{"id":4537,"date":"2023-03-15T14:56:28","date_gmt":"2023-03-15T18:56:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/podcastreview.org\/?p=4537"},"modified":"2023-03-15T14:56:59","modified_gmt":"2023-03-15T18:56:59","slug":"the-coldest-case-in-laramie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/podcastreview.org\/review\/the-coldest-case-in-laramie\/","title":{"rendered":"The Coldest Case in Laramie Is a Familiar Podcast About an Unsolved Murder"},"content":{"rendered":"

T<\/span><\/span>he Coldest Case in Laramie<\/i>, the latest podcast from Serial Productions and The New York Times<\/i>, is as much about the unsolved murder of Shelli Wiley as it is about the town she was murdered in. Host Kim Barker, an investigative reporter for the Times<\/i>, grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, where Wiley was killed in her apartment in 1985, and her home set on fire. Barker was a teen at the time, and Wiley was a student at the University of Wyoming. Barker remembers, all those years back, trying to identify Wiley\u2019s killer in a game of Ouija with her friends.<\/p>\n

What makes the case so unsettling is not the murder alone, or its miserable mishandling by police, but the fact that neither of those things seem out of the ordinary for Laramie. At least, not according to Barker. \u201cI\u2019ve always remembered it as a mean town,\u201d she says. \u201cUncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people.\u201d She goes so far as to say living there was worse than reporting in Kabul during a war, or Islamabad during suicide bombings.<\/p>\n

In episode one, Laramie is described with a gravity that makes it sound like another suspect in Wiley\u2019s murder, or at least a witness. But as the show unfolds, that framework \u2013\u2013 Laramie as personality, Laramie as degenerate driving its inhabitants to brutality and despair \u2013\u2013 dissolves. Barker instead turns her attention purely to the details of the case and its actors. The problem with that, though, is the case isn\u2019t all that interesting. It\u2019s terribly sad, and frustratingly unsurprising in its lack of justice, but it\u2019s nothing new: former cop is accused of murdering a young woman in what seems like an open-and-shut case with solid evidence pointing to his guilt, but charges against him are dropped. It\u2019s a story we\u2019ve heard many times before.<\/p>\n

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Podcasts about stories like this one, precisely because they\u2019re so numerous, can easily become stale. The Coldest Case in Laramie<\/i>, with its common plot points, spare sound design, and Barker\u2019s sedate speaking style, if at times all grimly compelling, mostly left me disappointed and a bit bored. Though well reported, the story ends up feeling frictionless for its predictability.<\/p>\n

The podcast does have its moments. They\u2019re small and sometimes easy to miss, partly because the show\u2019s structure doesn\u2019t emphasize them, but they\u2019re what helped me piece together what the series is really about, or at least, what it wants to be about. In a number of interviews, Barker shows the myriad, unexpected ways that Shelli\u2019s murder affected an entire network of people in Laramie. In one of those moments, a man Shelli was seeing around the time she died reveals that on the day of her funeral, he was more concerned about his upcoming football game than Shelli\u2019s death. In another, the man who gave a false confession to Shelli\u2019s murder explains that he did so in order to get the death penalty. These moments, almost alarmingly forthcoming, touch a nerve running through the series, one that it never fully explores.<\/p>\n

The Coldest Case in Laramie<\/i> wants to be a story about the mundanity of violence in a small, unsuspecting town in the American West, and the systemic failings of the U.S. legal system. It\u2019s about Wiley\u2019s murder, yes, but it also wants to be about the complexity of the human interactions surrounding that murder. And it almost is about that, but falls short.<\/p>\n