This story was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here by permission.
Kari DeWitt knew she was signing herself up for unpleasant times by talking with a journalist. But the 14-year Sublette County resident, office worker and mother of three, did just that, sharing words in support of Cody Roberts.
“By saying this to you, I will get death threats,” Dewitt said Thursday from a shaded picnic table outside of the public library. “I’m going to have to live with the repercussions of this through Christmas.”
Next came the words she worries will spur the harassment.
“Cody is not a psychopath,” DeWitt said. Roberts, she said, is a “good dad.”
“He did something incredibly stupid while drunk. It’s so bad. I get how bad it is,” Dewitt added. “But I almost feel like the response is as bad. Threatening to rape his daughter is as bad to me as what he did to that poor wolf.”
Roberts, a 40-something owner of a local trucking company, tormented a gravely injured wolf — an animal he allegedly struck with a snowmobile until “barely conscious” — in a way that attracted global ire.
In February 2024, he posed for photos while holding a beer alongside the wounded animal, its jaw bound with tape. Later, he brought the animal to the Green River Bar in nearby Daniel, where the tape was replaced with a muzzle and the wolf was strapped with an electronic shock collar, images from the night show. In one widely circulated image, he even leans over and kisses the wolf. Officials haven’t commented on how the wolf died, but WyoFile was told the animal was shot behind the bar. Roberts has never commented publicly on the incident.
The scorn was further inflamed by what critics see as the leniency of his punishment, a $250 discretionary fine issued by the Wyoming Game and Fish Department for possessing wildlife.
But that wave of anger and outrage didn’t just slam into Roberts. It’s tough to overstate the scope of the threats and harassment that subsequently rained down on the 9,000-resident county, which is dotted by historic ranchland and economically driven by gas-drilling and tourism. It occupies a mountainous, sagebrush-strewn swath of Wyoming that’s objectively stunning.
“Our emergency management person, Jim Mitchell, went on special duty just to deal with the backlash,” DeWitt said. “Our sheriff’s office had to assign a whole person to deal with it. And then our schools went on enhanced precautions.”
“It had died down,” she added, “and that’s the hard part of this.”
DeWitt, and many others in Pinedale, worry the fury and disruption to normal life is soon to return due to a grand jury’s indictment of Roberts. The charge, of felony animal cruelty, could potentially culminate in a trial that casts another intense spotlight over the community.
Albert Sommers, a cattle rancher and former Wyoming speaker of the House, understands DeWitt’s concerns. After Roberts’ actions with the wolf became public in early 2024, he defended Roberts’ character, calling him a “decent guy,” in a WyoFile interview.
“I had calls all hours of the day and night,” Sommers recalled Thursday. “Nasty, nasty things.”
Still today, he said, “people are afraid to talk.”
But not everyone. On a Thursday walkabout along Pinedale’s main drag, Pine Street, a WyoFile reporter and photographer approached a dozen or so locals to gauge the community’s views on the advancing prosecution of Roberts. Most agreed to talk, and even put their names to their reactions, expressing a wide spectrum of feelings. Some shared a desire that the incident, which gave Sublette County a black eye, would just go away. Others were grateful for the indictment, seeing it as a step toward justice. Yet others felt conflicted.
Longtime Sublette County resident Ricky John Chamberlin took a break from a midday beer and cigarette at the Corral Bar to weigh in. Roberts, who he knew as long ago as middle school, has a history of making a public mockery of captured animals, he said.
“He’s done this before, with a coyote,” Chamberlin said. “I know this isn’t the first time that he’s done something with wildlife.”
Taking injured animals into establishments as a “novelty” to take photos of and impress friends is behavior that the Pinedale carpenter called “a bunch of shit” and “fucked up.”
“Torture an animal after you ran it over with a snow machine?” he said. “I believe in animal cruelty. I have a dog.”
Chamberlin’s also of the mind that the Wyoming Game and Fish and Sublette County “dropped the ball” in their initial response to the incident. In the aftermath of Roberts’ wolf stunt, he was reportedly “going around town telling people it was worth” the $250 fine. Wardens had the option of issuing steeper penalties, requiring a court appearance that could have culminated in jail time, but declined to do so.
Early on, Sublette County Sheriff K.C. Lehr contended he didn’t even know about the episode until a month later when it blew up in the media.
But Chamberlin also wasn’t convinced that Roberts deserves jail time. And he chalked up Sublette County Prosecuting Attorney Clayton Melinkovich’s successful effort to charge the Daniel man with a felony as being politically motivated.
“I think he’s doing a little bit more for reelection,” Chamberlin said.
Incidentally, Melinkovich had answered a question about the same allegation minutes earlier outside the Sublette County Circuit Court building. Grand juries, by nature, can deflect the blowback that can come with charging controversial crimes, because it’s 12 jurists — not the prosecutor — ultimately making the decision.
Melinkovich maintains that politics — and the vociferous outcry from advocacy groups — had nothing to do with it.
“I raised my hand to do this job, and part of that job is to prosecute all crimes that occur in Sublette County,” he said. “I’ll tell you this, it wasn’t to take a target off my back. The reality of the situation is that the investigation stalled because of a lack of willingness for people to speak.”
Before the grand jury, just one eyewitness from the bar, out of 30-plus people who stopped by the Green River Bar on Feb. 29, 2024, cooperated with the investigation. Melinkovich guessed it wasn’t because they all condoned Roberts’ behavior. Rather, he speculated it was related to the avalanche of harassment and “people not wanting to be publicly doxxed,” harassed and threatened.
Nevertheless, no one would talk save for the whistleblower who reported the incident.
“That law enforcement investigation stalled,” Melinkovich said, “and the only way to keep it going was to convene the grand jury.”
Melinkovich couldn’t discuss the proceedings or evidence presented — it’s sealed and confidential under state statute — but he said publicly at the case’s one-year mark that the delays were because of forces out of his control. A third-party lab took many months to process an undisclosed piece of evidence, and just as the results came in, a heinous murder occurred within his jurisdiction: Big Piney resident Dakota Farley was shot and killed with a compound bow.
“My attention was drawn to that homicide case, understandably,” the county attorney said.
After Roberts was indicted this week, the news spread widely, with headlines even in the New York Times. In the first 24 hours, Melinkovich didn’t experience any personal blowback to his prosecution’s advancement. Just the opposite.
“I’ve heard support locally from individuals that I know and don’t know,” Melinkovich said. Emails have come in expressing gratitude from overseas, he said, and over the course of a 12-minute interview, the attorney received three supportive text messages “from around the state.”
Plenty of Pinedale residents are glad Roberts has been charged, and they aren’t afraid to say it.
“He needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent,” Bob Swanson, a local builder, said outside the Sublette County administration building. “I’m not a big animal activist, by any means. I’m just a normal guy. There’s obviously a lot of people in Daniel that thought that was OK and acceptable, and I disagree.”
The Pinedale Roundup editor Cali O’Hare, who’s faced a notably tumultuous month — her newspaper abruptly closed, then was purchased and reopened — said that she thinks the indictment is a step in the right direction for Sublette County, which has been cast in a “real negative light.”
“I think it was meaningful to a lot of Sublette County residents that this go through the proper channels, and the proper process, to confirm either his innocence or guilt,” O’Hare said from her office Thursday. “A lot of people that I’ve heard from and talked to, they really felt like all of Sublette County has had to pay the price for his actions — and then lack of accountability, and lack of remorse. They were sort of caught in the crosshairs just by virtue of also living here.”
Harassment and threats haven’t flooded Sublette County only because of out-of-state activist types. O’Hare’s dealt with it too, and been open about it. Out to lunch with fellow journalists in the wolf fiasco’s wake, she noticed a man who wouldn’t stop staring.
“Finally, he got his check,” O’Hare recalled. “He came over and he looked at me and said, ‘Eat shit, you fucking libtard.’”
The newspaper editor tracked down the man’s name. “I found that, in fact, he’s been very vocally in support of Cody,” she said.
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