Der kälteste Fall in Laramie - Shanghai Block Machine Co., Ltd

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transcript

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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 7,000 feet 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 Shelli Wylie. In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelli 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 murder arriving at my high school. Some students became suspects. Others played the guessing game. Shelli’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. Thirty-one years after Shelli’s murder, there was a development. The police arrested a former Laramie cop for the murder. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming.

On the night Shelli was killed in 1985, witnesses placed him at the scene. His blood had been found there too. And after being confronted with DNA evidence in 2016, he had even told police that, quote, “I’m not denying that I did it” and “I killed a girl.”

But then just a few months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against him, which means, a former cop had been arrested. His DNA had been found at the scene. He’d even, apparently, given something like a confession and then nothing? The whole thing seemed so Laramie?

I doubted this was a story my editor would be into — a 36-year-old cold case for my time in high school and might have a perfectly reasonable explanation for where it stood. But I figured, what’s the harm in making some calls, pulling some string, a little side project that turned into a full-fledged reinvestigation of the case and the people and the place I thought I understood.

From Serial Productions in The New York Times, it’s “The Coldest Case in Laramie” coming on February 23. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

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transcript

[MUSIC PLAYING]

From Serial Productions in The New York Times, it’s “The Coldest Case in Laramie” coming on February 23. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Hosted by Kim Barker

Produced by Alvin Melathe

Edited by Julie Snyder

Original music by Kwame Brandt-Pierce

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.

transcript

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

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 7,000 feet and got so socked in by winter storms it felt like we were trapped, like there was no way out. My family moved away before my senior year in high school. I never wanted to go back.

And the girls had to look a certain way, act a certain way, wear a certain kind of eyeliner, have a certain kind of bi-level haircut. I was bullied for the way I spoke, the way I dressed. I can still hear some boys mock barking my name, Kim Barker, down the hallway.

Whenever I talk about the roughest place I’d ever lived, I’d always say Laramie. Not Kabul, even though I reported there from the middle of a war. Not Islamabad, even though suicide bombs exploded there regularly.

There’s a good chance that if you’ve heard of Laramie before, it’s because of Matthew Shepard, a gay university student who was tortured there and later died. When I first heard about his death, I thought, of course that happened in Laramie.

But the main reason that Laramie has always stuck with me, the defining cruelty in a litany of them, was a young woman I had never met named Shelli Wiley. In the fall of 1985 when I was a high school sophomore, Shelli was murdered in her apartment.

She was a few years older than me and had gone to Laramie High. She went to college at the nearby University of Wyoming and earned money waiting tables at a truck stop. She was 22, white, a pretty brunette, living a version of the life me and my friends imagined for ourselves one day.

The details of her death were less clear to me at 14 than the brutality was. There were whispers about stabbings and blood. I’d heard that whoever had killed Shelli had burned her apartment to the ground.

I remember the shock of her murder arriving at my high school. Some students became suspects. Others played the guessing game. At one particularly terrifying round of Ouija with friends, we asked for a sign if the spirit knew who killed Shelli Wiley. At that very moment, a knock came on the basement window. Even the boys screamed.

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Shelli’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.

Then came January 2021. I was cooped up in my apartment, just me, my dog Lucy, and a global pandemic. Like almost everyone else, I was going a little bit stir crazy. I also owed my newspaper some story ideas, and truthfully, I was tapped out. So with a special kind of desperation, I Googled Shelli’s name again. This time, there was news.

In 2016, 31 years after Shelli’s murder, the police had actually made an arrest in the case, a guy named Fred Lamb. He was a one-time cop, a former sheriff’s deputy and Laramie Police Officer. According to news reports, on the night Shelli was killed in 1985, Fred Lamb had been staying in the apartment two doors down from her. His blood had been found at the scene. And after being confronted with DNA evidence in 2016, he had even told police that, quote, “I’m not denying that I did it,” and “Fred Lamb did it.”

But then a few months after charging him, prosecutors unexpectedly dropped the case. An article in the local paper headlined “Possible Delay in Cold Case,” quoted the prosecutor, who said her office needed more time to get test results back. She said they were dropping the charges against Fred, but only temporarily. They planned to refile soon.

That was in early 2017. To this day, prosecutors haven’t refiled, which means a former cop had been arrested. His DNA had been found at the scene. He’d even apparently given something like a confession, and then nothing? The whole thing seemed so Laramie.

I doubted this was a story my editor would be into, a random 36-year-old cold case from my time in high school that might have a perfectly reasonable explanation for where it stood. But I decided to make some calls anyway, pull some strings. I figured, what’s the harm in a little side project?

From Serial Productions in “The New York Times,” I’m Kim Barker. This is “The Coldest Case in Laramie.”

I read through the handful of articles about Fred Lamb I could find on the internet, and then I started looking for Shelli’s family. I didn’t find much. An obit for Shelli’s father and a pleading Facebook post from a young woman named Brandie, saying she was Shelli’s Wiley’s niece. She didn’t name Lamb, but she said a former sheriff’s deputy, a quote, “monster” had never had to answer for his crime. Brandie said that she and her family needed help. I messaged her. We set up a time to Zoom, along with her mom Lauri, Shelli Wiley’s younger sister.

Hi, can you hear me?

Yes, I — can you hear me?

Yeah, I’m just moving over to the Zoom. Yeah. Thanks so much. You must be Lauri.

I am.

Good Good to meet you. I’m obviously — and I’m obviously Kim. And that’s — oh, hi, Brandie. Good to see you.

Hi.

Hi. So I figured we should start out with you guys asking me questions about what I’m doing. And I would imagine that you would have questions.

Yes, absolutely. What are you writing about, exactly?

So what I would be interested in doing is basically trying to find out what happened with the case against Fred Lamb.

Right.

Like, just get records. Do all the sort of things that you do. And I just — I feel like that there could be something there, especially given that Fred Lamb was a cop.

Well, there is something there, I’m sure.

I’d hesitated before reaching out to Lauri directly. For one thing, I could see from LinkedIn that she was the Director of Nursing at a nursing home in California in the middle of a pandemic. I figured she was busy. I didn’t want to do this story without talking to her, and I knew my call could open up old wounds. But Lauri was blunt and matter of fact and willing to talk.

So why don’t we start with what your understanding is with what happened with Fred Lamb.

So what happened with Fred Lamb is — well, like, when they arrested him a few years ago, I know it’s very political and I know they had to keep things a secret from a lot of people in the police department at the time, but I did sit down with them about, I’m going to say, three or four years ago and looked at most of the case with them. Well, not most of the casebook. I was there for three hours and looked at a lot of it.

And what did you see? What did they show you?

Oh, good Lord, it’s a long story. But when we went in — so I went to Laramie. And actually, I’m really good friends with my sister’s roommate at the time, Michelle.

Oh, I would love to talk to her. Yeah.

I’d seen mentions of Shelli’s roommate, Michelle, in an old news story in the Casper paper. In the few articles I could find online, Michelle was the only person quoted who actually knew Shelli, the only friend mentioned.

I’m sure Michelle would probably talk to you too.

OK.

So actually, Michelle, I hadn’t seen her in a long time, but I had flown from my dad’s house. And Michelle picked me up, but we drove to Laramie. And she’d already talked to them, but I went there and I talked to the detective. We were in the room, and I know somebody was on the camera watching or guiding him. I could tell. But they just went over the story and they basically said, so — so his apartment was two apartments down.

The basics, as I understood them from talking to Lauri and reading about Fred Lamb’s arrest. Back in 1985, he had just left the sheriff’s department and joined the National Guard full time. Married with a kid, living just outside of Laramie. But on Guard drill weekends, he stayed at his friend’s place in town, which happened to be in the same apartment building as Shelli and Michelle, just two doors down. The weekend of Shelli’s murder was a drill weekend, so Fred was staying over as usual.

Lauri told me the last time she saw her sister Shelli was just a few hours before she was killed. Shelli and a girlfriend had spent the evening talking and drinking tea in her living room. Lauri stopped by after getting off of work. But soon, Shelli sent Lauri and her friend home. Shelli had to get up early for her waitressing shift. Michelle was gone for the night, so Shelli was alone.

At some point in the early morning hours of Sunday, October 20, someone got inside of Shelli’s apartment and attacked her in her bedroom. It looked like she’d tried to escape. She made it out the front door. But on the sidewalk just outside of her building, her attacker caught her, stabbed her repeatedly, dragged Shelli back inside before setting the apartment on fire.

At about 5:20 in the morning, witnesses saw flames shooting out of Shelli’s apartment, engulfing the living room and the front door. Fred was there, one of the few people at the scene.

Police interviewed Fred late that afternoon. He told them he had Guard duty the next day and would be heading to Arkansas for a couple weeks of training. And then as far as Lauri knew, the cops never looked at Fred again, not until three decades later in 2016 when Laramie investigators keyed in on Fred for the murder.

They gathered evidence and called Fred in for an interview. This one lasted more than seven hours. Near the end, according to news reports, is when Fred referred to himself in the third person and said things such as “Fred Lamb did it,” and “bottom line is, I killed a girl.” After Fred was charged, Lauri said the lead detective brought in her and Michelle and walked them through the early mistakes in the case.

Because I asked the detective, I’m like, well, why did the crime scene tape only go to the first apartment? And when he looked at the pictures, sure enough, they didn’t even go to the second or third apartment, even though there was more evidence further down.

So anyhow, yeah, they let Fred go. But there was — he did have some blood spatter on his door and he had a cut on his hand and he said, he cut his hand — I can’t remember what he told them. Knocking on the door. I can’t remember how he got that. But I know he went behind the building at one point and cut the whole phone line.

I mean, what’s it like to find out they arrest a guy two doors down?

I think Michelle was like, I knew he may have had something to do with it.

Michelle said that from the beginning.

I don’t know if she knew it was him, but she questioned.

Lauri says they all knew Fred Lamb. He used to go to Foster’s, a huge truck stop off of Interstate 80 where Lauri, Michelle, and Shelli all worked. They’d see Fred at Foster’s, meeting with other cops to drink coffee and shoot the shit. Foster’s was just across the dirt road from Shelli’s apartment building.

The building itself wasn’t much. Five low-slung units arranged in an L shape. It was the kind of building that looks like a strip of crummy motel rooms, but is, in fact, a strip of crummy rental units along a sidewalk and parking lot. That’s the other place Lauri remembers seeing Fred sometimes when she was over at Shelli’s apartment building.

We would sit outside. Sometimes we’d sunbathe out there because that’s what you did in the ‘80s. I know when they said it in the report, I’m like, oh my god. You’re trying to make us look like whores, aren’t you? I pretty much told him that. I’m like, that’s not how it was then. That’s not really what we were.

But they came home. But I remember, I was — I don’t even think we were sunbathing this time, but we were standing outside, and I must have been leaving. But I remember Michelle smacking me and telling me, look at those weirdos. There’s my neighbor. He’s a weirdo.

But I remember a couple weeks before their screen kept coming off their window, different screens. And somebody — they had somebody put it back on, or he offered to put it back on, and Michelle turned him down one time. But I remember their screens in the front would come off and then in the back would come off. But they never knew who it was. They weren’t too worried about it at the time.

Right. What did you think about the fact that he was a former police officer and used to be in the sheriff’s department?

Well, first I had to realize — I was like, hmm. I didn’t have a lot of feelings either way. And then I’m like, well, they’re assholes because they wouldn’t really answer any of our questions. But yeah, I was pretty naive then. I’m not nearly as naive now, or these days, I would have hounded them or called them more.

But yeah, no, they didn’t tell us they had any suspects or that they really talked to him or — that I remember. Maybe that’s why. The detective who is in charge of it now is not somebody who was originally a police officer at the time. He’s not from Laramie.

OK. So he’s — like, he’s not familiar with the case. I’m now sitting inside my bathroom because my dog’s being super loud.

Oh, OK. [LAUGHS]

Just going to move inside here.

He’s familiar with the case. He ended up with the case, and he investigated it. And he’s the one who got the warrant to arrest Fred the first time.

OK.

And then I don’t know. He’s now like the Assistant Chief of Police, but he kept the case.

So he sounds like he’s very invested in it then.

He’s very invested in it. He’s the only one that will help me with anything. Nobody else will go further. He’s the only one that tries to get them to press charges or to move forward or to do any of that. Nobody else will really help.

And what’s his name, the deputy?

The detective there, he may be the — I’m not even sure his title now. The Assistant Chief, his name is Robert Terry.

Robert Terry. OK. And how did you find out that they were going to drop the charges, at least for now, against Lamb?

I read it in the paper.

Ooh. They didn’t call you and tell you?

Oh, no. No. Any time I’d call any of the attorneys, they have — only had victims witness call me, like, twice.

I called a lot, though. I hounded the police station when he was arrested. And the first police officer that answered at the jail house, she was really rude and she was like, I don’t know what case you’re talking about. So she transferred me to another police officer, and he told me that he wasn’t allowed to discuss the case. But then it got really quiet and it was like he was whispering in the phone. And he said, you need to pursue this. Don’t stop. And then he hung up the phone.

But at one point, Peggy Trent was the prosecutor for it. And I called her a few times, and she wouldn’t answer the phone. And then I kind of got on a kick of calling — I thought in my head, I’m like, I feel like Laramie is really a bad place to try it, so I wonder if there’s something that I could do, you know, to get it transferred out of Laramie to maybe Cheyenne.

So I remember calling Cheyenne and asking them if they knew about the case and that I was her niece and how they get it transferred or whatever. And the lady that I spoke to, she said, I can’t just take the case. She said, it has to be given to us by Peggy Trent. But she was like, can I call you right back in 15 minutes? And I’m like, yeah. And I didn’t think she was going to call me back. Well, she called me back really quickly, and she was like, yeah, I just spoke to a judge, and we want it, but we can’t just take it.

So I called Peggy Trent back, and I told her, you know, Cheyenne wants it, the case. And I feel like it would be better to be — try it outside of Laramie. And she was so angry with me. She told me, how — who do you think you are, just trying to take my case away?

So I was really frustrated with her, and I would call her office every day just to ask questions. And eventually, I was sharing on my Facebook the article and saying, this is my aunt. Everybody, please share.

So it started to get around a little bit. And then Peggy Trent called my grandmother on me and told my grandma that I was jeopardizing the case and to make me stop. She called my grandma on me.

[LAUGHS]:

I talked to Peggy Trent about this story. She told me she didn’t remember Brandie calling her office, nor did she remember calling Brandie’s grandma. Peggy has since left the prosecutor’s office. She told me she wouldn’t talk about an open investigation.

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Lauri graduated high school a few months before Shelli was killed. She told me she’d spent much of her time at Shelli’s, even spent the night there sometimes. They were four years apart, but Lauri told me they were really close. They drank beer, went to university football games. In a Garfield notebook they kept on Shelli’s dresser, they wrote about their lives from the perspective of a cat.

When Lauri spoke to me about Shelli, she did it without a lot of sentimentality. She seemed like she put her memories of her sister and what happened into a box that she never opened. Kept a charm bracelet of Shelli’s with a dangling ballerina in a bag, in a drawer, where she rarely saw it.

Lauri told me that Shelli’s death devastated her family. For Vicki, Shelli’s mom, the murder of her oldest child became the divider of life into before and after. Life before, Vicki gave birth to Shelli just after high school, and the two pretty much grew up together. They looked alike, like sisters even. Talked all the time, even after Shelli’s dad and Vicki divorced.

Life after, Vicki became more of a recluse, according to Lauri, more depressed, more off on her own. Shelli’s dad kind of disappeared after his daughter’s murder, spent much of his time alone in the mountains, didn’t want to talk about Shelli’s murder, didn’t talk much about her at all.

He seemed to walk away from his second marriage without actually leaving. And after the couple finally broke up, Shelli’s father left Laramie for good. He died alone in Buffalo, Wyoming, leaving behind Shelli’s funeral notice tucked inside a book and a bitter hatred of the Laramie police.

One of Shelli’s brothers started drinking after Shelli’s death. He never stopped. He died shortly before my first conversation with Lauri and Brandie. When I asked Shelli’s family about her, what she was like, who she was, they tended to lean on the platitudes of the long dead. She lit up a room with her smile. She was smart, beautiful inside and out.

And it makes sense. Shelli is, in their minds, forever 22, a pretty woman who liked John Denver, who loved animals, especially cats, who worked out at the gym regularly before that was really a thing for women, who was often, in fact, the only woman in any of her engineering or industrial management classes.

In truth, the most important parts of who Shelli Wiley was were still in the process of being ironed out. 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.

Well, I’ve talked to you guys for more than an hour this evening. I don’t want to be — take too much of your time up in the very beginning. But like — and I hate to say that I’m giving homework, right? But there’s homework here. If you guys could get me — like, if you could talk to Michelle and see if she’d talk to me, and — I think that she would be really important to talk to just because she would be more familiar with what his role was in the building at the time and all that sort of stuff.

I’m sure Michelle will talk to you.

That’d be great.

OK.

All right. And we’ll — just stay in touch and we’ll see where this can go, OK?

OK, thank you.

Thank you.

Thanks so much.

Thank you. Bye.

What I gathered from talking to Lauri and Brandie was that they didn’t actually a lot more about what happened with this case than what appeared in news reports. In that vacuum, they’d started developing some theories. They were pretty clear that the whole thing was mishandled from the start, that Fred didn’t get a close look as a suspect back in 1985. They figured it was because he was a former cop, that maybe this was a good old boys protecting their own thing.

It was hard for Lauri and Brandie to feel like there wasn’t something shady going on here. They told me they’d be happy to have me find out what I could.

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That’s next time on “The Coldest Case in Laramie.”

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On a lark, Kim Barker, a Times investigative reporter, decides to look into the 1985 murder of Shelli Wiley, a young woman who was a few years older than Kim when they both lived in Laramie, Wyo.

The long-unsolved case took a turn in 2016 when the police arrested someone for Ms. Wiley’s murder: a former officer named Fred Lamb. The evidence against him seemed solid, but prosecutors, confusingly, dropped the case. They’ve never refiled.

Kim decides to call up Ms. Wiley’s family members to try to piece together what happened.

transcript

I just — I feel like that there could be something there, especially given that Fred Lamb was a cop.

Oh, there is something there. I’m sure. [MUSIC PLAYING]

I remember Michelle smacking me and telling me, “look at those weirdos. There’s my neighbor. He’s a weirdo. Then it got really quiet. And it was like he was whispering in the phone. And he said, you need to pursue this. Don’t stop.

There is homework here. If you guys could get me, like, if you could talk to Michelle and see if she’d talk to me. And —

I’m sure Michelle will talk to you.

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All right, can you hear me now?

Oh my god. Oh gosh, oh my gosh, it’s actually working. I just heard you.

All right!

Lauri and Brandie made good on their homework. Within a day of our first conversation, Laurie connected me with Shelli’s old roommate, Michelle. Michelle is a striking woman: big eyes, bigger smile. We met over Zoom. She prepared for the interview in a way I didn’t. I wore a baseball cap and soft pandemic clothes. Michelle dressed for this meeting like an important job interview, in full makeup and blown-out hair. She was eager to talk.

How did you meet Shelli?

At the restaurant, we were waitresses there. We kind of looked a little bit alike and had a lot of the same goals. We were both pretty good students and just — we just, we hit it off. She was a sweet, sweet, sweet person. We were just — it was like we were a married couple. We’re obviously two females. But I remember I bought a washer and dryer. She bought a stereo. We had milk crates for furniture. We had our stuff sitting on milk crates. And we just thought we were so cool. We just — were so poor. But we just felt like we had it all.

And she was — was she a couple of years older than you then if you were 19?

Yeah, mm-hmm.

And had you waited tables before? Or how did you end up at Foster’s?

They just were hiring. And I went down there and thought, I better find a job. It’s funny because I come from a big Spanish family, five kids. Nobody’s ever left home. And then I told my parents, I’m going to go away to college. And they’re like, yeah, sure you are. And they’re a poor family. And they couldn’t afford to put me through college. I said, well, I’m going to move there. I’m going to get a job.

And they were like, OK, good luck with that. And then come June 4th, I was — packed my bags. Well, I didn’t have bags. I didn’t have bags. I packed my boxes full of my clothes. And I said, I’m leaving tomorrow. And my brother was like, oh my god, she’s really leaving. So my dad had him drive with me and move there. And we drove into Laramie June 4th. And it snowed. And he was like, I won’t tease you if you come back home. I won’t say a word.

And I was like, no, I’m staying. So I applied for a job at Foster’s and got hired and worked there full time. Weird thing I’ll never forget, Big Pete from Big Pete’s Welding said, why did you move here? And I said, I came to go to college. He said, you’re going to get an education. But it’s not going to be at school. And I thought, what does he mean by that? Well, he wasn’t kidding. That town gave me an education.

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I remember it so well. I remember it like it was yesterday. I stayed at my boyfriend’s house. And we got in a huge fight because I wanted to go home. And I said, I want to go home. I don’t feel right. Something felt weird. And I remember, it was either 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning. And he said, you can’t go home now. It’s the middle of the night. Nothing’s going to change between now and then.

And I just said, something’s wrong. I don’t feel — I cannot describe it. And I can’t tell you why. And then that morning early, I went home. And it was like 5:00 or 6:00 or something. And that’s how I saw the flames. And I saw the apartment still burning. And when I pulled up, that’s when the officer said, who are you? And I said, I live here. And then they said, where’s Shelli? And I thought, what do you mean, where’s Shelli? She’s in the house. And I was hysterical, just going crazy. I just could never forget those words. They said, do you know where Shelli is? And I was just like, dumbfounded. I said, what do you mean, do I know where she is? She’s in that house. And I just went crazy, just went nuts.

Yeah, I can’t imagine.

Yeah.

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So shortly after Shelli was killed, I met my husband who I’m divorced with and married him quickly. He was 10 years older than I was. He was a high school teacher. And I was scared out of my mind. It was a scary time. And I was just searching for comfort. And that was — he was 30. I was 20. And he was a high school teacher. And I thought, he’s not going to hurt me. Terrible, but —

And do you think that Shelli’s death — I mean, I would imagine it had everything to do with that.

Oh, guaranteed because right after — so when Shelli was killed, I was still in shock. I was so young. And I was just — I didn’t even call my parents when it happened until probably the next day. And I think one of the detectives said, we got to call your parents. And then my dad wanted me to move back home because he was scared. And I wouldn’t. And then somebody sent me — I started — I rented an apartment, a basement apartment.

Foster’s gave me like $600 because I didn’t have any clothes. All my clothes were burnt. And I didn’t even have a coat, I don’t even think. And so they gave me $600 so I could rent an apartment. And then somebody mailed me a card with $100 bill in it and said, if you’re smart, you’d leave town. So the detectives got the card. I called them right away because I was so scared.

I thought, somebody’s going to come for me next, which nobody knew that I lived — I mean, I hadn’t been there for more than maybe a week. And so I did leave. And I stayed home for a month. And then I was just — I felt like I was running away. I thought, I’ll never be able to face my fears and face what happened. And I just wanted to go back to Laramie. Yeah, but that was all just so, so surreal, that whole — somebody said to me now, they think it was probably Fred that did that, the detectives.

But back then, they didn’t know. They just kind of, I don’t know. All the things that he did to us while we were in that apartment, it was constant. And back then, it was just so — it was so strange because Laurie and I laughed — not laughed, but we were talking about how I used to work graveyards. And so one time, I woke up in the middle of the day. And there was a mouse inside my shirt on my belly. And how does that get there?

And my screens would come off of my windows all the time. And then he would say — and then I was screaming because that mouse was on my belly. And I was freaking out. And he all of a sudden was at the door and was like, what’s wrong? What’s wrong? Do you need help? I mean, how did he know that — I think he put the mouse in. I don’t know. I guess I don’t know that for sure. But I know for sure that he would take the screens off, ask me for help and then say, can I come in and help you put your screens on, or —

So your screens would come off. You obviously probably wouldn’t see him take the screens off. But he was always there saying, hey, do you need help with that?

Yes, yeah, yeah, I noticed your screens are off. Can I help you put your screens back on and stuff, so. Yeah, in hindsight now, there is — I would say I am 99.9 percent sure Fred Lamb murdered Shelli. I think, you know what my gut tells me is she smoked, he smoked. I think she went out probably when she got home because she didn’t smoke in the house. She went outside to smoke because I brought her — I went to Florida with my parents that June.

And I brought her an ashtray from Florida. And that was outside, all broken. And I think she was outside smoking. He probably came outside and probably hit on her. She told him to go pound sand. And I bet you he tried to rape her. And that’s my thought. I don’t know truthfully how that all happened. But I think she was outside smoking when he started talking to her. I think she probably didn’t give him the time of day. He just probably was drunk and lost it. I don’t know.

So the stuff about Lamb being a former cop and a former deputy, it creates some complications, I would think, with the investigation. Like, were they just like, well, that guy is good because he’s one of us.

Yes, yes, yes, yep. And nobody questioned the fact that at 5:00 AM, he’s fully dressed. And he’s not even at his house. That’s not his house. He’s at somebody else’s house. He’s a married man there — and that his truck was parked in a parking lot away, running. There’s a matchbook by his truck. Nobody questioned any of those things. Nobody did — and then lets him leave town.

What was the matchbook? I hadn’t heard about the matchbook.

There was a thumbprint, like a bloody thumbprint on a matchbook. And they found that. But they didn’t investigate him, take his prints or do anything at that time. They just had that matchbook. And there was a bloody thumbprint on it. They tested Laurie. They tested me. They took hair samples from me, from my pubic hair, from Laurie. But they didn’t test Fred.

And then they let him leave the very next day with all of his clothes and all of his boots and everything that was there. I just knew that they weren’t looking in the right direction. And they didn’t have a frickin’ clue who did that because if they’re sitting there doing all of this to us, they didn’t know what they were doing. They had no idea.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

And the crazy thing, the craziest thing of all, so I worked at the Orthopaedic Center of the Rockies in Fort Collins for 17 years now. There’s a guy that works there that’s a maintenance guy. He’s worked there for 30 years. We’ve known each other for 17 years. And when the first thing came out about Fred, he had the article on his desk. And I thought, well, that’s weird. Why would this guy have this article on his desk?

Well, it turns out that he was the guy that found the apartment on fire that found Shelli that actually knocked on Fred Lamb’s door and caught Fred fully clothed at 5:00 AM. And Fred wouldn’t let him in his house. Fred told him, you can’t help her. I’m a police officer. You need to just leave everything alone.

Wait for the fire department to come. He basically was trying to stop him. But how crazy that — and I’ve always wondered, who was that man that helped us that day and tried to help Shelli? And I worked with him for 17 years and never even knew it. It’s just the strangest thing.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Are you OK if I record this phone call?

Yeah, yeah, I guess so.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pat Kalinay, the maintenance guy, was a little more reluctant to talk than Michelle was. He felt to me like a, speak only when you’ve got something to say, kind of guy. I haven’t lived in the Mountain West for decades. But I’m familiar with the type. Yet when it came down to the morning Shelli was killed, Pat was full of details.

Well, so me and a buddy got up early in the morning to go elk hunting. And he was running late. So I took off to run down to the fly store and drove right by the house and didn’t see anything, went into the fly store for just a couple of minutes and picked up some stuff for lunch and turned around and was on my way back when I went drove by the house. And flames were shooting out the door.

And so I swung around and pulled up in front and jumped out and went running up to the house. And right away, I saw Shelli in on the floor and yelled at her. And she didn’t move. So I tried to get in. And I just stuck my head in the door. And my hair started singeing just barely even getting my head in the door. So I just knew there was no way I was going to get all the way in.

So I went running to the neighbors and started pounding on the door. And a guy comes to the door. And I tell him that the apartment’s on fire. And I needed for him to get me some towels and wet them so I can try to get in and get the girl out. He nods. And he would not move. He wasn’t doing anything. And I think I actually just pushed him out of the way and ran in his house and grabbed some towels and came back.

And by the time I got back over to the apartment, my buddy had showed up. And when he showed up, he tried to do the same thing. And it was just way too hot for us to get in. But anyhow, the neighbor, which I’m sure you’ve heard who that is, right? Help me out here. I’m trying to — I forgot his name.

Fred Lamb.

Yeah, Fred Lamb — and he was just like — he was just out of it. And obviously, my adrenaline was pumping like crazy. And he wasn’t moving and helping me. And I was going crazy to try to get in there. And you could literally see the flames coming out of the door. The door was open. The window was busted out from the room. So flames were coming out.

And I don’t even remember him sticking his head out the door to look over, which is just — drives me crazy. And I remember standing at his door. And we could see where someone was hitting the door with a bloody hand. And then there was a big pool of blood. And then you could see where, obviously, she had hit the ground and then was drug back over to her apartment.

I mean, we were so blown away by the blood on the sidewalk that we thought it was just an innocent accident that her place got on fire and that she had gotten smoke inhalation and passed out or something. That’s kind of where we were at until we saw that blood. And then we were like, holy shit. What the hell is going on here?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the fire department shows up. And they took a statement and got our names and everything and said that they would be in touch. So we went hunting and then came back later. And they called us and asked us to come in. So we went in. And one of the first things I told him was the neighbor. I go, you got to check this guy out. He just seemed just guilty as hell. He knew something and would not help.

And the detective was like, you don’t worry about him. He’s a police officer. And you don’t need to worry about him. And when they told me that, I just came unglued. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? That makes it even worse that he never even stepped out of his apartment, that he couldn’t come over and help me, if you’re telling me he’s a cop.

So I was just livid. And they calmed me down. And so we talked about him, everything. And then that’s when they told me that she had already — she was already dead when I saw her, which me and my buddy both didn’t have a clue of that. We thought she might be still alive. And we couldn’t get in and get her. So it was just killing us all day long. But anyhow, that’s — I mean, I don’t know if you guys — that’s pretty much all I know. But —

Well, let me — I’m letting you just talk. Let me ask you a few follow-up questions. Do you remember talking about the guy? Do you remember having that conversation, like, what a strange encounter?

Yeah, I mean, that was the first place I was going with those — when the detectives were talking to me that night, so.

And did you hear anything from them after that?

I don’t think we did. I don’t remember them contacting us until, holy cow, what was it, 20 something years later when Terry opened it back up again.

What do you think about that?

Well, actually, now that you ask it, it seems awfully strange.

I just, yeah, I mean, I always thought that was always just so weird, although they came out in the papers. And I remember him saying they thought it was a truck driver and this and that.

And we always would talk and wonder who the heck it could have been and just figured it was like the police were saying, that they thought it was a passerby, someone traveling through. And they were gone. But I never did get any answers, so.

Yeah, and here we are.

Yeah, no, and that was just absolutely so maddening for Michelle and I, that Detective Terry told us a lot of this stuff that he had. And it’s like, holy cow, man, this almost seems like an open and closed case. And then the paper even put in his statement that, yeah, yeah, I did — do you remember how that he worded that? It was like, yeah, yeah, I did.

Saying that I did this wouldn’t, like, yeah, what was it exactly? Let me find it.

Yeah, yeah, I did this? It felt like that.

Yeah, something like that. Yeah, but his lawyer argued that he was browbeaten.

Said he was what?

Browbeaten because he — that he was an old man who was diabetic, who was hungry and didn’t understand, was talked to for seven hours. And so basically, all this stuff was taken out of context. Yeah, so —

I didn’t hear any of that.

Yeah, OK, this is what it says in the story from The Boomerang. “According to the documents during a police interview, Lamb initially denied the homicide allegation but later said, “Fred Lamb did it, dot, dot, dot, I’m not denying that I did it.” And, “bottom line is, I killed the girl,” the document states. Lamb consistently denied remembering the crime itself.”

Wow, yes, that’s why this came out just a while after we had met with Terry. And we were all like, yes, this is going to be over in no time. And then, nothing!

Yeah.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

There wasn’t a whole lot more reporting I could do from my apartment in Brooklyn. Police reports, court filings, none of that was online, neither were the news reports from back in the day. But lucky for me, it was March 2021. And the vaccines were rolling out in New York. The country was starting to open up again.

So, first stop is vaccine and then Laramie, right?

Directly, just vaccine —

Directly —

I had a little vacation time, two parents who lived across the country who I hadn’t seen in more than a year. I figured I’d pack up my dog Lucy, grab my friend Jasmine, and go on a road trip — make a pit stop in Laramie, poke around a little, see what I could see.

What do you think, Lucy? What do you think? It’s one very concerned bulldog.

Yeah, it’s a very concerned bulldog. So I think I could just go like this.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Kim talks to Ms. Wiley’s roommate. She tells Kim about the aftermath of Ms. Wiley’s murder and her feelings about Fred Lamb, and she connects her to someone who has even more specific and troubling memories about Mr. Lamb.

transcript

I would say, I am 99.9 percent sure Fred Lamb murdered Shelli.

Previously, on “The Coldest Case in Laramie.”

You could, literally, see the flames coming out of the door. And I don’t even remember him sticking his head out the door to look over.

Somebody mailed me a card with $100 bill in it and said, if you’re smart, you’d leave town. They think it was probably Fred that did that.

The detective who was in charge of it now is not somebody who was originally a police officer at the time. He’s not from Laramie.

What’s his name?

His name is Robert Terry.

Turn left onto Wyoming 130 East, Wyoming 230 East.

We drove into Laramie just before Easter — my first time back in decades. It was a strange sensation to drive through this place that had been frozen in my memory. I tried, but mostly failed, to restrain myself from pointing out all the landmarks I remembered to Jasmine, my friend and road trip partner.

The old houses I’d lived in as a teenager, Stink Lake, the construction pit where my old high school had been torn down — a fitting end to that place, as far as I was concerned. I started slow, working around the edges. I was wary about rolling into town in a new red Prius with New York plates and handing out my “New York Times” business card.

That kind of combination can work against you in Wyoming. I needed some time to adjust to the elevation, get the lay of the land.

I wonder if one of these is like Foster’s, you know what I’m saying? Like, it was in this area.

— into Wyoming 130 East.

Lauri and Brandie flew in from California. We had dinner at the home of Vicki, Lauri and Shelli’s mom. Lauri showed us around the outside of Shelli’s old apartment.

And that was her bedroom window. That would have been like where her bedroom window was right there, and Michelle’s was on the back side. And then, the other living room window was right here. So when —

Shelli’s apartment had been turned into a garage. The other four apartments in the building had been renumbered and repainted — a cheery blue, instead of a dingy brown.

The whole town had a bit of a makeover, really. Foster’s had been torn down and turned into a sprawling Exxon truck stop. The new high school had a gleaming football stadium, an actual running track. Just off Grand Avenue, there was, improbably, a vegetarian restaurant.

After we spent Easter weekend with Shelli’s family, Jasmine and I hit the library.

I’ve got a “Laramie Daily Boomerang” microfiche from October 19 to December 13, 1985. That’s a good picture of her.

Yeah. I haven’t seen that one.

Yeah. She was very sporty.

Right.

Shelli’s murder barely registered in the local paper.

But again, that’s not a jump. That’s it.

That’s it. Five paragraphs.

Hi.

I don’t want to interrupt you if you’re in the middle of numbering —

How can we help you?

So if I’m looking for court records, is this where I come?

Well, if it’s for a felony, a probate —

A trip to the courthouse was also kind of a dead end. We ran Fred’s name through the court system, and the only thing that popped up was a traffic ticket. If Shelli’s family hadn’t kept a few of the court documents, like the old search warrant for Fred and a list of witnesses who were expected to testify, I wouldn’t have had any paper trail. The record of the murder charge had been fully expunged.

The mailbox is full and cannot accept any messages at this time.

I called the old police officers, Shelli’s friends, everyone on the list of witnesses — really, anyone in Laramie who is even tangentially related to the investigation.

Hi, this is Stephanie. Please leave your message. Thank you.

I left a lot of messages.

[BEEP]

Hi, Stephanie. My name is Kim Barker, and I’m actually a reporter with “The New York Times.” I’m calling you on Thursday afternoon at about 12:30 —

I’d been in Laramie a week before I built up the nerve to call Detective Robert Terry, the man who was in charge of the investigation. I was, truthfully, avoiding it. If he didn’t want to talk, this story would be a lot harder to pull off. I didn’t see how I could figure out what was happening in this investigation if nobody doing the actual investigating would talk to me.

I’d been through this many times before. I would call and get the typical police line in this kind of situation. Open case, no comment. But I’d keep reporting and come back a little later, just checking in. I’d be persistent but respectful, a buzzing fly with good manners. Eventually, with a little luck, I would wear him down. But it would be a careful dance, a delicate game of cat and the —

Laramie Police Department, Robert Terry.

Is this Robert Terry?

Yes, it is.

Hi, I don’t know if I’d call you “Assistant Police Chief” or “Mr.” Which do you prefer?

It doesn’t matter.

OK. Well, my name is Kim Barker, and I’m actually a reporter with “The New York Times.” And I’m in Laramie right now, and I’d love to be able to talk to you about a case I know that you’ve worked on pretty hard over the last decade or so. Involving Shelli Wiley.

Right.

I’m actually in Laramie. I’m from Laramie. I went to high school here. I was actually in my sophomore year, in 1985, she was killed. And so I’ve just, like, always found it — it was a — I mean, you weren’t here, but it was a horrific time in Laramie. And I’ve always just been curious what’s happened with the case. And so is there any way we could meet in person and just sort of talk about what we’re doing?

I don’t — I don’t mind meeting with you in person, but I can’t really speak a lot about the case, because it’s still open.

Uh-huh.

I can sure discuss some of the things that are already divulged.

Yeah. That’d be great. That’d be perfect.

Maybe just get to know each other, but I mean, I can’t speak about some of the things we’re doing.

And — yeah, I know you can’t talk about things that are going on behind the scenes. But like, just about the stuff that’s been in the public — and I know — I mean, I know you’ve been very personally invested in the case. And so I mean, according to the family, you’re like the person that they’ve come to depend on.

So to talk a little bit about that, because that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything ongoing. Because it’s nice to have, like — considering who was arrested, to have a positive police officer involved, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, sure it does.

OK.

You want to come to my office, or —

Yeah, I’d love to come to your office. When would work for you?

How about now.

We can move these papers out of the way. Everything just piles up.

Here we go.

So if you could start by introducing yourself.

Sure. My name is Robert G. Terry, and I’m the Assistant Chief for the Laramie Police Department in Laramie, Wyoming.

So talk about this case. How did you come to this case?

So this case is probably the most prolific case in Laramie, and it never was solved. And Laramie has a few cold cases that we’ve worked on over the years, but this is one that a lot of officers had looked at and done some work on.

It’s, by far, the most worked case in the history of the PD, as far as hours and manpower. And this was one I really wanted to take a peek at, and so we pulled all the case files out and went through what we had in evidence, which —

So when they bring you out the reports, and you’re starting to dig into this, I mean, are we talking this much? Like, a foot and a half, 2 feet? How much are you looking at? I know a lot of it was on microfiche, so maybe it’s just like a few microfiche cards.

So kind of how it worked is, people before me had printed them all off. And print ‘em off, three-hole punch ‘em, and put them in notebooks. So it started off with two large — well, they’re right there. Actually, those blue ones that say 1 and 2, they’re just like that.

Whoa, you’ve got them right here.

Yeah. I’ve lived with these for 11 years.

The two —

Just the two blue ones were what is — were what were put together kind of prior to me. And that included all of the written police reports to that point.

And you keep them here.

I keep them with me. Yeah.

So back in the beginning, they didn’t talk a lot about the blood, just that there was a lot of blood. And I know from — the one piece of paper I was able to get was —

The affidavit?

Yeah, yeah, the search warrant and your affidavit. But it talks about the blood going down these two doors. And was there a handprint, or was there blood on that door that was two doors down from Shelli Wiley?

So the blood evidence between the apartment complexes is primarily between apartment 3 and 1, hers being 1, the apartment where Fred Lamb was staying in — number 3. So there was blood evidence on number 3, and then on the sidewalk, leading to and into number one.

So we know our crime scene — at least that portion of it is in there, from there to there. And lots of it. There’s a lot of story there.

The story, as Detective Robert Terry told it, was pretty simple, if a little vague. He said that when he first started poking around the case, he looked through all of the evidence and read through all of the police reports — basically, the write-ups of the interviews the police did in 1985, right after the murder.

Terry said he got interested in Fred Lamb for several reasons. Fred was there, but his reason for being there seemed odd for a guy with a family. Terry thought it was suspicious that Fred, a former cop, didn’t immediately respond when he heard a commotion outside.

Fred was interviewed by police the day of Shelli’s murder. But that interview seemed a bit cursory and strange to Terry. Finally, biggest of all, when Terry sent out cheek swabs of possible suspects to see if they matched with any of the DNA found at the crime scene, he got a match for Fred Lamb.

So what ties the DNA of Fred Lamb to Shelli Wiley?

I can’t tell you all that. But obviously, we have blood evidence of Fred in that crime scene. So that’s really all I can tell you, which says a lot, really. I mean, that’s almost too much, but that’s really it. We know that he was there. I mean, we saw him there that morning.

It’s not — like, the whole point of this is — like, this homicide is not very difficult. It’s just not. I would hope, knock on wood, this doesn’t happen, but if it happened today — I’ve always said this — I believe that the outcome would be much different, just because of the way that we’re trained and how we do things.

But it wasn’t — it’s not complicated. When I’ve talked to some of the guys — and some of them aren’t alive anymore that were there — everybody knew — I mean, he worked with them. Fred worked with everybody at that scene.

And not only that, but was in the guard. And I mean, that’s like a friend. So you’re showing up, and your friend’s there, and you’re kind of like, well, that doesn’t make much sense. But yeah, surely, people that I work with wouldn’t be responsible for something like this.

So the dynamics and the culture and the friendships and everything just — it made things more difficult, and it had to have been extremely hard for the officers, because they were uncomfortable. And they would never have thought that somebody that they knew and worked with, especially as a police officer, would be involved. But —

So there’s some match that comes back that you can’t discuss, but it implicates Fred with DNA evidence. What happens after that?

So when you go back and listen to his interview, he tells them about said piece of evidence, and it’s like, holy fuck. Like, excuse my language for whoever is listening to this, but like, seriously, he told him about it in 1985.

It’s just, it just goes back to that dynamic of the relationships. Like, oh, OK, Fred, thank you. We’ll get a hold of you later. I mean, just didn’t do anything with it.

What was he like? You might find my blood there, because I was putting a screen back in, or something like that?

Yeah, always has a reason for anything. He knows. He knows what they’re going to ask, and he just — he told them what he wanted them to know, and just made ‘em super uncomfortable, and that’s how it ended. Just, that’s it. OK.

Thanks, Fred. See you later, buddy. Let me know when you get back. We’ll go have a beer, kind of thing, you know? It’s just like me talking to one of my friends, and there’s no — that’s why we’re here now, almost 40 years later. So.

Can you talk about where the case stands now, just as much as you can say?

Yeah, I mean, the case is still active. I need a new prosecutor. I’m still working with Peggy’s office to get that accomplished, and then move forward with our plan. We want to take this to trial. We just got to have a prosecutor assigned and somebody that wants to do it. And COVID needs to let up on our restrictions for courtroom.

The jurors need to see this, and they have to see it. The family has to be there. Maybe not all of her family, but a lot of them want to know. They deserve that, and the time is running out. I mean, that’s just the sad part of it.

You know, people are getting old, and people are passing away. And all the cops are passing away, the families are passing away, and eventually, Fred’s going to pass away. And that’s the biggest worry of the whole thing — is like, are we going to miss our opportunity to hold him responsible? We know who did this. We just have to prove it.

Fred sent word that he didn’t want to talk. But his lawyer, Vaughn — he had a lot to say.

When Judge Sanford became a judge, I got all drunk, and I started giving Terry and all the cops a bunch of shit. And there was some of this going on. And I was telling him what a bunch of putzes they were for having the wrong guy.

Can I ask you just to identify, say what your full name is and what you do for a living?

Vaughn Howard Neubauer. I’m a criminal defense attorney.

So when you go to law school, do you want to do defense law?

I wanted to be a public defender. I’ve always hated the death penalty. I’ve never liked the cops. I hate authority. Yeah, I wanted to be a public defender, and I would — if I wouldn’t have gotten fired, I’d still be one, but there you have it. After my second daughter died, I had a very bad year. I got arrested four times in one year, and they let me go.

Oh, my god. OK, number one, your second daughter died?

Yeah, I got — they were both stillborn. But yeah. But we got two boys.

That’s good. But that had to be a really — and so you were working as a —

I had a stressful time. [LAUGHS]

So you’re a public defender. Your second daughter dies. You mess up a few times. And they fire you, and then you go and you hang your own shingle out. Is that about it?

That’s about the way it worked. Yeah.

OK. And you had any of your big cases before then?

Oh, yeah. All the death penalty stuff was as a public defender. I also did the Bush case, which was a 20-year-old cold homicide.

Cold cases don’t happen all that often. I’ve done — for Wyoming, I’ve done a significant number of cold homicide cases, though.

How many would you say you’ve done?

Eton, Bush, Bean, Lamb — four.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s a lot —

For Wyoming, it is. Yeah.

Yeah. So talk about how you got involved with the Lamb case and how you first heard about it.

They called me. I don’t know how they got my name. And they hired me. Yeah.

So then what happens?

Boy, we were ready to go. And they dismiss, claiming that they had to get other evidence tested. Now, this was a 20-some-year cold case, and the way these work is every time somebody gets promoted to detective, they’re handed all the cold cases. So every new detective since 19 — well, when was it, 1988 or —

‘85.

—‘85 — has had this case. Every piece of physical evidence has been tested. There was nothing left to retest. And they dismiss, saying they needed to get evidence tested some more, which was not even true. There’s nothing left to retest.

They’re out of blood.

They still have the swabs from the door where Freddy was.

And just because some of Fred’s blood was on a door, two doors down — I always fail to see the significance of that.

They had nothing inside the apartment.

I mean, her body — and there was enough left to identify her. She wasn’t completely consumed by the fire, and the fire really only did the living room. Lots of the bedroom, the kitchen — lots of stuff in that survived.

And they collected, you know, bed sheets. I can’t remember what all else, but there is nothing to connect Fred Lamb with the inside of that apartment. They found a bloody matchbook cover with a fingerprint on it.

What was it? Like a palm print or something?

Yeah, kind of like that. I don’t know if any of this is in my electronic files or not. If — now, Fred said I could talk to you. So if it’s not in here — I mean, because there is so much. I don’t know if we put it in the electronic files or not. It’s in storage, either over at 6th Street or in our storage locker. I can —

That’d be great.

I can go find it.

Yeah.

But again, it’s a cold case. I mean, the DVDs are that high. There’s a lot of stuff.

Happy to look through that with you, if you’re amenable to that.

Sure.

Boy, OK, so we do have it.

Come on.

See, it’s thinking.

Yeah. It got mad at me.

You made it do a lot at the same time, to be fair.

Yeah.

But yeah, let’s go back to talking, and then we can look at some stuff. So you get involved. You get all this discovery. You start going through it.

And you’re working with somebody who’s — it’s been a very long time. I don’t know — is he — is his mind all there? Does he remember that night?

Yeah, you know, Fred’s a —

he’s a simple man. But no, his memory is good. I mean, he remembers going to sleep. He remember some kind of commotion. He looked out the window, and then there’s people banging on his door saying there’s a fire.

That’s what Fred remembers. And so he’s a guy — he really thought that the police were coming to scratch his brain to see if he could have any insights, you know. Seven hours, he didn’t see it coming.

And they confronted him with all these lies about what the physical evidence was. And after seven hours, the most Terry could get Fred Lamb to admit — he got him to admit that, yes, I agree that the great weight of the evidence points towards me. He never had a speeding ticket. The one and only crime he’s ever been charged with is first-degree murder.

I’m assuming that would have been your defense, had you gone to trial.

It would have been both a negative defense — Fred didn’t do it — and we had an alternate suspect that we thought we could have put pretty big meat on. Now, I don’t know if the “Boomerang” ever had this before the fire department got called.

Some Hispanic male came in and bought gas. I think this is at the fly store. They did a composite sketch of him, and it sure looks like Larry Montez’s junior high school yearbook photo to me. I know Larry did it. He did it.

I mean, it was pervy as hell. That night, Larry — he drove — he had a crush on some teenage girl up in Rock River. He drove up there in the middle of the night, went into her house — I don’t think he had to break in. They probably had the door open — but sat there and watched her sleep for an hour. And he left Rock River in plenty of time to get back down here and do this. Yeah.

And Larry Montez’s name — it’s never been made public.

No, they dragged Fred through the dirt. And yeah. I mean, he went to prison for being a child molester, you know. But —

Larry did.

Larry did, yeah. He died in prison.

Right. Right. So what is your impression of how that scene was handled from the very beginning, and the evidence collection, and what the police did?

You know, I’m not a cop, but I do know they like to keep a track of their witnesses in the early stages of an investigation. They had a very racist response. They’d gotten information that Shelli Wiley had had an African-American boyfriend, and maybe she had a preference for African-American males. And oh my god, did they turn this town upside down looking for African-American males.

In talking to her family, they just — they also talk about all the rumors that were being spread about Shelli at that point, you know — blaming her, you know.

She had it coming. She was flirting with guys at the truck stop. She was going out with African-Americans. She had to be a slut because of that. You know? I mean, no morals whatsoever. Didn’t she think something like this was going to happen to her? Yeah, there was lots of that. There was — yeah.

Do you think they’re, at all, investigating anything now?

They did a search warrant on Fred less than a year ago. Me and Fred had to go get a whole other set of complete handprints taken.

And they’re not going to show anything, because Fred was asleep. I mean, I don’t know all the killers, but I’ve met a lot of killers. If Fred Lamb’s a killer, I’ll kiss your ass on a main street.

Did you — did they give you any of the old audio of the initial investigation, like the interviews?

Let’s see.

These are from 2009. Here’s a — that’s from 11.

Here’s one from 1985. Three disks. It’s on video even.

Do you have this that connects to there? So we can just bring over a hard drive. And that works, right?

Looks like they’re all there. You got some nighttime reading.

Over the years, I’ve had lawyers show me documents they believe will persuade me of their client’s story. I’ve had lawyers give me depositions that never made it into a court file. I’ve gotten redacted police reports through public records requests.

But I’ve never had a lawyer hand me everything they’ve gotten in discovery, all the police and lab reports, and basically say, have at it. I was confused about why Vaughn made the offer, and suspicious about whether he would actually give me the entire file, or just the stuff that made his client look innocent. It was hard to know how seriously to take Vaughn.

He told me that the only DNA they found of Fred was at the door of apartment number 3 — the information that Terry was being tightlipped about. But was that true? I could already sense him trying to sell me on the Larry Montez thing.

I was skeptical, felt pretty damn convenient to blame the murder on a sex offender — and a dead one, no less. When Vaughn ended the interview that day, he said we’d hit beer o’clock. We headed over to The Buckhorn, the oldest, weirdest bar in Laramie — Vaughn’s favorite.

Jasmine and I drank more beers than we should have. Over the next few days, we circled back and grabbed all of the case files. I sat at Vaughn’s office computer, sandwiched between art prints of Che Guevara and Cheech & Chong, making sure I got everything.

It was a fire hose of reporting material. I’m pretty sure Vaughn thought that once I reviewed it all, I’d have to come to the conclusion he’d been paid to come to — or at least paid to defend it — that there was no way Fred Lamb committed this murder.

Kim heads to Laramie for the first time in decades and talks to the detective who arrested Mr. Lamb and still resolutely believes he killed Ms. Wiley. Mr. Lamb’s defense lawyer tells a very different story.

transcript

We’ll, uh, get a hold of you later. Let me know when you get back. We’ll have a beer.

Previously, on “The Coldest Case in Laramie —”

I remember it so well. I remember it like it was yesterday.

A detective was like, don’t worry about him. He’s a police officer. And you don’t need to worry about him. And when they told me that, I just came unglued. I was like, what the hell are you talking about?

Well, they’re assholes, because they wouldn’t really answer any of our questions.

I know that he did it. He did it. I mean, it was pervy as hell.

He knows. He knows what they’re going to ask, and he just — he told them what he wanted them to know.

The case file Fred’s lawyer gave me was sprawling — almost 8,000 pages of Investigative reports, hundreds of photos, more than 70 hours of audio and video interviews. Bad xeroxes and stapled-on addendums and handwritten notes. I stared at a poorly rendered drawing of Shelli’s Sweet Dreams night shirt for a while.

In the earliest pages, I could see the police contending with the little they had to go on. The fire destroyed a lot of potentially helpful evidence. So did the attempt to contain it. Shelli’s body was burned, badly enough that it couldn’t be a helpful source of leads, although it was clear she was naked.

Police took that and the bloodstains on her water bed as signs that the attack might have started as a sexual assault in the bedroom. Other evidence was found outside. Behind the complex, someone had cut the phone lines to all five apartments.

And about 350 feet away, a distance slightly longer than a football field, there was a bloody matchbook with some kind of hand or fingerprint visible through the blood. The matchbook was decorated with a train and the words, “tank town” on the cover. Police found it near several footprints and tire tracks left in the dirt.

And then, there was the blood. There were two large puddles on the sidewalk in front of the apartments. In the middle of one, a broken serrated blade from a steak knife. Nearby, bloody pieces of a broken vase.

The police figured that Shelli must have tried to escape at some point, making her way from her apartment and down the sidewalk before her attacker caught her. He pulled her back toward her apartment, dragging her 44 feet down the sidewalk, and stabbed her, leaving the puddles. The drag marks went over the top of a bloody boot print.

This was a clue, too. It suggests that the killer had left it when he was dragging Shelli back to her apartment. The blood trail and the sidewalk appeared to stop entirely, at least 10 feet from the door to apartment number 3.

Notably, the police did find a little more blood there, separated from the rest of the blood at the crime scene. A few tiny flecks on the door of apartment number 3 — Fred’s friend’s place, where he was staying the night.

Police brought him in to answer questions about 11 hours after Shelli’s murder. The first recorded interview in the case file —

The date — 20th August — of October — 20, October, 1985. Place — Detective Graham’s office, present. Fred Lamb and Rob Graham.

Try to find out what you know of what occurred out at — on Taylor Street.

The mood of the interview was chummy. Detective Rob Graham and Fred actually knew each other. Graham seemed more interested in Fred as a witness than as a suspect.

So you start with last night, but you had a drill last night, a guard drill?

Right, we had a drill this week, too.

Fred said he spent the evening at the American Legion with a few of his buddies, including Dave Palmer, his National Guard friend who rented apartment number 3.

And we sat around, and we’re drinking. They were drinking beer and pop, and I was drinking mostly coke. At about 8:00, I decided to switch to Jack Daniels and some coke. And I had five of those.

And it was about 10:20, I left. And the reason that I left was because I had seen an advertisement on TV that instead of “Saturday Night Live,” they were having Championship Wrestling.

Dave stuck around and eventually headed home with a woman. So Fred was alone for the night. Either the advertisement was wrong, or Fred misunderstood it. But when he got to Dave’s apartment, there was no Championship Wrestling. Instead, Fred said he watched the second half of “MASH,” and headed to bed.

The next thing that happened was, I woke up. And I remember — and this is awful crazy, because I didn’t wake up quickly. But I distinctly remember somebody pounding or knocking on something, somebody pounding — it sounded like when a rowdy friend shows up — how they pound on the door.

And I can’t tell you where it was at. I can’t tell you if it was Dave’s door, number 3, or somewhere else in that complex. And then, I heard a female voice.

After the loud knocking, Fred said he heard what sounded like a woman’s voice. Not screaming exactly, but loud. At first, he didn’t think much of it. There was always some kind of noise around Dave’s apartment on the weekend, but he figured he should give it a look, so he got up and poked his head out.

Everything was quiet, so I closed the door. And since Dave wasn’t there, I went over to his stereo and turned on the alarm clock. I was thinking about going back to sleep, and I thought, shit, 5:00 — another half-hour of sleep — I might as well just get up. And when I took my morning leak and came in and was sitting down, putting my uniform back on, when I heard a vehicle drive up and the horn started honking and somebody screaming, fire, fire, fire.

So I ran to the door and opened it up, and there were three male subjects there, running up and down the complex, screaming, fire, fire. Do I have a telephone? And I looked out, and saw the flames coming out of apartment number 1.

I didn’t know it was apartment number 1 at that time, but I saw flames at that end of the building. So I ran inside and grabbed the telephone and got absolutely nothing. The phone was just slap dead.

A kid came running back to the door, and he says, do you have any towels or anything? And so I said, are the people out of the apartment? And he says, I don’t know, I think so.

So I told him that the bathroom was at the end of the hall, to get towels or whatever he needed out of the first bedroom on the right, which is where Dave sleeps. And I started towards the apartment. As I was going towards the apartment, I noticed that somewhere in the vicinity of number 2, there looked like to be a puddle of blood, about a unit worth of blood in size.

And so I stepped to my right, so that I wouldn’t walk over it, and walked down the gravel. Right in front of the door to number 1 was another puddle of blood. I would say one to one and 1/2 units in size — damn good size puddle.

Bigger than the first one.

Yeah, by about half again, if not twice as big.

At that time, I noticed that there were drag marks from the pool of blood, and then there was a drag mark that didn’t go up the staircase, kind of a kitty corner, and into the door. And at that time, I heard the first unit sirens.

So I just walked back up to my — to Dave’s apartment, to make sure it wasn’t burned. And then, Officer Avery showed up and asked me what I knew of it, and then I showed him — I showed him the blood. Oh, one of the things I did do was, I believe it was Officer Avery requested that I cut the power if I knew where it was.

While we were going over that crime scene, those drag marks got pretty close to Dave’s place. And it was a little bit of just real tiny splatter, like on the door that’s mine.

It was your blood?

That’s my blood. If it’s on his door, it’s my blood.

It was just a little bit, you know — well, what happened was, when I was hunting and my dog was giving me a bunch of crap, and so I reached in the back of the truck and smacked him and cut this knuckle on his collar. And that would have been the 12th, 13th, and the 14th, when I was duck hunting.

And when [INAUDIBLE] I went over, I usually rang the doorbell and hit the door. Ding dong, ding dong, da da da. And when I rap the door once, I must have cut that damn scab. Because I went like that, and the porch light was on, and I saw the blood splatter on the door. I looked at my knuckle, and it was bleeding.

So on the door, I can’t say it’s all my blood, but there is some of my blood on the door. I couldn’t even say how many drops.

OK. What blood type are you, Fred?

I’m sorry?

What’s your blood type? Because they’re going to — I’m sure they picked that up.

A-positive.

A-positive? Yeah, I don’t want them typing your blood.

Tests would soon show two types of blood at the crime scene — type O, which matched Shelli, and type A, which was found at several spots, including a trace amount on the matchbook, 350 feet from Shelli’s apartment. Fred’s interview didn’t go on much longer than this.

The whole thing lasted about 35 minutes. He mentioned that he had guard duty the next day, and would be heading to Arkansas for training. He’d be gone a couple of weeks. But just before the interview ended, Detective Graham and Fred had a small exchange. Looking at the case file, it seemed to indicate where the investigation was headed.

I’m hearing people talk and yammer. Apparently, this chick ran with a pretty heavy crowd.

Fred says, “You know, I’m now hearing people talk and yammer. Apparently, this chick ran with a pretty heavy crowd.”

They weren’t the salt-of-the-earth types.

“They weren’t the salt-of-the-earth types.”

It might have caught up with her.

“Well, it might have caught up with her,” Detective Graham responds.

I’m gonna kill this tape recorder at 4:13 PM.

After that first interview with Fred, the Laramie Police Department spoke with the people in Shelli’s life — family, friends, former roommates, coworkers, ex-boyfriends. And in these interviews, they started focusing on certain aspects of Shelli’s life in what sometimes felt like a pretty ham-handed way.

Is — was Shelli promiscuous? And did she like sex, I guess? Now, we’re looking for a motive. That’s the worst thing in this —

Do you have any indication what her reputation was, who she messed around with, things of that nature?

What was Shelli’s favorite drink?

What kind of person do you think Shelli was prior to your relationship?

In these conversations and in tips that came in, the police collected many facts about Shelli. There were a lot of rumors mixed in there, too — that Shelli was part of a drug deal gone wrong, that a satanic cult could be involved, that she was at a party the night she was killed where someone had threatened to kill her. I followed the pinball of their inquiry, spoke to as many of their targets as I could.

I know she was a popular girl. No doubt about that. Did she seem to concentrate on the Black athletes, or was she friends with all of them?

Detectives initially seemed to focus on Shellis’ relationships at the University of Wyoming. They’d heard, for example, that she was friendly with members of the football team. One name in particular kept coming up — Alan Griffin.

Police couldn’t find Alan the Sunday Shelli was killed. So that day, all officers in the Laramie area were told to be on the lookout for him and his vehicle. For security reasons, was passed from officer to officer, not over the radio, but by word of mouth.

They eventually found him. Three days after Shelli’s murder, police brought him in for questioning. At the time, Alan a star wide-receiver for the University of Wyoming Cowboys. He told police that he and Shelli met at a baseball game in 1981.

How much did you actually date her in 1981? Was it a relationship that kind of grew? Was it longer that you knew each other? Or was it just an occasional type thing?

It was more of an occasional thing, definitely occasional.

How about during the 1982 school year? Did you still continue being friends?

Yeah, we were friends. That’s about it.

What happened when you came back to school? Anything in particular? Did you ever date in 1982?

Date her?

Yeah.

No. We — I think —

we need to clarify that — get on the same page about the word, “date.”

OK, yeah, I understand that. I figured, you know, I consider a date just going out and having a good time with people, you know.

No, we never —

What do you — what do you define as a date, I guess?

I guess, well, a date — going out, and — I don’t think we ever went out on a set date, say, you know, I’ll pick you up at 7 and we’ll do this and do this and do that. It wasn’t like that. It was more of a — it was more of a spontaneous thing. I’d either just call her and say, you want to come over, you want to get together, or it’d be like I’d see her somewhere, and then we’d get together.

Yeah, I have no qualms with that. I think we’re on the same line, really. I just consider just a guy and a gal going out and having a good time, whether it’s spontaneous or, hey, you know, what are you doing next Friday. Doesn’t make a difference to me.

Can you give me a list, in your own mind, of other acquaintances that she might be friends with? I realize that she was kind of a popular young lady. So you could probably help me if we can compile a list of who she’s acquainted with.

No, I really don’t. The only people I knew that she hung around was a roommate, Michelle, and Michelle’s boyfriend, and I guess, maybe some people that she worked with. Like I said, if we talked about it at all, the only thing she ever told me was that she had — she would stay after work and have a couple of drinks at the bar.

Uh-huh. How about other Black athletes, Alan?

As far as knowing her or —

Knowing or going out with her.

I don’t know of any that went out with her. I know she — I’m pretty sure there’s a couple of guys that know her. So.

What were some of her interests? What did you guys like to do when you were together?

To be totally honest, the only thing that we ever did together was have sex. That was about — I mean, that was — it was — when we were together, I mean, that was about the extent of things. It was only — like just a casual hi and bye besides that.

One of the things I anticipate getting into, of course, is — it’s interesting in this — regards that we don’t know what a motive is for this incident. Of course there’s no doubt in my mind this is a homicide. It’s a very brutal killing.

Since you mentioned the sex, I was going to get into that. Do you feel uncomfortable talking about that subject? I think you’d be in a better position than any of the family would, whatsoever, because it’s a private life.

Right.

Did she have any quirks when it came to sex?

No.

How about any homosexual tendencies? I’m not saying that there are any. I’m just asking, in regards to sexual habits.

As far as —

Do you have any knowledge of her having any homosexual tendencies?

No. I have no idea. I would seriously doubt it, but I don’t know for sure.

OK, well, I’m not making those allegations. Don’t get me wrong. I’m just asking, because you know, heterosexual or homosexual type things as coming up. What kind of reputations did she have?

You look at a rather attractive white girl, and it’s kind out of character. And I’m not trying to be prejudiced or anything, but I want you to realize, one of the things we’re looking at is, it’s unusual for — well, I’m not saying it’s unusual.

I think it’s a rather natural thing, but when you have a white, fairly attractive student dating or just acquaintance with Blacks, some people seem to frown on that, and it seems to stick in their mind for some reason. Did you ever have any difficulties with your parents in regards to your relationship with her?

The police took fingerprints and blood from Alan, combed his pubic hair, too. From the beginning, when the police approached him at his apartment, Alan said that he had an alibi. He had spent the night in Laramie with another woman. That eventually checked out.

Alan Griffin lives in Washington State now. He’s a basketball coach and a high school teacher. I tracked him down, because I wanted to know his reaction to being a suspect back in 1985.

I had absolutely nothing to hide. It wasn’t like I was concerned. It was just like, I would have had, back then, a much higher regard for law enforcement than I do now. And I would have definitely, back then, I just did whatever they asked me to do.

I learned that Alan didn’t really know much about the investigation, definitely didn’t know that he was a suspect. Considering how large Alan loomed in the early parts of the case file, it was surprising to me how much of a mystery Shelli was to him.

I just remember how — I mean, she was — she was like — what’s the best way to describe her? I mean, she was real — she was cool to hang out with, just low-key, didn’t talk a whole lot.

She had a — she had just — she was a pretty young lady. And when she smiled, and it was real, it was just awesome. She had an awesome smile. But she didn’t — like I say, she didn’t talk much, wasn’t — I mean, she could be in a room and nobody even noticed, right? I mean, she wasn’t loud.

She wasn’t — she would intentionally, I think, as I got to know her — she would intentionally, probably, want to just fade into the background, right? Not be noticed. But she was friendly, genuine. Yeah, she was cool.

In the police interviews, Shelli’s family and friends talked about how much she liked Alan. They seemed to think it had been a serious relationship, or at least that Shelli wanted it to be one. One ex-boyfriend mentioned that Shelli had, quote, “quite a newspaper collection of his outstanding feats and whatnot.” Alan was in the dark about all that, too.

I mean, it’s surprising. I wouldn’t — it just was — this is going to sound really weird, but it wasn’t — it was just safe. Friends with benefits. I would — it’s kind of surprising that she had more feelings than that, than what I’m aware of.

Talking to Alan, it felt like he was looking back at this period of his life through the eyes of an adult, maybe for the first time — that he was considering how young they both were, how immature he was back then, that he was realizing how much growing up he got to do that Shelli didn’t.

You know, the sad part about it is, I was so shallow-minded and self-centered, that the only thing I was really thinking about is — I mean, it was game day.

So I borrowed a friend’s car to go to the funeral, and I was just thinking about it, just got to — you know, hope this doesn’t last long. Sat in the back. Or it was — if I remember correctly, it was pretty crowded in the little church. It had an A-frame.

I didn’t — I didn’t realize how her dad must have been feeling, how her brothers were feeling. It didn’t really, like — it didn’t really, like — I wouldn’t have been — I didn’t think like that then, because I was thinking about not being late for the game. Because I knew how my coach was.

If I was late, I wouldn’t have played, so I was thinking more like that.

I was kind of —

kind of disappointed that that’s what I was thinking, but that’s just the truth.

And that’s about all that I remember. It was just like, I was only thinking about me.

When Fred’s defense attorney handed me the case file, he had mentioned that the police response to Shelli’s murder was sexist and racist. I heard that in the interviews, and I saw it in the paths the detectives went down in their investigation. They didn’t stop with Alan Griffin, someone they knew Shelli had a relationship with. Instead, they went after a lot of the Black players on the University of Wyoming football team.

So explain to me, did you know Shelli at all?

Not at all.

Had you ever even met her?

Might have seen her.

So —

But I mean, didn’t know her from a can of paint.

Eric Porter was also on the team, played both ways — linebacker and runningback. Some safety thrown in there, too. He came to Wyoming from San Diego and remembers the culture shock of arriving — the fights with the largely white wrestling team, the bar he remembers locals banning the football team from.

Eric says he held out on giving his blood and fingerprints to the police for a while. He still remembers how they sprung into action shortly after Shelli’s murder.

Right after they said it was a crime scene, you literally saw 1/2 of Laramie police standing up near the dorms. They had football programs in their hand, looking for guys. And you’ll be walking to class — hey, come with me. They were just smashing up wherever we were.

They were hanging out wherever. They were, literally, on a corner spot, just snatching you up. It felt like some shit out the ‘30s and ‘40s, when they just round up Black people and hang you. That’s what it felt like.

So what do you remember — what do you remember about being called in and about them actually getting you into the police station?

When I finally came back to Wyoming and submitted to it, the cocky-ass attitude. And they finally got me to do it. It was like, we finally got this [MUTED]:. That was their attitude. That was their attitude.

And I hated that I had to submit to get peace. They just wouldn’t leave me alone. And my mom finally said, hey, they’re not going to stop. You didn’t do nothing, so just give ‘em, just give ‘em something, Eric. And maybe then —

They made a deal with my mom, and I’m like, Mom, if they don’t stop, I need you to give me an attorney. And my sister worked for the phone company, and she promised, if they didn’t stop, she would hire an attorney. This shit still gets me emotional right now.

During the first week of the investigation, the University of Wyoming football team theory didn’t go much of anywhere. But it’s clear from the case file that the police were simultaneously pursuing another lead.

What kind of party were we having there?

We were just dancing around with them. I do believe they were. They were saying quarters when I first got there.

What’s quarters?

Well — (CHUCKLING) You get a quarter and bounce it on the table, and you try to make it in the glass.

The party with all this dancing and quartering was happening at a ramshackle house about three blocks from Shelli’s apartment on the night she was killed. The crowd of about 15 was mostly current and former Laramie High and Junior High students. Shelli wasn’t there. She was at home, drinking tea with a friend.

But the party seemed to pique the cops’ interests. Police already knew some of the partygoers — young Hispanic men who had lots of run-ins with the cops already, some of the usual suspects in town. Both the party and Shelli’s apartment were on the west side of Laramie, which was less a census-designated place than it was, literally, the wrong side of the tracks.

The railroad divided it from Laramie proper. The West Side had a few fancy homes, but for the most part, it was poorer. It’s where you’d find auto repair yards, tire shops, and mobile homes.

A lot of the Hispanic population of Laramie lived there, too, including one attendee of the party, Vaughn Neubauer’s favorite alternate suspect, Larry Montez. As Vaughn told me, Larry had stolen a car during the party, and then he’d gone missing for a few hours, right in the window of time when Shelli was killed.

— was a sign that right there. You are represented by your attorney, Cal Rerucha. And we’ve already discussed the fact that we are not interested in the unauthorized use of the vehicle. OK? All we’re concerned about is the homicide.

Vaughn had told me that Larry had gone to Rock River, because of some girl he had a crush on. That wasn’t quite right. Larry was actually visiting his ex-girlfriend, Summer Stevenson, who lived just outside of Laramie, about a half-hour away from Rock River.

He was right about Larry’s alibi, though, and how bizarre it was. Larry said that after he stole the car, he grabbed a hot dog and a Slurpee from a convenience store. From there, he drove to Summer’s house, where he slipped into her room and found her asleep.

I just sat around and just watched her.

And then, I got up. Because I started seeing daylight. I said I’d better get his car back. I had to have been about 4:00, 4:30, between there.

By the time they brought him in, the police had heard a bunch of suspicious things about Larry from that night — that he had cuts on his face, that his glasses were missing, that he was wearing a different coat than he’d worn at the party, that he was acting strange.

This is important. I want you to think about it before you answer. When you went back to the house, to the party, about what time was that?

Had to have been about 5:00, 5:15.

OK.

Took me a while to get out there.

All right. You know — do you know the girl that was killed?

Not really.

All right. Have you ever been over to that apartment there?

I don’t know where it is. [CHUCKLES]

You don’t know where the apartment’s at? So in other words, if I were to check fingerprints, I shouldn’t find your fingerprints there?

In the house? No.

OK. Did you ever hear anyone say that you did it?

No.

Did you know people have been saying that you did it?

No.

Is there any reason why people would think that you did it?

Yeah, ‘cause I have a record.

You have a record? Any other reason?

No. I’m not that kind of dude.

You tell me why I’m talking to you. If you’re a police officer, why am I talking to Larry Montez?

Well, because he was around the scene of crime.

And what else?

And —

He’s missing for two to three or four hours. We don’t know where he’s at, which is about the time a gal got killed. When I’m talking to all these people here, in the last few days, I’m concerned that we’ve learned stuff like, you’ve been getting into other people’s homes that you didn’t know about. Don’t ask surprised, because we’re being pretty open here.

I mean, the people that have talked to me have identified you as being that person. I mean, there’s no doubt in their mind that they knew who it was. They even talked to you, confronted you about it. I’m just trying to tell you like it is. That’s all. And I know that you and your friends on the West Side are very tight. You’re a very select group of people. You don’t think so?

No.

Well, us white folks think that you are, OK? OK. Well, we just think that you’re just your own little group, like you got the Cowboys or the Mexicans or whatever else — the metal heads — whatever they call them — I’m not that familiar with all the groups that we’ve got.

But all that peer pressure that’s there has a bad effect on kids. You got kids that are drinking, doing drugs, having sex with girls and stuff like that when they’re really, really young. And all sorts of problems — breaking into homes, stealing shit, and shoplifting, all that stuff that goes on.

This homicide that took place — it’s got a lot of people in this community scared, a lot of people that didn’t even know this girl. A lot of people who live in — a lot of people who live in Laramie are saying, you know, I came to Laramie because I didn’t want to live in Chicago or Denver, where this happens all the time.

They’re here, because they figure this is a nice, quiet town. And now, they’re thinking, we got some damn demon out here, who’s killing, murdering people, stabbing them, beating them, and doing all this sort of shit. So it just — it’s no fun for me or anybody else. I’ll get off my soapbox. We need to get this other stuff down on tape.

Police looked at Larry Montez for a few more days. They confirmed that Larry had been in a fight a week before, possibly explaining his bruises. They talked to Summer Stevenson, his ex, who when asked whether she knew Larry, said, simply, unfortunately.

Summer didn’t really remember Larry stopping by to watch her sleep. But Larry had engaged in such stalkery before, and Summer’s sister did find a big Gulp cup on the dresser, with ice still inside. The police seemed to rule Larry out after giving him a polygraph.

He was one of four men who took a lie detector test in the first month of the investigation. Police said Larry’s results couldn’t be scored as conclusively truthful, but quote, “there is no strong indication that would tend to show deception, given the fact that polygraphs generally aren’t allowed as evidence in court.”

I didn’t make much of those results. Other results seem more clearcut to me. It’s not just that this investigation seemed to corral the relatively few people of color in town into its dragnet. It’s that it seemed to linger there, burrowing in deeper than even the most charitable reading of the evidence called for.

I did a tally of the 39 men who initially gave fingerprints or blood samples. 25 of them were Black or Hispanic — more than 1/2, in a town where 9 out of 10 people were white.

Contrary to the description of Shelli’s family and friends, and even Detective Robert Terry, the police did give Fred a second look. 10 days after the murder, someone from the state lab told police that Fred’s story of how his blood got on the door of apartment number 3 — that he knocked on the door a few days before the murder and broke open a scab — didn’t match the spatter pattern.

Detectives called Fred back in after he got back from his trip to Arkansas, but without much urgency. They took a blood sample and fingerprints, but never looked in his actual home for evidence. It took them almost two months to look inside apartment number 3, where he was staying the night of Shelli’s murder.

Fred did agree to take a polygraph, showing that the police seemed to be treating him as a suspect. But that was pretty much the end of it. And what I can only interpret as a sign of how little they regarded him seriously — the results from that polygraph never even made it into the case file.

With their initial leads fizzling, the police started going broad. Over the next year and a half, they surveyed all the barber and beauty shops in town, checking if anyone had come in with burns or singed hair.

They followed up on tips from the Crime Stoppers phone line and pursued leads. Police interviewed a guy who’d talked to Shelli once at an aerobics class, another man who Shelli had dated in high school, who had started a few fires and lived two hours away. They called in a man who’d come onto their radar because of a recent arrest for practicing as a ninja in public.

They looked for men with nicknames — the Spook, described as a shady guy, with a pale complexion and sandy hair, who haunted the library — and the Guardian, a regular customer at Shelli’s restaurant who supposedly looked out for her. All that effort didn’t produce anything resembling a bona fide lead.

Police were more or less spinning in circles, until almost two years after the murder, when they finally got a break — a call from a detective in Flagstaff, Arizona, who relayed a message. Someone had confessed to killing Shelli Wiley.

Kim digs into the early stages of the investigation into Ms. Wiley’s murder and follows up with old suspects. She takes a close look at who the Laramie police scrutinized — and who they didn’t.

transcript

Just a heads-up, the following episode has brief mentions of suicide. Please take care when listening. If you’re having suicidal thoughts or need someone to talk to, please call the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.

Previously on “The Coldest Case in Laramie”—

And I know that you and your friends on the West Side are very tight. You’re a very select group of people. You don’t think so? Well, us white folks think that you are. OK?

I just knew that they weren’t looking in the right direction, and they didn’t have a frickin’ clue who did that. Because if they’re sitting there doing all of this to us, they didn’t know what they were doing. They had no idea.

What kind of party where we having there?

We were just dancing around with them. I do believe they were playing quarters when I first got there.

What’s quarters.

Well —

Was Shelli promiscuous? And did she like sex, I guess? Now, we’re looking for a motive.

Right after they said it was a crime scene, you literally saw half of Laramie police spanning out through the dorms. They had football programs in their hands, looking for guys. They were just snatching up wherever we were.

I knew Jake Wideman before he confessed to killing Shelli. Back when I was 15 years old, his locker was next to mine at Laramie High. I remember him as a beanpole of a kid who sometimes buttoned his polo shirts up to the top button. Quiet, gentle, smart, a great basketball player. He was so trusted and so well-thought-of, that he had been picked by classmates as a peer counselor, a keeper of other secrets.

He was also Black, one of the few kids in school. By Laramie’s standards, he had a famous father. Author John Edgar Wideman taught at the university. He was best known for writing a memoir about his brother, who had been convicted of murder. All of us had watched Jake’s dad talk about that on “60 Minutes.”

But honestly, the thing that stuck with me most about Jake was how he used to stuff his uneaten lunches into his locker. It smelled up the entire hallway. I remember telling the principal on him.

In the summer of 1986, the year after Shelli was murdered, Jake did something horrific that landed him in jail in Flagstaff, Arizona. That August, during a traveling summer camp trip for teenagers, he woke up in the middle of the night, grabbed a hunting knife he had bought at a souvenir shop in Yellowstone National Park, and stabbed his sleeping roommate, Eric Kane, twice in the chest.

Jake then fled after a nationwide manhunt. Jake eventually turned himself in and confessed. He said the murder was neither premeditated nor provoked. He only explained the stabbing as a, quote, “result of a buildup of a lot of different emotions.”

In other words, Jake could articulate no motive, no reason, which made the murder particularly chilling. Jake had been in jail for a year, awaiting trial in Arizona for killing Eric, when he asked to talk to the same local detective he had first confessed to.

This is going to be a taped interview with Jake Wideman taking place at the county jail. Date is May 20 of ‘87. Time is 22:31 hours.

I just received word prior to tonight that you wanted to talk about the murder in Laramie, Wyoming. Is that true?

Jake asked to speak to the detective, because he wanted to confess to killing a second person — Shelli Wiley. Jake’s story was that he’d been in an affair with Shelli. He said she was about to reveal this to her boyfriend, Alan Griffin. Scared about how that would play out, Jake said he went to her apartment.

When he got there, he got into an argument with Shelli, and then he stabbed her three times. He said he then left and walked home, leaving a decoy knife at the scene, throwing the real murder weapon into a dumpster.

What else happened, Jake? What else happened before you left?

Jake said he knew what the detective was referring to. The fire that was set in Shelli’s apartment — that part, he said, wasn’t him.

That was not me. I did not start a fire.

Jake got almost everything in his confession wrong. He mentioned a fireplace that wasn’t in Shelli’s apartment. He said the violence took place entirely inside. Throughout this first interview, it seemed like Jake didn’t even really know where Shelli lived.

The whole thing — the decoy knife, the affair when he was a gawky 15-year-old with a significantly older Shelli — it just didn’t really add up. It seemed to trouble the detective in Flagstaff, too — enough that he asked Jake why he was telling him this, whether he would ever admit to a crime he didn’t commit.

Would you have any objection to talking to the detective in Laramie, Wyoming that has investigated this case and have more facts in the case?

No, I wouldn’t.

If I arranged a telephone call for you to talk to him, you’d be willing to do that?

Mm-hmm.

OK, I’m going to arrange that right now. [CONNECTING TONE]

Laramie Police Department.

Cheryl, will you just give me a 10 count? I’m trying to get a recorder going, and I don’t think it’s working too well.

Ready?

Uh-huh.

Testing.

Jake then talked to Lieutenant Gary Puls, who was still in charge of the investigation in Laramie.

Yes, Jacob?

Yes.

My name is Gary Puls. I’m a lieutenant with the Laramie Wyoming Police Department.

OK.

How are you tonight?

Pretty good.

OK.

Jake repeated his story to Lieutenant Puls with the same inaccuracies, the same hard-to-believe details. In Puls’ voice, I could hear skepticism of Jake’s story. Puls told Jake that he needed to do more investigating to figure out whether Jake was telling the truth, and whether charges would be filed. But that didn’t happen. Hours after Puls heard Jake’s paper-thin story, Puls charged Jake with Shelli’s murder.

Jake Wideman’s confession in 1987 didn’t actually go anywhere. He never got as far as entering a plea. Evidence contradicted his confession. But the charges against him hung on the books for more than three years.

During that whole time, the file basically stalled out. Nobody did much work on the Shelli Wiley case. I had heard the outlines of all of this before. I knew about Jake’s confession, and that nothing ever happened with the charges. But the “why” of it had always bugged me. So I reached out to Jake.

This call will be recorded and subject to monitoring at any time. Thank you for using IC Solutions.

35 years on, he is still in an Arizona prison for killing his former roommate, Eric Kane.

You may begin speaking now.

Hey.

Hi, how are you?

Good, good. Good.

Good. So I wanted to start by taking you back to where you were at the time where you were in Laramie. Did you know Shelli at all, or did you know of her?

I didn’t. No, I just had heard rumors. When the crime occurred was the first time I actually remember hearing her name. And people in the high school were talking about the case and talking about the fact that she had been killed. And that was my first encounter with her name.

I mean, it’s just — to be quite honest, Kim, it’s a really, really difficult and painful thing to look back on and to get back in touch with. And you know, I was trying to do that this morning in anticipation of our call, and just kind of put myself back in that time. And I was still dealing with a mental illness and a neurological disorder that I’d had since I was a kid.

Of course, the crime that I committed in Arizona had exacerbated everything, but there was also a lot of shame and a lot of guilt, both from knowing what I had done, that I had taken the life of Eric Kane, and also from things that had happened many, many years before. And by that time in 1987, a little over a year after I’d been jailed, I think I had attempted suicide.

I know I had attempted multiple times. And I was just overwhelmingly self-destructive, and I was looking for a way out, to take my life. And at that time, after the first couple of suicide attempts, they had put me in a cell in the jail, which was right down in the booking area, and had a great big window, where they could easily look in on me.

So it was almost like a permanent kind of suicide watch. So I knew that there was no way I could get away with actually killing myself. And so I thought about, you know, what I could do. And I remembered the Shelli Wiley crime.

I figured that, to that point, that they probably hadn’t found a suspect yet, because they didn’t find one in the immediate aftermath. And so I figured that the fact that I had committed this crime in Arizona would make me a credible suspect, and I figured confessing to this crime in Wyoming would be the cherry on top of the cake, that would almost guarantee that I would get the death penalty, either in Wyoming or in Arizona, if I was then guilty of two murders.

And that was going to be my way out. So it was essentially a suicide attempt by proxy. And so I had convinced myself that this was the only way. There was this weird nervousness that I wouldn’t be believed. And so when I was thinking about what story to tell, I just — I kind of tried to make it as detailed as possible.

And as I could sense that maybe I had gotten some things wrong, just by kind of a skeptical tone of voice on the part of Detective Puls, I got more and more anxious and more and more desperate to kind of convince him, no, no, this was me, this was me, and just feeling like — feeling deflated, which may sound like a strange thing to feel at that time.

But like thinking to myself, this isn’t working, you know, he’s not believing me. He’s trying to believe me. He needs a suspect. I think part of him wanted this to be true, because they needed to close the case, but then I just — there was just not the credibility there that he needed to believe me.

And afterwards, after the interview, and I’m back in my cell, thinking about it and reflecting on it. I literally started to cry. And I fell into this kind of temporary black hole, where I thought, how am I going to — how am I going to escape myself?

And so he leaves, and you think, I’ve failed.

Right.

When do you find out that he’s actually bought what you’re selling?

Not until —

I know it was my attorneys who told me that I had actually been charged. And I was like, OK, whatever he may not have believed, he believed me enough to charge me. I mean, I was immediately excited.

And I had every intention of — as soon as they took me up to Wyoming for arraignment, I was going to plead guilty, right then and there. And not even a — not even allow any space for a longer investigation, which may uncover the fact that I didn’t do it, or any kind of a trial or any kind of an evidentiary hearing.

I was going to forestall that by immediately pleading guilty. And that, of course, never happened. I never got taken to Wyoming, never got arraigned, but that was my intention. I feel awful about what I put Shelli’s family through.

And I never took the time or the opportunity to apologize to them. And for a while, I was told not to, by my lawyers and my family, for legal reasons. But that’s not an excuse.

I felt at different times a desire to reach out to them and apologize, and I never did, and that was purely selfish.

And I just — I feel terrible about what I put them through, both for those three-plus years, but also in the years since, by not giving them at least the clarity of having a letter from me apologizing and explaining why I did what I did.

Over a year of conversations, Jake Wideman told me a lot — about his angst and alienation in high school, about his guilt over killing Eric Kane. Court records told me more. Assorted psychologists and psychiatrists had diagnosed Jake with a variety of conditions — schizotypal personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, atypical conduct disorder, and eventually, temporal lobe syndrome.

There is no consensus. Regardless, Jake was found competent to stand trial as an adult in the murder of Eric Kane. After initially wanting to die, Jake decided to live. To avoid the death penalty, he agreed to a plea deal of life in prison, with the possibility of parole after 25 years.

But as Jake became eligible for parole, Shelli’s murder and the doubt around it hung over his hearings. Even though the state of Wyoming said Jake was no longer a viable suspect in Shelli’s murder and dropped the charges, the case had never been solved, so therefore, maybe he did do it. That was the insinuation anyway.

In 2016, Jake had his seventh parole hearing. He was released on house arrest with an ankle bracelet. One of the conditions for his release was meeting with a specific psychologist. Although Jake traded emails and left voicemail messages for the therapist, the two didn’t meet.

So nine months after being released, Jake was arrested for failing to make that appointment. He’s been back in prison ever since. Jake has had a lot of time to process what he’s done, and the effect it’s had on other people. He was forthcoming about it in our conversations, even when I could tell it was hard for him. But in all of our talks, there was one place Jake just wouldn’t go.

The only thing I really don’t want to talk about, and that I would hope you’d avoid asking me about, is the whole Angelo situation.

The whole Angelos situation. When Jake made his false confession in 1987, he wasn’t just implicating himself. Jake’s initial strategy was claiming responsibility for killing Shelli while professing ignorance about who set the fire afterward. That didn’t work for Lieutenant Puls.

Puls wanted a name. So after some prodding, Jake gave him one — Angelo Garcia. Jake said that Angelo was responsible for the fire, a co-conspirator in Shelli’s murder.

The one thing Jake would tell me about this is that he didn’t know Angelo. He’d just heard his name around town as a bad kid. Puls knew Angelo well, for a lot of the same reasons.

Angelo was interviewed by the police before, in the first week of the investigation. He was a usual suspect in town, and he hung around with Larry Montez. He was actually at that party, the one where Larry stole their friend Eddie’s car and disappeared.

In that first recorded interview, Angelo had an alibi. He sounded cooperative, talking about how Larry had gone missing. But two years later, within hours of Jake’s confession, and with no other evidence, Puls brought Angelo in again.

What I desire to do, Angelo, is question you in regard to the homicide of Shelli Wiley. And before I ask you any questions, this is a criminal matter. I’m going to advise you, but with constitutional rights. OK?

Who in the fuck is Jacob?

Well, we’re hoping that you can help us with that a little bit, OK?

Who’s Jacob? I don’t know Jacob. I’m fucking pissed off.

OK, just keep cool. You know, we’re on good terms, right? Now, this is a very serious charge. We realize that.

No shit! And I don’t want to be fucking blamed for the fucking shit!

OK. Let’s talk about it. You willing to talk with it?

I ain’t going to fucking jail for it, because I didn’t do the fucking shit! All right? You need to under-fucking-stand me, too.

I’m trying to, but I’m not going to yell back at you.

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

I ain’t going to jail for nothing I didn’t fucking do.

Well, don’t understand me wrong. You’re under arrest at this time.

I understand that.

Let’s talk about it, OK?

All right.

OK.

Angelo, are you acquainted with Shelli Wiley?

I never even knew the chick.

You never knew her?

Besides Lauri, her sister.

Uh-huh. What was your relationship with Lauri?

I knew that Laurie and her were sisters, but fuck, I never even spoke to the chick or nothing.

And as far as much as Jacob, whoever the fuck Jacob is, I don’t even know who the fuck the clown is either.

Jacob Wideman was a resident of Laramie. He’s what we call a mulatto. He’s a kind of a half-white Black kid that is currently in Arizona right now. He says you torched the place, Angelo. And you were with him.

That’s not true.

If that wasn’t true, why would he be saying that?

I don’t know. He don’t even know me.

He says he knows you. I talked to him at midnight this morning and interviewed the man for 2 and 1/2 hours. And he says you were with him.

Did you ever go to Shakey’s? You know where Shakey’s used to be?

Yeah.

The building is still there, but it’s, what, the Prairie Schooner now. Jacob Wideman told me that you picked him up there that night, at approximately 10:30 PM.

Sure the fuck didn’t.

He further advised me that you made arrangements with him at the park at about 11:00 AM that day to do that, to pick him up.

This dude’s fucking crazy.

I don’t know where he’s coming with the information, Angelo, but that’s exactly what he told me.

Me neither.

I think you realize that I’m being upfront with you, and I’m telling you exactly what the information is that we know.

Hey, I ain’t got nothing to hide, man. I gave you all information I had. I’m trying to straighten out my shit here. You guys are up here trying to —

No, we’re not trying to do anything to you. We’re just trying to get to the facts, OK? And right now, we’ve got information that this person is telling us that you’re involved in the murder and the fire that killed Shelli Wiley. That’s a capital offense. You don’t realize. That is a death-penalty offense.

No shit.

That is exactly right. Now, they haven’t executed anybody in the state of Wyoming for many years, but there’s people on death row, awaiting execution. That’s —

What happens if I’m — say, someone is innocent, and they put him away for so many years, and they come back out and get evidence and shit? What can happen?

Well, if I have information pertaining to that, I don’t want to put an innocent person in jail.

That’s right.

I have a duty to do that to protect you as well as anybody else.

I ain’t going to jail just ‘cause some chump says it was me.

Well, that’s exactly what has been said, Angelo. Do you know who killed Shelli Wiley?

I sure don’t. If I knew, I’d probably tell you right now.

Well, as I told you, we’ve had lots of sources come in and tell us that you’re responsible for killing Shelli Wiley. Is there any truth to that?

It’s completely false, bud. I did not touch the chick. I didn’t even know the chick. Why should I kill the chick? I may be crazy, but I’m not insane, man.

Well, I’m not saying you are.

This right here is going to make me go insane. Fuck. I’m serious.

What can you tell us about? Why would this Jacob Wideman be telling us, telling me specifically, that you set that house on fire?

I don’t know, sir. Shit, if I knew — if I knew why this guy’s trying to set me up, I’d probably tell you, but I don’t know why.

OK. Well, I’ll terminate the interview at 4:05 PM.

After Lieutenant Puls interrogated him, Angelo was actually briefly charged with arson and murder. I didn’t know Angelo Garcia back when I lived in Laramie. But I knew of him. He was a few years older than me but had dropped out of school in junior high.

Angelo was known mostly for smoking weed, getting in fights, throwing parties, and dating younger girls. He had a hair-trigger temper and a long-running beef with law enforcement. One example — after police brought him into jail on a minor violation a few months before this interview, Angelo had slammed his head against the wall, breaking the sheetrock. Rather than get him help, authorities charged him with a crime — destroying property.

Can we get you some bad coffee or some water?

Water’s fine.

OK, cool.

Thanks.

Angelo met me at a basement Airbnb in Laramie. He was short and wiry, with a graying flattop and a goatee. He dressed casual — jeans and a black sweatshirt with white prayer hands on it. He seemed guarded at first, but open to talking. I introduced him to my dog, Lucy. She was clearly excited to see him.

What’s going on, pup? It’s a good doggy.

Yeah, she’s a sweetheart.

From the police files, I knew Angelo had nothing to do with Shelli’s murder. He was alibied from the very start. But he was arrested anyway. His name splashed all over the front page of The local paper. In a case where there had been three arrests made in 37 years, Angelo stood out to me as the most arbitrary, the most avoidable.

And so what is this like? You’re being accused of this thing that you have no idea what they’re talking about. What is this like for you?

I mean, at first, it’s like, whatever, I’ll go down. You know, you need to question me? No problem, you know? But when they started telling me all this stuff, that we’re going to give you the death penalty, this and that, you start saying, whoa, I mean, I didn’t do this. I never had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t there or nothing, you know. So.

Do you remember where you were that night?

Oh, yeah. We were drinking, playing quarters. I was a little drunk, and I fell asleep, and they woke me up. They said, Larry stole Eddie’s car, we need to go look for him. So we went, driving around, looking for Larry. Couldn’t find him anywhere. Get back to the house that we were partying at.

And Larry was hiding my uncle’s car. Why he was hiding, I don’t know, because he brought the car back. Why he had a change of clothes, I don’t know. Why he didn’t have any glasses on, I don’t know. So that always made me think, what’s going on? But I don’t know.

You think he had something to do with it?

I don’t know. It’ll be like me accusing him, like they did to me. But I always thought that — I don’t know. I looked for answers. I couldn’t find any. I lived with Montez for a while ‘cause I had nowhere to be. He was always my friend.

I can’t accuse somebody, because I know the hurt that it does to you.

Do you ever remember even meeting Jake Wideman?

I don’t even — I don’t even think I met him. I don’t even think I know this kid. You know what I mean? It’s like, who is he? I don’t even know. So. You know, his brother was in my grade. You know, I knew him when we played basketball. But I don’t even remember which one was which, so.

Yeah.

I just don’t know the kid.

Why do you think he would have named you like this?

I have no idea. I have no idea.

Because —

Did he even do it?

No.

I don’t know why. You know?

No. I mean, like, he’s been very much ruled out, and he himself has said that he was lying, and he just was saying this because he wanted to die. Because he’d already been arrested on this murder charge in Arizona, because he had killed a kid down there. He definitely did that — and that he just sort of made this decision to confess to this case.

And you know, I can’t seem to get an answer out of him, because I’m talking to him about, like, why did you finger this guy? What he said was that he just had heard your name around as being like a bad kid, you know.

You know, I was a good fighter back in the day, you know. And that’s just the way we grew up on the West Side. Everybody always wanted to see who was the baddest and whatever. And so I was a good fighter. So what? What’s that got to do with anything? You know?

Do you remember when you found out about the guy being arrested, like, five years ago?

Oh, man, my cousin Rita — she sent me a message on my phone. And she goes, look at “Laramie Live.” You know, OK. What is she talking about? So I looked on there. And they had Lamb whatever. You know, OK.

So I started crying with so much happiness. They finally got him. That was — that was the happiest day of my life.

I told my family, well, you know what? It was one of their own. One of their own.

And it just — it just made me so happy that they finally caught somebody.

I called my mama right away. They caught — they caught the murderer, Mom. [CRIES]

What did she say?

She didn’t know what to say.

Do you think she believed you didn’t do it before?

Probably. I don’t know.

She never talked to you — you never talked to her about that?

She knows you’re upset and needs to give you some comfort.

That’s good.

Not very many people know how to do that. [CHUCKLES]

Good job, Lucy.

Two days after Angelo was charged with murder and arson, Jake talked to Lieutenant Puls again. After learning about the charges against Angelo, Jake told Puls that Angelo wasn’t involved. It took another couple of days for the charges against Angelo to be dropped.

He spent the whole time in jail. For a few years after, Angelo had a rough go of it. He piled up more criminal charges, never quite got his feet on the ground. Did work-a-day jobs in construction or restaurants, mostly. But eventually, he got his life together, got married, had eight kids, found god.

After the charges were eventually dropped against Jake, the investigation into who killed Shelli Wiley was back at square one. By this point, Puls was leaving the case behind him. He had just been elected Sheriff. “Pull for Puls” was his campaign slogan. The case passed to another detective in 1991.

I started reading through everything that the new detective did next. I could see that he pursued various theories over the next dozen or so years. He looked at Jake again. He looked particularly hard at a long-haul trucker who’d confessed to 70 rapes, and then a man who had killed and raped a co-worker’s roommate in a town about 300 miles from Laramie.

No theory panned out. Looking through the case file, it seemed like the new detective wasn’t dedicating much time to the case. He wasn’t doing fresh interviews. He didn’t appear to be revisiting what the police may have missed.

The investigation started to resemble more of a training exercise than an open case. A couple of boxes of files handed over to a succession of new detectives with a shrug. Sure, give it a spin. Everyone else has.

It took almost 30 years for another arrest to be made in the case, for another new detective to take a closer look at the file and see something the others hadn’t — almost 30 years to arrive back at the crime scene and reconsider the question, what about Fred Lamb?

Kim interviews a man who confessed to Ms. Wiley’s murder from a jail in Arizona in 1987. She tries to understand why and tracks down the unwitting man he named as his co-conspirator.

transcript

Previously on “The Coldest Case in Laramie.”

Those drag marks got pretty close to Dave’s place.And there was a little bit of just real tiny splatter on the door.

That’s mine.

That’s your blood?

That’s my blood. If it’s on his door, it’s my blood.

We know who did this. We just have to prove it. He didn’t see it coming. And they confronted him with all these lies about what the physical evidence was. And after seven hours —

According to the documents, during a police interview, Lamb initially denied the homicide allegation but later said, “Fred Lamb did it, dot, dot, dot, I’m not denying that I did it. Bottom line is, I killed the girl.”

Wow.

I would say I am 99.9 percent sure Fred Lamb murdered Shelli.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

For decades, Shelli Wiley’s case seemed to go very cold. There was nothing much in the case file that indicated it was a high priority, not until Robert Terry came along. Shortly after Terry took over Shelli’s case in 2009, he started bringing in people police hadn’t talked to in decades, not as suspects, necessarily, but people who might have known something. One of those people was Fred Lamb.

Fred came from a very influential family in Laramie. His parents were as close to Laramie royalty as you could get. His mother was a respected elementary school teacher. His father taught at the university for decades, even ran the school’s civil engineering department, served a term in the Wyoming State House. But Fred chose another path. Straight out of high school, Fred enlisted in the Navy and went to Vietnam, where he lost some of his hearing.

After coming home, Fred became a cop, then a sheriff’s deputy. Shortly before Shelli was killed, Fred quit law enforcement and joined the National Guard full-time. By the time Terry became a detective, Fred was working maintenance at the jail. Like a lot of the cops in Laramie, Terry knew Fred. He had heard some of the stories about him. He’d heard that Fred had served in the military, that he was a former Navy SEAL.

He’d heard about Fred’s brush with Laramie fame as the only survivor of a plane crash when a rescue mission for missing skiers went down in 1979. Fred suffered a crushed hip and a broken back. The other two men on board both died. Terry knew Fred as a good old boy’s good old boy. They liked to tell jokes, shoot the shit, hunt and fish. When Terry brought Fred in for their first interview in 2009, it was the first time Fred had been asked about Shelli’s murder in 24 years.

Thank you very much for coming down.

Oh, not a problem, not a problem at all.

They ran through Fred’s story of that early morning in 1985 again. It was a friendly conversation, a relatively brief one. Terry was just at the beginning of his investigation. There was a lot of file left to sift through. But Fred brought up something curious, something that wasn’t in the case file I had and that Terry also didn’t seem to know about before the interview. Fred talked about the results of the polygraph he said he took back in 1985.

Yeah, I took it for Gary Puls who was in your position.

Yeah.

And he said I was too truthful for responding very well, because of the uniqueness of my military position, there were questions that he had to ask directly that I had been committed or involved in. Have you ever killed anybody? Well, I was in the military for 19 years. So —

Absolutely, yeah, yeah.

So, and I answered him. And I knew Gary. I was extremely comfortable with him. And the other person that was giving them at that time was Glen Bennett, who worked for the Sheriff’s Department.

Yep, I recognized his name.

But they figured that Gary should give it to me because I had been away from him for 10 to 12 years and had been working directly with Bennett for quite a while. So they had Gary do it so that there wouldn’t have been a —

A conflict of interest.

A conflict of interest, I hate to use that word.

Yeah, we have something similar here at the police —

If Terry was extra suspicious about this conversation, it didn’t show up in the case file. At the end of the interview, he took a swab from inside of Fred’s cheek for DNA. But he seemed more interested in other leads. He didn’t compare Fred’s DNA with any samples from the scene. In 2009, Terry worked this case more than any detective had worked it in decades. But he worked it in his spare time. And he didn’t work it for long. Months after interviewing Fred, Terry was promoted to sergeant.

A new detective took over the case. His theory seemed to be that Shelli might have been killed because she was on the wrong side of a cocaine deal, another version of one of the first rumors about Shelli. For years, detectives also tried to match swabs taken from the crime scene with their favorite suspect’s DNA. And for years, they came up empty until 2015. 5 and 1/2 years after Robert Terry first swabbed Fred’s cheek, lab techs tested Fred’s DNA against blood found on the door of apartment number three. Finally, they got a match.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Not long after he got the match for Fred, Robert Terry took back the case. He ordered more tests. And he made plans for his second and final interview with Fred on August 17, 2016. This interview was crucial, Terry’s one shot. He wanted a confession.

So I’m going to need your help to do it.

The meeting took place in a small interrogation room at the station, pretty nondescript save for a pattern wall hanging in a circular table. Video captures all seven hours, two minutes and 29 seconds of it, beginning with the niceties.

You’re obviously not under arrest. You drove down here on your own, came down. But since I’m going to ask you some questions here at the police department, I’d like to advise you of your rights, more as a formality, if you’re OK with that.

Yeah.

OK, I think we did this in 2009, too. So it’s pretty much going —

Fred is 67 years old, bald with a pot belly, wearing a green shirt, jeans, and a khaki vest. You wouldn’t think twice if you saw him with a fishing pole in his hands. He looks relaxed, leaning forward under the table. Terry is on the other side. He looks younger than his 39 years, wears a blue dress shirt and a tie like he’s on the management track at a Men’s Warehouse, except that he has a gun in his side holster and handcuffs tucked into the back of his slacks. He’s got a couple of binders and photos with him, the case file.

So I thought we could just start with the basics. I’ve got the story, I think, what was going on. But maybe you can just tell me in your own words what was going on that day, you know. And I hope since we’ve talked before, seven years ago now, you know that I’m not lying to you as I’m talking to you.

Yeah, no, I have no problems.

From the beginning, Terry makes a very particular choice. He signals that he isn’t talking to Fred as a witness to a crime or as a suspect. He’s talking to Fred as a former cop, a colleague of sorts.

And that’s why we’re here, you know? We got to figure this out. You were there. You’re my best friend. You’re my ally in this, OK?

They went through the story again, what Fred remembered from that early morning in 1985, what he did after he heard knocks on his door and someone shouting, “fire!” Terry was friendly but probing. He asked Fred about the layout of the apartment, where he stayed that night, what he wore, and where he parked his truck. Fred’s version of events didn’t change much from his previous interviews except for one key detail.

In the past, Fred said that when he heard a woman’s screams, he didn’t react much at first. In this interview, he said that after he heard knocks on the door and realized a fire was raging nearby, he hopped into his truck to go find a payphone to call for help. Only, by the time he got to the payphone, he heard sirens. So he doubled back and parked a couple of blocks away from the apartment.

Oh, you were parked on Monroe Street where Terry Miner’s place is?

I’m sorry?

You parked on Monroe?

Terry seemed excited about this, suggested to Fred that he parked on Monroe Street. This is important because Monroe Street happens to be where the bloody matchbook and footprints were found. Fred initially agrees that, yes, that’s right. That’s where he parked, before backing off, saying he isn’t so sure.

Because no, I wasn’t — I was parked over here. Let me get myself straight here.

That’s all right.

Fred said he was getting muddled about the layout of the streets around the apartment. He got turned around enough that he asked Terry for a city map.

Yeah, we can get you one of those.

Yeah.

Now I am really, really confused.

We don’t want to confuse you, Fred. I want to clarify today.

Well, that’s what I’m trying to — I’m trying to get it set in my own mind.

Terry got him the map. Fred turned it around for a bit. And Terry tried to get him to confirm that it was Monroe Street where he parked. But Fred never really commits, blames his bad memory. I should say that witnesses at the scene in 1985 mentioned Fred sticking around the apartment as police and firefighters arrived. A couple of people even mentioned his truck being in the parking lot as the fire was going.

If he did move his truck early that morning and park it over on Monroe Street, it’s a little unclear when he would have had the time to do it. In any case, they go back and forth on this for a little while longer before Terry finally asks Fred about the blood on the door. Back in 1985, Fred told police that his blood got on the door when he knocked his bloody knuckle on it a few days before Shelli’s murder, which, even back then, the state lab guys said didn’t make sense. Now, Terry actually had Fred stand up and reenact the whole thing with a bottle of water and a prop door.

OK, so you’re on the porch. Those spots come like this, right, according to our picture.

I think that would have — is that about what you think?

Let me borrow your water.

Sure, I got it.

So I get it on the floor. But am I in trouble?

I don’t think so. I think they’ll allow it.

Water’s a little thinner than blood.

That’s true. It’s probably going to run a little bit.

You got dots.

Yeah, you do.

And then you’ve got the long streaks and the comet trail. And I can’t see where it ran out. But the last one should have a comet tail on it.

About an hour and a half into the interview, Terry turned to what kind of shoes Fred was wearing. Fred had told him he was dressed in his National Guard gear that morning, which included a pair of jump boots made with a waterproof material called Corfam. So Terry started taking out pictures of the crime scene, flipping through ones taken just outside of Shelli’s apartment, including one picture of a bloody boot print.

I know walking back and forth, it’s probably evident that you had to walk through that scene at some point, whether it was dark or what.

Yeah, so I’d have been focused on that and not paying attention to what the hell. I could have walked on a rattlesnake.

You’re not going across gravel. I mean, we’re not in the evidence safeguarding mode. We’re thinking fire safety.

Yeah.

Why say —

Yeah, like I didn’t realize that something criminal had happened.

Right.

So I’m not cognizant or even paying attention to what I’m doing.

No, and that’s important. I mean, that’s —

With few exceptions, police officers are allowed to exaggerate and lie in interviews. Another Laramie detective who worked this case even falsely told a woman that her fingerprint had been found on the bloody matchbook. So here, Terry didn’t actually know what kind of boot prints are in the picture he’s showing Fred.

From the file, it’s clear that lab techs never matched the print with a specific type. And they never got Fred’s boots to compare them to, only snapped photos of them. The murder was in October in Laramie, hard to believe Fred was the only person wearing boots.

Does that look pretty familiar to you?

Oh yeah, that’s a heel. It looks like a Corfam heel print.

It looks like it to me.

Because they’re just —

About an hour later, Terry moved on to asking Fred about the fire.

I don’t have too much experience in arson stuff. But the accelerant used in there, we know that it was obviously highly flammable. What would you have used, I mean, to make something burn that hot that quick?

What would I have used?

Yeah.

In a panic mode or a plan mode?

Well, in this case, I mean, it’s panic. It’s something that’s probably done after the fact — obviously, not thinking too clearly.

The closest sort of gasoline I could find. Usually a lawnmower gas can or some gas cans sitting out somewhere would have been my guess.

At this point, Terry really only had one piece of solid evidence tying Fred to the scene of the crime. He had confirmation that Fred’s DNA matched the blood on the door of apartment number three, but nothing else. His blood wasn’t found inside of Shelli’s apartment. Yet Fred seemed to believe everything that Terry said or even implied.

I mean, obviously, we did a lot of blood typing back in the day. So there was OA. Those are the two contributors to the blood in this case. A is you. O is her. So that’s how it’s been, I guess, broken down in there. And so all that A, we tried to then get DNA on to eliminate and/or include you.

So that’s kind of how we went about it, just to be kind of upfront with you. Every swab, we’ve tested. They pretty much took about as many swabs as I would today. I might have taken a few more. But pretty much anywhere there was blood, they swabbed it, took a reference sample.

They swabbed that door. So they got all those blood samples off the door. Pillowcase, checked for any biologicals on that. Swabs from the wall, ran all that stuff. So we’re pretty much done with that. There were about five swabs that had A typing on it, type A, which was you.

Yeah.

Any reason why that would happen? I mean, she’s O. And this is blood evidence, not —

I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.

OK, so as you’d guess, most of them swabs are Shelli’s. She was the main bleeder. She was injured really severely. So she’s the main bleeder in the house. The ones that weren’t hers, the door for example, that wasn’t hers.

The face and some other swabs weren’t hers, Fred.

We’ve been talking, Fred, for 2 and 1/2 hours. And I’m not real sure if your memory is better today or if your memory was better then. And there’s certain things I wouldn’t expect you to remember, minute details, you know? So I think you’re telling me the truth on the bloods on the door.

And I think that blood belongs to who we’re looking for, Fred.

Cool.

What do you think? I mean, because it’s on the door. It’s fresh. It’s in the proximity of the crime scene. And it’s not the victim’s.

Yeah.

So I’m thinking that — and I’m getting that result. But when I told you today, we’re going to solve this, and I mean that. We’re going to solve it.

I hope so.

Well, we are, Fred. There’s two important dates in this case: October 20, 1985, and August 17, 2016, today. So the first important date is when it happened. Second important date is the day that we figured out who did.

And so I want to talk to you about that. I need to talk to you about why this happened, why you were there. I want to hear the story. I don’t care how bad it looks, how bad it sounds. Fred, your blood, your blood’s at the crime scene, sir.

There ain’t no goddamn way that I did it. How the blood there got on the door, I honestly can’t answer that.

I know, Fred.

But I don’t kill people. There is no way in God’s green earth that I fucking did this.

Fred, I’m not saying you kill people. I’m saying you did this one event.

No.

This is the end of it.

No, absolutely not. That is impossible.

It’s not impossible.

I was at the club. I had a few beers. I went to Dave’s house. I laid down on the couch. I heard noise outside. I opened the door. I looked out. There was nothing there. I will admit that I had been drinking.

I know that.

But no, no, absolutely fucking not!

I know you’re telling me that. But the evidence doesn’t match that, OK? I’m not here because I’m guessing.

Absolutely impossible.

It’s not impossible. I told you, the goal today is for the closure, all right?

I didn’t do it. There’s nothing to close! I’m not the person.

Fred, your boot prints are in the blood.

What?

Your boot prints are in the blood.

That is correct.

OK.

I walked down there. I admit that.

I showed you the pictures.

Yes.

I showed you. Your boot prints are in the blood. You said, yep, that’s mine. That would be 100 percent a Corfam boot. What I didn’t tell you, Fred, is there’s blood on top of that boot mark. When you get blood on top of that boot mark, that tells us a lot of stuff. That tells us that you walked in the blood. Later on, blood was transposed on top of that heel impression. That’s exactly what happened. The blood in that heel impression comes back to Shelli Wiley.

And I was the only one wearing Corfam?

At the time of this murder at the scene, yeah. That’s what you told me.

I did walk down there. I did look at it. I didn’t pay any attention to the blood. I went around the corner in the back.

I know.

I didn’t do it.

All stuff you didn’t mention in 1985.

I didn’t do it.

All stuff you did not mention in 1985.

I didn’t do it.

I understand you’re saying that.

I didn’t do it.

I get it. In 1985, you gave a pretty detailed statement on how blood would end up in the crime scene should they find it. The blood spatter expert that looked at the door blood also agrees. Your story that you gave in 1985 about how the blood got there, absolutely impossible, a farse, a lie. It didn’t happen that way. Unfortunately, the officers in 1985 believed you. They believed you because they were friends with you.

No, I didn’t do it. You cannot make something happen that didn’t happen.

But you can’t convince me didn’t do it because —

I’m finding that out. I mean, that’s rather obvious.

I’m objective! I can only go off what the evidence shows. Unlike you, that’s what I’m relying on.

I understand.

I’m relying upon the evidence. And the evidence does not lie.

No.

The evidence points directly to you. That is what it is.

I didn’t do it.

You were in her apartment. You were in her bedroom, absolutely.

No, absolutely not.

Fred, we got blood in the bedroom, too, blood on the carpet, blood in the bedroom.

I was never in her fucking house, dude!

No, that is —

Never, ever.

Yeah, I’m sorry. That is a lie.

No!

Fred, you’re lying to me.

No!

You were just straight lying. There’s her blood again on her carpet next to her bed and a bloody water bed, by the way. Fred, this started in the bedroom.

No.

Where did it start, then?

It didn’t! I did not do it. I wasn’t there. I was in apartment number fucking three, asleep!

Maybe for a while, but you weren’t asleep the whole time.

Well, then it woke me up when I heard voices. But beyond that, I was in that apartment, zonked out, out cold.

I didn’t do it. I have absolutely, emphatically no memory of doing something that heinous. If I did have a memory of it, it would bug me to death. I have no memory of it if I did do it. And I did not do it!

I know. And that is common. And I’m with you on that.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

For a while in this interview between Detective Terry and Fred Lamb, the main theme was Terry accusing, Fred denying, almost on a loop. But now, almost four hours in, there was a little crack. It’s subtle. But it’s there. Fred had gone from saying, I didn’t do it, to, I don’t remember doing it.

This isn’t just going to end because even if I die, if I drop this case and I go get hit by a car or die —

Don’t do that.

— there’s going to be another detective that’s going to pick this up. That’s the way it works nowadays, Fred.

No, I understand.

Everybody, Fred, knows what happened. It’s just time to hear it from you.

I don’t have anything. I don’t! If I did do it, I don’t remember.

Fine, fine, I can live with that. I live with that. You did it. But you don’t remember. I live with that. I can go to bed tonight at least knowing that. You are making progress. You’re making progress. You’re making progress.

I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t know what — if there is a defense mechanism, how to turn it the fuck off.

OK.

I have not a clue. Maybe I’m fucking screwy as people think I am. I don’t know.

Well, I can tell you something —

Maybe I’m a half a bubble off and just don’t know it.

Right now, you’ve got to help, Fred. You got to, man.

There’s nothing to help. I didn’t do it.

Fred, today is the day to help, Fred. This is it.

I didn’t do it.

You did, Fred.

I didn’t do it.

You did, by all aspects.

I did not do it.

Fred —

I’m sorry. I’m not trying to make your life difficult.

It’s not my life you’re making difficult.

I did not do it.

It’s not my life you’re making difficult. What’s going to be difficult, Fred, is where we go after here. And they’re going to hear a story. And they’re going to hear it either from me or from you.

Well, I’ll tell them.

You’re going to tell them that you didn’t do it. And I don’t know why. I have no idea!

No, I’m going to say —

Jeez.

— that the evidence points out that I did it.

The evidence points that you did it —

But I don’t remember.

Exactly, the evidence points that you did it. So when you tell a rational person that the evidence points that you did it but you don’t remember, that’s not you taking responsibility.

I don’t — I’m telling you, I don’t remember. I didn’t do it.

Well, don’t remember is different than didn’t do it, OK?

I understand that.

OK, if you’re worried about the repercussion, which I think you are and that’s why you don’t want to tell me —

Well, who wouldn’t be?

I know. But the repercussion is there. It’s already there.

Yeah.

It’s going to happen. Thing is, it’s the character of the man, Fred.

I can’t remember if I did anything!

It’s in. You saw it with these two eyes.

I’m being totally honest with you, I don’t remember if I did anything.

So how am I going to explain this to the people that you love? How am I going to explain this?

To my wife?

Yeah.

I’ll explain it to her.

You’re going to explain that —

All the evidence, the DNA and everything points to the fact that I did it. I cannot refute that evidence. I mean, it’s pretty cut and dried when you get down. Blood type is shaky. But DNA is almost an absolute. But to my mind, I didn’t do it.

You’re obviously in denial, Fred.

Oh, obviously.

You are denying — I can tell you that —

I mean, if you handed me this case file on somebody else —

Yeah?

— I’d be right where you’re at right now, no doubt about it because that says emphatically that I did it. But I don’t remember if I did anything.

And until I figure out or if I remember it, how can I tell you I did it? Because then you’re going to say, well, what did you do? Well, I did this. I did that.

That’s why I told you —

And you’re going to find out that the wheat doesn’t match up.

That’s why I didn’t tell you.

Because you have all of that. I don’t remember. If I did anything, I do not remember.

So where do we go from here?

I honestly don’t know. I guess the ball’s pretty much in your court. If the preponderance of evidence says I did it, it should go to the courts.

And you said the preponderance of the evidence said you did it.

Yeah, I understand that.

What do you want me to tell people?

What the book said, Fred Lamb did it — pretty much bottom line thing.

Right.

It happened. Bottom line is I killed a girl from the evidence presented. And where it goes from here is up to the county attorney and you and everybody else.

Am I doing the right thing if I arrest you on this crime?

Absolutely, if that’s what the book says.

OK.

Absolutely, you’re a good cop. Be proud, dammit.

Thank you.

Most people would have looked at it and said, [BLOWS RASPBERRY]: and thrown it back on the shelf.

Well, I have no — I’m at a lost for words for that because —

That’s not what I’m supposed to say? [LAUGHS]

No, it’s just under the circumstances, it’s — it’s quite a compliment. And I’m —

It’s a beautiful compliment. And you deserve it

Thank you.

I don’t know if you want me to jump up and down saying, you dirty, rotten, crummy —

Sometimes, that makes me feel better about my job, you know? I’m going to be honest with you, Fred. I’m glad the case is over.

Yeah.

I’ve lost so much sleep over this in the last couple of years. And I’m nothing in this equation.

Now, we’ve both got to move forward to the best of our abilities.

That’s right.

Is there anything else, Fred?

I think right now, oh fuck would be appropriate.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The interview ended. Fred called his wife and son and told them that he was being arrested for the Wiley murder.

Are you sitting down?

Although he messed up Shelli’s first name, calling her Sharon. Fred handed over his pen, billfold, keys, glasses, and false teeth.

Just a little [INAUDIBLE] because I got to take my teeth out.

OK.

He faced the wall and held his hands behind his back. Terry cuffed him then led him out of the room.

OK, I do have walking issues. So I’ll try not to fall.

I’ll hold on to you for sure. We’re going to go left and —

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’d watched this interview on my laptop in an Airbnb near my mom’s house in Arizona. She and I hung out there mostly to avoid her 18 cats. Don’t ask. After the video ended, I closed my computer. I’d heard from so many people that Fred Lamb was guilty, that this interrogation more or less confirmed it. But I saw something else playing out. Terry was implying the existence of way more evidence than there was in the file I’d read.

The blood at the scene, the boot print, Fred seemed to take Terry’s word for all of it, believing that the police wouldn’t lie to him. He was, after all, one of them. Terry’s affidavit of probable cause included several quotes from Fred, quote, “Fred Lamb did it, dot, dot, dot, I’m not denying that I did it.” And, “bottom line is, I killed a girl.” I’d been listening for them the whole time. And sure, they were there. But they weren’t exactly in context, more like sentence fragments rearranged to appear more damning than they were.

If I’d done that in a news story, I’d be out of a job.

The case had pretty much taken over the Airbnb living room at this point. Old police reports and Laramie yearbooks surrounded me. My mom had of course not read any of the case file that I had, didn’t have the background on the evidence. But she had caught snippets of the interrogation as it played from my computer, enough at least to offer a verdict to me, unprompted. Fred seemed pretty guilty to her.

Kim examines the 2016 interrogation that led to Fred Lamb’s arrest — an interrogation that is much more bizarre and much less conclusive than she’d been told.

transcript

Previously on “The Coldest Case in Laramie”—

You’re obviously in denial, Fred.

Oh, obviously.

You are denying — I can tell you that —

I mean, if you handed me this case file on somebody else —

Yeah?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’d be right where you’re at right now.

There was a thumbprint, like, a bloody thumbprint on a matchbook. And they found that. But they didn’t investigate him. And then they let him leave.

He had a cut on his hand. And he said he cut his hand — I can’t remember what he told them — knocking on the door. I can’t remember how he got that. But I know he went behind the building at one point and cut the whole phone line.

Obviously, we have blood evidence of Fred in that crime scene which says a lot, really. I mean, that’s almost too much.

Well, I’m sure you have questions.

Yeah.

We’re in shock.

Yeah, absolutely in shock.

So this crime occurred —

About a half hour after Fred was arrested, Robert Terry brought Fred’s wife Linda into the police station. Fred and Linda had been married for 34 years. After they got together, Linda became a dispatcher for police in the sheriff’s office. She stayed there for decades, retired just months before her husband was arrested.

Terry and Linda knew each other a little from her time at the department. So this was a delicate conversation. He told her that this whole thing was pretty uncomfortable for him.

After asking her a few questions about what she remembered from 1985, Terry ran her through the outlines of the case. Eventually, he got down to the interrogation with Fred. Terry laid out his evidence and theories for Linda. He seemed to want to know what she made of him.

Well, I just — I still can’t believe that Fred did this. Because that’s not Fred.

Right.

Fred is, you know, gentle.

The only — one time he lost his temper. I had Ronnie up in the little — when she was a baby, those chairs they sit in. And she was flopping around and jumping around while I was making dinner. And she went off. And she was screaming bloody murder. And he came upstairs, put his hand straight through both walls.

Oh, wow.

And he said, you should have known not to put her up there. Well, yeah, I guess I should have. But you know?

Yeah.

You know? But he would just — he could just snap. And then he was fine.

And I think that’s kind of what we concluded is that he has an episode. I guess that’s the best way to —

Blackout episodes where he —

He loses his mind and he gets violent.

It’s a very violent — well, ‘Nam.

Yeah.

I mean, he was a SEAL. They dropped those guys in there. They had to exist for weeks. They had to do all this covert shit.

Yeah.

And then if they made it, they got picked up.

Right.

And the only way you can deal with that shit is to put it out of your mind after you’ve got to do it. So he could have even thought he was — I’ve had him think that he was back in ‘Nam.

Oh?

You know, when he’s having an episode at night, and he’ll start flashing and yelling and talking in Vietnamese and flailing his arms. And when we were first married, I mean, if he was having an episode, you just got out of the room because he’d kill you.

Does he remember those when he wakes up?

Nope. No.

No recollection of that, huh?

Nope. Somebody from the SEAL team called him the other night, that they had made a pact — there’s five of them — that if any of them was in trouble, they’d get together. And the guy is going to be here Sunday to do stuff. So I’m sure that’s bringing all sorts of shit up that he’s had buried that he doesn’t even remember.

Right.

But you’re sure it’s him?

Mhm. I mean —

I just can’t even fathom him doing anything like that except if he — he was in his —

Right.

“Didi mao” all that kind of shit, flailing his arms like he did, like he does. I guess I can see that because he is totally somewhere else when he’s having those episodes. There’s no way else you can put it. He’s — he’s not there.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

I’ll admit I was surprised when I came across Linda’s interview. Mainly surprised because Linda herself didn’t seem all that surprised. She seemed to offer Detective Terry a pretty damning profile of her husband, a man who was prone to sudden rages and blackouts stemming from his time as a Navy SEAL.

Although on that Navy SEAL point, this wasn’t the first time I’d heard it. A few people who knew Fred in Laramie had that impression. One former cop told me he thought Fred was an expert in knife work. Fred had even mentioned his military service in previous interviews with police, referenced killing people in Vietnam as a reason why his polygraph was screwy.

But this was new. Fred’s time with the SEALs as an explanation for Shelli’s murder, a PTSD-induced blackout, a murder with no memory attached, a neat little package that explained it all.

Lieutenant Carrie Hendly How may I help you, sir/ma’am?

Hey, Lieutenant Hendly This is Kim Barker calling for “The Times”— from “The Times.”

Kim, how are you doing?

Good. You talk so fast I feel like I’ve got to match you. [LAUGHS]

Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll slow down.

No worries.

According to his military records, Fred Lamb served in the Navy from 1967 to 1971. He split his time between a Naval cruiser and a logistic support base. Neither location saw much action. At both of these places, he officially spent his time as a lithographer, which is to say that he worked at the military equivalent of a Kinko’s. There is no record of Fred having been a Navy SEAL.

On the one hand, I took this to mean that Fred lied and that he’s capable of keeping a lie going for decades. If he could do that, it seemed plausible that he could also lie about a murder and keep it to himself. But on the other hand, the fact that Fred wasn’t a SEAL, that punctured a hole in the argument that he was some highly trained vet who might have flown off the handle and murdered someone.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Without that story, what you’re left with is a man with a bad back, a bum leg, and lousy hearing who said he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time, trying to sleep off one too many Jack and Cokes.

I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something, some clue about Fred’s behavior. I decided to talk to as many of the cops who had worked with Fred as I could, the ones who’d investigated Shelli’s case and the ones who hadn’t. I figured they might have some thoughts at least on whether the Fred they knew could have done this. By this point most of them had died or moved. All of them had moved on from police work.

Lieutenant Gary Puls, the officer who’d interviewed Jake Weidman and Angelo Garcia, who’d been in charge of the investigation in its earliest days, actually still lived in Laramie. I stopped by his home. His wife told me that I could find him at his gig at the old territorial prison, which had been turned into a museum.

So I stopped by the gift shop. Poles talked to me just long enough to tell me to go away. He practically ran into a door marked Staff Only. A few former cops did talk to me but didn’t want to talk about Fred or the investigation.

I don’t really want to go into that.

I said this is an open case.

What did you think after you heard that he was charged with this?

You know, I’d probably want to keep that to myself, too.

I asked the same question to another cop who was 24 at the time of Shelli’s murder and still remembers sitting with her body during the autopsy.

About the only thing I could say is I’m not surprised.

He left it at that.

I did manage to track down one person who knew the case, remembered Fred, and talked openly. Detective Rob Graham did that first recorded interview with Fred back in 1985. He was the one who awkwardly asked Fred about the blood on door number three. And then, seemingly relieved by Fred’s explanation, pretty quickly moved on.

Detective Graham worked for the Laramie Police Department for a decade. He’s now 75 years old, retired, and living in a small town in Missouri. But he has a solid recall of Shelli’s case.

I worked on 23 true homicides. Of 23, we solved 22.

You know, this is a — this is the one that’s always hung in there.

And if — I don’t want to assume I blew it by not getting on Fred’s case.

But it’d be easy to say I did. You know, I talked with him.

So therefore I may have caused the failure of this investigation. But at the time, those are things I didn’t do. I did what I felt like I could at the time. And I have mixed emotions on whether or not Fred’s a suspect. And I’m sorry it’s an unresolved issue.

Graham didn’t have a whole lot to tell me that I didn’t already know from the file. But he did mention something I hadn’t come across, something he said he noticed when he first interviewed Fred.

Fred’s hands were crisscrossed in small cuts, across both palms. I said, Fred, where did this come from. He says, well, I was pulling weeds at my parents’ house. I thought those are some tough weeds. Why no gloves or something?

And so I photographed his hands. Actually, I think they were Polaroids I took, I don’t know, four or five.

These Polaroids are not in the file. Graham knows that. He says a Laramie detective called him a few years ago about the Shelli Wylie case. The detective was shocked when Graham mentioned the pictures. Graham thinks they must have gotten lost at some point, slipped through the cracks in the file cabinet at the station.

Though what’s confusing to me is that it’s not just that the pictures aren’t in the file. There’s also no mention of these Polaroids or crisscross cuts on Fred’s hands or anything like it in any of Graham’s write ups from the time. In his notes, Graham does acknowledge the broken open scab on Fred’s knuckle. [MUSIC PLAYING]

But he never mentions the hand cuts or the pulling weed story. I don’t really know what to make of that.

I do think I know why the charges against Fred were dropped and why they’ve never been refiled. After his arrest, Fred hired Vaughn as his lawyer and bonded out. As part of discovery, Vaughn soon got all the evidence that he later handed over to me.

Here’s what I saw. From early in the case, the police were focused on the two types of blood found at the crime scene. The first was Type O, which meant Shelli. The other was Type A, which police assumed belonged to the killer. There was relatively little of it compared to ShellI’s Type O, just a few samples.

In 2001, the Wyoming state crime lab sent those samples off to DNA experts. Most samples were faint and degraded. But the tests would show that some of the samples had Shelli’s DNA on them and small amounts of unknown DNA.

The best of those samples, the ones that were obviously not Shelli’s were found on the door of apartment number 3 and pieces of a broken vase. Eventually, the blood on the door would come back as a match for Fred. That one was clear.

The unknown sample on the vase was more complicated. It likely matched a tech at the state crime lab, probably an error in handling the samples. In any case, Fred was arrested. More tests were done.

I think Terry had high hopes for these. Some compare DNA from Fred and Shelli with a slew of blood samples from the sidewalk and walls of the building. These seem like a Hail Mary to see if more advanced tests would pick up trace amounts of Fred. But they didn’t.

Other DNA results were also a bit of a wash. There was nothing conclusive that could be drawn from them. And they were the kind of science that would be argued over in any trial, with qualified experts on both sides, leaving the jury unsure of what to make of anything.

I’ve talked to several of the country’s top DNA experts. And here’s about all I’m comfortable with saying. Other than the blood found on the door of apartment number three, there is no other DNA evidence found at the scene that implicates any suspect, including Fred. This is not one of those cases that science will solve, not now at least.

So without any other DNA evidence to lean on, the prosecutors would have to contend with the biggest hurdle in their case, the matchbook. Found in the dirt 350 feet away from Shelli’s apartment, next to footprints and tire tracks, we know it was part of the crime because it was covered in Shelli’s blood. The matchbook also had what appeared to be a thumbprint on it. Police later figured that the print wasn’t from a thumb, but another part of the hand.

So Detective Terry tried to match it to Fred. The search warrant allowed police to take prints from all over Fred’s hands. But Terry never got a match. Tests comparing the Polaroids of Fred’s boots with the footprints found next to the matchbook were also not a match.

So even if you could figure out a motive for Fred killing Shelli, even if you do raise an eyebrow or two with a story of how his blood got on the door of apartment number three, you’d still have to explain why a matchbook with Shelli’s blood was found more than a football field away from where Fred spent the night and why nothing from that matchbook came back to Fred.

Really, the only thing Terry had on Fred, a DNA match on the tiny bit of blood on the door of apartment number three, and the shaky story of how it got there, which Fred had volunteered all the way back in 1985.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Five months after Fred’s arrest, the prosecutor, Peggy Trent, dropped the charges. Neither Trent nor the man who’s taken over for her would elaborate on why they never refiled. So I can only offer this educated guess. They never refiled the charges against Fred because there just isn’t much of a case against Fred.

OK. Moving on from physical evidence, what about the witness statements? What about the people I talked with who are absolutely certain that Fred killed Shelli, people who had clear memories of Fred’s behavior, who had strong suspicions that he’d avoided a hard look because he was law enforcement?

[PHONE RINGING]

This is Pat.

Hi, Pat. It’s Kim Barker calling. How are you?

Good, how are you?

Good. I actually didn’t call — we’re actually here. So I forgot to call as we were approaching.

Oh, no problem.

Pat Kalinay was the second person police recorded an interview with, along with his elk-hunting buddy, Dan. I found audio of that original interview, which took place in the evening after Shelli was murdered. I wanted to play it for Pat. I wanted him to hear what he said about interacting with Fred back in 1985.

You know, when you arouse this guy in apartment number three, what did you tell him?

We just told him to call the fire department. And he went in and said his phone was dead.

OK.

And then soon as he said that I ran in and grabbed a towel out of his bathroom and soaked it. And I was going to go back and try it one more time. I think the police drove up right about — right when we were at his — at that guy’s doorway.

OK. Did you ever see any blood?

Yes I did.

OK. Would you explain what — what your observation is?

OK. It seemed like that this guy came out and he said — he told us, he said, look at the blood. Me and Dan looked down. And we hadn’t even seen it. It seems like he’s the one that brought it to our attention.

And God, we just looked at it. We just couldn’t believe it. Because we knew right off the bat what had happened there. Because you could just see where —

You didn’t actually see the blood until it’s pointed out to you?

I don’t know. I’m pretty sure he’s the one that brought it to our attention.

OK. While you were trying to get in the doorway, do you remember any blood —

And that was it. Pat never said anything about Fred being suspicious or seeming guilty as hell. Certainly nothing where the cops say, oh, he’s a cop. Don’t worry about him.

I checked whether there was any record of Pat saying anything else about Fred to a detective, either at the scene or before or after the recorded interview. There is no record of anything.

If there’s anything that you think of, write it down and give me a call or whatever. OK?

Sure.

All right. Well, that’s all the questions I have. We’ll terminate the interview at 5:40 PM.

[CLICK]

Wow. That is —

I can’t imagine when that was that they told me not to worry about it. There is no way I dreamt that up, no way. I know they told me that — don’t worry about him. And I just — that was one of the most things I remember about anything is how upset I was about him not helping me.

It just makes me wonder if my — because that’s what is so vivid in my mind, was being so upset with him staying in the apartment and then later finding out he was a police officer. And where would I come up with that, don’t worry about him he’s a police officer if — I can’t imagine my mind. I know they told me that at the interview. I know they did.

Hm. Because if he says he was out and on the sidewalk, it’s, like, wow. Man, I swore he never came out of the apartment. And that’s why I was so sure that he was. Knowing that he’s a cop and that he didn’t even come out to even check on anything was just so plain that he had something to do with it that I couldn’t —

I just feel like I’m so unreliable that —

that everything I remember that morning is, like, what the heck?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Pat was shaken. He joked about needing a drink, even though it was early on a Saturday afternoon. I texted him the next day to check in on him. I’m OK. But just keep going over everything. I’m still beating myself up, he wrote back. I know I have a bad memory, but not that bad.

Michelle Gilbert had only lived with Shelli for a few months over the summer and fall before Shelli’s murder. But the trauma of the whole ordeal has stayed with her for the last 37 years. Of all the people I spoke with, Michelle’s memories were the most specific, the most visceral, the most present.

A year after meeting Michelle on Zoom, my producer Alvin and I flew to Colorado to talk to her about what we’d learned. We were greeted by Sadie, a white powder puff of a dog, who sat down near the home’s welcome mat as if to highlight its message. Sadie is in charge. We just live here.

Michelle’s husband Rick invited us into the kitchen. He told us that Michelle was running late. She was still at the gym. Rick’s a retired cop and a little protective over Michelle. When she got back, he sat down at the table with us for the interview, pen and notebook in hand.

I came to Colorado to ask Michelle about something she had told me the year before, a threatening card she remembered receiving shortly after Shelli’s murder. The card was slipped into an apartment she’d escaped to, where almost nobody knew she was. The card had a few $20 bills in it and a message telling her to get out of town.

This card that was left, can you, like, refresh — can you, again, just sort of refresh my memory and what you remember about the card?

Oh, the card that was mailed to me?

Yeah.

Oh, that was a huge memory, real specific. Like, I can see it. I can see where I was in my basement apartment. I don’t know why that stuck with me.

One, I think it scared the hell out of me. And two, it felt like a lot of money because I didn’t have a thing at that point. My money burnt down — you know, my money burnt in the apartment. My clothes burnt. I didn’t have anything.

And so $100 was a lot of money. And one, I was afraid the police were going to take it from me, because I needed it. And two, it scared me. Because basically that card said to leave town.

Right, and it’s coming to you — the way you remember it is it’s coming to your new apartment?

Well, it’s not the way I remember it. It’s a fact. It came to my new apartment because that lady brought it to me from upstairs. And I didn’t — nobody really knew I was at that apartment. That was quick.

And then you reported that to the police?

Oh, right away because I was scared. And that’s what kind of — it was, like, a fleeting thought for a second. Because I thought they were going to take that money from me and I wanted it. And then — but I was also scared.

Yeah, and they gave it back to you, right?

Yeah, I think so.

So I want to show you something that might ease your mind when it comes to the card. Because we were able to get a lot of the evidence in the case.

Really?

Yeah. So we actually have the police report about the card.

Oh, wow.

We have all of it. I just have to call this up. OK.

So this is nine pages. So I just want you to read it. And you can feel free to read it out loud or if Rick wants to go around the back.

Would you please deliver this card?

So is that it?

That’s it.

I mean, you can go through the pages. Like, it has a picture of the money. It has a picture of the card. So if you want to scroll down, I can show you how to scroll down.

OK.

Oh, she scrolled all the way down.

Oh, she scrolled all the way down?

Where’s the written part inside of the card?

It just sort of says “Merry Christmas.” There’s no mention of there being, like, this written part that was threatening.

In the case file, the card was inside an envelope with Michelle’s name on it. It was sent to the house of Lee Stinson, Michelle’s boss at Foster’s. “Lee, would you please deliver this card?” a note inside said.

That’s not — that’s not — that’s not the card. That’s not — there was something written inside. That’s not how I remember that. Because why would I be afraid of — why would I be afraid of $20 bills in a Christmas card? That’s not how I — this came to my house, though. That — wow, that’s not how I remember that.

Do you think it’s possible, and I’m just asking this — Rick knows this. Like, do you think it’s, like, the whole idea that your memory can betray you a little bit?

Possibly, sure, sure. But that’s just almost mind boggling to me. I just don’t — how could — for the past 37 years, I was afraid of this card. I don’t — I just — my mind is blown right now.

I just don’t — there was something written inside it. It wasn’t “Merry Christmas.” It wasn’t — it wasn’t that.

I just don’t — I feel like there’s another card. Like, there was another one. I don’t know what to say.

And is it blowing your mind because the memory is so vivid?

Yeah. Yeah. Because I feel like I remember that. And I — and Lee and I were so close. I wouldn’t be afraid of Lee handing me something. I don’t feel like I remember it that way.

You know, could there have been two cards? I don’t know. But I kind of felt, like, I will sometimes remember things in a way that’s, like, different than what might be — different — especially when you’re young and especially when something —

Yeah.

— this formative happens when you’re young.

Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t surprise me that my mind thought that. And now that I’m sitting with it a little bit, I believe you. Not that I believe you — I’m — I believe what you showed me, that there wasn’t two cards. And that my scared brain was so traumatized and felt like — but I just — I don’t know.

Maybe I felt like I needed an excuse to go home, that I had to allow myself an excuse to go home. And maybe telling my dad that I got a card and now I have to go home. I’m not sure what. I’m trying to figure out now. It’ll take me a while to figure out why I believed that.

I think somebody just wanted you to have some money.

Somebody was just being nice. Yeah. I think you’re right.

I walked Michelle through the physical evidence in the police files and how some of the things she and others told me originally didn’t quite line up. Like, Fred’s truck was never actually seen near the matchbook where Michelle thought it was found. Fred’s thumbprint wasn’t found on the matchbook, either. And there’s no evidence that he cut the phone lines.

There were other smaller things, too, like the window screens. Michelle remembered that Fred would offer to put her and Shelli’s window screens back in when they fell out. She figured he was the one taking them out in the first place. There is no evidence of that in her original interview or in the case file. But the police did hear from another man, not Fred, who told them that he remembered helping Shelli and Michelle with their screens.

Then there was Michelle’s memory of Fred leering at the women when they were sunbathing. The case file shows Fred did notice the young women trying to get tan. He told Terry as much in 2009 and in 2016.

But Michelle didn’t remember much about Fred until his arrest. It seems possible that talking to Terry is what jogged that sunbathing memory loose. That in a more general way, talking to Terry when he had his sights set on Fred might have refashioned Michelle’s memories, retrofit them around the idea of his guilt.

But you can sort of see the leaps that people are making here to explain away evidence, to have it point at Fred no matter what. And you can see what a defense attorney would do with that.

Mhm.

So a lot of these tests that I’m telling you about, they came back after Fred was charged.

Oh.

And I think that there was a real hope that all this stuff is — you know what the hope was.

Yeah. Hope’s a bitch.

It doesn’t pan out always. That makes a lot of sense. Wow. God. Could he — could he have not done it?

We think he might not have.

Wow.

I don’t know what to say about that. It’s really odd. It’s interesting. And I appreciate all the work you’ve done. That’s really helpful to me, personally.

And we also don’t understand why they ruled out certain people.

Really?

Yeah, we don’t. And we’re not saying — we can’t say for certain Fred didn’t do it.

Yeah.

But that’s what the evidence is. But Terry for certain feels, like — Terry really wants them to charge Fred, really wants to move ahead with the case. But I think that that’s — what we’ve just told you about is the explanation of why they haven’t.

I have a lot of respect for Robert Terry. And I think he’s very smart.

That makes me happy that he still believes it. Because the last thing I want to feel like is there’s somebody else still out there.

For some reason, for me, personally, it felt — comforting’s not a great word, but happy that at least Robert thinks he still did it. You know, for the good part of my young adult life and to being an adult, raising children, I was always very scared and just very — I never felt complete. I never felt satisfied.

[MUSIC PLAYING] I never felt, like — I just always felt some big pit, hole in my being that was just empty. And the day that I got a call from somebody in Laramie to tell me that Fred Lamb was charged, it was, like, this weight came off of my back that I couldn’t even describe. I couldn’t.

I just felt so good and so happy that somebody was going to be held responsible and that Shelli’s mom and dad would finally be able to put everything to rest and that I wouldn’t have to be scared anymore. You know, because I — I exercise one or two hours every day just to make myself feel strong and so that I can protect myself and my kids.

And even though now I’m happily married and I have, ironically, I marry a cop. Is that ironic? Is it really? Or luckily, I don’t know. I don’t know why I chose what I chose.

But I felt comfortable, finally, that he couldn’t hurt me or anybody. And then to think that maybe it’s not him, ah, just — it’s not good. It’s not.

I just wish — I wish he would just tell me. I would honestly could almost say that I wouldn’t tell anybody. Or I wouldn’t — I just want to know. I want to feel peace again

I sympathized with Michelle here, how she wanted peace and how she felt talking to Fred might give that to her. She needed an answer, still, 37 years later, to the question of who killed her closest friend, the story at least to help explain it.

I felt slightly guilty on that last point. I pushed so hard on her memories. I could feel myself collapsing the careful scaffolding she’d built over the years. It felt a little cruel, even though my facts were right, even though I felt justified in the doubt I was introducing. Maybe it’s because I couldn’t offer her much in the way of a replacement for her certainty about Fred.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

In any case, it didn’t seem like Fred wanted to say anything. I’d asked over and over again, in the time I’d been reporting this story. And I’d mostly gotten radio silence. And then, when I’d all but given up hope, I got a text message from Vaughn, his lawyer. Finally, Fred was ready to talk.

Kim takes stock of the evidence against Fred Lamb and tries to make sense of the stories she’s heard about him, including one from his wife of more than 30 years.

transcript

You’re good cop. Be proud, dammit.

Thank you.

Most people looked at and said throw it back on the shelf.

Previously on the coldest case in Laramie.

Well, I am not — I’m at a loss for words for that, because, under the circumstances that’s —

Well, yeah.

— that’s quite a compliment, and —

It’s a beautiful complement and you deserve it.

Thank you.

I just can’t even fathom him doing anything like that, except if he was in his —

Right.

“Didi mao” all that kind of, shit, flailing his arms, like he did —

Mm-hmm.

— like he does.

How could — for the past 37 years, I was afraid of this card. There was something written inside. It wasn’t Merry Christmas, it wasn’t that.

This homicide is not very difficult. It’s not complicated.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

Hi.

Hi. [INTERPOSING VOICES]

Nice to meet you.

Nice — meet you.

Go ahead. I’m Fred.

Nice to meet you, Fred.

I’m Alvin.

After more than a year of me asking and more than a year of him saying no, Fred Lamb finally agreed to talk to my producer, Alvin, and me. By the time we arrived at his lawyer’s office for the interview, Fred was already there along with his wife Linda. I recognized Fred from the video of his interrogation with Robert Terry. But that was six years ago. The man in the room with me now seems significantly older than his 73 years, hearing aids, a cane. His limp was more pronounced than it was in the video. Linda, who is 70, looked different as well. But she seemed younger than she did in her interview with Terry, more at ease, obviously.

So how do we want to do this, that’s good for you?

Would you hold my calls? I’ve always wanted to say that.

Do you want to be here, on this side?

I didn’t really have questions for Fred about his version of what happened back in 1985. I’d read the case file and listened to his police interviews a number of times. The idea that Fred would choose this Tuesday afternoon in his lawyer’s office to make some startling admission that would upend everything, it seemed kind of, unlikely. Fred’s story had remained fairly consistent over the years. Some of the details had changed, but the thrust of it hasn’t.

Did you kill Shelli Wiley?

No. No way, no shape, no form.

But to my ear at least, back in 2016 in their interviews with Robert Terry, both Fred and Linda seemed not so sure. Back then, they seemed to be saying that Fred could have done something, that he was capable of it, that maybe he did do it and then forgot about it. That’s what I really wanted to know from Fred. What was it like to have your own reality, your own story rearranged over the course of a seven-hour interrogation? I asked Fred what happened in that interview with Terry.

How did that all go down?

I was working as a maintenance person for the Correction Center over at the Albany County Sheriff’s Department. It was just before lunch. I came out. The detective that was doing the interview, another Deputy Lieutenant was there. He came up and said, would you mind coming out and talking to us again about it? Well, we just want to re-interview you, because, just ask you a few questions because you’re our only link in this whole thing. I said, sure, not a problem.

So I drove my truck out to the Police Department in South Laramie, and was met there, and taken in a room. My rights were read to me. I waived my rights because I had nothing to hide. And personal opinion only, but express from there, it went downhill really bad. So that’s when we started the whole — (SIGHS) the whole, I’ll call it an interrogation, for lack of a better term. Everything I said to him, he lied to me through the whole thing to get the answers that he required.

One question I think, I mean, I had in watching this interview is why didn’t you get a lawyer?

You know, I’ve been asking myself that same question, because I didn’t think they were out to hang me. I honestly thought that I was going to help them. And they got me just before lunch. And I’m diabetic. And to be honest with you, I can’t answer that question. I guess maybe because I was dumbfounded by the way it was going. And that’s why at the end of the interview, after around, what, 7 and 1/2 hours, I finally said, I can see this is not going to go anywhere. Congratulations, you just solved the crime of the fricking century. And then I was cuffed and escorted to Cheyenne and ate peanut butter sandwiches.

I mean, what are you coming away from that interview thinking that the police have on you?

Nothing.

Despite like — because it seems like —

The only way I was going to get out of that interview, and then the whole thing was, like I said, this is going nowhere. There was no way, no out for me. And I honestly should have thought, with my experience in law enforcement, of saying I want an attorney, I want to quit talking. But by that time, I was just out of it.

Because the congratulations to him feels really weird. Like I’ve watched the video.

If you listen to the tape, you’ll note a little cynicism in my voice when I tell him that. I’m being very sarcastic. You know, well, congratulations, you solved the crime of the century. Then that was the way I figured I was going to get out of it. And it worked. Unfortunately, I got shipped to Cheyenne, instead of home.

Earlier, Fred showed me a book he brought with him called “How the police generate false confessions.” I figured that’s what we were going to talk about, false confessions. But now, it seemed like Fred was saying — actually, I’m not sure what Fred was saying. Alvin jumped in trying to clarify.

Can I bring you back, just — I know how you feel. I know how you feel now about what Terry was telling you. But there seems to have been a moment where you go from I didn’t do it to, I didn’t do it, but if I did, I don’t remember it. And there’s a little bit of a gap there. And that eventually turns into you congratulating him, and —

Because he kept stating I was black — blacking out. If you go back to that tape, you’ll say, well, you had blackouts when you drink too much. Well, at that point, I had given up, though. (SNORTS) I knew that he was not going to let me get out of there without me telling him that I did it.

There’s no part of you in that moment that wonders, well, maybe I did this, and I memory hold it.

No, absolutely not.

In that moment?

Any time, at that moment, never.

Fred, I think it’s important to say that having listened to this tape a lot, that when you congratulate Robert Terry, it doesn’t sound sarcastic. And you also say something along the lines of, a lot of other people would have put this back on the shelf. And it’s really hard to do these kinds of investigations, because all of these people around you. And you did the right thing by being unbiased. You don’t remember saying it that way? You remember saying it sarcastically?

No, I just — I knew at that point, I was screwed. And I just — I knew that was the only way I was going to walk out of that room, was to tell him basically what he wanted to hear. And what he wanted to hear was that I had done it. And it just — I was tired. I was, you know —

Do — know any of this, Linda, at the time? Do — that he’s going in to talk or anything like that?

No. It was after they arrested him. He called and said, I just got arrested for Shelli Wiley’s murder. It was just like, are you kidding me?

And what do you remember thinking when you get that call from Fred? And then what are you thinking when you sit down with Robert Terry?

(CHUCKLES) Do edit this language out. You got to be fucking, kidding me.

This is what you remember saying to him or what you remember feeling?

I said that to him. Because he came to my house. And he says, well, you can come down and get Fred’s truck. And we want to interview you. After all, you’ve been living with a murderer for 30 years. And I just lost it. I’d had a run in with this particular officer, who thought he was better-than-thou. And I said, you obviously haven’t looked at the case, or read the case, or something to that effect. And he kept changing my words, like he did for Fred, blackouts. Fred didn’t have blackouts. He had flashbacks. They’re different. And he only wanted to get what he wanted out of you. And I just was kind of like — I was really —

This is an interview that’s happening at the house or at the station?

No, at the station. But he came to the house to get me. So, as we’re walking out the door, he’s telling me that they want to interview me, because, after all, I’ve lived with the murderer for 30 years.

And — so there’s no — again, same question, as asked for Fred. There’s no part of you that thinks that this is remotely possible?

No.

Even in 2016?

(CHUCKLES) No, no, no. You got to — the man, you know.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

Throughout this interview, Fred and Linda were disagreeing adamantly with my premise that Robert Terry had led Fred down a path for seven hours that ended in a manufactured half admission of guilt, that Linda didn’t take too much convincing to imagine that her husband was a killer. Instead, they told me what they thought was really going on, which is that Robert Terry was out to get Fred, to banish his own credentials, get a promotion. They were bitter about it, bitter at Terry and other police, bitter at the local media outlets that ran headlines about Fred’s arrest, bitter at the people in Laramie who still believe Fred did it.

One thing they weren’t bitter about, and this surprised me somewhat. They weren’t bitter about Shelli’s family and their belief that Fred is a killer. When Fred talked about Shelli’s family, he visibly softened. He said he understood why they believed he was the murderer. Even if he wasn’t going to be prosecuted, her family needed to believe the mystery was over, that the case was solved. Fred thought they needed that story.

I’m Margaret Lyons. I’m a TV critic for The New York Times and a writer for The Times newsletter, called “Watching.” To create this newsletter, my colleagues and I sift through hundreds of movies and shows so we can help you find something you’ll love. Sign up, and we’ll email you our best recommendations four times a week, so you can get a quick fix on TV tonight, or binge all weekend. “Watching” is part of a collection of newsletters just for our Time subscribers. Sign up for “Watching” and browse all of our newsletters at nytimes.com/subscribernewsletters.

We’ve been talking for more than two hours in the law office, going in circles a little bit, when I brought up one last question I needed to run by Fred and Linda.

One thing that I have to ask that’s going to be uncomfortable, it’s not about Shelli Wiley, but —

Is it uncomfortable for you to ask or for me to answer?

For you to answer.

Oh, OK.

No, I’m OK asking this, because it’s one of the reasons Robert Terry was looking at you. And it is because he believes you have said you are a Navy SEAL and that you are not a Navy SEAL.

My records reflect that I was a lithographer. I was associated with it because I was with Commander Naval Forces Vietnam. But I really don’t think I want to steal that one, no, thank you.

So you never told anybody were a SEAL?

People asked me, do I knew SEALs, I said, well, yeah. I associated with them, but I never went through the complete training. And I quit at the end-field base.

And you never killed anybody in Vietnam?

No, ma’am, not that I remember.

But you thought — you thought he was a SEAL.

Mm-hmm. But that him having never said it, I don’t know.

Did you — did you ever talk to him about what happened in Vietnam, like his tours in Vietnam?

No, if he brought it up, he would say what he wanted to. I never — it was not a good time for him. So I never — if he wanted to talk about it, he would.

Do I need to hit any other big picture things?

I don’t think so.

OK. Just a couple last ones that I wanted to hit.

I could have pushed more with the Lambs about how this story they were telling me didn’t match what I’d heard, and seen, and read. I could have pushed them both more on the Navy SEAL stuff. I could have played them back the 2016 tape that sounded so different to Alvin and me. But I also knew there were plenty of reasons why they’d arrange themselves into a defensive crouch. Sitting down for an interview with me, it wasn’t without risk. The case is still open. When prosecutors dropped the charges against Fred, they did so, quote, “without prejudice.” They could, in theory, bring back the charges any time. This isn’t entirely over for Fred and Linda.

So 1,000 percent, you think Fred Lamb did this?

Absolutely.

It’s been more than a year since I first sat in Robert Terry’s office asking about Shelli Wiley. In all that time, he hasn’t budged.

I mean, do you worry at all that you had tunnel vision on Fred?

I thought about that for 10 years. And I think being conscious of that, and being that a possibility, I don’t think so. And I’ve also shown this case to multiple other law enforcement entities to ensure that I’m not doing that. I took the simple approach of, what’s the simplest answer, what makes sense? You have to let the evidence guide you to what’s going on. And the evidence shows Fred was there, Fred was bleeding there. That’s who I looked at.

Do you think they actually will try Fred Lamb?

I don’t know.

I’m not convinced. I mean. I press it, and I push it. And I ask, and I’m — but I just — give me a time, man. Tell me when are we going to do it. Or no, like, tell me no, because I don’t do well without — if you’re going to give me hope, I’m going to keep pressing it. If you told me no, then I don’t know what to do, except wait for a new prosecutor, if that’s the case. Because a new prosecutor could come in at any time on an election and decide that this case is worthy, you know. And sometimes, that’s the best thing. But it’s not going to get any better. The case is not going to get better with time. It’s just — it’s just not.

Case’s what it is right now.

It’s as good as it’s going to get.

So what’s the other stuff that points to Fred? We know there’s the DNA, but he does admit an 85. He’s like, Oh, yeah, if you find something on that door, it’s me, you know.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s a lot of things. I just can’t really go into it too in-depth right now just because of where we’re at and trying to keep what we have. Secret is not the best word, but it kind of, is. I mean, things that can’t get out. Because there’s going to be things that only the person there knows about that we’re going to bring forth.

I’m still just seeing the blood on the door.

I know, but I can’t — I can’t divulge it right now. I can’t tell you.

Don’t you, kind of, want to? Because you — they’re not going to pros — they’re not going to prosecute this.

I just — I can’t, though. And it would be very detrimental.

So a case that you admit is not going to happen.

Well, I’m just to the point now where I’m maybe accepting it as that. But I told you I still have hope. And I don’t want to jeopardize that by divulging details that I can’t divulge.

I have learned a few things about what Terry has been up to. For one, I know he worked with experts to reconstruct the fire that burned in Shelli’s apartment. It doesn’t seem like there’s any new definitive evidence, though, at least no more DNA. As far as I know, six years after arresting Fred Lamb, the most damning evidence Terry has is still the match of Fred’s DNA on the door of apartment number three.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

It’s remarkable, really, for a 37-year-old case. But Shelli is still everywhere in Robert Terry’s office. Her case file is in the two plastic bins stacked next to the wall. Her photo is on the yellow ribbon hanging behind his desk. Terry’s devotion to this case means everything to Shelli’s family. As far as they’re concerned, he’s the only police officer who’s actually tried to solve it, who returns their phone calls, who is committed to seeing justice done.

You’re been a police officer 20 years now.

Almost.

I mean, how does this case rank in like your career? Like you have this thing that you obviously worked so hard on and —

Yeah, that’s — it is hard, because I want to retire someday, and I don’t want to leave this case. I mean, at some point, I got to move on. I have to, personally. I can’t — I can’t sit with boxes of files in my office. I can’t take them with me when I retire.

This is a hard one. It’s hard because I know what happened. I know who did it. I know who’s responsible, and I can’t do anything about it.

So that’s it. That’s where this case stands right now, in a holding pattern. Robert Terry has talked about retiring. He’s got his 20 years in. And when he does retire, here’s what will probably happen. The plastic bins will be handed on again to whoever is anointed Laramie’s newest detective. That person will read through all of the evidence and come to his or her own conclusions about who did it, create yet another story out of all the interviews and lab tests. I know this because I’ve done it.

And here’s what I got from reading through all the evidence in the case, more accurately, what I got after I stopped focusing so much on Fred. There is another suspect that popped out at me. And I know, now I’m doing the same thing that every detective in this case did, picking out a name from almost 8,000 pages of documents, from hundreds of potentials, insinuating that yet someone else murdered Shelli in a case where others have been falsely and publicly accused. But I want to take a moment to tell you what I found, because it shows just how much you can take all of the same information and construct an entirely different story.

Larry Montez, the car stealing party-goer whose alibi for the murder was that he was stalking an ex-girlfriend, one of the town’s usual suspects, who died in prison in 2019. When Fred’s defense attorney, Von, first mentioned Larry Montez, I didn’t give it much thought. But as I reached out to more people, I kept hearing about Larry. Like when I was talking to Angelo Garcia, the guy who was falsely accused by Jake Weidman.

Angelo knows the pain and destruction of wild accusations. He didn’t know much about what the police had on Fred Lamb, why they thought Fred was the killer. But he told me he knew Larry Montez. He saw Larry the night Shelli was killed and the next morning. He’d always thought that it was possible that Larry had something to do with it. It was just like that with Larry. I’d be interviewing someone about something else, and Larry’s name would just come up.

I always — I always thought it was Montez because he’s just creepy.

Penny Manson grew up kitty corner from the Montezes. She was at the same party as Larry the night Shelli was killed. Penny was interviewed by the police back in 1985. And even then, she told police that she thought it was possible Larry could have murdered Shelli.

He’s just a really creepy guy, just not right. And we always got that ugly vibe from him.

Penny’s friend, Valerie, who was also at the party told the cops she remembered seeing Larry in the early morning hours, right after the fire was set. She described him as being out of it, dirty and rumpled. Specifically, she noticed how grimy his hands were. He was missing his glasses, had scratch marks on his face she hadn’t noticed hours earlier. And the thing is you could make Larry fit the evidence. Even if Larry had gone to stalk his ex-girlfriend that night, he still had time to kill Shelli and set her apartment on fire.

At one gas station, worker said I quote, “scraggly looking man, who was possibly Mexican had bought $2 in gas in the middle of the night.” People, even Larry’s friends, called police repeatedly saying that they had heard Larry had done it and that Larry was acting strange. Before Shelli was killed, Larry had been known to break into different women’s homes. And after, he was convicted for assaulting women, both physically and sexually.

In 1997, Larry ended up pleading guilty to a felony of second-degree sexual assault of a 19-year-old woman. He spent more than six years in prison. And then, in 2007, Larry was caught in bed naked from the waist down next to his friend’s kids. The kid’s mother had a steady boyfriend at the time named Eric Pisano, who remembers walking in on the scene.

I didn’t think twice. I’d grab him and drag him out of that bed, and beat the dog shit out of him. And he tried to press charges on me for assault and all this other stuff. And the DA just laughed at him.

Before this incident, Eric said he and Larry were acquaintances, not especially close ones. Larry was tighter with the kids’ mom. But they’d have beers together, sometimes, smoked weed occasionally. Eric remembers that these hangouts would often consist of Larry getting pretty drunk and at some point in the night, sort of crying, and mumbling to himself. Eric would ask him what was wrong. But Larry always waved it away. It’s nothing, man. Eric usually didn’t push too hard on it, but —

I know there’s one I really did press the issue. And he did kind of — he kind of indicated that he was a suspect in a murder, murder rape. And I think said, 85, 86. And I looked straight in his eye and I said, well, maybe have any part of it or what? You feel guilty about something, I said, because you’re always kind of apologizing about. Or was that what you — said that what you’re reminiscing, is that something that sticks to your heart, that’s killing you, that you need to let off your chest, that you got to talk to somebody about, like what’s up? And he just looked at me, like just stared me straight in my eyes. He didn’t speak for at least a minute, minute and a half straight, and just straight looked at me dead cold in my eyes, like a deer in headlights. And was like, no, I know girl. I’m good. I was like, all right, man, whatever.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

Larry became the initial suspect in the week after Shelli’s murder. He would have been 20 at the time. It’s not clear why he was ruled out, possibly because he passed a polygraph test, which, again, are unreliable, or possibly because he had a pretty big deal in Laramie defense attorney. In any case, it seems like the police have barely looked at Larry in the past two decades.

After going through the case file and seeing how detectives tried to connect the dots, I recognize that what this case has in abundance is sure, I had confidence. What it lacks is a measure of humility. Because truthfully, I could also make Larry Montez unfit the crime. He was extremely drunk that night. Hard to imagine him having the wherewithal to cut the phone lines in the back of the apartment building.

The memories that people have of Larry that point toward his guilt, they’re hard to disentangle from the fact that he was, by many accounts, creepy and violent. And he’s dead. It’s convenient to point the finger at a dead guy. The bottom line is this, I know of nothing that ties Larry Montez to the crime scene.

Over the last two years, I have pored over the thousands of pages of police and lab reports, repeatedly watched and listened to dozens of police interviews, and talked to more than 75 people. I’ve made six trips to Laramie. In that time, I’ve learned two main things. The first thing I realized is that despite having more than 30 years’ worth of evidence, despite interviewing all these people, despite knowing that there is an answer to the question of who killed Shelli Wiley, I can’t figure it out.

The mess that was made of the case is too built-in too foundational to undo. The failure of the police to collect crucial evidence and to pursue obvious leads, the years they spent on wild-goose chases are letting the case go dormant. Altogether now, the case is just missing too many pieces. I could talk to every trucker who had a route through Interstate 80, and former classmates, and the entire town of Laramie, Wyoming. And I’m not sure it would make much of a difference. The truth, as far as I can see it, is that unless someone confesses, unless someone comes forward, whoever killed Shelli Wiley got away with it.

The second thing I realized is that we’re all unreliable narrators, especially of our own stories. Time twists memories, as does new information, causing us to fill in blanks and create stories to fit new facts. Michelle was certain that someone had sent her a menacing card telling her to go home. Pat was certain he had told police about Fred’s suspicious behavior. Former police tipped me off to evidence that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist. I talked to witnesses who remembered whole exchanges, complete with dialogue and colorful details that never happened. I think we create these stories to make sense of things that fundamentally don’t.

I had even been telling myself my own story about Laramie, about its meanness. I’d never really looked hard at my time there, just kept my memories wrapped up in a vague cruel bow, anecdotes I would tell about bullies and murderers. And no wonder Matthew Shepard was killed there. By going back, I’ve unspooled my own experience into a more complicated one.

Most high schools back then were probably their own little cauldrons of mean. The girls at my school were actually pretty nice. My junior year wasn’t that bad. I had found journalism that year, stopped wearing teal eyeliner, and traded my by-level for a short boyish cut, with no repercussions. Looking back, I remember that I had actually wanted to stay my senior year. And if there is one constant I’ve had in reporting the story, it’s that almost everyone I’ve talked to in Laramie has been extremely open and kind.

One Saturday evening, I got on Zoom with Lauri and Brandi, Shelli’s sister and niece. For nearly two hours, I told them about all the evidence I had seen in the case. I told them how many ways the Laramie police messed up, how they dismissed Shelli as a woman who ran with the wrong crowd, how they smeared her. I answered all the questions I could. I laid out my doubts about Fred’s guilt and why I had them. And I explained that despite Robert Terry’s certainty, I didn’t think new charges would ever be filed against Fred, let alone anyone else.

I think Terry really did want to solve this, and really does want to solve this, and really does believe it’s Fred, and really does want to hold him accountable. And I think he does want to give you answers.

I do too.

It’s just very — it’s a very hard thing to get answers out of at this point.

Sure.

And will they close the case?

I don’t know. I — I — I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know if they will.

Right.

It feels like — I feel like it’s a really weird position to be in, to have like looked at all the stuff that I’ve looked at and you don’t have that same opportunity.

No.

Which you’d have — you would have that and more. You would know everything that’s been done on this since 2016, right, if you were to get the case closed and just get the information yourselves.

I don’t know that my grandma or my mom want it closed. I wanted it closed so I can have other people look into it. Because nobody else can look into it, because they keep it as an open case. I don’t know how my grandma or my mom feels about that.

I don’t care either way. Yeah, if it’s closed, I guess they can look into it. I want to be nice to expose the Laramie Police Department for everything they did that they screwed up and lied about, and —

Yeah, and I think that’s why they don’t want to close the case, because they don’t want everybody to see how bad they fucked it up. Because I definitely blame them too. They had a big part in not doing things correctly. And so it does piss me off because my grandpa already passed away. He’ll never see justice. My grandma is not getting any younger. And she deserves something, at least to know. She’s not going to know who did it, and sit in court, and get to look the person in the eye. She deserves to know everything that happened, and what they did or what they didn’t do, and what they should have done. And I think she deserves that, at least.

[GENTLE MUSIC]

After I talked to Lauri and Brandi, I looked into why they haven’t just closed this case. I found out something weird. The new County Prosecutor, Kurt Brosius told me he’s not even really in charge of the case anymore. He said a special prosecutor had been appointed, an Assistant US Attorney in Wyoming. According to Brosius, she had the ultimate say so on the future of the case against Fred. I followed up with that special prosecutor. Her office said nobody there knew a thing about the appointment. So I went back to Brosius several times. He never responded.

At this point, it’s not clear to me who would close Shelli’s case. It’s not even clear who’s responsible for it. That feels like an awful limbo, with no one taking ownership of the case, with no official admitting that it’s irretrievably broken, with Shelli’s family waiting for promised charges that will likely never come, with Fred always having a cloud of suspicion hanging over him. I don’t know that closing this case and releasing the files will do much in the way of solving Shelli’s murder. But I understand Brandi and Lauri’s impulse. I’m the last person to stand in the way of someone wanting to see what’s there, to lay the whole thing out and try to make some sense of it, even if the only thing waiting on the other end is knowing you may never have an answer.

“The Coldest Case in Laramie” was written and reported by me, Kim Barker, and produced by Alvin Melathe. Additional production and photography by Jessamine Char. Julie Snyder is Executive Editor of Serial Productions. Additional editing by Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, Katie Mingle, Neal Drumming, Elon Barry, Kirsten Dennis, Rebecca Corbett, and Bethel Hobday. Our Standards Editor is Susan Wesseling. Legal review from Dana Greene and Al Amin Summer. Research and fact checking by Ben Phelan and Jessica Soriano. Additional research by Julie Tate and Michael Keller.

Original score by Kwame Brandt Pierce. Sound design and music supervision by Michael Comite. Art by Roderick Mills. Serial’s Supervising Producer is Ande Chubu. Our Digital Manager is Julie Whitaker. Sam Dolnick is an Assistant Managing Editor of The New York Times. At the New York Times, thanks to Ronan Borrelli, Jordan Cohen, Kelly Doe, Jason Fuji Cooney, Ash Kagami, Desiree Igbokwe, John McNally, Enisha Mooney, Crystal Pamatos, Nina Latham, Jeffrey Miranda, Kimmie Sy, and Julia Simon.

Special thanks to Nancy Peterson, Lin Andrews Trujillo, Barbara Burnett Ramsey, Dr. Maria Cuellar, Sandy Zabel, Dave Thompson, Lisa Ribicoff, and John Butler. And thank you to the Wiley family for opening up to us about Shelli and what 37 years of waiting has been like. “The Coldest Case in Laramie” is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.

After more than a year of asking, Kim finally interviews Fred Lamb. His version of events is very different from what she has observed. With new information, Kim takes a fresh look at the case.

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.”

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 BarkerProduced by Alvin MelatheEdited by Julie SnyderEdited with help from Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, Katie Mingle, Neil Drumming, Ellen Barry, Kirsten Danis, Rebecca Corbett, and Bethel HabteAdditional production by Jasmin ShahFact-checking and research by Ben Phelan and Jessica SurianoAdditional fact-checking and research by Julie Tate and Michael KellerSound design and music supervision by Michal ComiteSupervising producer Ndeye ThioubouOriginal score by Kwame Brandt-PierceArt by Roderick MillsStandards review by Susan WesslingLegal 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, Jon Kadner, Lynne Andrews-Trujillo, Barbara Burnett Ramsey, Dr. Maria Cuellar, Sandy Zabell, Dave Thompson, Lisa Ribacoff, and John Butler.

Kim Barker is an investigative reporter who was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in national reporting in 2022. Her book, “The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” is the basis for the movie “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.” More about Kim Barker

Behind the SeriesYour HostKim BarkerAbout the MusicKwame Brandt-PierceFurther Reading From The Times Reported by Produced by Edited by Edited with help from Additional production by Fact-checking and research byAdditional fact-checking and research by Sound design and music supervision bySupervising producer Original score byArt by Standards review byLegal review by