CHEYENNE — Eight months after drawing two consecutive life sentences for gunning down two men at a downtown coin shop in 2015, Douglas Mark Smith died in a Wyoming prison on Thursday.
The Wyoming Department of Corrections reported Friday that Smith, 71, died at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institution in Torrington, and that an autopsy will be conducted to determine his cause of death.
A Cheyenne jury found Smith guilty of two counts of first-degree murder on July 18, 2025, and he was sentenced Aug. 12 to serve two life sentences back-to-back without the possibility for parole.
The trial and sentencing came a decade after George Manley, 76, and Dwight Brockman, 67, were shot and killed on the morning of July 20, 2015, at The Coin Shop at 510 W. Lincolnway.
Smith was at first not considered a suspect in the killings.
He called 911 and reported the shooting, telling police that he walked in on a robbery in progress. The two men had already been killed when he walked in, Smith reported to police.
The Mysterious Man
In interviews with Cheyenne Police Department investigators, Smith claimed a mysterious man with a neck tattoo pointed a .45-caliber handgun at him when he walked into The Coin Shop, and told him to leave, according to an affidavit of probable cause in his court file
Smith said he left, then called 911.
Along with passing a polygraph test a few months after the crime, testimony from his preliminary hearing revealed that the neighborhood surrounding the shop wasn’t searched, nor was Smith’s vehicle.
He wasn’t initially considered a suspect, so also wasn’t subjected to a gunshot residue test.
Eight Years Later
It wasn’t until eight years later in 2023 that investigators picked up the by-then cold case and went to California to interview Smith again, where he was then living. Since the shooting, he had moved to Canada, where he was born, then to California, the affidavit says.
During their renewed investigation, detectives learned Smith had owned multiple .45-caliber handguns during his lifetime.
After analyzing nearby surveillance cameras covering every direction surrounding The Coin Shop, there was no evidence of anyone other than Smith leaving the business at the time of the murders, the affidavit says.
Smith had told 911 operators he would try to get a photo of the suspect when he left the building but never saw anyone leave westbound from the store, which only had one exit.
Nearby witnesses who had heard a muffled gunshot also reported seeing nobody leave the store or run from the area.
Officers arrived at the scene shortly after and also saw no suspects leaving the scene.
Smith later picked out a man with a large tattoo on his neck from a suspect lineup with 97% confidence, according to the affidavit.
Previously, Smith had never mentioned the suspect having any kind of tattoo on his neck.
Discrepancies
It was during his 2023 California interview that Smith’s inconsistencies became more pronounced, the affidavit says.
He tried to explain away the inconsistency with the neck tattoo in a late-night email sent to former Detective John Pederson four days after the murder, where he speculated that the man must have been wearing makeup to cover up the tattoo while committing the crime.
Smith also jumped to other conclusions about the suspect, who he referred to as “our guy,” saying the man “has done this in the past,” the affidavit says.
When asked about the email in 2023, Smith said he didn’t remember sending it.
During an in-person interview conducted May 9, 2023, Smith said he was certain the suspect was someone else and denied ever looking at photo lineups, the affidavit says.
During a May 3, 2023, phone interview with investigators, Smith said he had been in the store for around 15-20 seconds.
However, in his initial interview, Smith said that two to three minutes had passed from the time he entered the store until he called 911.
He also claimed to have called The Coin Shop before he went there to make sure it was open, but there’s no record of the call.
When confronted with inconsistencies in his stories of the crime then and eight years later, Smith denied killing the men that day at The Coin Shop.
“If you guys want to haul me back and throw me in jail, that’s fine,” he told investigators.
Smith was arrested June 24, 2025, at his home in California, then immediately extradited back to Wyoming and the Laramie County Detention Center in Cheyenne.
He was convicted by a jury after a weeklong trial.
Greg Johnson can be reached at greg@cowboystatedaily.com.
