George “Doc” Manley, a 76-year-old man, died on July 20, 2015, after a bright, crowded Cheyenne morning turned violent inside The Coin Shop on West Lincolnway. The Cheyenne Frontier Days pancake breakfast was winding down just blocks away, and people were still circulating through downtown when a call came in reporting a shooting and a robbery in progress. When officers arrived, they found Manley and coin shop owner Dwight M.
Brockman shot to death inside the business, a brazen double homicide in the middle of the day that left families and longtime friends trying to make sense of how something so public could happen so fast.
In the first hours and days after the killings, the case took shape around the account of the man who reported the crime. The witness told investigators he'd walked in and seen a Hispanic man at the safe behind the counter, claimed the intruder pointed a gun at him and ordered him out, and said he fled to call 911 while the suspect ran off on foot. The description helped send police and the community searching for someone who seemed to vanish into the movement of a busy summer morning, and for years the murders remained open while the investigation passed through multiple detectives, tips were reviewed, and the evidence was revisited as new techniques became available.
Nearly nine years later, the story pivoted back to that original caller. Cheyenne police announced on June 25, 2024, that Douglas Mark Smith—then 68, living in McCloud, California—had been arrested with assistance from the Siskiyou County Sheriff's Office on a Wyoming warrant alleging two counts of first-degree murder. Authorities said Smith had been in Cheyenne when the killings occurred, and he was ultimately extradited back to Wyoming and booked in Cheyenne on July 3, 2024. At his first court appearance, a judge set no bond, keeping him jailed as the case moved toward prosecution.
As prosecutors laid out their theory, the man who once positioned himself as the key witness became, in their telling, the person who had steered attention away from the truth. Investigators said Smith's accounts shifted over time, and that phone records, surrounding video footage, witness observations, and the crime-scene timeline didn't match the version he repeated through the years. Reporting on the case described how later review of surrounding surveillance coverage and reconstructed movements around the shop supported the argument that no unknown stranger escaped the way the 911 caller had described, tightening scrutiny onto the person who stayed at the center of the narrative from the beginning.
In July 2025, a jury found Smith guilty of two counts of first-degree murder for the killings at The Coin Shop, delivering a verdict nearly a decade after Manley's death. The following month, on August 12, 2025, a district court judge sentenced Smith to back-to-back life sentences, closing the courtroom chapter with punishment measured in the remainder of a lifetime—while leaving families to carry what can't be sentenced away: the sudden, permanent absence that began on that July morning in Cheyenne.
