again."

"Matthew didn't do anything to them--he was just being himself," she says. "As a child, I was brought up to believe that we weren't to lie, yet it seems like just because somebody is gay that [other people] want them to live a lie, or otherwise they end up dead. That's why Allen ended up being dead, because he was tired of living a lie."

She once opposed the death penalty for her son's killer, Terry Helvey, because she didn't want his family to suffer too. (An accomplice, Charles Vins, negotiated a plea bargain and served only 78 days in a military prison.) But she changed her mind for fear that Helvey might go free when he's eligible for parole in 2002.

Activism eases the pain Hajdys-Holman still feels from the loss of her son. "It helps some, you know, thinking that I'm making a change," she says. "I don't think I've ever done anything important before, you know, and this seems like it's helping some."

Activism has also helped Hajdys-Holman to stay connected to her son. "I think Allen is working through me, that Allen helps me say what I say," she says. "Maybe I'm crazy--but I think that Allen's up in heaven saying, `Go for it, Mom. Don't let this happen to anyone else.' And I think Allen cried when it happened to Matthew."

Savage is a freelance writer in Chicago.