It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming, for Monday, April 7th. I’m Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - Brought to you by Wyoming Community Gas. The Choice Gas selection period ends on Wednesday April 23rd – This is your opportunity to select your Natural Gas Provider for the coming year. For more information, visit Wyoming Community Gas dot ORG.”
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It was a crime that captured national and international headlines in 1996, on the day after Christmas, when 6-year-old JonBenét Ramsey was found murdered in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado.
Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher spoke to Michael Vail, a retired music publicist and song writer living in California, who believes his childhood friend, Gary Oliva, killed the girl. He believes that because Oliva, a convicted pedophile, told him he did.
“He had called Michael Vail that night to say, I hurt a girl, and he was hyperventilating. And Michael said that he'd never heard anybody be that upset about anything. So that really struck him, and the next day when he opened the LA Times and saw that a little girl in Boulder had actually been killed, he was like, This is it. He's finally done it. So he called police, and then nothing happened. So this has been going on for years now… Gary Oliva is just absolutely 100% obsessed with John Benet, to the point where he has little altars to her, and he talks about her being the Messiah and him worshiping her. It's very bizarre. And, and Michael Vail is carrying this all around, and he just wants police to take a second look at this guy.”
However, in a 2019 statement following an interview Vail did with The Daily Mail, the Boulder Police department seemingly ruled Gary Oliva out, saying they were aware of Oliva’s confessions and have investigated his potential involvement.
Read the full story HERE.
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UW President Ed Seidel is facing backlash after the demotion of a popular dean of engineering.
The University’s board says it demoted Cameron Wright because he lacked a compelling plan to use state funds to elevate the UW College of Engineering and Physical Sciences to nationally recognized levels of excellence.
But detractors told Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland that the president pushed for Wright’s demotion because Wright refused to shift a half-million dollars from the engineering college’s budget to a school run by Seidel’s partner, Dr. Gabrielle Allen.
“His romantic partner runs the School of Computing, and there's been this talk now imminent, of a plan to spin the School of Computing out of the College of Engineering and make it its own thing. And the board's going to supposedly vote on that this month. So people recognizing what they call Seidel’s enthusiasm for this project and the fact that his romantic partner runs that school, are … alleging, well that could be behind the firing of the Dean of the College of Engineering, who back in August, September, last year, refused to divert some college of engineering money into the School of Computing ...the Fallout has been huge, because the department heads from the engineering school lashed out like, this is terrible. You know this, this sudden, seemingly covert demotion of our dean.”
The John P. Ellbogen Foundation – which gives hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to UW — announced a pause in grants to UW for the spring 2025 funding cycle and beyond. The foundation’s letter cited a lack of transparency surrounding Wright’s deanship dismissal.
Read the full story HERE.
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Generation Z has grown up digital, and many aren’t choosing traditional colleges. They’re packing Wyoming’s trade schools, lured by shorter, cheaper programs and better job prospects.
Cowboy State Daily spoke to several young people who are proud to embody their age group’s new label - the Toolbelt Generation.
“Gen Z is kind of picking trades over four year universities and two year community colleges. It's just an economic shift. They are responding to the reality that's out there on the street right now. They can make more money taking a trade. The cost of four year and two year colleges has gotten to be so much that you know it's sticker shock when you realize that you're going to exit with six figure loans that may take you a lifetime to pay back… Having a trade lets you open your own business, you know, if you're a plumber, if you're an electrician, a welder, auto mechanics, all of these are things that lend themselves very well to opening your own business and having a lot of independence… We have all these baby boomers who are retiring. You know, that's creating shortages in some of these areas, particularly electricians, welders, plumbers, we're going to be short half a million plumbers, if I recall correctly, in like 2030.”
Trade schools can take as little as eight weeks, ranging on up to two years, but many have programs that take just six months. The vastly shorter timeframes, the chance to start a business, the cheaper tuition, and the hands-on nature of the learning are among the many factors that Generation Z cite when picking trade schools over universities.
Read the full story HERE.
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In the bitter cold and darkness of the early morning hours of Dec. 20, 1983, a U.S. Army veteran who was working as a unit operator for a power plant went to the home of friends and a coworker outside Gillette and killed the homeowner, his girlfriend and her two young sons by gunshot, then blew up the kitchen with a pipe bomb.
Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck spoke to two former Gillette PD detectives who remember well the tragedy that unfolded on the night that 28-year-old Dale Chamberlain also took a hostage, and killed a Gillette police officer.
“He went to a home of some friends. One of them was a co worker at the power plant, killed her children and then her boyfriend, and then went to the house of a woman that he had worked with, and also, apparently, he tried to have a romantic relationship with and took her hostage. Made a call to the police that there was a burglary across the street, and then proceeded to shoot two police officers who showed up across the street for that burglary, and then that developed into a hostage situation that Gillette police, deputies from Campbell County and everybody responded to… he killed John Hardy, who was an officer on the department for only a little over a year, and everybody said he was a great officer.”
The standoff ended when Chamberlain was killed by one of his own bombs. Gillette Deputy Chief of Police Brent Wasson told Cowboy State Daily the department continues to have a memorial service for Officer Hardy every year, and a special memorial spot in the building honors their only officer who was shot and killed in the line of duty.
Read the full story HERE.
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A Wyoming native and University of Wyoming alumnus died Thursday night during a professional bullriding event in Texas, after a bull stepped on his neck.
About 2,500 people witnessed the fatal incident at the Wharton County Youth Fair’s PRCA Xtreme Bulls event, in which Dylan Grant was fatally injured. Cowboy State Daily’s Clair McFarland spoke to the rodeo announcer who watched it all happen.
“It was deceptively hopeful to hear the rodeo announcer describe it because Grant got up after he was stepped on. It looked like he slipped under the bull. Looked like his hand was caught in, possibly the rope, and then he got stepped on his neck. But the announcer told me, like, well, it wasn't the worst wreck I've ever seen. It was not. And the kid got up and he ran straight to the corner where paramedics were stationed, so they had him in an ambulance 15 seconds off to the hospital. So even though this huge crowd was shook up after seeing the wreck, I think people were hopeful at first, and then it was, of course, shocking to his loved ones and to spectators later to learn that he had died.”
Grant grew up in the Jackson area and was a state champion bull rider for Jackson Hole High School in 2018. He moved to Pavillion with his parents during high school, and later attended the University of Wyoming.
Read the full story HERE.
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Yellowstone National Park is the perfect place to simultaneously observe the wonders of nature and the short-sighted, ill-informed decisions of tourists and visitors. But there may never be a tourist as short-tempered, loud and willfully destructive as Donald Duck.
Donald Duck and his mischievous nephews visited Yellowstone in the Oscar-nominated animated short “Good Scouts,” produced by the Walt Disney Co. in 1938. Cowboy State Daily’s Andrew Rossi spoke to a retired park ranger who confirmed that the Donald’s antics would land him in hot water - if he wasn’t a cartoon character, that is.
“He said, Just off the bat, just like just scratching the surface in terms of violations they'd get him for tying a tent off to a tree, improper food storage, disturbing wildlife by hitting a grizzly, which is never a good idea, littering enter a thermal feature, which is thermal trespass. That's the one we see all the time, especially during the summer, and creating a hazardous condition. But there's a big caveat on that you can't cite a duck. So Donald Duck might have gotten off scot free for all the various crimes that he committed in the park, but it's clear that he had no regard for any kind of rules or regulations.”
Donald should be grateful he was a fictional character who can’t be cited for his egregious conduct in Yellowstone. Otherwise, he’d face serious fines and a substantial stint in the jail of the Yellowstone Justice Center at Mammoth Hot Springs.
Read the full story HERE.
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Even in Wyoming, there’s been a divided response to President Trump’s February executive order to stop minting new pennies. The logic behind that move is simple: with a minting expense over three-and-half-times its face value, the cent is in the red. But ironically, the order catalyzed a craze for the latest batch of cents.
In Wyoming, businesses and banks weighed in on the initial order with mixed reactions. But Cowboy State Daily’s Zakary Sonntag spoke to coin collectors and dealers, whose perspective goes beyond economics.
“It's kind of a case study in a common human behavior. It's like, you don't want something. We're sick of it. We're tired of it. It's annoying. Get rid of it. And then it's like, oh, wait, it's gone. Suddenly, we kind of like it more, you know. And so as a result, you're seeing people that are paying as much as 50 times a face value for a penny on some resale sites. I talked to one coin and currency expert who's telling me that right now, the 2025 Lincoln pennies are going for about 15 to 20 times face value… I talked to David Brockman, owner of the coin shop in Cheyenne, and his perspective was very firm. He does not want to see the penny go away… he says it's really important to have hard currency and to be a hard currency society, because that gives us a connectedness to our sweat equity and our labor, and it reminds us of the work we've done, and it kind of allows us to appreciate the value of the work we've done in a unique way.”
Americans are undoubtedly losing money on pennies. In 2024, the Treasury lost $85 million by minting billions of new cents. So only time will tell if 2025 becomes a key date coin worth collecting.
Read the full story HERE.
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When things go wrong in grizzly country, they go wrong quickly, so you have to be even quicker with your bear spray.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s “Robobear” is there to help teach people just how quick they must be to avoid a mauling. Robobear is a wheeled contraption with a fake bear mounted on it that can reach speeds 20 mph or more as it charges.
Cowboy State Daily crime and courts reporter Clair McFarland and outdoors reporter Mark Heinz were among a crowd Saturday at Game and Fish regional headquarters in Lander, ready to face Robobear’s charges.
MARK: “The first time we did it, when we had to practice pulling it from the holsters, Clair did great. I screwed up. I would have died because I left the retaining strap over my bear spray, which was just dumb, but they let me have another try, and I did very well the second time. But, yeah, that first time, just a lesson learned.”
CLAIR: “So the first time I was like, in the stance, you know, and I had my hand on the can, you're not going to be like that if you're up in the mountains. But I wanted to, I wanted to get the bear, because my boys had done it before me, and they had gotten the bear, and they were all smirking at me, like, Mom's not going to get the bear. She's a little girl. She's not going to do this. And so I wanted to get that bear, and so I cheated, and I got the bear the first time. After that, I quit cheating, and then I didn't get the bear.”
The Game and Fish instructor pointed out that, like any other defense mechanism, use of bear spray requires practice. Bear spray also has a limited shelf life, so if a can of bear spray is past its expiration date, don’t bet your life on it – buy a fresh can.
Read the full story HERE.
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And that’s today’s news. Get your free digital subscription to Wyoming's only statewide newspaper by hitting the Daily Newsletter button on Cowboy State Daily Dot Com - and you can watch this newscast every day by clicking Subscribe on our YouTube channel, or listen to us on your favorite podcast app. Thanks for tuning in - I’m Wendy Corr, for Cowboy State Daily.
