Matthew Ryan Boyer, 25, a White man from Gillette, Wyoming, was shot at his home in the early hours of Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 2013, after what authorities and later court proceedings described as a dispute tied to rent. Public reporting said a woman called 911 around 4 a.m. after someone knocked on the door and Boyer was shot. He was taken to a hospital but died there from the chest wound.
Prosecutors later said he had been shot once in the abdomen and once in the chest, turning what should have been a holiday morning into a sudden, violent ending inside his own home.
The man publicly identified as the suspect was Todd Michael Sindelar of Gillette. Reporting at the time said Boyer’s girlfriend told investigators the two men had been in a dispute about rent before the shooting. After the gunfire, Sindelar did not stay in town. Authorities said he fled Gillette, and the case quickly became more than a homicide investigation when law enforcement tracked a vehicle linked to the shooting into South Dakota. There, according to published accounts, he led officers on a chase of roughly 200 miles, with South Dakota Highway Patrol reporting speeds up to 120 miles per hour before he was arrested.
As the case moved into court, prosecutors pursued a murder charge, and the central fight became not whether Sindelar had fired the shots, but why. At trial, his defense argued that he had not intended to kill Boyer and that he acted in self-defense. Later appellate material captured Sindelar’s version in greater detail: he said he went to Boyer’s house around 3:30 a.m. to talk, that Boyer answered the door holding a knife, and that Boyer lunged at him, prompting him to fire. The prosecution’s theory was far darker and simpler, portraying the shooting as a lethal escalation of the earlier dispute. A jury in 2015 convicted Sindelar of second-degree murder while acquitting him of first-degree murder.
That conviction did not end the case. In 2016, the Wyoming Supreme Court reversed and vacated the first second-degree murder conviction because the jury had been given a flight instruction that the court said was improper under Wyoming precedent. The reversal sent the case back for another round, forcing Boyer’s death to be relived in court a second time. In January 2017, Sindelar was retried, again argued self-defense, and again was convicted of second-degree murder in Boyer’s killing.
The legal story closed more firmly after that. Reporting on the second case said Sindelar received the same sentence again: 48 years to life in prison. In 2018, the Wyoming Supreme Court affirmed the second-degree murder conviction, rejecting his claims of prejudicial jury-instruction errors and leaving the conviction in place. So, in the public record, the case did result in an arrest, a named suspect, two murder convictions, one reversal on appeal over jury instructions, a second conviction, and ultimately a sentence that kept responsibility for Matthew Boyer’s death fixed on Todd Michael Sindelar.
