A Voice in the Dark, Volume 1 by Larime Taylor

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.įrom Serial Productions in The New York Times, it’s “The Coldest Case in Laramie” coming on February 23. 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. He’d even, apparently, given something like a confession and then nothing? The whole thing seemed so Laramie? 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.”īut then just a few months later, prosecutors dropped the charges against him, which means, a former cop had been arrested. On the night Shelli was killed in 1985, witnesses placed him at the scene. The evidence against him seemed overwhelming. The police arrested a former Laramie cop for the murder. Thirty-one years after Shelli’s murder, there was a development. Shelli’s murder was never solved.Įvery few years, after I moved away, after I became a reporter, I’d search her name for news almost as an idle reflex. I remember the shock of her murder arriving at my high school. She was 22, white, a pretty brunette, living a version of the life my friends and I imagined for ourselves one day.

She graduated from Laramie High just a few years before I got there. In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelli was murdered in her apartment. Coaches who caught guys fighting in the hallways made them fight for real in a makeshift ring.īut 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. Some boys were held down and branded with letters like they were livestock. The town’s only high school, Laramie High, was grim even by normal high school standards. 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. 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.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming. The sound of an investigation as it unfolds. A slam-dunk case that mysteriously fell apart. Transcript The Coldest Case in Laramie From Serial Productions.

A Voice in the Dark, Volume 1 by Larime Taylor