The Coldest Case in Laramie aims to go beyond true crime — podcast review

In The Coldest Case in Laramie, Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, goes back to her hometown of Laramie, Wyoming, which she describes as “a mean town. Uncommonly mean. A place of jagged edges and cold people.” There, she looks into the unsolved murder of 22-year-old Shelli Wiley, a University of Wyoming student who, in 1985, was stabbed in her apartment which was then set on fire. Arrests were made over the years, including, in 2016, a former police officer, Frederick Lamb, who lived two doors up from Wiley and who seemed to confess to the crime while being interviewed. But none led to a conviction and the case went cold.

The Coldest Case in Laramie comes from Serial Productions, the company created off the back of the mega-successful true-crime podcast Serial, and which is now owned by the New York Times. That first series, hosted by Sarah Koenig, concerned the murder of high school student Hae Min Lee and cast doubt on the conviction of her boyfriend Adnan Syed (last year, Syed’s conviction was overturned). Downloaded more than 300mn times, it transformed the podcasting landscape and almost single-handedly kick-started the true-crime boom.

Since then, Serial Productions has made a conscious move away from true crime, looking at the US electoral system with 2021’s The Improvement Association and an alleged Islamist plot to infiltrate British schools in last year’s The Trojan Horse Affair. But with this new series, there is a sense of the team going back to their roots and perhaps trying to relive past glories.

Barker is very good: serious, thorough, thoughtful, while avoiding the navel-gazing that often afflicts podcasters with connections to the cases they are investigating. The access she gains to police files and recordings is remarkable. Early on, she conducts lengthy interviews with major players including Wiley’s sister, her former roommate, a Laramie detective frustrated by the years of inaction and Lamb’s attorney, who tells her: “I’ve met a lot of killers. If Fred Lamb’s a killer, I’ll kiss your ass on Main Street.”

Barker and the Serial team have said firmly that this is not a whodunnit, perhaps to stave off the amateur sleuthing triggered by Serial’s first series and which has, more generally, become a blight of the true-crime genre. Instead, the show makes clear that it is about the subjective nature of truth and memory, and the way a desire for resolution, however well-intentioned, can lead to chaos.

If there is a problem, it’s with the familiarity of both the story and the approach. What was new and exciting when Serial debuted nine years ago now, in a saturated market, feels run-of-the-mill — something no amount of high-minded philosophising can obscure. There is much to admire in The Coldest Case in Laramie, though it’s hard to shake off the feeling that this kind of podcast has been done to death.

nytimes.com