The Coldest Case In Laramie - Episode 8

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Speaker 2 You're a good cop. Be proud, Dammit.
Thank you.

Speaker 3 Most people would have looked at it and said and thrown it back on the shelf.

Speaker 5 Previously, on the coldest case in Laramie.

Speaker 2 Well, I am.

Speaker 6 I'm not a loss for words for that because,

Speaker 2 under the circumstances,

Speaker 2 it's quite a compliment. And I'm.
It's a beautiful compliment. I think you deserve it.
Thank you.

Speaker 7 I just can't even fathom him doing anything like that.

Speaker 7 Except if he was in his

Speaker 2 D D Mau,

Speaker 7 all that kind of shit flailing his arms like he did. Like he does.

Speaker 9 How could for the past 37 years I was afraid of this card? There was something written inside. It wasn't Merry Christmas.

Speaker 10 It wasn't that.

Speaker 12 This homicide is not very difficult.

Speaker 4 It's not complicated.

Speaker 4 Hi. Hi.

Speaker 13 What happened, Ben? Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.

Speaker 14 I'm Fred.

Speaker 13 Nice to meet you, Fred. I'm Alvin.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 By the time we arrived at his lawyer's office for the interview, Fred was already there, along with his wife Linda.

Speaker 15 I recognized Fred from the video of his interrogation with Robert Terry.

Speaker 15 But that was six years ago. The man in the room with me now seems significantly older than his 73 years.

Speaker 15 Hearing aids, a cane.

Speaker 15 His limp was more pronounced than it was in the video.

Speaker 15 Linda, who is 70, looked different as well. But she seemed younger than she did in her interview with Terry.
More at ease, obviously.

Speaker 13 So how do we want to do this that's good for you? Would you hold my call? I've always wanted to say that. Would you want to be here?

Speaker 16 On this side?

Speaker 15 I didn't really have questions for Fred about his version of what happened back in 1985.

Speaker 15 I'd read the case file and listened to his police interviews a number of times.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 Shelly Wiley?

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 17 No way, no shape, no form.

Speaker 15 But to my ear, at least, back in 2016 in their interviews with Robert Terry, Both Fred and Linda seemed not so sure.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 What was it like to have your own reality, your own story, rearranged over the course of a seven-hour interrogation?

Speaker 15 I asked Fred what happened in that interview with Terry. How did that all go down?

Speaker 16 I was working as the maintenance person for the Correction Center over at the Albany County Sheriff's Department.

Speaker 3 It was just before lunch.

Speaker 14 I came out.

Speaker 19 The detective that was doing the interview,

Speaker 20 another

Speaker 3 deputy lieutenant was there.

Speaker 17 He came up and said, would you mind coming out and talking to us again about it?

Speaker 19 You know, well, we just want to re-interview you because, you know, just ask you a few questions because you're our only link in this whole thing.

Speaker 19 I said, sure, not a problem.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 14 personal opinion only, but expressed from there it went downhill really bad.

Speaker 16 And so that's when we started the whole,

Speaker 8 the whole.

Speaker 18 I'll call it an interrogation, for lack of a better term. Everything I said to him,

Speaker 18 he lied to me through the whole thing to get the answers that he required.

Speaker 15 One question I think, I mean, I had in watching this interview is,

Speaker 15 why didn't you get a lawyer?

Speaker 3 You know, I've been asking myself that same question because I didn't think they were out

Speaker 21 to hang me.

Speaker 20 I honestly thought that I was going to help them.

Speaker 3 And they got me just before lunch.

Speaker 17 And I'm diabetic.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 18 to be honest with you, I can't answer that question.

Speaker 19 I guess maybe because I was dumbfounded by the way it was going.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 3 that's why at the end of the interview,

Speaker 19 after, oh, what, seven and a half hours, I finally said, I can see this is not going to go anywhere.

Speaker 18 Congratulations.

Speaker 3 You just solve the crime of the freaking century.

Speaker 17 And then I was cuffed and escorted to Cheyenne and ate peanut butter sandwiches.

Speaker 15 I mean, what are you coming away from that interview thinking that the police have on you?

Speaker 14 Nothing.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 There was no way, no out for me.

Speaker 19 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

Speaker 8 out of it.

Speaker 15 Because the congratulations to him feels really weird. Like, you know, I've watched the video.

Speaker 3 If you listen to the tape, you will

Speaker 18 note a little cynicism in my voice when I tell him that. I'm being very sarcastic.

Speaker 19 You know, well, congratulations, you solved the crime of the century.

Speaker 17 And

Speaker 21 that was the way I figured I was going to get out of it, and it worked.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, I got shipped to Cheyenne instead of home.

Speaker 15 Earlier, Fred had shown me a book he brought with him called How the Police Generate False Confessions.

Speaker 15 I figured that's what we were going to talk about. False confessions.
But now it seemed like Fred was saying,

Speaker 15 actually,

Speaker 15 I'm not sure what Fred was saying.

Speaker 15 Alvin jumped in, trying to clarify.

Speaker 6 Can I bring you back? Just, I know how you feel.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And there's a little bit of a gap there, and that eventually turns into you congratulating him.

Speaker 19 Because he kept saying I was, you know, blackening out. If you go back through that tape, you'll say, well, you know, you had blackouts when you drink too much.

Speaker 22 Well, at that point,

Speaker 14 I had given up.

Speaker 21 I knew that he was not going to let me get out of there without me telling him that I did it.

Speaker 6 There's no part of you in that moment that wonders, well, maybe I did this and I memory hold it.

Speaker 14 No.

Speaker 14 Absolutely not.

Speaker 6 In that moment.

Speaker 19 Anytime. At that moment, never.

Speaker 6 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.

Speaker 6 And you also say something along the lines of a lot of other people would have put this back on the shelf.

Speaker 6 And it's really hard to do these kinds of investigations because all of these people around you, you did the right thing by being unbiased. You don't remember saying it that way?

Speaker 6 You remember saying it sarcastically?

Speaker 22 No, I just...

Speaker 19 I knew at that point I was screwed and I just

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 21 And what he wanted to hear was that I had done it.

Speaker 23 And

Speaker 19 I just,

Speaker 22 I was tired.

Speaker 14 I was, you know.

Speaker 15 Do you know any of this, Linda, at the time? Do you know that he's going into talk or anything like that? No.

Speaker 7 It was after they arrested him. He called and said, I just got arrested for Shelly Wiley's murder.
You know, it was just like, are you kidding me?

Speaker 6 And what do you remember thinking when you got that call from Fred?

Speaker 24 And then what are you thinking when you sit down with Robert Terry?

Speaker 7 Do edit this language out. You gotta be fucking kidding me.

Speaker 6 This is what you remember saying to him, or what you remember feeling?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 and I said,

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Blackouts.

Speaker 7 Fred didn't have blackouts. He had flashbacks.

Speaker 25 They're different.

Speaker 7 And he only wanted to get what he wanted out of you. And I just just was kind of like, you know, I was really.

Speaker 6 This is an interview that's happening at the house or at the station?

Speaker 7 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 a murderer for 30 years.

Speaker 6 And so there's no, again, same question as I asked for Fred. There's no part of you that thinks that this is remotely possible, even in 2016.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 7 You gotta know the man.

Speaker 7 You know?

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 That Linda didn't take too much convincing to imagine that her husband was a killer.

Speaker 15 Instead, they told me what they thought was really going on, which is that Robert Terry was out to get Fred, to burnish his own credentials, get a promotion.

Speaker 4 They were bitter about it.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 One thing they weren't bitter about, and this surprised me somewhat.

Speaker 15 They weren't bitter about Shelly's family and their belief that Fred is a killer.

Speaker 15 When Fred talked about Shelley's family, he visibly softened. He said he understood why they believed he was the murderer.

Speaker 15 Even if he wasn't going to be prosecuted, her family needed to believe the mystery was over. But the case was solved.

Speaker 15 Fred thought they needed that story.

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Speaker 9 It's Wednesday, Adams.

Speaker 10 I see you're trying to distract yourself from your own banal thoughts.

Speaker 4 Let me help.

Speaker 9 Here's a recording thing made of my latest root canal.

Speaker 9 Wednesday, Season 2 is now playing only on Netflix.

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Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 One thing that I have to ask that's going to be uncomfortable.

Speaker 15 It's not about Chelly Wiley, but...

Speaker 3 Is it uncomfortable for you to ask or for me to answer?

Speaker 19 For you to answer.

Speaker 15 Yeah, no, I'm okay asking asking this because it's one of the reasons Robert Terry was looking at you.

Speaker 15 And it is because he believes you have said you are a Navy SEAL and that you were not a Navy SEAL.

Speaker 19 My records reflect that I was a lithographer. I was associated with it because I was with Commander Naval Forces Vietnam, but

Speaker 3 I really don't think I want to steal valor.

Speaker 14 No, thank you.

Speaker 15 So you never told anybody you were a SEAL?

Speaker 3 People asked me,

Speaker 19 do I know SEALs? And I said, well, yeah, I associated with them.

Speaker 19 But I never went through the complete training.

Speaker 21 I quit at the Anfib base.

Speaker 15 And you never killed anybody in Vietnam?

Speaker 14 No, ma'am, not that I remember.

Speaker 15 But you thought he was a SAAL.

Speaker 7 But that, you know,

Speaker 7 him having never said it, I don't know.

Speaker 15 Did you ever talk to him about what happened in Vietnam, like his tours in Vietnam?

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 7 If he brought it up, he would say what he wanted to. I never,

Speaker 7 it was not a good time for him, so I never,

Speaker 7 if he wanted to talk about it, he would.

Speaker 15 Do I need to hit any other big picture things?

Speaker 25 I don't think I'm.

Speaker 15 Okay.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I could have pushed them both more on the Navy SEAL stuff.

Speaker 15 I could have played them back the 2016 tape that sounded so different to Alvin and me.

Speaker 15 But I also knew there were plenty of reasons why they'd arranged themselves into a defensive crouch.

Speaker 15 Sitting down for an interview with me, it wasn't without risk. The case is still open.

Speaker 15 When prosecutors dropped the charges against Fred, they did so, quote, without prejudice. They could, in theory, bring back the charges anytime.

Speaker 15 This isn't entirely over for Fred and Linda.

Speaker 15 So 1,000% you think Fred Lamb did this?

Speaker 4 Absolutely.

Speaker 15 It's been more than a year since I first sat in Robert Terry's office asking about Shelly Wiley. In all that time, he hasn't budged.
I mean, do you worry at all that you had tunnel vision on Fred?

Speaker 19 I thought about that for 10 years.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 I took the simple approach of, you know, what's the simplest answer?

Speaker 18 What makes sense?

Speaker 12 You have to let the evidence guide you to what's going on. And the evidence shows Fred was there, Fred was bleeding there.

Speaker 6 That's who I looked at.

Speaker 15 Do you think they actually will

Speaker 15 try Fred Lamb?

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 12 I'm not convinced.

Speaker 12 I mean,

Speaker 12 I press it and I push it and I ask,

Speaker 12 but I just give me a time, man. Tell me when are we going to do it?

Speaker 4 Or no. Like, tell me no.

Speaker 12 Because I don't do well without,

Speaker 12 if you're going to give me hope, I'm going to keep pressing it. If you tell me no, then I don't know what what to do except for wait for a new prosecutor, if that's the case.

Speaker 12 Because a new prosecutor could come in at any time on an election and decide that this case is worthy.

Speaker 12 You know, and sometimes that's the best thing,

Speaker 12 but it's not going to get any better. The case is not going to get better with time.

Speaker 12 You know, it's just, it's just not.

Speaker 15 Case is what it is right now.

Speaker 12 It's as good as it's going to get.

Speaker 15 So what's the other stuff that points to Fred? We know there's the DNA, but he does admit in 85, he's like, oh yeah, if you find something on that door, it's me, you know?

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 12 There's, there's a lot of things.

Speaker 12 I just can't really go into it too in depth right now,

Speaker 12 just because of where we're at and

Speaker 12 trying to keep what we have.

Speaker 8 You know,

Speaker 12 secrets, not the best word, but it kind of is.

Speaker 12 I mean, things that can't get out because there's going to be things that only the person there knows about that you know we're going to we're going to bring forth

Speaker 12 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

Speaker 15 don't you kind of want to because you know they're not going to pro they're not going to prosecute this i just i can't though and

Speaker 12 it would be very detrimental

Speaker 6 To a case that you admit is not going to happen.

Speaker 12 Well, I'm just at 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

Speaker 4 that

Speaker 12 by divulging details that, you know,

Speaker 4 I can't divulge.

Speaker 15 I have learned a few things about what Terry's been up to. For one, I know he worked with experts to reconstruct the fire that burned in Shelly's apartment.

Speaker 15 It doesn't seem like there's any new definitive evidence, though. At least no more DNA.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's remarkable really for a 37-year-old case, but Shell is still everywhere in Robert Terry's office.

Speaker 15 Her case file is in the two plastic bins stacked next to the wall. Her photo photo is on the yellow ribbon hanging behind his desk.
Terry's devotion to this case means everything to Shelly's family.

Speaker 15 As far as they're concerned, he's the only police officer who has actually tried to solve it, who returns their phone calls, who is committed to seeing justice done.

Speaker 15 You've been a police officer 20 years now. Almost.

Speaker 15 I mean, how does this case rank in, like...

Speaker 8 your career?

Speaker 15 Like you have this thing that you obviously worked so hard on and

Speaker 4 yeah, that's uh

Speaker 11 it is hard because I want to retire someday, you know, and I don't want to leave this case.

Speaker 12 I mean, at some point, I got to move on. I have to personally, I can't

Speaker 12 sit with boxes of files in my office. I can't take them with me when I retire.

Speaker 12 This is the hard one.

Speaker 12 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.

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Speaker 15 So that's it. That's where this case stands right now, in a holding pattern.

Speaker 15 Robert Terry has talked about retiring. He's got his 20 years in.
And when he does does retire, here's what will probably happen.

Speaker 15 The plastic bins will be handed on again to whoever has 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.

Speaker 15 Create yet another story out of all the interviews and lab tests.

Speaker 15 I know this because I've done it. And here's what I got from reading through all the evidence in the case.

Speaker 15 More accurately, what I got after I stopped focusing so much on Fred.

Speaker 15 There is another suspect that popped out at me.

Speaker 15 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 Shelly in a case where others have been falsely and publicly accused.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Larry Montez.

Speaker 15 The car-stealing partygoer 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.

Speaker 15 When Fred's defense attorney Vaughan first mentioned Larry Montez, I didn't give it much thought.

Speaker 15 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 Wideman.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 He saw Larry the night Shelly was killed and the next morning. He'd always thought that it was possible that Larry had something to do with it.

Speaker 15 It was just like that with Larry. I'd be interviewing someone about something else, and Larry's name would just come up.

Speaker 32 I always thought it was Larry Montez because he was just creepy.

Speaker 15 Penny Munson grew up kitty corner from the Montez's. She was at the same party as Larry the night Shelly was killed.

Speaker 15 Penny was interviewed by the police back in 1985 and even then she'd told police that she thought it was possible Larry could have murdered Shelly.

Speaker 32 He's just a really creepy guy, just not right. And he always got that ugly vibe from him.

Speaker 15 Penny's friend Valerie, who was also at the party, told the cops she'd remembered seeing Larry in the early morning hours, right after the fire was set.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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 Shelly and set her apartment on fire.

Speaker 15 At one gas station, workers said a, quote, scraggly-looking man who was possibly Mexican had bought $2 in gas in the middle of the night.

Speaker 15 People, even Larry's friends, called police, repeatedly saying that they had heard Larry had done it and that Larry was acting strange.

Speaker 15 Before Shelley 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And then, in 2007, Larry was caught in bed naked from the waist down next to his friend's kids.

Speaker 15 The kid's mother had a steady boyfriend at the time named Eric Pisano, who remembers walking in on the scene.

Speaker 33 I didn't think twice. I grabbed him and drugged him out of that bed and beat the dog shit out of him.
And

Speaker 33 he tried to press charges on me for for assault and all this other stuff, and the DA just laughed at him.

Speaker 15 Before this incident, Eric said he and Larry were acquaintances. Not especially close ones.
Larry was tighter with the kid's mom.

Speaker 15 But they'd have beers together sometimes, smoked weed occasionally.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Eric would ask him what was wrong, but Larry always waved it away. It's nothing, man.

Speaker 15 Eric usually didn't push too hard on it, but

Speaker 33 I know there's one night I really did trust the issue and he did kind of

Speaker 33 he kind of indicated that he was a suspect in a murder, murder rape.

Speaker 33 And I think he said 85, 86.

Speaker 33 And I looked him straight in his eyes and I said, well, did you have any part of it or what? Do you feel guilty about something? I said, Because you're always crying and apologizing about shit, bro.

Speaker 33 Is that what you're

Speaker 33 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?

Speaker 33 And he just looked at me like, just stared me straight in my eyes.

Speaker 33 I 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 he was like, no, no, bro.
I'm pissed.

Speaker 33 I was like, all right, man, whatever.

Speaker 15 Larry became the initial suspect in the week after Shelley's murder. He would have been 20 at the time.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 In any case, it seems like the police have barely looked at Larry in the past two decades.

Speaker 15 After going through the case file and seeing how detectives tried to connect the dots, I recognized that what this case has in abundance is sure-eyed confidence.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Hard to imagine him having the wherewithal to cut the phone lines in the back of the apartment building.

Speaker 15 The memories that people have of Larry that point toward his guilt, they're hard to to disentangle from the fact that he was, by many accounts, creepy and violent. And he's dead.

Speaker 15 It's convenient to point the finger at a dead guy. The bottom line is this.

Speaker 15 I know of nothing that ties Larry Montez to the crime scene.

Speaker 15 Over the last two years, I have poured 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.

Speaker 15 I've made six trips to Laramie.

Speaker 15 In that time, I've learned two main things.

Speaker 15 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 Shelly Wiley, I can't figure it out.

Speaker 15 The mess that was made of the case is too built in, too foundational to undo.

Speaker 15 The failure of the police to collect crucial evidence and to pursue obvious leads. The years they spent on wild goose chases or letting the case go dormant.

Speaker 15 Altogether now, the case is just missing too many pieces.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 The truth, as far as I can see it, is that unless someone confesses, unless someone comes forward,

Speaker 15 whoever killed Shelly Wiley got away with it.

Speaker 15 The second thing I've realized is that we're all unreliable narrators, especially of our own stories.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 I talked to witnesses who remembered whole exchanges complete with dialogue and colorful details that never happened.

Speaker 15 I think we create these stories to make sense of things that fundamentally don't.

Speaker 15 I had even been telling myself my own story about Laramie, about its meanness.

Speaker 15 I'd never really looked hard at my time there, just kept my memories wrapped up in a vague, cruel bow.

Speaker 15 Anecdotes I would tell about bullies and murders, and no wonder Matthew Shepard was killed there.

Speaker 15 By going back, I've unspooled my own experience into a more complicated one.

Speaker 15 Most high schools back then were probably their own little cauldrons of mean.

Speaker 15 The girls at my school were actually pretty nice. My junior year wasn't that bad.

Speaker 15 I had found journalism that year, stopped wearing TLI liner, and traded my bi-level for a short boyish cut with no repercussions.

Speaker 15 Looking back, I remember that I had actually wanted to stay my senior year.

Speaker 15 And if there is one constant I've had in reporting this story, it's that almost everyone I've talked to in Laramie has been extremely open and kind.

Speaker 15 One Saturday evening, I got on Zoom with Lori and Brandy, Shelly's sister and niece.

Speaker 15 For nearly two hours, I told them about all the evidence I had seen in the case.

Speaker 15 I told them how many ways the Laramie police messed up, how they dismissed Shelly as a woman who ran with the wrong crowd, how they smeared her.

Speaker 15 I answered all the questions I could.

Speaker 15 I laid out my doubts about Fred's guilt and why I had them.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 And I think he does want to give you answers. I do too.

Speaker 15 It's just a very,

Speaker 15 it's a very hard thing to get answers out of at this point.

Speaker 34 Sure. When will they close the case?

Speaker 4 I don't know.

Speaker 15 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 4 I don't know if they will.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 15 I feel like it's a really weird position to be in, you know, to have like looked at all the stuff that I've looked at and you don't have that same opportunity,

Speaker 15 which you would have, you would have that and more. You would know everything that's been done on this since 2016, right?

Speaker 15 If you were to get the case closed and just get the information, you know, yourselves.

Speaker 34 I don't know that my grandma or my mom wanted 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.

Speaker 34 I don't know how my grandma or my mom feels about that.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 34 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.

Speaker 15 After I talked to Lori and Brandy, I looked into why they haven't just closed this case and I found out something weird.

Speaker 15 The new county prosecutor, Kurt Britzius, told me he's not even really in charge of the case anymore. He said a special prosecutor had been appointed, an assistant U.S.
attorney in Wyoming.

Speaker 15 According to Britzius, she had the ultimate say-so on the future of the case against Fred.

Speaker 15 I followed up with that special prosecutor. Her office said nobody there knew a thing about the appointment.
So I went back to Britzius several times. He never responded.

Speaker 15 At this point, it's not clear to me who would close Shelly's case. It's not even clear who's responsible for it.

Speaker 15 That feels like an awful limbo, with no one taking ownership of the case, with no official admitting that it's irretrievably broken, with Shelly's family waiting for promised charges that will likely never come, with Fred always having a cloud of suspicion hanging over him.

Speaker 15 I don't know that closing this case and releasing the files will do much in the way of solving Shelly's murder. But I understand Brandi and Lori's impulse.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 Even if the only thing waiting on the other end is knowing you may never have an answer.

Speaker 15 The Coldest Case in Laramie was written and reported by me, Kim Barker, and produced by Alvin Melleth. Additional production and photography by Jasmine Shaw.

Speaker 15 Julie Snyder is executive editor of Serial Productions.

Speaker 15 Additional editing by Sarah Koenig, Ira Glass, Jen Guerra, Katie Mingle, Neil Drumming, Ellen Berry, Kirsten Dannis, Rebecca Corbett, and Bethel Hobtay.

Speaker 15 Our standards editor is Susan Wesling. Legal review from Dana Green and Alameen Sumar.

Speaker 15 Research and fact-checking by Ben Phelan and Jessica Suriano. Additional research by Julie Tate and Michael Keller.
Original score by Kwame Brandt

Speaker 15 Sound design and music supervision by Michael Kamate. Art by Roderick Mills.
Serial supervising producer is Ende Chubu. Our digital manager is Julie Whitaker.

Speaker 15 Sam Dolnick is an assistant managing editor of the New York Times.

Speaker 15 At the New York Times, thanks to Renan Barelli, Jordan Cohen, Kelly Doe, Jason Fuji-Kuni, Ashka Gami, Desiree Abakwe, John McNally, Anisha Mooney, Crystal Plomatos, Nina Lassam, Jeffrey Miranda, Kimmy Tsai, and Julia Simon.

Speaker 15 Special thanks to Nancy Peterson, Lynn Andrews Trujillo, Barbara Burnett Ramsey, Dr. Maria Queyar, Sandy Zabel, Dave Thompson, Lisa Rybikoff, and John Butler.

Speaker 15 And thank you to the Wiley family for opening up to us about Shelley and what 37 years of waiting has been like. The coldest case in Laramie is from Serial Productions and the New York Times.