‘The Coldest Case’ is Serial’s latest podcast on murder and memory

In Kim Barker’s memory, the town of Laramie, Wyo, where she spent several years as a teenager, was a miserable place. A veteran journalist with The New York TimesBarker is now also the host of The coldest case in Laramiea new audio documentary series from Serial Productions that takes her back to the rugged corners of her former home.

The cold case in question happened nearly four decades ago. In 1985, Shelli Wiley, a University of Wyoming student, was brutally killed in her home, which was also set on fire. Subsequent police investigations yielded nothing conclusive. Two separate arrests were eventually made for the crime, but none stuck. And so the case remained on hold for a long time.

At the time of the murder, Barker was a child in Laramie. She remembered the case: its brutality, its openness. Decades later, while being held up by the pandemic, she revisited the murder — only to find a new development.

In 2016, a former police officer who had lived near Wiley’s home was arrested for the murder based on blood evidence linking him to the crime scene. As it turns out, many in the area had long suspected he was the culprit. This felt like a final solution. But that lead didn’t go anywhere either. The charges against him were suddenly dropped shortly after his arrest, and no new charges have been brought since.

What exactly is going on here? Here Barker enters the scene.

The coldest case in Laramie is not quite a conventional true crime story. It certainly doesn’t want to be that; Even the creators specifically insist that the podcast is not a “case of whodunit.” Instead, the show is best described as an in-depth account of what happens when the confusion surrounding a horrifying crime meets attraction to its conclusion. It’s a mess.

In the heart of The coldest case in Laramie is an interest in the unreliability of memory and the slipperiness of truth. One of the podcast’s most striking moments revolves around a woman who was living with the victim at the time. The woman recalled that shortly after the murder, she was sent a letter with a pile of money and a warning to leave town. The message had been burned into her brain for decades, but as Barker’s account revealed, few things about that memory are what they seem. Later, Barker presents the woman with evidence that radically challenges her core memory, and you can almost hear her mind changing.

The coldest case in Laramie is undeniably compelling, but there’s also something about the show’s underlying themes that feels oddly mundane. We’re currently head-deep in a documentary film boom, so completely dominated by true crime stories that we’ve pretty much passed saturation point. At this point, these themes of unreliable memory and subjective truths feel like they should be starting points for a story like this. And given the Serial Productions pedigree, responsible for landmark projects like suburban town, Nice white parents – and you know, Serial — it’s hard not to get used to expecting something more; a larger, more recent idea that this story might hang on to.

Of course, all of this is not meant to undermine the coverage, as well as the still very important ideas that drive the podcast forward. It will always be frightening how our justice system depends so much on something as unpredictable as memory, and how different people look at the same piece of information only to come to wildly different conclusions. By the end of the series, even Barker begins to reconsider how she remembers the Laramie she grew up in. But the increasingly anticipated nature of these themes in non-fiction crime fiction begs the question: Where do we go from here?

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