Listen and follow ‘The Coldest Case in Laramie’
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In 1985, when Kim Barker, a Times reporter, was a teenager living in Laramie, Wyo., a young woman named Shelli Wiley was murdered.
The killing stuck with Kim long after she left Laramie, long after she traveled the world as a reporter. Part of it was the brutality of the murder. It was an emblem of her time in Laramie, a town that stood out as the meanest place she’d ever lived in. The other part was the mystery: Though the police made two arrests early in the case, neither stuck. The case went cold.
It wasn’t until 2021 that Kim learned there had been a development in the case — and a strange one. Five years earlier, the Laramie police had arrested someone for Ms. Wiley’s murder. He was one of their own, a former Laramie police officer. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming: Witnesses placed him at the crime scene, and his DNA was found there, too. In an interrogation before his arrest, he seemed to all but confess to the crime.
But just a few months later, the prosecutors in Laramie dropped the charges. They said the move was procedural, only a temporary delay. But they still haven’t refiled the charges, and it’s never been clear why.
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.
Behind the Series
Your Host
Kim Barker, an award-winning enterprise reporter for The New York Times. Before joining The Times in 2014, she was an investigative reporter at ProPublica. Her book, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” published in 2011, became the basis for the movie “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.”
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About the Music
Kwame Brandt-Pierce is a pianist and composer from Brooklyn, New York. He has performed with various artists, including Jean Grae, Pharoahe Monch, The Roots, Saul Williams and Solange Knowles. Kwame’s composer credits include the 2021 Serial podcast “The Improvement Association” and the 2022 documentary film “Unspoken” with the director Stephanie Calabrese. He is currently working on an interactive Afro-futurist project, “Shabazz B. Spacely’s Cabinet of Intergalactic Curiosities,” to be performed at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in March 2023.
Reported by Kim Barker
Produced by Alvin Melathe
Edited by Julie Snyder
Edited with help from Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, Katie Mingle, Neil Drumming, Ellen Barry, Kirsten Danis, Rebecca Corbett, and Bethel Habte
Additional production by Jasmin Shah
Fact-checking and research by Ben Phelan and Jessica Suriano
Additional fact-checking and research by Julie Tate and Michael Keller
Sound design and music supervision by Michal Comite
Supervising producer Ndeye Thioubou
Original score by Kwame Brandt-Pierce
Art by Roderick Mills
Standards review by Susan Wessling
Legal Review by Dana Green and Al-Amyn Sumar
Special thanks to Sam Dolnick, Renan Borelli, Jordan Cohen, Kelly Doe, Jason Fujikuni, Ashka Gami, Desiree Ibekwe, Jon McNally, Anisha Muni, Krystal Plomatos, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Kimmy Tsai, Julia Simon, Nancy Peterson, Lynne Andrews-Trujillo, Barbara Brunett Ramsey, Dr. Maria Cuellar, Sandy Zabell, Dave Thompson, Lisa Ribacoff, and John Butler.