You Still Here

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Joe Biden's advice for Princess Leia....."}]

Politics 1 27 25

Cowboy State Daily is Wyoming’s largest newspaper with Wyoming’s most experienced journalists. 

<title>Today In Politics: Monday, January 27, 2025 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Joe Biden's advice for Princess Leia.....

Today In Politics: Monday, January 27, 2025

 Joe Biden's advice for Princess Leia.....

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Business & Tourism

The first time Farmstead Cider went after old apples in Jackson Hole, it was just for the flavor. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It soon became about the bears. "}]

Every fall as apples drop and ferment in the backyards and ghost orchards of Jackson Hole, grizzlies and black bears do what comes naturally. They follow their noses straight into trouble — calorie-rich fruits that taste oh-so-good when you’re a bear desperate to fatten up for winter. 

The first harvest, though, was all about the homesick wives, Farmstead Cider’s co-owner Orion Bellorado said. They had grown up on the East Coast, where apple harvests are a big deal. 

“We started harvesting the apples in our neighborhood off of peoples’ trees that were kind of derelict,” he said. “And they were tiny, so we pressed a bunch of juice and made some cider out of it.”

The party was great and word soon got around. 

“Someone from the county found out about it and said, ‘Hey, you should really put in for this community grant to start a business,” Bellorado recalled. “‘Because we’ve really been having issues with bears.’”

That was in 2016, and the business has been going ever since, bottling 5,000 to 7,000 gallons of native-yeast cider a year and selling it across Wyoming as well as other states such as Washington and Montana. 

In the process of climbing into backyards and abandoned orchards, Bellorado stumbled onto a bigger realization. Wyoming is curiously — if quietly — rich in apples across the state.

“They are everywhere,” he said. “I mean, Lander was called Apple Town before it was called Lander. It’s full on part of this interesting tidbit of our culture and our history that’s really been left behind.”

That history is being rediscovered thanks to a project called the Wyoming Apple Project. Through it, researchers have been cataloguing a hidden network of heritage and volunteer trees that have somehow survived a century or so of drought and neglect. Researchers say these hardy survivors might point the way to a new kind of apple economy in one of the harshest fruit-growing climates in America.

You wouldn’t know it from today’s landscape of hay bales and cattle, but Wyoming was once thick with apples. Homesteaders brought apple seeds to plant in their new homes, carving out orchards that were just as essential as a root cellar to their survival.

Apples meant sauce, butter, cider, vinegar and livestock feed. They were essential calories, but also comfort — the kind that could be stored up through a long, hard winter.

By the early 1900s, experimental orchards and private growers had tested at least 218 named apple cultivars across Wyoming, including 11 that were Wyoming-bred. 

Among the most ambitious of the early apple pioneers was an experimental fruit farm in Lander, which trialed 175 different cultivars under superintendent John Steinbrecht, who also developed 10 of the 11 Wyoming-bred cultivars. 

Not far away from Steinbrecht was Lander orchardist Ed Young, who planted a prodigious 3,000-some apple trees in 1882 — an act of faith in a place better known for blizzards than fruit blossoms.

At the time, Wyoming was held up as a national example of what’s possible on the frontier. 

“A lot of those early settlers, such as Ed Young, and their success in growing apples was used in news articles back east, to bring hope to people thinking about moving West,” University of Wyoming graduate and plant physiologist Jonathan Magby told Cowboy State Daily. “It helped show them that you can successfully inhabit this remote location of the United States.”

Wyoming’s apples at that time came from everywhere — Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Canada and even Russia. Several nurseries were involved in seeing which varieties could stand up to Wyoming’s brutal mix of cold, drought and wind, including 

At one point, at least 70 out-of-state nurseries and 20 in-state nurseries across 11 Wyoming cities were selling apple stock to Wyoming growers.

Then, slowly, the state forgot about its apples.

Wyoming’s agricultural identity shifted solidly toward cattle and general row crops. Many orchards were abandoned. Irrigation ditches shifted. Families moved away or sold off land.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Winters kept coming. "}]

And the apple trees that had been left behind continued growing. They became part of an unintended Darwinist experiment — one where only the fittest would survive. 

What’s left of the apple trees that once dotted Wyoming are now the toughest of the tough. Trees too full of Wyoming grit to give up and die.

Among the most interesting is a gnarled apple tree in Lander. Its limbs curl up to the sun like an insect on its back, and its trunk is so hollowed out, one wouldn’t be surprised to find a hobbit — or some other creature of legend — sleeping inside.

Somehow, though, this ancient tree is still alive, still leafing out, still stubbornly insisting on producing apples, despite a century or so in a place that routinely tries to freeze them to death.

Wyoming is not a state known for hardy trees. It is, after all, among the coldest and driest of states in the Lower 48. And apple trees aren’t known for being especially long-lived, either. Most never see a 100th birthday.

That makes this particular apple tree special. It’s passed a 100-year stress test, one where Wyoming wind and drought are separating the true pioneers from the pretenders.

To Magby, the Lander tree is far more than a curiosity. It’s a symbol of what Wyoming apples once were, as well as what they could be again. 

These survivors could help develop ever more hardy Wyoming stock, making apples a potential new and viable agricultural commodity. Because of that, the tree’s tissue was pulled and grafted onto new stock, so it can keep growing for another 100 years.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Like A CSI Detective"}]

Magby has been searching out all the old heritage apple trees of Wyoming using DNA finger-printing techniques more often associated with crime shows like CSI. 

So far he’s sampled 510 trees at 91 locations in 19 cities, from Lander and Sheridan to Buffalo and Casper, to figure out which trees match known cultivars and which might be lost or forgotten varieties. So far he’s found more than 150 unique genetic fingerprints that don’t match anything in old reference collections. 

Some of those varieties show up in multiple towns, suggesting they are long-lost cultivars that no longer exist anywhere else. hey are a living link to an era when Wyoming was serious apple country.

Two varieties that keep showing up, meanwhile, are Wealthy and Haralson, both bred in Minnesota. They are roughly one-third of all the identified surviving trees in his data set.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Charming History"}]

Magby doesn’t see Wyoming apples as a charming historical footnote. He believes these survivors are pointing the way to a viable agricultural commodity for the state, one that could lead to more products that are made in Wyoming, such as Farmstead Cider in Jackson Hole. Making products in Wyoming — referred to as value-added products — is a better bang for the buck. It keeps most of the economic value chain in-state.

Apple cider production makes a lot of sense in Wyoming, alongside the growing microbrewery scene, Magby said. People also just enjoy fresh produce that’s been grown in Wyoming, whether that’s an apple or other fruits.

“We take pride in anything that’s been produced in Wyoming,” Magby said. “So I’d love to see someone take a strong stance of producing and backing development of cultivars and revamping testing of grape and pear varieties and other small fruits, just to provide that diversity, not just in fresh food products, but also diversity of economies.”

Bellorado is already living that future at Farmstead Cider, thanks to bear-safety grants that helped launch a business to haul apples out of backyards and ghost orchards. 

Now, instead of attracting trouble, those apples are a useful and delicious product in a growing business. It’s more joy to the human world, all from abandoned, pioneer apple trees.

Apples Ian Mc Gregor co owner of Farmstead Cider Courtesy Photo 6 27 26

<title>Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Wyoming was once thick with apples. In fact, it was a top apple producer. Now those forgotten apple trees are being rediscovered by small cider houses. "They're everywhere," said one cider house owner. "Lander was called Apple Town before Lander."

Wyoming’s Ghost Apple Orchard Trees Have Been Rediscovered And Are Producing

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Around Wyoming

New research indicates that Wyoming’s prehistoric hell pigs had different diets based on their size. The bigger they were, the wider the menu.

Brynn Wooten, a Ph.D. candidate at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, published 

 in Archaeotherium, a prehistoric mammal that’s better known as “the North American Hell Pig.”

“They look similar to pigs, but they’re actually more closely related to whales and hippos,” Wooten told Cowboy State Daily. “They were one of the largest things capable of eating meat in their ecosystem.”

Wooten’s study focused on the teeth of hell pigs, including specimens in the collections of the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. She studied the microwear on the tooth surfaces of multiple species to get an idea of what they were biting and crunching.

[{"type":"text","text":"Even she was surprised by the results."}]

“I was shocked,” she said. “We found a really interesting phenomenon that is uncommon in modern mammals. In fact, we actually see the exact opposite. It’s surprising and really interesting.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Hell Pig Person"}]

Hell pigs are an extinct group of large mammals that were widespread in North America, Europe and Asia from 36 to 19 million years ago. The first fossils were found near Fort Laramie in 1850. A food cache fossil is on display at the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis.

These had enormous heads with thick jaws and powerful teeth. If that wasn’t frightening enough, the largest entelodonts could grow to the size of a horse.

Hell pigs weren't quite that big, but it was one of the largest and most successful mammals in North America during the Eocene and Oligocene periods. Its fossils are common in 

, which stretches across the western U.S.

Wooten became enamored with “hell pigs” when she saw their massive skeletons at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science as a child.  Her latest research is the first chapter of her Ph.D. dissertation on hell pigs.

“When I go to conferences, I’ll tell people when and what I’m presenting, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, you’re the hell-pig person,’ and get really excited.”

That excitement stems from the fact that while hell pits and other like creatures are legendary in paleontology, there’s been little research done on them. Wooten’s focus on the paleoecology of hell pigs is, in many ways, the first of its kind.

“Everything else has been inferred by looking at and measuring bones,” she said. “I'm taking a more quantitative approach, and that’s excited a lot of people because we’ll get to learn a little bit more about a truly lost lineage.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"You’ll Wreck Your Teeth"}]

Modern pigs aren’t picky. They’ll eat anything, making them true omnivores.

Hell pigs aren’t really pigs, but it’s always been assumed that they were similarly omnivorous. The first step in Wooten’s research was to see whether she could support or refute that idea by becoming a prehistoric dentist.

“Dental microwear texture analysis can't tell us what an animal was eating, but it can tell us the texture of what the animal was eating,” she said. “Since the diet of entelodonts has been contested, we thought it’d be interesting to see if we could figure that out.”

Wooten scanned and studied 53 hell pig teeth from 13 co-existing species in the collections of the UW Geological Museum, the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville.

The fossilized teeth Wooten used for her study came from South Dakota, Colorado, Nebraska, and Oregon, with a handful from Wyoming.

Teeth wear differently depending on diet. But studying the distinct patterns of microwear on the hell pig teeth, Wooten could determine whether each individual was primarily eating brittle items, like bones, browses, and seeds, or tough items like flesh and grass.

“That's why it's important that we compare the microwear on the fossilized teeth to modern animals,” she said. “We know what modern animals are eating. If we can see similarities in microwear texture, you can infer what the prehistoric animals were eating.”

Wooten had an idea of what she’d see on the teeth. What she exactly saw subverted her scientific expectations.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Who’s Eating What"}]

After examining the dental microwear texture on the teeth of hell pigs and comparing that with that of modern animals, clear patterns emerged. They weren’t the patterns Wooten was expecting.

“I was really expecting to scan these and come out with everything that was eating super hard things,” she said. “When the results came back, I was shocked.”

Several teeth showed the telltale textures of a bony diet, comparable to the teeth of modern hyenas. Others showed little to no evidence of anything hard in their diet, with microwear comparable to that of modern cheetahs.

Wooten decided to explore these differences until she found an explanation.

“As I was exploring these differences, I discovered a body-size difference,” she said. “I ran all the statistics with the body size separated into smaller and larger, and that's when I found that there was this significant difference in diet.”

Wooten’s conclusion was that the smaller hell pigs were eating tougher food while the bigger ones were eating whatever they could. That’s an anomaly in modern ecosystems.

“Larger animals actually eat softer foods because they have the liberty of eating softer foods,” she said. “Smaller animals eat whatever they can get because they're not as advantaged as the larger animals. That’s what we expect to see in nature. The opposite is fairly uncommon.”

Wooten also noted that this size-diet split was tied to species, not age. Smaller species of hell pig had softer diets, while larger species had harder diets.

“The larger-bodied individuals ate like hyenas, but the small-bodied individuals ate like cheetahs,” she said. “Cheetahs are exclusively flesh eaters, so it’s possible the smaller Archaeotherium were exclusive flesh eaters, too.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Gimme, Gimme!"}]

With this intriguing diet disparity determined by body size, it’s only natural to speculate what that could reveal about the biology and behavior of hell pigs.

Wooten doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, but she did say the differences in the diet could have been partially caused by a common behavior scientists see in many modern ecosystems: kleptoparasitism.

That’s a big word for big animals stealing food from small animals. Wyomingites can see it happen all the time in places like Yellowstone National Park.

“Bears will scare wolves, lynxes, or pumas from their kills and eat the remains,” Wooten said. “When you’re scavenging, you eat bone even if you don’t really mean to.”

Wooten referenced a fossil from the White River Formation that suggests the same behavior. It’s believed to be 

, containing several partial skeletons of Poebrotherium, a small prehistoric camel.

“The camels were killed by a bite to the head and neck,” she said. “The meatier portion of their bodies — the butt — was eaten, while front portions, the head and arms, were dragged back to a meat cache.”

This fossil has been cited as evidence of active hunting by hell pig mortoni, which Wooten called “the smallest of the smaller-bodied Archaeotherium species.”

The butt-less Poebrotherium food cache might give more credence to kleptoparasitism among hell pig species. If the camels were killed by a smaller-bodied species, it would align with what Wooten discovered from her dental microwear analysis.

“Maybe the smaller ones would run and actively hunt their food, and the larger ones could have scared them off and consumed their kills,” Wooten said. “It's really hard to have two different kinds of animals that are living at the same place at the same time, because then they're constantly going to be fighting for resources.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Closer Look"}]

Wooten has learned a lot from the dental microwear analysis of hell pig teeth. The next step in her research is more in-depth dentistry.

“The next step is using stable isotope analysis to put more of the puzzle pieces together,” she said. “That’ll give me a better picture of what was going on.”

Stable isotope analysis is an increasingly powerful tool in paleontology. A 2025 study 

determined the diets of Jurassic dinosaurs

, down to the specific salads Brontosaurus ate, using the calcium isotopes preserved in their tooth enamel.

Using stable isotope analysis on hell pig teeth, coupled with the microwear textures, would help Wooten narrow down the dietary preferences of the different-sized species.

It will also shed insight on whether hell pigs were primarily carnivorous or had a more generalist diet of meat and plants.

“Unless we have a time machine, I don't think I'm ever going to know exactly what they were eating day-to-day,” she said. “Stable isotope analysis will help clarify the textures of foods being eaten and potentially lead to a path to infer what actual foods were being eaten.”

Wooten has already done some stable isotope analysis, but she’s not at liberty to share what she’s learned. That’s for the next paper.

[{"type":"text","text":"“It’s embargoed, but it’s very fascinating,” she said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Archaic And Unknown"}]

Wooten’s ultimate goal is to use her ongoing dental analysis to build “a broader picture” of the many species of hell pig in their ancient environment.

“Going forward, I’ll focus more heavily on general paleoecology,” she said. “Where were they living? How might they have adapted to the changing environment? How do they utilize the resources in their habitats?”

Wooten believes there’s a lot to learn from hell pigs. It was a long-lived and diverse genus that served as a top predator in its ecosystem for 17 million years.

“That’s a really long time for any genus, let alone one with over a dozen different species, to survive,” she said. “They’re all related to reach others, but distinctly different, which is another really interesting factor in all this.”

That means she’s more than content to be “the hell-pig person” for the rest of her career.

“I fell in love with these creatures,” she said. “They’re so archaic and unknown. They’re different from anything else we have today, and it’s always going to be exciting to learn a little bit more about them.”

Hell Pig E6 CC83 C8 0 A84 495 B 9723 19 D2 D0 E8 D744 1 6 27 26

<title>Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos | Cowboy State Daily</title>

The first fossils of the prehistoric mammal known as the "North American Hell Pig" were found near Fort Laramie, Wyoming in 1850. Scientists say although they look similar to pigs, they are more closely related to whales and hippos.

Wyoming's Prehistoric Hell Pigs Looked Like Pigs But Were More Like Whales And Hippos

The Fry family lost their 14-year-old corgi Lola on May 16. She was wandering near her home along Wyoming Highway 50 south of Gillette when she disappeared without a trace.

Nearly a month later, Lola turned up in a Facebook Classified post in Wisconsin, more than 1,000 miles away.

“I got a call at 8:15 a.m. and just cried," Kimberly Fry told Cowboy State Daily. “By 10 a.m., my husband, dad, and a family friend were on the road and drove all night to get her from Wisconsin.”

Lola is frazzled and lost a little weight after her strange journey, but is doing fine otherwise. Fry’s children, 7 and 3, were overjoyed to have the family dog back home.

Nevertheless, Fry is still trying to parse out what happened. She believes her corgi was stolen and abandoned by the people who stole her, making their reunion a miracle.

“You try not to give up faith,” she said. “After a month of hell, it’s very surreal to have her back.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'My Newspaper Dog'"}]

 but she’s a bit of a handful in her old age. After all, she’s at least 98 years old in dog years.

“She’s deaf, her back leg shakes because of a partially torn ACL, and she’s on a sensitive dog food diet because of heart issues,” Fry said. “But she’s the sweetest thing ever.”

Fry called her corgi “my newspaper dog” because that’s how she 

 found her. It’s a reminder of just how old she is.

“Someone put an ad in the newspaper that they had puppies for $150,” she said. “We don’t really have newspapers anymore.”

Lola’s routine has been spending most of her time outdoors on the family ranch. Fry said she hangs out with the sheep, horses and chickens, and has been happy “doing her thing” for years.

Then, in her old age, Lola suddenly started to “see people,” as Fry put it.

“Two years ago, she decided she was lonely and walked a mile to visit the neighbors and their cats,” she said. “She’s just a friendly old dog.”

That’s why the Fry family wasn’t immediately concerned when Lola wasn’t home one night. It was the first night of an agonizing ordeal for the family.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Lola Lost"}]

On the morning of Saturday, May 16, Fry’s 

-year-old daughter was taking Lola to her kennel when the dog slipped out of her collar.

“It's common for ranch people to have their dogs' collars pretty loose,” Fry said. “She made it into the kennel but without her collar.”

With Lola in her kennel, the family went into town at 1 p.m. When they returned home at 2 p.m., Lola was gone – the kennel’s door hadn’t been fully shut.

Nobody panicked. They figured Lola was off visiting someone and would be back soon. It was only when it got dark that the family started getting worried.

“My husband looked a little that night, but there was no sign of her,” Fry said. “We figured she’d be back tomorrow. She never came back.”

By Monday, the Frys figured someone must have taken Lola to the pound. When they called that morning, Lola wasn’t there.

That’s when, according to Fry, “the real panic started.” She started posting about Lola in every Facebook group she could, asking for any sign of her missing corgi.

“On Tuesday, we searched with a lady who had a tracking dog,” Fry said. “We found that she had gone to the neighbors, and someone had seen her near the highway on Sunday.”

On Wednesday, they searched with another tracking dog, thermal scopes, and a drone. No sign of Lola.

Fry feared the worst, but the evidence didn’t add up. That was simultaneously hopeful and dreadful.

“If she had passed away, the tracking dogs would have smelt her,” she said. “We were set on (the explanation) that someone had picked her up.”

If so, they weren’t reaching out. Fry tearfully recalled the long wait for any information.

[{"type":"text","text":"“You never want to give up,” she said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'I Have Your Dog'"}]

[{"type":"text","text":"One week. Two weeks. Three weeks."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"Still no sign of Lola."}]

Both of Fry’s children celebrated their birthdays without their corgi. Fry gave herself an emotional break from posting about Lola, but started again in mid-June.

[{"type":"text","text":"On June 14, Fry got a call. It was a woman from Wisconsin."}]

“She said, ‘I have your dog,’ and I just started bawling,” Fry said. “I asked if she was sure, because we had a couple of people reaching out trying to help, and she said, ‘Yes, I have your dog'.”

The Wisconsin woman had acquired Lola via Facebook Marketplace. Someone was trying to give Lola away, for free, to anyone who’d take her.

According to Fry, the woman who picked up Lola got some details from the people who had her. It was a young couple who apparently picked up Lola while moving from Wyoming to Wisconsin.

“They saw her on the side of the road and picked her up,” she said. “They just took her.”

The couple said they tried asking someone nearby if they knew who Lola belonged to before taking her. They claimed they weren’t aware she was missing and desperately wanted back.

The woman wasn’t aware Lola was missing either, but Fry said she had “the gut intuition” to check.

“She was going to pick Lola up because she wanted to be the free home, and was OK getting an old dog,” Fry said. “But she had a gut intuition to look into it, she searched Facebook and found us right away.”

Lola made it home at 7:30 a.m. June 19. She was tired, flustered, and had lost a little weight, but quickly settled in when she realized she was where she belonged.

“We’ve taken her to the vet, and everything’s good, all considering,” Fry said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Jumped And Dumped"}]

Lola’s back, but Fry is still trying to determine what happened to her dog. The circumstances have left her upset and angry.

The couple who picked up Lola claimed they had no idea anyone was looking for her. Fry doesn’t believe it.

“I had missing posters all over Facebook and at every veterinarian in the area,” she said. “I posted in the In Search of Missing Dog group on Facebook. I called the police and the sheriff’s department. I contacted every pound in the state.”

Assuming they didn’t know, their decision to give her away for free on Facebook Marketplace is, for Fry, telling.

“She has issues, and she was probably puking because she didn’t have her special dog food,” she said. “I feel like (the couple) decided she was more work than they wanted, and they put her up for free.”

Fry said if the couple had made a point of checking whether anyone in the Gillette area was missing a corgi, they could have easily found and contacted her, and gotten Lola back much sooner.

[{"type":"text","text":"Instead, they took the dog to Wisconsin and gave her away."}]

[{"type":"text","text":"“I don’t believe they even tried to find me,” Fry said."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Almost The 7%"}]

Getting Lola back was an emotional moment for Fry. The moment of full emotional catharsis is when Lola was reunited with her children.

“They were with their grandparents that week,” she said. “We kept it as a surprise for them.”

After a month of “sleepless nights,” Fry is resting easy now that Lola is finally home. She’s been reunited with her $150 newspaper dog thanks to a “For Free” post on Facebook.

“She’s old and has had a rough, rough month,” she said. “In the research that I've done, there is a 93% chance you'll get your dog back. I was almost in the 7%, and had it not been for this lady who had that intuition to look, I would have been in the 7%. It’s surreal.”

Lost corgi c1c90697 e551 4c84 a020 1a94283cfe13 6 27 26

<title>Hooray! Desperate Search For 14-Year-Old Gillette Dog Has Happy Ending In Wisconsin | Cowboy State Daily</title>

When Gillette's Kimberly Fry got a phone call at 8:15 a.m. that someone had found their 14-year-old corgi in Wisconsin, she started crying. An hour later, her family was on the road and drove more than 1,000 miles straight to get their rescued dog.

Hooray! Desperate Search For 14-Year-Old Gillette Dog Has Happy Ending In Wisconsin

Jen kocher

Jen Kocher

Law Enforcement

Authorities are working to unravel the mysterious deaths of a man and woman who were found in Laramie County earlier this year within three months of one another in unrelated incidents.

The first, a woman thought to be between 30 and 50 years old, was struck by a vehicle and killed on the side of Interstate 25 outside Cheyenne in late April.

The second is an unknown man found near a commercial building on South Greeley Avenue earlier this month.

Both deaths are under investigation, pending autopsy results from the Laramie County Coroner’s Office.

The fatalities were not publicly announced by authorities, but instead entered into the National Unidentified Persons System — known as NamUs — which is the country’s only centralized database for tracking missing and unidentified persons.

Although anyone with an account can enter missing people into the database, only law enforcement and those with coroners' offices can add unidentified people.

Twin genealogists are working to identify a John and Jane Doe found two months apart in Cheyenne earlier this year. “They don’t have a voice,” the sisters said, “but their distinctive tattoos could help investigators track down who they are.”

Today In Politics: Monday, January 27, 2025

In case you missed it

More in You Still Here

You Still Here? Sunday, June 28, 2026

Bonus Video 2: Sunday, June 28, 2026

Today In Music Mashups: Sunday, June 28, 2026

Bonus Video 1: Sunday, June 28, 2026

Most read