Almost a decade ago, the first Serial podcast didn’t so much transform the true crime medium as define it. Now owned by the New York Times, Serial Productions’ latest one-season-one-story is The Coldest Case In Laramie (widely available), which dropped on February 23.
Hosted by investigative reporter Kim Barker, it explores the unsolved murder of a young woman named Shelli Wiley in Laramie, Wyoming in 1985. Barker was living in Laramie at the time, attending the same school Wiley had attended a few years earlier. Police made two early arrests, but neither stuck, and the case went cold.
Barker remembers Laramie as, “uncommonly mean, a place of jagged edges and cold people… Whenever I talk about the roughest place I’ve ever lived, I’d always say Laramie not Kabul, even though I reported there from the middle of a war”.
Wiley’s murder stuck with Barker long after she moved away. She would check for developments, but it wasn’t until 2021 she discovered that a former Laramie police officer named Fred Lamb had been arrested in 2016 and charged with Wiley’s murder. There was evidence aplenty: witnesses, DNA, even a supposed confession. A done deal, Barker assumed, until she heard that prosecutors dropped the charges, claiming temporary procedural reasons.
Police dropping a case against one of their own was all too Laramie for Barker, so she decided to investigate. “If Fred Lamb’s a killer, I’ll kiss your ass on main street,” his lawyer tells Barker in episode three. A long pause follows.
“We know who did this,” Robert Terry, the detective working on the case says, sounding frustrated by the decades of inaction. “We just have to prove it.”
True crime podcasts thrive on the trope of the big-town reporter muscling in on a small-town cold case (beautifully skewered in the TV show Only Murders in the Building, where the characters obsess over a Serial-like podcast called All Is Not OK in Oklahoma). Yet The Coldest Case In Laramie isn’t a whodunnit. It’s more an examination of what happens, and what’s leftover, when the truth becomes distorted, diluted and confused. In classic Serial style, the opening is evocative and sharp, the production clean and unshowy, and Barker acknowledges the often-impossible logical tangles life throws up.
“In truth, the most important parts of who Shelli Wiley was were still in the process of being ironed out,” she says. “Her family mourns this just as much as they mourn the person they loved. That she was murdered right at that precipice; before she or anyone else had a chance to find out who she was going to be.”
The Coldest Case In Laramie plays out over eight episodes, so put half a day aside. You’re going to need it.