Podcast Corner: Serial crew return with a true-crime series
Kim Barker presents The Coldest Case in Laramie.
Serial Productions makes its first outing of the year on Thursday, and goes back to its true crime roots, with the release of The Coldest Case in Laramie.
Serial is one of the shows responsible for the explosion in podcasting over the last decade. The first season in 2014 looked at the murder of a young woman and wondered if maybe the wrong man had been put behind bars. In case you missed it, Adnan Syed finally walked out of prison, cleared of charges, last year - a bonus episode of Serial charting that day in court was almost emotional to listen to.
There are other seasons of Serial you can listen to as well, along with its various releases since it was bought by the New York Times - see last year’s The Trojan Horse Affair, which ruffled some feathers but ultimately was a bit of a confusing/confused show.
But The Coldest Case in Laramie is taking Serial back to the genre of true crime. Hosted by Kim Barker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, she was in school in Laramie, a, “uncommonly mean town” in Wyoming, in 1985 when a 22-year-old college student named Shelli Wiley was murdered.
She was stabbed repeatedly before being dragged into her apartment, which was then set on fire. But as the name of the show suggests, despite some arrests, the case went ice cold.
As Barker tells us in the trailer for the show, “a former cop had been arrested, his DNA had been found at the scene, he’d even apparently given something like a confession, and then… nothing?” 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.”
There are eight episodes of The Coldest Case in Laramie, which you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts, from Thursday.
For something completely different, another new show launching Thursday is LAist Studios’ California Love: K-Pop Dreaming about K-pop's coming of age. Full of heart, nostalgia, thoughtful analysis, and a little bit of fangirling, the series examines the origins of K-pop from traditional Korean music and US post-war influences to its global popularity today – all told through the lens of Vivan Yoon as she came of age in Los Angeles' Koreatown as a second-generation immigrant.
