Casper’s Invisible Couple: Homeless, Pregnant And Living In Abandoned Car

Malachy Zion Springer and his partner Kayla Riley sleep in an abandoned sedan on a vacant lot near the train tracks in north Casper.

The passenger side windows are stuck in the down position, so they hoist a ragged box spring mattress against the car frame to shield out the elements, pulling it snug behind them as they climb in through the only functional door on the passenger side.

The car holds everything they own, which amounts to little more than a mound of blankets and clothing along with their latest food pantry haul. 

Springer sleeps upright beside the open window. Kayla curls up like a question mark on the seat beside him. The quarters are as tight as they are breezy.

“We bury ourselves in insulation. You gotta make sure every nook and cranny around you is isolated and insulated, or that one little breeze is going to freeze you out all night,” Springer told the Cowboy State Daily on a recent March morning as he made fresh tracks through a 6-inch blanket of overnight snowfall surrounding the car.

Either together or separately, Springer and Riley have mutually spent their entire adult lives cycling on and off the streets. So, as it relates to sleeping in a cramped sedan, it could certainly be better, Springer said. But he’s also had it a lot worse.

“When I was 17, most of the time I didn’t even have a sleeping bag,” he said. “It was just alleyways and my leather jacket. You learn how to deal with shit.”

Springer and Riley are among the growing number of people experiencing homelessness in Wyoming, which in the Casper area is estimated to have risen by 15% in the last year. This is according to the measure of occupied beds at the Wyoming Rescue Mission, Adam Flack, community coordinator at the mission, told Cowboy State Daily.

Their experience calls attention to the hardship of unsheltered life and offers a glimpse at what more Wyomingites are likely to face if the trend continues.

In both appearance and demeanor, there’s nothing to obviously suggest Springer’s a man experiencing homelessness — a man who brushes his teeth without a sink, defecates against a fence line in the open air and who must come and go furtively from his nightly shelter to not bring attention to himself or Riley.

Meet Malachy Zion Springer

Springer, 21, is tall and lean. He has mousy brown hair, whiskey brown eyes and prides himself on a sense of fashion, wearing finger rings as well as a half-dozen pendants around his neck. 

He has an air of teenage buoyancy, and a theatrical flair with shades of a prop comic. His back scratcher becomes a wand for casting boisterous, nonsensical spells. He jokes how the previous night’s 16-degree low was delightfully balmy.

Appearances, however, can be misleading. 

Despite his playfulness, he confided to Cowboy State Daily that he’s bothered by awful thoughts, trailed by trauma, reliant on substance and given to violent tendencies, checking off every dark hallmark of homeless life.

In recent years, his unsheltered experience has been running in the family.

Springer, along with his unmarried mother and father, have all overlapped in their stays at the mercy shelter at Wyoming Rescue Mission. At one point last year, he spent four months living with his mother in an encampment under the Poplar Bridge that crosses the North Platte River.

He has no shame in his lifestyle but is suddenly feeling an urgent need to rein in his demons and get off the street, because his responsibilities are about to grow significantly: Springer and Riley are expecting a child. 

As he prepares for fatherhood, he’s reflecting on his own upbringing and asking himself what he might do differently to break the cycle.

The Hustler

In many ways Springer’s upbringing was conventional.

As an adolescent he played first-person shooter video games and took part in sports at the Wells Park complex. He was naturally athletic and relentlessly competitive, parlaying these tendencies into his “first hustle” of running wagers on playground races — always betting on himself.

His later hustles, however, put him on a fast track to big trouble.

These began shortly after his family moved to the area of south Casper known locally as “Felony Flats,” where he says he fell in with the wrong crowd.

“I was around 15 or 16, I got into the wrong crowd,” he said. “I started smoking weed, getting into crimes, robberies, burglaries. I was usually the guy standing guard and helping the others get in and out of the house through the window.”

Trouble like this is part of why his parents kicked him out at 17.

He then cycled between the streets and a series of non-permanent residences, swiftly developing a rap sheet of violent offense and drug possession charges.

“By the time I turned 19, I had a string of violent offenses on my record, because if somebody stole from me or owed me money, I’d track them down and beat the hell out of him and whoever was with him,” he said, adding that such violence was often galvanized by meth use.

More than one of these charges involved his first wife, a woman named Jessica to whom he was civilly married in 2021, and whose mutual drug addiction and ensuing conflicts invoked the imagery of a crime thriller. 

On one occasion, he confronted his wife in the act of an extramarital affair on the top level of a parking garage in downtown Casper.

“I came up to that parking garage like a bat out of hell, and when I found them on the fourth floor, I popped her front tire and back tire with a razor blade,” Springer said. “They try to drive away, and I jump on the hood of the truck and I start bashing the window in with my bare hands. They swerve and I fall off the truck and they run me over.”

Springer filed for divorce that year, and said he’s come a long way since, making strides against his drug addiction and building a network of sober, supportive people.

But the biggest reason for his recent life improvements is owed to one person specifically, he said.

Meet Kayla Riley

In contrast to Springer's liveliness, Riley, 31, keeps a soft and cautious bearing. She has coffee-colored complexion and a pair of guarded, ember-dark eyes that harbor the trauma of her past.

Her life took a rough turn early, and she came of age on a roller-coaster of foster families, treatment facilities, group homes and the Casper Youth Crisis Center (YCC).

She was fostered at the age of 8 along with her younger sister following an incident that, coincidentally, involved Malachy’s father, who shot out the back window of Kayla’s mother’s car in a drug dispute gone sideways, she told Cowboy State Daily. Though, she didn’t learn of the connection until more than a decade afterward.

As a 9-year-old, she was raped by her 16-year-old foster brother, a moment that haunts her still.

“It’s a work in progress,” she said about dealing with it more than two decades later. “It still traumatizes me.”

In this way she matches a common pattern among people experiencing homelessness, a demographic with a disproportionately high level of childhood trauma, said Flack of the Wyoming Rescue Mission. 

“Severe childhood trauma, especially under the age of 7, is something that's often reported as a reason that people are going through their struggles” related to homelessness, he said. “Because that can lead down a road to mental health issues that then lead to substance abuse. It’s a domino.”

In Riley’s case, the dominoes kept falling.

At age 12 she attempted to end her life by overdosing on prescription drugs she found in her grandmother's cabinet.

“I felt like nobody understood me,” she said. “Nobody heard me, nobody was paying attention to me. I felt like the outcast in my family and so the best way to solve the problem was take me out of it. I died for two minutes.”

This was followed by stints at, and recurrent runaways from, the Hemry Group Home and YCC. She had a child at 17 and dropped out of high school.

When the state took custody of her son, she started using drugs and excessive alcohol. By 23, she was irreparably addicted to meth. Her preferred method was “shakers,” or syringes in which meth rocks are shaken up with water into an injectable solution. 

“I used to shoot it in my legs, in my foot, my hand, backs of my arms, front of my arms,” she said, rolling back her sleeve to reveal a map of tracking scars and “craters,” or the scarring that happens when a chemical reaction burns from the inside out toward the surface of the skin. 

Her addiction might have continued unabated were it not for an eye-opening moment of betrayal. 

In her late 20s she was living in a Casper apartment with friends from her addict community. One night while sleeping, her roommates injected her with a dangerously potent dose of meth, a tactic deployed by addicts to get other users more deeply hooked, Riley explained.

“I’d just fallen asleep on the couch after being up for, like, two weeks as it was from just smoking it,” she said. “Next thing I know, I’m wide awake and I’ve got two syringes sticking out of my arms.

“I was so high I couldn’t see straight. I was coughing and hyperventilating at the same time. It was 80 ccs. They could have killed me.”

She wanted to start over and get clean, but she also knew she couldn’t do it alone. As if by divine grace, she shortly after began getting close with a man who shared her goals of getting clean and living a healthy life. 

Springer was there for her when she got out of a community drug help program at the Central Wyoming Counseling Center, and they’ve been giving one another support since. 

Soon they’ll be supporting one more.

The Routine

Springer and Riley are on a waiting list for housing support through the Community Action Partnership of Natrona County. 

Once they have housing, Springer envisions getting into the construction trade. Riley intends on becoming a retail cashier, and is attending courses at Casper College in preparation for her high school equivalency test.

In the meantime, they’re maintaining their routines. 

Springer walks the fence lines at local high schools and other foot-trafficked areas with an eye out for loose change. A day’s gathering can usually get him a pack of cigarettes or a few “pre-rolls” of THC-9, a cannabinoid derivative that helps him sleep.

Throughout the day they’ll stop by the downtown transfer station bus stop, the unofficial “street family” meetup. Here they may pass a pint of vodka, smoke pot halfies and pre-rolls and gab with friends.

The atmosphere at the transfer station is typically friendly, but it can devolve fast. On a recent afternoon, Cowboy State Daily witnessed men come to a physical altercation over a disputed winter jacket. 

Whereas Springer said that at this bus stop he’d recently stabbed a man in the side with a surgical steel knife “because he raised a hand to Kayla.”

Other errands include the mission, where they can count on a handful of free warm meals provided by volunteers during the week. On Saturdays, they stockpile sack lunches provided by the local food pantry, grabbing enough for their “household of five,” Springer explained with a wink.

They keep a mental calendar of the days certain restaurants are likely to toss food. Lately, they’ve found steady plunder in dumpsters at Little Caesars Pizza.

“We gotta stock up when we can,” Springer said at the bus stop, turning to nod at Riley. “She’s eating for two.”