It’s time to take a look at what’s happening around Wyoming for Monday, October 26th. I’m Mac Watson.
This newscast is sponsored by Lisa Kinney for Congress. Lisa has, Chuck hasn’t. That’s why former Gov. Mike Sullivan has endorsed Lisa Kinney for Wyoming House. Learn why Lisa is the choice for Wyoming’s future at Lisa Kinney for Congress dot com.
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Nearly 30 years after the naked body of an 18-year-old Shoshoni woman was found decomposing along an Idaho highway, investigators are still pushing to solve the cold case. Cowboy State Daily’s Jen Kocher reports it doesn’t help that some of the evidence was destroyed in 2008.
“They retrieved a partial male DNA profile off of her body. However, it hasn't matched anyone yet. They do have one suspect and two persons of interest, and the suspect is the last guy who saw her, a trucker named David Lord. The Bonneville, Idaho Sheriff's Office leadership in 2008 determined that her evidence was taking up too much space in the evidence locker, so that he ordered some of it destroyed. So they still do have evidence. However, the partial male profile so far has not conclusively matched with their suspect David Lord or the other two men who are persons of interest. This case hinges on a tip coming forward.”
The investigation into Tanya Teske’s murder shifted in the spring of 1998 when federal and local authorities connected a series of killings spanning from 1983 to 1997 across Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, and Idaho. The killings were dubbed the “Great Basin Murders,” named from the geographic region in which the bodies were found.
Read the full story HERE.
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After 54 years of delivering mail through wind, ice and mud on a 66-mile rural route around Hulett, Wyoming, the Spangler family is calling it quits. Cowboy State Daily’s Dale Killingbeck reports that Ione Spangler says, “I would probably have to finish it with a walker.”
“It was a 66-mile route up and up to a little town in Montana, and then back down to Hewlett in a kind of a circle, hitting all these ranches along the way, and as you would expect, lots of mud in the wintertime back in the day. It was interesting how it started because her dad was like a bondsman. He put up a bond for this mail person back in the day, and this person got sick, and so the U.S. Postal Service said, ‘Hey, you put up the bond now; it's your route, so you got to do it.’”
Spangler recalls some winter challenges. Once, perhaps in 1978, when she and her sister were helping with the route, a blizzard struck. They had chains on their truck tires and were traveling in four-wheel-drive, but the wind was blowing drifts across the road faster than they could shovel them out. She remembers two men met them on the road and helped them get across the state line into Montana.
Read the full story HERE.
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A skeleton sex orgy strapped to the roof of a Casper GMC SUV has some residents angered and some shrugging. Cowboy State Daily’s Kolby Fedore reports that one outraged resident says, “To me this is no different than a couple having sex in public.”
“I spoke to the president of the Wyoming Prosecuting Attorneys Association, Loretta Kallas, and she says that this is a free-speech issue. So, while there are state laws prohibiting sex acts in public and obscenity laws, this one falls into an interesting category where the people who put up the display might argue that it's satire or political commentary. Kallas says that matters because prosecutors wouldn't just have to convince the public that this is obscene; they would have to convince a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Under Wyoming law, material is obscene when an average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that it appeals to a prurient interest; it depicts or describes sexual conduct in a patently offensive way; and, taken as a whole, it lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. The key word there is “and.” All three requirements have to be met, Kallas tells Cowboy State Daily.
Read the full story HERE.
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Truckers who crisscross the steepest mountain grades across the West pray they never have to use a runaway truck ramp but they're grateful for them. Cowboy State Daily’s Greg Johnson reports that one trucker says, “It's the difference between getting stopped and a bunch of people getting killed.”
“The truckers I talked to said that they're very aware of where these runaway truck ramps are, especially driving in the Rockies in Wyoming and Colorado. The alternative to steering into a giant, basically a giant gravel moat that slows down an 80,000-pound missile coming down a 10% grade is to plow into other motorists, and that's obviously not not the outcome that that anybody wants. They also reacted to this recent incident on I-70, just just west of the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado, where a runaway truck had to use the ramp, and he had so much speed going that his truck, with a huge plume of of dust coming up behind him, went all the way to the top of this runaway truck ramp, which even the truckers I talked to said ‘That's insane.’”
Runaway truck ramps run channels of deep gravel and sand off the side of the highway to catch semitrailers that become 40 tons of steel, rubber, and momentum that can obliterate anything in their path. A 2023 study published in the journal Transportation Research Procedia found that gravel arresters can bring a vehicle to a complete stop in as little as 150 feet, depending on weight and whether the driver is or isn't braking.
Read the full story HERE.
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I’ll have more news from Cowboy State Daily right after this.
Cowboy State Daily News continues now….
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Our own Clair McFarland writes that recently she’s made a recipe her family loves but sounds gross. It’s called feetloaf which she describes as a gruesome abomination of culinary science as a Halloween prank.
“I found the feetloaf recipe on a blog. I was getting pretty excited about the recipe, but when I was making the monster feet out of the meatloaf, I was laughing to myself because of how ridiculous I felt. But I shaped up the ankles, flooded them with ketchup, topped them with an onion slice to signify a bone, and put little onion toenails. It's the first time I've ever given a manicure to severed meat feet, and then popped it in the oven. and I thought, ‘oh boy, when these feet come out; they're going to be so disgusted,’ and it's going to pay them back for all those times they spat toothpaste on the faucet. But they were not disgusted; they were completely delighted.”
Clair adds “I can honestly say those were the only feet I’ve ever eaten and they were delicious!”
Read the full story HERE.
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Cowboy State Daily's Bill Sniffin just bought a Tesla because he loved the idea of the car driving him. In fact, the 80-year-old let the car drive for nearly all of his recent 3,000-mile trip.
“We flew down to Dallas. I had a doctor friend down there who had been trying to sell me this Tesla, and I fell in love with the car and fell in love with the idea of it doing a lot of the driving. And so we took off on a 3000-mile trip and went back to Iowa to our hometowns and visited relatives. And I just let the doggone car do most of the driving, and all it requires is that you take your finger and just press on it to give it a little constant pressure. Because these cars are all sensors. It's just full of sensors, and as long as it senses that you're paying attention, away it can go.”
Bill tells Cowboy State Daily that the only problem the car had navigating was construction zones. But besides that, Bill says it was a smooth ride back to Wyoming.
Read the full story HERE.
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Cheyenne is getting the PRCA’s rodeo headquarters and Hall of Fame, but Wyoming tourism leaders are pushing for rodeo statewide to maximize the impact. Cowboy State Daily’s Renee Jean reports that former Wyoming tourism director Diane Shober says the statewide economic potential is huge.
“This isn't just a huge economic impact in Southeast Wyoming or Cheyenne. It doesn't stop at the Laramie County border. Wyoming is a rodeo state. Like Jim Walter was saying when he was in Madison County, he basically was one of the communities on the way to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and they had all these people traveling through his community, and then one day they just started asking, you know, what about these people who travel through here? And when they did that, it was just like a huge boost for their tourism. Wyoming can do kind of a similar thing. Cheyenne is now Wyoming's Cooperstown.”
The 35-acre PRCA and ProRodeo Hall of Fame campus will anchor the 415-acre Hitching Post Business District near Interstates 25 and 80. Those two corridors put visitors on routes leading across the state.
Read the full story HERE.
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For a woman with deep agricultural roots who became a candlemaker because she was tired of the consumerism of Christmas, she's thrilled her candle “Calf Slobbers”
is such a big hit. Cowboy State Daily’s Kate Meadows reports it may sound gross but for creator Jackie Miller Reeves, calf slobbers is a good thing.
“The scent has really caught on to a lot of just Western buyers, egg-minded people, and non-ag-minded people. They buy in part for the curiosity. Some people, you know, purchase this scent because they're curious: what the heck does calf slobbers smell like? According to Miller Reeves, calf slabber has a sweet tang to it. You might think of it like smelling like lemon meringue pie. I talked to Lana Davis in Nebraska who owns Wesley's Boutique and purchases the calf slobber scent from Jackie Miller Reeves. Lana Davis also told me that it is her best-selling scent as well. And even last week when we were working on this story, it was sold out at Wesley's Boutique.”
While the name might raise eyebrows, the fragrance itself is bringing back memories of homemade pies topped with fluffy meringue — which is also sometimes called “calf slobber” because it resembles the white foam that builds up around a calf's mouth when it salivates.
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 watching - I’m Mac Watson, for Cowboy State Daily.
