Jimenez is a journalist with a credible track record, and a gay man to boot, who spent over a decade researching the case.  He had no cultural axe to grind or ulterior motive to publish such an account.  In fact he had every ulterior motive not to, as evidenced by the villification he subsequently received at the hands of people who publicly refused to read the book.  His book contains lots of evidence, i.e. data that renders his theory more probable.  To say that you haven't seen any evidence suggests that you haven't read the book.Was your rejection of Jimenez's work only technically true, or do you think that the book is substantively flawed?

Anyway, I'm not a professional Matthewshepardologist, but given Jimenez's account, along with the general arc of a spectacular, rare, and politically flattering case turning out, on closer examination, to be a depressingly mundane and politically embarrassing one, I know how I would bet.

As to relevance, if you think that a Bad Thing should have been prevented by better law, then you have to identify the relevant reference class that the Bad Thing belongs to and target your legislation to that class. I think that the relevant reference class was not "young gay men senselessly beaten to death by bigoted rednecks" but "young meth dealers senselessly beaten to death by other meth dealers/users", and those are two very different reference classes calling for different strategies.  Being gay probably didn't have anything to do with it, except inasmuch as it predisposed him to the tina drug culture, and hence to becoming involved with his eventual killer. Skeptics in the Matthew Shepard case are not saying "this hardly ever happens, and therefore doesn't require legislative attention" so much as "wait a minute, this didn't even happen in *the very example offered in support of the legislation*, and therefore the legislation wouldn't have done anything to prevent it."

So it seems entirely germane to point that out.