Cari Lea Farver was born on November 30, 1974. We don’t know too much about Cari’s background, but by 2012, she was 37 and had a son in high school. Cari worked as a computer programmer in Omaha, Nebraska. She and her son Max were living in Macedonia, Iowa, around one hour away from her work place.
Cari’s mother Nancy Raney has said that Cari was diagnosed with depression in her late 20’s and that she was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder.
“She had been seeing therapists and was on medication,” Nancy said. “There was a couple of times when she would stop taking the medication because she said, ‘Mom … I feel like I’m numb.'”
By 2012 though, Nancy said Cari was in a good place in her life and with her mental health.
“You noticed Cari when she walked into a room,” said her friend Amy Long. “She had a laugh, she had a smile. She lit up a room… You couldn’t help but notice her. You were drawn to her.”
Friends and family have said that Cari was vivacious and warm.
In 2012, Cari took her Ford Explorer into an auto repair shop in Omaha. There she met Dave Kroupa – he was the manager.
Dave had recently moved to the area. He had just separated from his long term partner with whom he had two children. Dave spoke about trying to get back into the dating scene.
“I didn’t know how to venture back into the dating pool,” he said. “I felt pretty rusty … so internet dating was … the way to go.”
The first woman that Dave met was Elizabeth Golyar – she went by the name Liz.
“I thought Liz was very pretty. I was attracted to her right away, so then we set up a date,” he said.
Liz told Dave that she was a single mother with two children who were around the same age as his children. They went on a few dates and they became intimate. Dave apparently told Liz that he was enjoying their time together but that he also wanted to continue seeing other women.
Dave and Cari met six months after he met Liz. Dave said that Cari was an ‘extremely attractive woman.’
“When we looked at each other, there was a little spark,” Dave said. “She’s showing me something inside the vehicle and we’re standing there, and we’re very close … and there was some tension.”
The two went out on a date and Dave invited Cari back to his apartment. When they got there, Cari said she was just looking for fun and did not want anything serious.
“I felt like I hit the jackpot with that,” Dave said.
As Cari left his apartment at the end of the night, she walked right past Liz in the hallway. Liz had turned up unannounced because she wanted to pick up some of her belongings from Dave’s place.
“It was just a brief encounter, maybe 10 seconds or less … but this encounter would go on to have lasting ramifications for all three of them,” said Jenn Carpenter, host of the “So Dead” podcast, which followed the case.
As we mentioned, Cari’s workplace was around an hour from her home. When she was placed on a big work project, Dave offered to let her stay with him as his house was closer.
On the morning of November 13, 2012, Dave got ready for work. He kissed Cari as he left and told her he would see her later.
A few hours later, Dave got a strange text from Cari. She was talking about wanting to move in together. He said that this was “ very left field because we had already talked about that not happening.”
Dave wrote back that he wasn’t interested. Cari responded almost straight away. “Fine. I hate you. I’m dating someone else. I don’t want to see you anymore. Go away.”
“Lots of profanity,” Dave said. “I didn’t know what to think. I was blown away.”
When Dave got home that night, Cari was gone. After a few days, his phone started blowing up with texts from her.
“I hate you … you’ve ruined my life… You’re a terrible person.”
David said “I don’t need this… I dodged a bullet.”
Around this time, Nancy (Cari’s mother) started getting strange texts from her daughter.
Cari told Nancy that she had taken a job in Kansas. Nancy said that this ‘totally threw me.’
Nancy has said that the texts were often mean and aggressive “saying that I wasn’t a good mother and that I was controlling.” She noticed that often times the texts would be full of grammatical and punctuation errors, as well as spelling mistakes, which she said was out of character for her daughter, who was “a stickler for punctuation and spelling.”
Nancy tried to call Cari many times, but was never able to get hold of her. Finally, when Cari did not show up to her half-brother’s wedding, Nancy reported her missing.
Nancy told authorities about Cari’s bipolar disorder and that she was on medication. After that, Nancy said that the authorities would not take the situation seriously.
“The police jumped on that and said, ‘Well, this kind of thing happens all the time. When somebody who’s bipolar stops taking their meds, sometimes … they can start some really erratic behavior,'” said author Leslie Rule, who wrote “A Tangled Web” about the case.
Cari also missed more family events including her son’s 15th birthday, Thanksgiving and also the funeral of her father.
Dave kept getting messages on both text and email from Cari – hundreds of them.
“I will do what I can to make you suffer,” one message said. Another said, “We belong together, Dave.”
Along with the messages, Dave said that he was being stalked.
“On one specific occasion, I was sitting in my La-Z-Boy with my feet up, watching TV, trying to relax, and it’s nighttime and I get a text saying, ‘I see you. You’re sitting in your chair with your feet propped up, wearing a blue shirt.’ And those things were true,” he said.
Dave said that most of the messages he received focused on Liz.
Liz told him she was also receiving harassing texts and emails. She called Dave one day and said that her home had been vandalized.
“Upon pulling into the garage, she found that someone had written … ‘Whore from Dave’ on the inside” in spray paint, Dave said.
Liz reported this incident to police in late November 2012.
Dave and Liz continued to see each other during this phase. Sometimes, they would both be harassed at the same time. “It was actually extremely common for us to be… hanging out on a couch, watching TV or something and both of our phones would start blowing up with text messages and emails from Cari,” David said.
Cari’s son Max also received texts. His mother told him that she was going to Kansas and would be coming to get him but she never showed up.
In January 2013, Dave noticed that Cari’s vehicle was parked in a nearby parking lot. He took a photo of it and sent it to Omaha police.
Police searched the vehicle and found a single fingerprint on a mint container. The print did not match Cari’s, or anyone else in the national database.
Meanwhile, tips about Cari’s whereabouts were coming in. One man called Nancy to say that he had seen Cari at a homeless shelter and that she wanted her mother to go and pick her up.
“I was shaking… I thought, ‘Oh my God, we’re going to bring her home, she’s going to be OK,'” Nancy said.
When Nancy went to the shelter, it was discovered that Cari had never been there.
“It was such a letdown and I was just devastated,” she said. “I get this raising in my hopes and then it’s dashed again… I knew somebody was playing games here.”
Six months after his mother disappeared, Max messaged her on Facebook. She messaged back “ ‘Hey little man, how are you?'” “He asked her to answer three questions to prove that it was really her… What his middle name was, what the name of their first [dog] was and what his best friend’s name was, and she never responded to that message.”
Cari kept up the harassment of Dave and Liz. She sent an email to Dave where she threatened to kill Liz and included a photo of a woman tied up in a vehicle. Cari also sent Dave a link to a fake obituary for Liz.
In August 2013, Liz’s home caught fire. Her pets – two dogs, a cat and a snake – all perished. Fire investigators said that they suspected arson. Liz said that she believed Cari had started the fire.
The auto shop where Dave worked was vandalized. In January 2014, Dave was with a woman in his apartment when his cell phone was blasted with messages. They also heard someone trying to open the front door. A brick was thrown through a window of the home that night.
The mother of Dave’s children also received threatening messages from Cari.
Dave became so worried that he purchased a gun for his safety. He would later realize that the gun was missing and he reported that to police.
The harassment continued for years. By the Spring of 2015, nobody had seen Cari for 2.5 years but the messages kept coming.
Detectives Ryan Avis and Jim Doty, of the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had never worked on the case but they had heard about it in the office. The two detectives decided to approach the case from different angles.
“Jim’s going to work it like she’s dead and I’m going to work it like she’s alive. I’m going to try and prove every which way I can that Cari is still out there, and Jim is going to try and prove every which way that she is not,” Detective Avis said.
Detective Avis became alarmed when it was discovered that there had been no activity on Cari’s bank accounts.
“It’s not normal for adults to just up and leave and literally spend no money. No one’s seen them and no one’s heard their voice… It just didn’t make sense,” Detective Avis said. “She had good income, a good house… I had come to the conclusion that I could not prove she was actually alive.”
Detective Doty said that Liz was one of the people who stood out to him. She had never been involved in Cari’s life until she went missing. “All of a sudden she’s this focus of harassment,” he said. “Her name was all over all the reports. So to me, there was something with Liz. … She definitely was a person of interest.”
All of the harassment was sent electronically so the detectives enlisted a digital forensics expert to help.
Dave and Liz agreed to have their phone data examined. This was the beginning of discovery in the case.
“We knew these messages don’t seem to really be coming from Cari Farver,” Anthony Kava, the digital forensics expert said. “Cari, or … the imposter who was pretending to be Cari, sent Dave about 15,000 email messages over a three year span…. It might’ve been upwards of 25,000 or 50,000 texts in all.”
“Whoever was pretending to be Cari … got more and more sophisticated in what they were doing to try to hide their IP address, to try to hide their real identity,” he added.
Investigators also found a photo of Cari’s vehicle in Liz’s phone dump. This had been taken a month before the car was recovered by police.
“Somehow Liz knew where Cari’s vehicle was before law enforcement even did,” Detective Doty said. “Another thing we found on the phone download was there were six calls that were made to Cari’s residence. It was using the *67 prefix to disguise the number, so Liz was calling Cari six times. This didn’t make sense to us because she said she’d only met Cari one time passing through a hallway.”
The photo of the tied up woman that had been originally sent to Dave was determined to have been taken by Liz’s phone.
Investigators also discovered a video showing someone walking outside of Dave’s apartment. It had been uploaded to YouTube under Cari’s name but had come from an IP registered to Liz’s home.
Nancy spoke to investigators and said that in 2012, Cari sent her a text saying that she had sold her furniture. She asked Nancy to let the buyer into the house to collect it. Cari sent Nancy a photo of a check for the furniture that had been signed by ‘Shanna Golyar.’
“We knew Liz Golyar’s real name was Shanna,” Detective Doty said. It was yet another connection between the two women who supposedly were strangers.
“Granted, [that] didn’t give us any answers on what had happened to Cari, but we knew [that] Liz knew more than she was telling us.”
The fingerprint that was found on the mint container in Cari’s car was determined to belong to Liz.
In December 2015, Liz went to the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office. She told the detectives that she wanted to file a harassment complaint against the mother of Dave’s children, Amy Flora.
Liz then said that she thought it was Amy who had been sending her messages this whole time, not Cari. She also said that she thought Amy had Dave’s missing gun.
“She realized that she probably shouldn’t know any details about the gun and … then any further questions I asked about the gun, she was very vague,” Detective Avis said.
Investigators asked if Liz would give consent for her phone data to be examined and she did.
The following day, Liz called 911 and said that she been shot in the leg and that she thought the shooter may have been Amy Flora.
“I found it highly suspicious that the day before she felt the need to tell me that Dave Kroupa’s gun had been stolen … and less than 24 hours later, she is shot,” Detective Avis said. “It was pretty quickly determined that most likely Liz Golyar had shot herself.”
Amy was cleared of any involvement on that night.
When police investigated Liz’s phone contents, they discovered that she had registered “upwards of 20 or 30 fake [email] addresses,” all of which had some variation of Cari’s name.
They also found that she had an app which allowed her to schedule messages to be sent at later times and dates. This could explain how both Dave and Liz would often be harassed at the same time.
“She was able to send messages pretending to be Cari, and they would arrive while she was sitting on the couch next to Dave,” Anthony Kava added. “From Dave’s point of view, Liz couldn’t have sent it because she was sitting next to him the whole time.”
It was said that Liz must have spent about 40 to 50 hours a week impersonating Cari.
Police came up with a plan. They told Liz that they believed Amy had shot her. They said they wanted her help to see if Amy would incriminate herself.
This worked. Liz immediately created fake emails from Amy.
“We started receiving messages … that she said were from Amy [Flora] … where Amy confesses to shooting Liz at Big Lake Park,” Detective Doty said.
The detectives continued to press Liz to ask “Flora,” for details about Cari’s death. They knew they were talking to Liz and not Amy.
They said she forwarded an email to them that had supposedly come from Amy, saying she had stabbed Cari “three to four times” and stuffed her body into a garbage bag.
“The details were … bone chilling because they were graphic,” Detective Doty said.
Liz started to become upset because Amy had not been arrested. The detectives told her they needed specific information that only the killer would know before they could make an arrest.
Within hours, they said more “confession” emails from “Flora” appeared. The emails included that Cari had been stabbed to death in her own car.
“These emails … gave us Cari’s vehicle as a crime scene,” Detective Doty said. “What we wanted to do was go back and look at that vehicle to determine if that crime happened there.”
Police searched Cari’s car again. They removed fabric from the passenger seat and found her blood stained on it.
Liz was confronted with all of the evidence that investigators had gathered against her. She denied being involved and also said she had no internet service.
Police searched her apartment and found some of Cari’s belongings including a camera and a camcorder. On the camcorder, they found video of Cari talking about how someone had vandalized her car. It was time stamped two days before she disappeared.
On December 22, 2016, more than four years after Cari vanished, Liz was arrested and charged with first-degree murder.
Douglas County attorney Brenda Beadle, who prosecuted the case, said, “this was by far the most difficult case I’ve ever tried.”
“Most homicides are dark. This one was … bizarre to the point where it would take some convincing to make somebody believe that it actually happened,” she said. “There’s no way that someone would let their dog die in a fire that they started. There’s no way that someone would shoot themselves in the femur.”
Liz’s attorney decided to waive a jury trial in favor of a bench trial. This meant that a judge would decide the case.
“Not only was there no body, there was no crime scene, there was no murder weapon… There was no proof that she even died,” the attorney said. “We waived the jury trial to move it up so I could try this case hopefully before they’d find a body.”
The trial was scheduled to start in 2017. A few months before this, Dave remembered that he had an old tablet in storage and he gave it to police. Investigators discovered a micro SD memory card in the tablet that also had been in Liz’s phone around the time of the murder. The SD card had thousands of deleted images — all of which were able to be recovered.
“I came to a photo that no one had seen before,” Anthony Kava said. “I wasn’t sure what I was looking at first, but it turned out to be … a human foot with a tattoo.”
The tattoo was of the Chinese symbol for the word “mother.” It was the same one Cari had on her foot.
“It was shocking,” Anthony Kava said. “It made me realize that … Liz Golyar killed Cari Farver and she’s taking photos of her body.”
In 2017, Judge Timothy Burns found Liz guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced her to life in prison. During his ruling, Judge Burns said, “Cari Farver did not voluntarily disappear and drop off the face of the earth. Very sadly, she was murdered.”
Cari’s remains have never been found.
Nancy has said that she wants to remember her daughter as “as the fun-loving, talented, smart woman that she was.”
“Cari was only 37 when she died,” Nancy said. “If I could talk to Cari right now, I’d say ‘I love you. I’m so glad that you are in my life. You have a beautiful son who’s got a wonderful life coming, and I miss you terribly.'”
SOURCE LIST:
https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/lover-stalker-killer-release-date-news
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/175584784/cari_lea-farver
https://abcnews.go.com/US/horrific-stalking-case-jealous-lovers-cover-murder/story?id=74431142