A conversation with Kim Barker, host of The Coldest Case in Laramie

Her podcast explores the 1985 murder of UW student Shelli Wiley, the racist police investigation that followed, and the prime suspect: former cop Fred Lamb. All eight episodes drop tomorrow.

A new podcast from Serial and the New York Times takes a deep dive into an unsolved Laramie murder.

The Coldest Case in Laramie explores the death of Shelli Wiley, a University of Wyoming student who was murdered in 1985. Her assailant stabbed her, dragged her into her apartment and set it ablaze.

Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for the New York Times, remembers learning about the murder back when she was a student of Laramie High School. Two years ago, Barker decided to take a closer look at the unsolved case that’s haunted Laramie since it occurred.

No one is in prison for the murder of Shelli Wiley. Local law enforcement scoured local communities of color in the immediate aftermath, but the case went cold. When Robert Terry — now the assistant chief of police — became a detective with the Laramie Police Department, he reopened the case and eventually made an arrest.

The man Terry arrested was Frederick Lamb, a former cop who had served with LPD and the Albany County Sheriff’s Office in the years before the murder. He was not considered a serious suspect in 1985, despite his blood being found at the crime scene.

The 2016 charges against Lamb were eventually dropped. The case went cold again. But Wiley’s family thinks they know who did it.

All eight episodes of The Coldest Case in Laramie — each 20-40 minutes — drop tomorrow, Feb. 23.

The Laramie Reporter spoke with Barker about the upcoming podcast, the racist and sexist policing that initially bungled the case, Barker’s own relationship to Laramie and the ethics of true crime reporting.

The following conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Laramie Reporter: The murder of Shelli Wiley was something you knew about from your time living in Laramie in the 80s and you describe in the first episode how the half-understood memory of that event stuck with you, hanging around in the background. I think we all have things like that — news stories we heard about as a kid and never really worked out the whole thing. Tell me about taking this case from something you just-kind-of-knew-about to an actual earnest journalistic investigation?

Kim Barker: As you said, we all have something from our childhoods, our early teenage years.

In the middle of the pandemic, I was alone by myself for a pretty long time. I just had this idea like if I take some vacation, and if I just go out there, I'll find a story. If you just go someplace, you will find something — especially (because) nobody had dug into this.

I remember reading the Laramie Daily Boomerang and wanting to know more and … never even getting a sense that (Shelli) was a human being. She was described as, like, a ‘co-ed.’ They never talked to her, they never talked to her relatives, they never talked to her friends. And I've tried to do the opposite of that. When you're a reporter at a smaller newspaper, I know there can be a lot of competing things that you have to do — but I really have tried, as a journalist, as much as possible, to put a face on whoever I'm writing about.

LR: Do you think your two impressions of Laramie — first as a teenager and then as a reporter coming back to it — were different because one was Laramie pre-Matthew Shepard and one was Laramie post-Matthew Shepard? Or do you think it's simply your different perspective?

KB: I think it's more complicated than that. When I heard about Matthew Shepard, it was just something that was reinforcing what I had always thought, this memory that I had. (But) when you start unpacking that stuff, even when you unpack what happened with Matthew Shepard, it's much more complicated than what it's been boiled down to. And that's what memory is. We boil something down to an anecdote.

Going back there, everywhere we went, we were just like, ‘Oh my God.’ Everybody was really open to helping us do what we wanted to do — and really willing to talk to us. I do think a large part of that is because I lived there, and I don't seem like, you know, the New York Times coming in to sort of do this. Although I do work for the Times, I'm from Montana and Wyoming. I don't know if that made a difference. But I don't know if everybody would have talked to me the same way if I didn't have the frame of reference of Laramie High, you know?

LR: Absolutely. I’m teaching a podcasting class at the university this semester. And during our Monday class, I told them about your podcast, played the preview for them. We were discussing it and one theme they were picking up on was this theme of an internal perspective versus an outside perspective. Like maybe the community of the police protecting their own versus an outside police detective who moves here and can see the things that we miss because we can't really see the water we're swimming in. And having listened to the full thing now, I see that throughline through the whole piece.

KB: That was one of the things that we were thinking about while putting it together, and another theme is most definitely memory and the stories that we tell ourselves, for sure. Everything you just said. And another large problem in this case was that these rumors that were going around infected the case. And at least in Laramie back then, (there’s) blaming the victim. And I'd like to think that doesn't happen in Laramie anymore — I'd like to think that, I don't know if I'm right. You're the one who lives there.

LR: We’ve had some incidents. I was honestly shocked hearing some of the clips of the early interviews — these police interrogations that are really just racist and misogynist to, I would say, a shocking degree. Did that surprise you?

KB: I found it shocking, because it wasn't the 1950s, it wasn't the 1930s. I could not believe the things they were saying about Shelli. Her family had some sense that there was a lot of victim-blaming going on. They heard certain things, but it’s different to actually hear the things that were said. I found it shocking, listening to those old, old recordings. It was a different time, but it doesn't seem like it was that different. It shouldn’t have been that different. You know what I mean?

LR: That was exactly my thought as I was listening: It wasn’t that long ago … Without giving too much away, this podcast took a case where I thought I knew what had happened and changed my opinion — or softened my opinion, I should say. It landed me in a comfortable, neutral agnosticism. Did that happen to you as you were working on this?

KB: Yeah, I mean, I think you can tell. I don't want to do spoilers, but everybody in the beginning told me one thing, and I was like, ‘Well, these people seem to know what they're talking about.’ And then as I dug more into it, I was like, ‘I don't know if I see things quite that same way.’ And I think that's really important, being a reporter, not just going in and thinking, ‘This is definitely what the story is,’ but letting the facts you find and letting what you uncover determine what the actual story is.

LR: You can never have too many reminders of that.

KB: Otherwise you can get trapped in your own beliefs. Reporting that just echoes what you think — that's not going to be a good story. It's not going to be an accurate story, I should say.

LR: Might be a good story. Maybe not an accurate story. Another thing we’ve discussed in my podcasting class is the ethics of true crime storytelling. I think the benefits of this kind of reporting or coverage are kind of obvious: it sheds light on forgotten cases, it can exonerate the wrongly accused in the court of public opinion and so on. But there have also been critiques: that true crime can be exploitative, that podcasters and journalists have different evidential standards than a court. I read one critique that argues by telling these stories — stories about cops getting the bad guys — that we’re propping up a justice system we know is deeply flawed. Did you consider any of these things as you were approaching this story? Had you read criticisms of true crime? Was that something you were thinking about?

KB: I decided that from the very beginning, if the family didn't want me to look into this, I wasn't going to do it. I didn’t want to be that person. I don't need to go and scratch my own itch if the family said no. That was one thing I was really adamant about.

Let's just be honest about it — the whole idea of having a trailer about a podcast. It's about somebody who was killed in a really horrific way. It feels weird.

But I do think bringing attention to the policing, to how we got where we are with this case, I think that is really important. And I think that's what the family is holding on to and it's what I'm holding on to.

LR: On the topic of the family being comfortable with it, another theme — in addition to the ones that we talked about — is that of closure, or the denial of closure. We don't have any solid answers. The family doesn't have those answers. The community doesn't have an explanation for why this took place. But you made an effort to lay out everything for everyone to see, to speak with the family, explore every avenue, even call out the people who messed up and maybe even praise the people who seem to be trying to do something about this. Do you think — or do you hope — with your investigation, you could give people something approximating closure?

KB: I think I got as far as I could possibly get. I tried as hard as I could. I think that the family would have to answer that. The family’s closure is the most important thing, obviously, and they've been resigned for a very long time to the fact that they're not going to get justice for Shelli.

But for Brandi (Shelli’s niece), at least I know that she just wants to see everything, to know exactly what the police came up with. And I think she does have a sense that if she's able to arrange these pieces in a certain way, something will become clear.

Closure’s a tricky thing. Who am I to say this is gonna give anyone closure? It could just raise more questions, you know?

LR: What you're saying reminds me of a district court judge we had for a couple of years here. Every time she would sentence someone, she would explain the various reasons they're being sentenced. One reason was that society needs to punish you. One reason was that society needs to rehabilitate you. One is that we need to make a demonstration to the community that this is what happens when you break this certain law. And so on.

I'm not saying I always agreed with that, but I always appreciated her laying it out that way and breaking up the different reasons that we engage with the justice system at all. It actually serves multiple different purposes. And so, I guess with this, I was hoping it could serve the purpose of elucidating the public, even if it can't actually bring closure.

KB: I think it does that. You just hear that audio and you're like, ‘Okay, this gives me a lot more answers than I had before.’ I do think that people will come away with a lot more answers now. And a lot more sympathy for Shelli's family, and for people like Angelo Garcia and even Fred (Lamb).

LR: It shows the complexity that you can only get with a four-hour version of the story.

KB: Yeah, sorry I took up four hours of your week.

LR: It was time well spent.