AP / Jae C. Hong

The fence is long gone. But the image is forever seared into memories, like a brand on cattle: A near-dead college student, his flesh so beaten, bloodied and intertwined with cord that the first passers-by mistook him for a scarecrow.

Not an image you can tear down as easily as a fence.

And yet 11 years later, the curious still venture to the outskirts of Laramie, Wyo., looking for the spot where University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard was robbed, pistol-whipped, tortured and left to die — many believe, because he was gay.

It’s behind a Walmart now, but anyone looking for that iconic fence will find only “no trespassing” signs.

So why do people still go out there looking for it?

“Because that’s what we’re famous for,” one Laramie local is quoted as saying in Laramie, Ten Years Later. That’s a new, 90-minute epilogue to The Laramie Project, a landmark play developed from interviews conducted by New York’s Tectonic Theatre Project after the 1998 killing.

The play has become one of the most produced in the world, and it was made into a 2002 HBO film.

On Oct. 12, more than 150 theaters around the world, from high schools to New York’s Lincoln Center, will perform staged readings of the new epilogue. (See box for Rhode Island readings.) Playwright Moisis Kaufman and his team returned to Laramie to explore what has — and has not — changed in this small college town that, as much as that fence, is synonymous with a grisly murder most agree could have happened anywhere.

But it happened in Laramie — and the aftershocks from the murder continue to reverberate there.

What Tectonic found, and found most troubling, “is that so much of the town is rewriting the crime as not a hate crime,” said Stephen Belber, a writer on both “Laramie Project” incarnations.

The irony is that the primary killer now admits that it was a hate crime.

“Matt Shepard needed killing,” Aaron McKinney bluntly told Tectonic company member Greg Pierotti for the epilogue, which includes the first interviews with McKinney and Russell Henderson since 2004.

“As far as Matt is concerned, I don’t have any remorse,” McKinney said during nine hours of talks with Pierotti. “The night I did it, I did have hatred for homosexuals.”

McKinney’s initial motive was robbery. But he targeted Shepard, he said, because “he was obviously gay. That played a part. His weakness. His frailty.”

McKinney now calls himself “the poster child for hate-crime murders.”

Shepard’s death has mobilized both sides of hot-button issues like hate-crime legislation, gay marriage and domestic partnerships. Much of the debate over the past decade has been whether a hate crime is worse than any other crime.

Ironically, McKinney’s own words might now help settle that argument.

The Matthew Shepard Act, currently before Congress, would expand the 1969 federal hate-crime law to include crimes motivated by a victim’s actual or perceived gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.

“I think there was a very strong political side to Matthew that would have made him proud as hell to have been the namesake on this movement,” said Belber. “But I think there would be a bit of bemusement, as well.”

Ten years later, Belber found some in Laramie to be in denial, others in a state of “extreme self-examination.” But the antipathy residents have for the town’s continued association with the crime is palpable.

“Laramie is not a project,” one resident says. “It is a community.”

One that has been forever pigeonholed.

“Laramie is notorious now as ‘the place where Matthew Shepard was strung up on a fence,’ ” Belber said. “But what does a town then do to reclaim its identity when it has been nationalized this way?”

Using the passage of time to morph a horrible incident into something, well, less horrible, is human nature, said Rick Barbour, who is directing a Denver reading of the epilogue.

“It’s an example of how we will change history to live with ourselves in it,” said Barbour, who has assembled a cast of 28 that includes Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter and Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal.

“As a prosecutor, we worked on a lot of cases with people who were victimized because of their sexual orientation,” said Ritter, a former Denver district attorney. “Matthew Shepherd was obviously an extreme circumstance, a very tragic case. But what this is about is dignity, respect and the treatment of all people.”

The second act is dominated by interviews with the killers. Belber believes McKinney’s chilling lack of remorse offers valuable insight into the mind of a murderer.

“I think Greg caught Aaron in a particularly nonremorseful moment,” Belber said. “But Aaron has gone through various stages of remorse for his crime. He expresses no remorse for Matthew’s family now, but he has in the past.

“I think remorse takes place over many years and has many iterations. We can’t pin it down. But I think we should walk away from the play not putting Aaron McKinney in a fixed hole where we think, ‘Oh, this is an evil person.’ We have to keep a more open mind. We should want to chart him, I think.”

Belber interviewed Henderson, an accomplice in the robbery, in prison. McKinney says Henderson played no part in the killing, yet received the same life sentence.

“These are two different individuals whose lives have taken very different paths since the crime, even though they are sitting in prison, literally, side by side,” Belber said. Henderson has taken a victim empathy course. He talks about how his own mother was raped and killed in Laramie. He wrote a letter of apology to Shepard’s mother.

Readings of the epilogue “help to expand and make more meaningful the national conversation about what kind of country we want to have,” said Stephen Seifert, organizer of the Denver reading. “We have learned from the epilogue that an important conversation once started should not soon be over. Much work remains to be done.

“The act of creating and performing the epilogue encourages us not to forget, to be conscious of how fragile memory is, and how malleable history is.”