Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, revisits an unsolved murder that took place while she was in high school in Laramie, Wyoming, nearly 40 years ago. She confronts the conflicting stories people have told themselves about the crime because of an unexpected development: the arrest of a former Laramie police officer accused in the murder. All eight episodes of "The Coldest Case in Laramie," a new show from Serial Productions and The New York Times, are available on Thursday, February 23rd wherever you get your podcasts.
Years ago, when I was a teenager, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming.
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.
Laramie stood at an elevation of more than 7,000ft and got so socked in by winter storms, it felt like we were trapped, like there was no way out.
The town's only high school, Laramie High, was grim, even by normal high school standards.
One of my classmates killed someone.
Other students killed themselves.
Some boys were held down and branded with letters like they were livestock.
Coaches who caught guys fighting in the hallways, made them fight for real in a makeshift ring.
But 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 Shelly Wiley.
In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelly was murdered in her apartment.
She graduated from Laramie High just a few years before I got there.
She was 22, white, a pretty brunette, living a version of the life my friends and I imagined for ourselves one day.
I remember the shock of her murderer arriving at my high school.
Some students became suspects, others played the guessing game.
Shelley's murder was never solved.
Every few years after I moved away, after I became a reporter, I'd search her name for news, almost as an idle reflex.
There was never anything.
Until 2016.
31 years after Shelley's murder, there was a development.