The Coldest Case in Laramie Serial Productions/New York Times
Sunday Feature: Carol and Muriel (Radio 3) | BBC Sounds
The Rabbit Hole Detectives Folding Pocket
Owain Wyn Evans (Radio 2) | BBC Sounds
Ooh, a new true crime cold case podcast from Serial! Stop the clocks, etc. Actually, don’t stop them, but turn them back to the first series in 2014, just to remember how different the audio and TV climate was when true crime wasn’t a thing. Imagine! Now, as the recent tragic death of Nicola Bulley has demonstrated, true crime has ballooned from a successful media genre into a lunatic, hands-on approach to the news. Don’t just shout at the telly, spout unproved theories on TikTok and rock up at the crime scene with a spade and a phone camera. After all, these days, who would trust the police?
Which brings me to The Coldest Case in Laramie, a new eight-episode podcast from Serial Productions and the New York Times. Over lockdown, searching for a story, journalist Kim Barker remembered a strange case from the town she lived in as a teenager: the murder of Shelli Wiley, 22, in 1985. Wiley was stabbed and her flat set on fire. No one was convicted of her murder. So far, so standard podcast fare, but there’s a twist and it’s this. Everyone in Laramie, Wyoming, says they know who did it and the person they name – a former Laramie cop named Fred Lamb – was even charged at one point. He’s even seemed to admit to the murder, on tape. So why is he still free?
Barker is excellent: dogged but fair, utterly reasonable, on the side of Wiley’s family. She gets access to all files and tapes and, as she investigates, this cops-protecting-their-own yarn develops into something sadder and more infuriating. Old prejudices sent police down blind alleys, old friendships stopped them following up leads. (An example: every member of a mostly black student sports team comes under suspicion, simply because Shelli, a white woman, had a “friends with benefits” relationship with one of them.) The podcast also becomes a story about memory and how human recall – even of such a shocking event – is never as accurate as we think. It’s a gripping but subtle listen that exposes the biases, hopes and assumptions that everyone brings to a case such as this. No amount of evidence can help with that.
Here’s another cold case: a death by ignoring. Muriel Box, a British film director and screenwriter so successful that one of her screenplays, The Seventh Veil co-written with her husband, Sydney, became a film that broke all audience records in both the US and UK (18 million people saw it in Britain); who won an Oscar for best screenplay, the first woman ever to do so; who directed 13 features and is the still the most prolific female director the UK has ever produced… has disappeared. She’s unacknowledged by the film industry, by the UK in general. No blue plaque for Muriel, sorry.
In Radio 3’s Sunday Feature: Carol and Muriel, the charismatic and enthusiastic film director Carol Morley talks to former film student Karen Peploe, who once interviewed Box for seven hours, intending to centre her academic thesis on her work. But Peploe’s supervisors were so unencouraging – she was told that Box only worked as a director because she was film producer Sydney Box’s wife – that she gave up. She speaks to the BFI’s Jo Botting, who declares Box’s film Simon and Laura the best British film of the 1950s. Actually, all Box’s films sound brilliant – experimental, unusual, with a woman’s perspective – and Morley is such a lovely audio presence that you can’t fail but be swept up with her upbeat, charming passion. It’s clearly an injustice that Box isn’t better known and you feel galvanised by Morley’s tribute.
More jolliness and charm from a new podcast, The Rabbit Hole Detectives, in which the Rev Richard Coles, archaeologist and historian Dr Cat Jarman and Charles Spencer (yes, Diana’s brother) are each given an obscure topic and then talk to each other about what they’ve found out. So, a bit like The Boring Talks mixed with a clever dinner party: the first episode discusses time zones, the seaside and paperclips. All three have massive historical knowledge and it’s all madly posh, in a good way: eccentric, well-lived, entertaining, with the delightful assumption that the listeners know stuff too. I liked it far more than I expected.
On Radio 2, in Vanessa Feltz’s old early breakfast slot, new presenter Owain Wyn Evans is doing very well. Familiar to listeners as Feltz’s regular stand-in, fluffier and jollier than his predecessor, he breezed through his first five days last week and seems thoroughly at home already. Wyn Evans has what Graham Norton once described as the ability to “rattle on” and he brings up so many silly topics for discussion that listeners are bound to find one that clicks. On Monday, we had “how Owain should get through an upcoming interview about rugby when he knows nothing about it”, as well as “strange family habits and rituals”. The music is lush pop – rare is the track without a string section – and it’s all very sweet and welcoming. Lovely.
