He was a 21-year-old gay man who was lured, kidnapped, savagely beaten, set on fire, tied to a fence and left to die just outside Laramie, WY in the late night hours of Oct. 6, 1998. He died six days later in a hospital in Fort Collins, CO.
The two men who did it, Russell Arthur Henderson, then 21, and Aaron James McKinney, then 22, received both two consecutive life sentences. Henderson pled guilty to avoid the death penalty, while McKinney was convicted. There's an Associated Press interview of Henderson for the 20-year anniversary of Shepard's death on YouTube.
