Murder Of Wyoming College Student Still Raw For Family After Nearly 30 Years

It was almost a relief to laugh, Ryan Bryant admitted, despite the gravity of the subject. Nearly 30 years ago, his sister Berry, then an 18-year-old freshman at Northwest College in Powell, was murdered by fellow student.

Ryan never imagined he would find anything to laugh about until he heard his sister’s story recently featured on the Wondery podcast “Small Town Murder,” in episode 584, “Killer Homecoming King,” that aired in late March.

The podcast hosts, Jimmie Whisman and James Pietragallo, are comedians who take a humorous slant on the worst crimes.

They’re careful never to make fun of the victims or family members nor do they glorify any aspect of the violence. Rather, they poke fun at the many ways people imagine they can get away with murdering a person as well as some of the bumbling investigators along the way. And of course, make fun of small towns and what makes them tick. 

And though they take some heat from the earnest who don’t believe murder and comedy should mix, Ryan found it a relief to actually find some levity in the worst tragedy in his life, one that gutted both his family and the community of Riverton, where they grew up. 

“It was the first time I actually got to laugh because this is a hard subject for me,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I actually laughed several times about the unique way they described how quickly this case went from investigation to sentencing. Our family is grateful to the no-nonsense prosecuting attorney and judge in Park County."

He also welcomes when anyone — podcast or news media — takes the time to remember his sister.

“I appreciate someone wanting to look up her story,” Ryan said. “She shouldn’t be gone, and none of it should have ever happened.”

Final memories

Ryan remembers the last time he saw Berry. She had just left for college, and she and her roommate came to see his track meet in Cody. Both Ryan and Berry were avid runners and spoke on the phone several times a week.

Despite earlier years of bickering, the two had since grown close in high school, where she’d taken him under her wing. He was 16 when she graduated and left for college.

They were raised by their single mother, Sharon Bryant, in Riverton. Sharon has since passed away in 2023.

Ryan’s last memory of Berry was sharing his Chips Ahoy cookies with her and her roommate on the school bus. Afterwards, they said goodbye, and he watched them walk through the parking lot back to her car.

That was the last time he’d ever see her. Less than a month after leaving for college, Berry would be dead on Friday, October 4, 1996.

Caught the wrong guy’s attention

By all accounts, Berry was a social butterfly who was popular among her peers. Blonde with a lithe runner’s build and lots of energy, Berry was described by many in media reports as a charismatic, kind person who made others feel good about themselves. She even created funny nicknames for everyone to make people feel included.

In high school, Berry ran track and cross country and played the saxophone and danced in the local and now defunct Free Steppers country western dance group with her brother and other local kids.

She loved sewing her own clothing and planned to go into fashion merchandising. In fact, she’s buried in a dress she made herself for a school dance, Ryan said.

“It’s a beautiful dress,” he said.

Berry was the type of attractive, outgoing girl who caught the attention of many guys. One of those was fellow student, 19-year-old Levi Collen, from Ten Sleep, who was immediately drawn to Berry.

It’s not clear if this was the first time he’d seen her, because he’d reportedly attended a 4-H leadership conference that Berry had also attended that summer.

According to reporting by the Casper-Star Tribune, Collen spotted Berry in a dorm lounge and told a fellow student that he was “going to get her.”

Drinking in a dorm room

The night she died, Berry had attended a dance, then went with her friend Jessie LeClair, to a friend’s dorm party. There Berry sampled alcoholic drinks to see which ones sufficiently camouflaged the taste of alcohol, the Casper-Star Tribune reported.

As Whisman and Pietragallo describe her in the podcast, Berry was “the original Zima girl.”

At the party, LeClair and Berry sat on a bed chatting with friends until she stood up and said she was going to go visit someone down in the hall in another room.

When she left, Collen sat down next to LeClair and asked her to hook him up with Berry. He didn’t stand a chance, LeClair told him, because Berry was fresh out of a relationship and not interested in dating. Collen got up and took off.

In the 2022 Investigation Discovery episode, “The Dark Road,” LeClair recounted an eerie encounter with Collen daysHa earlier. The three had taken a drive in Berry’s car. She was behind the wheel with Collen in the passenger seat and her in the backseat behind them.

Collen was bragging about himself and acting like a “stud muffin,” LeClair said, when he pointedly told Berry he could tell she was a virgin just by looking at her.

The comment made LeClair uncomfortable, but Berry was unperturbed, shooting back that yes, she was a virgin and proud of it.

At the dorm party that night, LeClair waited for several minutes for her friend to return. When she failed to do so, LeClair went back to her dorm room and went to bed. There was no reason to believe her friend was in trouble, she said.

Later, a student would report seeing Collen and Berry leaving the parking lot in his car.

Changing stories

LeClair had been in her dorm around midnight when she got a call from the resident assistant in Berry’s dorm, wondering if she’d seen her. The police had contacted the college to say that Berry was missing, and they were looking for her.

LeClair’s stomach dropped, she said in the documentary, and she immediately knew that something was wrong. The two began their own search for their friend, including going to the local hospital out of fear that she’d been in a car accident or something happened.

Meanwhile, Collen returned to his dorm in the early morning hours covered head to toe in blood. He told his dormmates that he’d been in a serious fight with another guy, and they helped clean him up and offered to drive him back to the scene to recover his knife, according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

Once in the car, however, Collen changed his story. He’d raped and murdered a woman, Collen told his friends, who immediately restrained him and drove him to the police station.

At first, he claimed that he and Berry had had consensual sex and that he’d killed her in self-defense after she attacked him with a beer bottle. Later, he confessed, admitting to raping and killing her.

He said he’d driven her against her will to a secluded area about 16 miles north of town, where upset, Berry had gotten out of the car and started to walk home. He tackled her, raped her and repeatedly cut her in the face and neck with a knife. Berry fought back to the bitter end and her hands were shredded from defensive knife wounds.

No remorse

Former Powell Police Chief John Cox told the Star-Tribune that Collen showed no remorse for his crimes.

“This guy was just completely dispassionate about what he’d done, totally unrepentant,” Cox told the newspaper in a 2006 interview.

Ryan saw that same lack of remorse when he attended Collen’s sentencing. Former Park County Prosecutor Michelle Marker had let him and his mother and other family sit in the jury seats facing Collen as former District Judge Hunter Patrick handed down three life sentences for murder, kidnapping and two counts of rape.

At the sentencing, Marker read Ryan’s statement: “I always knew I’d have to bury her, but not this soon. I hope and know you will be haunted by the spirit of my sister.”

Ryan doubts Collen is haunted by his actions based on the lack of remorse he showed at the time.

“He [Collen] did make a statement at sentencing, but it was all about him and what he was losing,” Ryan said. “There was nothing about what I took from this girl or family. It was all about him, and that’s what really pissed us off.”

Collen, now 47, is currently serving his life sentences at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington.

He did not respond to Cowboy State Daily’s request through an external inmate messaging system to share his story.

That guy

Ryan still remembers when the police officer came to their Riverton home to deliver news that Berry had been murdered.

The news was too terrible to process, he said. He and his mother were devastated.

Worse, when Ryan saw Collen’s mug shot, he immediately recognized him as the “creepy” kid who was hanging around asking questions when he and his mother were moving Berry into her dorm.

“When I saw his booking photo, I was like, ‘Oh my god, I saw this guy,” Ryan said.

Berry’s death also devastated her friends and the community of Riverton and the many people whom she’d already impacted in her short time in Powell.

To this day, Ryan has never seen such a packed funeral home. The community room at the Methodist church was packed. There were so many people, they had to set up a projection screen in the courtyard to accommodate the overflow.

Several shared stories about the many ways his sister had impacted them, Ryan said.

“It’s a shame what happened to her,” he said. “She should still be here.”

Not the first time

It’s not clear how Collen was able to lure Berry out to his car that night, but after he was arrested, another woman came forward with an eerily similar story.

Two months before Berry was killed, Collen had met a woman at a bar and lured her out to look at his 1989 Pontiac because “it was all computerized,” according to the Casper Star-Tribune.

When she got close enough, he pushed her into the car and drove her to remote location. When she escaped and ran, he reportedly tackled her and raped her, biting her in the neck. Afterwards, he threatened to kill her if she told anyone.

Collen was also charged for her rape during sentencing.

The fact that nobody stepped in to stop Collen still bothers Ryan after he learned that there were allegedly other unreported incidents.

About a month before Berry’s murder, Ryan learned that Collen had been accused of sexual assault at Northwest College but was never charged. Prior to this, Collen had allegedly been accused of fondling a female student in grade school that also went unchecked.

For this reason, he and his mother did not respond to Collen’s family when they reached out to them to say they were sorry. 

“We denied that because of all the shit that was covered up,” Ryan said. “This guy never got in trouble for anything before college. He should have been incarcerated years ago, but it just kept escalating.”

‘Daffodil girl’

The first shoots of daffodils are sprouting near Berry’s memorial bench west of the Campus Mall on the Northwest College campus in Powell.

Shelby Wetzel, NWC foundation executive director, just visited the bench and nearby budding garden of daffodils planted in Berry’s honor.

Berry’s mother, Sharon, had called her daughter the ‘daffodil girl,’ the designated flower for March birthdays.

Wetzel was working at the college at the time of Berry’s murder and still remembers being called in on Sunday to be briefed on the news.

“It was just deadly silent in that auditorium as we all tried to process what had happened,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “We think we live in this small town that’s so community based, and that things like that can’t happen here.”

Immediately, the college kicked into gear, bringing in grief counselors for the students, installing emergency phones throughout campus and hiring security. They also worked to create a women’s education program focused on domestic abuse and family violence, Wetzel said.

“We tried to put a lot of energy into proactive steps to address violence,” she said.

Rather than try to cover up what happened, the college took the opposite approach.

“It’s a chapter of our history that might not be so wonderful, but you need to know about it, and you need to learn from it,” she said.

Creating a memorial

The memorial bench and subsequent scholarship in Berry’s honor would come decades later, thanks to Berry’s close childhood friends, Mandy Williams and Jamey Kirkland.

Williams, who did not attend Northwest College, came to Powell for a conference in 2021 and was upset to see that Berry’s memory had seemingly faded and she couldn’t find a trace of her friend on campus, Wetzel said.

“Mandy said, ‘can’t we do better,’ and I agreed,” she said.

When Williams approached Wetzel with the idea of creating a Berry Bryant Memorial Scholarship, Wetzel was all in. Their initial goal was to raise $5,000 to start the endowment, with an additional $1,000 to purchase a memorial bench.

Not only did they exceed that amount, but Kirkland stepped in to donate the marble bench etched with Berry’s name surrounded by daffodils. Wetzel and others planted daffodils near the bench.

This year, the scholarship will be awarding its fifth recipient. Berry’s mother Sharon wanted the scholarship to be geared toward those students with financial need because Berry would never have been able to attend college without the scholarships she received.

“Sharon wanted the scholarship to emulate Berry’s life,” Wetzel said, “so we look for students with financial need who have shown extensive involvement in their community.”

The idea is for the scholarship to touch the world in a way that Berry did, she said.

In addition to the memorial bench, there’s also a memorial at the site where Berry was murdered as well as an annual run in her honor that begins and ends on the college campus.

Dee Havig, former residential housing director, also created a memorial on a hill above campus known as “the bench.” He and students spray painted rocks to say, “We love you, Berry,” which Havig diligently refreshes every five or so years, and told Wetzel that he’ll continue to do as long as he’s alive.

The memorials serve as grim reminders of a life snuffed out far too soon by violence, she said, but also honor her life.

“We need to uphold Berry’s memory by trying to protect others,” Wetzel said.

Sifting through memories

After years of living in Seattle, then Salt Lake City, Utah, Ryan has since moved home. He did so after his mother’s first stroke, to be close and help take care of her.

During her lifetime, Sharon was an outspoken advocate for victims of domestic abuse and violence. She frequently shared Berry’s story both at Northwest College and elsewhere and championed her daughter’s memory.

Now home, sifting through his mother’s boxes of stuff, he sees the impact Berry’s death had on her life and the pain that she carried.

One trunk is full of objects that bear the name “Berry,” such as toys, dolls, gum wrappers, and even two boxes of Berry Berry Kix cereal.

His mother loved strawberries, which is how Berry got her name, he said.

In death, the objects carry an even heavier weight as he looks back on those memories.

“I knew she was struggling, but I guess I didn’t realize how much,” he said.

All these years later, Ryan is still eager to share his sister’s story, despite the pain.

“It matters,” he said. “It was such a senseless thing to happen to such a good person, and I don’t want anyone to forget her.”

Jen Kocher can be reached at jen@cowboystatedaily.com.