![]() Years ago when I was a teenager, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. This transcript was created using speech recognition software. She reaches out to Shelli’s family to understand why the police arrested a man named Fred Lamb for Shelli’s murder in 2016, and why prosecutors abruptly dropped the charges against him. Transcript Episode 1 A Times investigative reporter, Kim Barker, revisits the murder of Shelli Wiley - a long-unsolved case from Kim’s time in high school. How did a case that seemed this open-and-shut fall apart with such a whimper? To find answers, Kim heads back to Laramie and grapples with conflicting memories and dueling narratives. But they still haven’t refiled the charges, and it’s never been clear why. They said the move was procedural, only a temporary delay. In an interrogation before his arrest, he seemed to all but confess to the crime.īut just a few months later, the prosecutors in Laramie dropped the charges. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming: Witnesses placed him at the crime scene, and his DNA was found there, too. He was one of their own, a former Laramie police officer. Five years earlier, the Laramie police had arrested someone for Ms. It wasn’t until 2021 that Kim learned there had been a development in the case - and a strange one. The other part was the mystery: Though the police made two arrests early in the case, neither stuck. It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in. Part of it was the brutality of the murder. The killing stuck with Kim long after she left Laramie, long after she traveled the world as a reporter. In 1985, when Kim Barker, a Times reporter, was a teenager living in Laramie, Wyo., a young woman named Shelli Wiley was murdered. Original music by Kwame Brandt-Pierce Listen and follow ‘The Coldest Case in Laramie’ Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Amazon Music But I figured, what’s the harm in making some calls, pulling some string, a little side project that turned into a full-fledged reinvestigation of the case and the people and the place I thought I understood.įrom Serial Productions in The New York Times, it’s “The Coldest Case in Laramie” coming on February 23. I doubted this was a story my editor would be into - a 36-year-old cold case for my time in high school and might have a perfectly reasonable explanation for where it stood. ![]() He’d even, apparently, given something like a confession and then nothing? The whole thing seemed so Laramie? And after being confronted with DNA evidence in 2016, he had even told police that, quote, “I’m not denying that I did it” and “I killed a girl.”īut then just a few months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against him, which means, a former cop had been arrested. On the night Shelli was killed in 1985, witnesses placed him at the scene. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming. The police arrested a former Laramie cop for the murder. Thirty-one years after Shelli’s murder, there was a development. ![]() Shelli’s murder was never solved.Įvery few years, after I moved away, after I became a reporter, I’d search her name for news almost as an idle reflex. I remember the shock of her murder arriving at my high school. She was 22, white, a pretty brunette, living a version of the life my friends and I imagined for ourselves one day. She graduated from Laramie High just a few years before I got there. In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelli was murdered in her apartment. Coaches who caught guys fighting in the hallways made them fight for real in a makeshift ring.īut the main reason that Laramie has always stuck with me, the defining cruelty in a litany of them, was a young woman I never met named Shelli Wylie. Some boys were held down and branded with letters like they were livestock. The town’s only high school, Laramie High, was grim even by normal high school standards. Laramie stood at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and got so socked in by winter storms it felt like we were trapped, like there was no way out. I’ve always remembered it as a mean town, uncommonly mean, a place of jagged edges and cold people, where the wind blew so hard it actually whipped pebbles at you, actually pushed trucks off the highway. Years ago, when I was a teenager, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming. The sound of an investigation as it unfolds. ![]() A slam-dunk case that mysteriously fell apart. Transcript The Coldest Case in Laramie From Serial Productions. ![]()
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