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In Kim Barkers memory, Laramie was a miserable place.
Ive always remembered it as a mean town, she recalls.
A place of jagged edges and cold people.
Its common for people to hold morose views of where they grew up, but this is something else.
(Its also the first Serial project hosted by aTimesreporter since the studio was acquired by the organization.)
But it also feels like its missing something.
The cold case in question took place almost four decades ago.
Two separate arrests were eventually made for the crime, but neither stuck.
And so, for a long time, the case was left to freeze.
Years pass, lead detectives turn over, trauma congeals into lore.
Barker was a kid in Laramie at the time of the murder.
The case had stayed with her since, so notable was its brutality.
Lamb had even given something close to a confession during an interrogation.
(The reason they returned to him as a suspect after so many years is complicated.)
At any rate, it seemed to be a solved case.
Then, shortly thereafter, police officials inexplicably dropped the charges.
None have been filed since.
What, exactly, happened here?
Lets not callThe Coldest Case in Laramiea true-crime story.
It certainly doesnt want to be.
Even the shows press materials explicitly distance itself from being a case of whodunit.
In the absence of true information, all manner of things may rush to fill the void.
Collateral damage is all but guaranteed.
Its a massive clusterfuck.
In a detailed way, I mean.
Howd you get to work last Wednesday, for instance?
The detective seems to believe the praise to be earnest.
Frankly, its hard not to think the same.
But even that might not be the truth.
When Barker interviews him more recently, Lamb claims that he was being sarcastic.
Were vaulted, then, back into the deep fog of subjectivity.
What, exactly, did the recording of that interrogation reveal?
Everything presented in the podcast is incredibly compelling, but it also feels, oddly, somewhat commonplace.
This may well have less to do withThe Coldest Case in Laramiethan with nonfiction crime storytelling more generally.
It will always be terrifying how our justice system depends so much on something so capricious as memory.
It will always be unsettling how our self-narratives can be so unreliable.
At this point, those ideas should be a storys starting point, not its culminating note.
The bigger question is: Where do we go from here?
