Serial To Launch "The Coldest Case In Laramie" Feb. 23

 In podcasting, there are two distinct determinants of time, just like in human history with BCE and CE. 

In podcasting, it's before Serial (BS) and after Serial (AS). That year was 2014. 

Back then, season one of Serial investigated the 1999 murder of Hae Min Lee , an 18-year-old student at Woodlawn High School in Baltimore. Adnan Masud Syed, Lee's ex-boyfriend, was arrested on February 28 at 6 a.m. and charged with first-degree murder. Syed's first trial ended in a mistrial, but, after a six-week second trial, Syed was found guilty of Lee's murder on February 25, 2000, and was given a life sentence. On September 19, 2022, a judge, citing the prosecution's failure to hand over potentially beneficial evidence to the defense, overturned the conviction. Syed, after 23 years in prison, was released, now a free man. 

Since 2014, Serial has been downloaded over 300 million times. Then, in 2020, The New York Times acquired Serial Productions.

Now, Serial Productions is set to launch its latest show – “The Coldest Case in Laramie” – on February 23. This eight-part series finds Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter for The New York Times, returning to Laramie to explore the shaky memories and conflicting stories behind an unsolved homicide that took place nearly 40 years ago while she was in high school.

  In 1985, when Kim Barker, a Times reporter, was a teenager living in Laramie, Wyo., a young woman named Shelli Wiley was murdered. Wiley had been stabbed repeatedly before being dragged into her apartment, which was then set on fire.

The killing stuck with Kim long after she left Laramie, long after she traveled the world as a reporter. Part of it was the brutality of the murder.2 hours

 The limited series, featuring eight episodes, will see Barker confront the conflicting stories people have told themselves about the crime.

 in January of 2021, when Barker began reporting on this story, it wasn’t a case of whodunit. Not really. Barker found many people in Laramie — including the lead detective on the case — who said they knew who killed Shelli Wiley: a former Laramie police officer who was staying two doors down from Wiley that night. His DNA was found at the scene. Under questioning, police said he all but confessed. He was arrested, eventually, in 2016.

But then, confusingly, a few months after his arrest, prosecutors dropped the charges. They said it was temporary. A procedural hiccup. But they still haven’t refiled, and it’s never been clear why. Even now, the lead detective on the case says: “We have blood evidence … we know that he was there … this homicide is not very difficult. It’s just not.”

In the podcast, Barker asks how did a case that seemed so simple—so straightforward—end before it even got started?

“This is our first Serial show hosted by a New York Times reporter,” said Serial’s executive editor Julie Snyder. “And what’s cool about this show is that it really highlights not only Kim Barker’s extraordinary investigative skills, but also her talent as an interviewer. In an almost fly-on-the-wall type of storytelling, we get to follow Kim while she works, and we come to discover that this is a story with many unreliable narrators.” 

 

Host of "The Coldest Case In Laramie," NYT reporter Kim Barker.

 Season one of Serial in 2014 and 2015 was a revelation for podcasting. Why? First, because it enabled podcasts to graduate from nerd media to the mainstream. Second, the popularity of Serial demonstrated to advertisers that the right podcast could attract millions of ears to their product or service. Thanks to Sarah Koenig, the creator of Serial.

The rest is, of course, recent history.