THE UNSOLVED MURDER OF SHELLI WILEY IN WYOMING ALMOST FOUR DECADES AGO IS SPOTLIGHTED IN THE NEW SERIAL PODCAST
In August 2016, the town of Laramie in Wyoming was rocked when a local man was arrested and charged with murder. It was a shock development in what was considered Laramie’s longest unsolved homicide – the 1985 murder of student Shelli Wiley. However, it wasn’t just the fact that they had finally caught someone decades after the brutal events that shook the community, it was who had been arrested that sent the rumour mill into over drive – because Frederick Lamb was a former law enforcement officer. Then, months later, Lamb, now 74, was released,andalltraces of the charges against him expunged. Now the subjectofthe latest Serial podcast,The Coldest Case InLaramie,the road to just ice forShelli hasbeen one full of unexpectedturns.
THE CRIME
Shelli Wiley had lived her whole life in Laramie. Dating back to the days of the wild west, and with a population of around 30,000, Serial host and investigative reporter Kim Barker – who lived there as a teenager – calls it a “mean town… full of cold people”, and describes a place beset by storms so violent, trucks are blown off the highway. She also recalls her time at Laramie High, the forbidding and cheerless high school where “one of my classmates killed someone, other students killed themselves”. But it was from this, the town’s only high school that Shelli – described by those who knew her as “beautiful, with big dreams” – graduated, before being accepted into the University of Wyoming.
In 1985, Shelli was a 22-year-old student. She’d moved out of the family home and was living in an apartment with a roommate, Michelle Gilbert, and working part-time as a waitress at Foster’s truck stop. She should have had her whole life ahead of her, but that bright future was cut short in the early hours of 20 October. That afternoon, Shelli had spent time with her sister and a friend, who had both left in the evening as Shelli needed to be up early to work a breakfast shift the next morning. Michelle was staying at her boyfriend’s, but Shelli had no reason to feel unsafe alone in their apartment andwenttobed.Exactlywhathappened next is not known, but witness accounts and evidence found at the scene suggest a terrible sequence of events.
Sometime in the early hours, Michelle recalls being hit by a terrible sense of foreboding. In the podcast, she describes how she told her boyfriend she needed to go home because she felt something was wrong. She got back to the apartment between 5am and 6am, but she was already too late. As she arrived, she saw the building was on fire. She recalls, “I pulled up and a police officer said, ‘Who are you?’ and I said, ‘I live here’. And then they said, ‘Where’s Shelli?’ And I said, ‘She’s in the house’. I was hysterical.�
