Hello, serial listeners. Sarah Koenig here. I want to let you know about our newest show. It's called the coldest case in Laramie. Kim Barker tells this story. She's an investigative reporter with The New York Times. She's covered campaign finance and wars she has lived all over the world. But in this show, Kim tries to get to the bottom of something that happened in Laramie, Wyoming, back when she was a high school student there. She tracks sources down one leading to the next, leading to the next. You are learning information the same time Kim does. And maybe because her interest is pure or maybe because Kim is kind, all these people open up to her in unpredictable

ways. The show has a noble, straight ahead tone that I love. It's right there in the title,

The Coldest Case in Laramie. You can listen to all eight episodes next week, starting February 23rd.

Just search for the title, The coldest case in Laramie,

and then you can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Here's Kim with the trailer.

Years ago, when I was a teenager, I lived in Laramie, Wyoming.

I've always remembered it as a mean town, uncommonly mean, a place of jagged

edges and cooled people, where the wind blew so hard, it actually whipped pebbles at you, actually

pushed trucks off the highway. Laramie stood at an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and got

so socked in by winter storms, it felt like we

were trapped, like there was no way out. The town's only high school, Laramie High, was grim

even by normal high school standards. One of my classmates killed someone, other students

killed themselves. Some boys were held down and branded with letters,

like they were livestock.

Coaches who caught guys fighting in the hallways made them fight for real,

in a makeshift ring.

But the main reason that Laramia's always stuck with me,

the defining cruelty, and a litany of them, was a young woman I never met,

named Shelly Wiley. In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelly was murdered

in her apartment. She graduated from Laramie High just a few years before I got there. She was 22, white, a pretty

brunette, living a version of the life my friends and I imagined for ourselves one day. I remember

...