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

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

cold people.

Where the wind blew so hard, it actually whipped pebbles at you, actually pushed trucks

off the highway.

Army stood in an elevation of more than 7,000 feet and got so sucked 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 cut guys fighting in the hallways made them fight for real, and it makes

shiftering.

But the main reason that Laramie has always stuck with me, the defining cruelty in a litany

of them, was a young woman I never met, named Shelley Wiley.

In the fall of 1985, when I was a high school sophomore, Shelley was murdered in her apartment.

She graduated from Laramie High just a few years before I got there.

She was 22, quite a pretty brunette, living a version of the life my friends and I imagined

for ourselves one day.

I remember the shock of her murder arriving at my high school.

Some students became suspects, others played the guessing game.

Shelley's murder was never solved.

Every few years, after I moved away, after I became a reporter, I'd search your name

...