A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  The interview with the detectives lasted about an hour, and halfway through Garret got a text from “Cari.” “If I remember right, it was something as simple as, ‘Hi. How was your day?’” She also had a new phone number, and she texted that to him. He immediately relayed the information to the investigators. Whatever “Cari’s” reasons for her bizarre behavior, she was a human being, and Garret felt, “She needed help—which is why I agreed to keep texting her and talking to her, to help the investigators try to find her, so that they could know it was actually her, and she was okay.” He agreed immediately when the detectives asked to download his phone. It was new, with virtually no history. Most of his communication with “Cari” had been on his old phone, and he promised to bring it in the next day.

  He left the interview in a fog. The scenario the investigators had painted was so different from the reality Garret knew. In this new twisted version of his world, Liz’s good pal, “Cari,” was threatening to kill her, both women were sleeping with some guy named Dave Kroupa, and his own girlfriend was involved in a devious plot to set him up with the nut who’d been terrorizing her. Liz was indignant when Garret confronted her. The cops had it wrong. Dave was a guy she’d dated years ago. Sure, they were friends. They saw each other when their kids played together. How dare Garret suggest she was cheating? It wasn’t her fault that Cari had flipped out. Of course, she knew Cari was gaga over Dave. But there was nothing romantic between Liz and Dave. If Garret believed that, he was as delusional as “Crazy Cari!”

  “Essentially, Liz said she was kind of caught up in the deal, just because she was friends with Dave, and Cari was someone he’d dated. They broke up, and Cari wasn’t happy about it.” As for labeling his photo “fat ass,” Liz was insulted that he would accuse her of such a thing. And the idea that she was trying to dump her stalker on him was ludicrous. Hadn’t she just got done telling him at lunch that there was a problem with someone bothering her? It was Cari. She sounded surprised that he hadn’t realized that, when she thought she’d made that fact perfectly clear. Garret really needed to listen better.

  As Liz spun her words around him, he felt almost foolish for doubting her. He told himself he’d overreacted. None of it was Liz’s fault. If anything, she was more distressed than he was by the whole mess. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have gone to the police. This Cari person was obviously a basket case if she was freaked out because Liz had dated Dave a lifetime ago. If Garret allowed himself to be jealous of their bygone relationship, then he was just as unreasonable as the nut who was causing all the trouble.

  It crossed his mind that the cops could have deliberately misled him about the situation to throw him off balance. Maybe they thought he was hiding something and wanted to rattle him. It was kind of a low blow to falsely claim his girlfriend was cheating on him and that she’d captioned his photo “fat ass.” But Liz sounded genuinely offended by those accusations. Garret wasn’t sure what to think about the baffling situation.

  He was just beginning to see tiny, blurred fragments of a tragic mystery that he now played a part in. He did his best to make sense of it, but he knew only what police and Liz had told him. The detectives knew a lot more than Garret did, and Liz knew more than all of them put together, though she had managed to make everyone believe she was as mystified as they were.

  If Garret had seen the email Liz had received six days earlier, he would have been even more bewildered:

  Hey, Cari and I would like Dave and you to come out to dinner Friday night. It’s on me. I would like to meet him.

  Plus, it will be a good chance for me to sort out if they have feelings for each other. Cari says she doesn’t have feelings for him, but that he still has feelings for her. So, I would like to see for myself if she is telling the truth. So, if it’s no inconvenience, do you think the two of you could come to dinner Friday? Let me know as soon as possible. And thank you, Liz.

  Sincerely,

  Garret

  The email address contained Garret Sloan’s name and was registered with Yahoo. It was not Garret’s email address, but it certainly looked like it could have been. Garret didn’t write the email and was not aware of its existence. It had, in fact, been written for Dave Kroupa’s benefit. Liz showed Dave the email she claimed Garret had sent her, along with her brusque reply to him: One, Friday is Dave’s date night—or alone night without me. Second, I really don’t want to double date with you and Cari. You two haven’t even met yet.

  In the bizarre, alternate universe where Garret’s cyber-double was developing a romantic interest in “Cari,” the two apparently met two days later, after Liz had coolly pointed out to “Garret” that he and “Cari” had yet to meet. If the email sent to David on January 5 was any indication, the set up between the digital versions of Garret and Cari was working beautifully: So, Cari is here and said I had to email you. So, me and Liz talked a while ago about you, and what she was looking for. So, I just want to say she deserves someone good. She has been hurt so much the last 10 years from abusive to verbal-abusive relationships. I know it’s not my place to say shit, plus Liz isn’t talking to me, and this will piss her off more. Well, Cari won’t let it go, and you know how it is when a beautiful woman asks you to do something. All I ask is that you don’t hurt her, and if you don’t want her, to let her go. I am not going to tell you to leave her or anything. So, what is going on with you and my girl?

  Garret

  Garret was unaware emails were being sent in his name, and Dave gave them little thought. Dave was a drowning man, swept away in a deluge of words, a tsunami of bizarre emails and text messages that washed over him in an inexplicable, never-ending wave of hate. He could make no sense of “Cari’s” motives, and the weird emails from “Garret” had all the impact of a drop of rain on a sinking swimmer.

  It didn’t dawn on Dave that Liz had written the emails from Garret, just as he didn’t guess that she was behind the thousands of threats. In reality, Liz was having a grand time dreaming up nightmares for the men in her life. Dave was no more plotting to sic the stalker on Garret than Garret was sending Dave emails because “you know how it is when a beautiful woman asks you to do something.”

  When we scrutinize Liz’s concoctions with the wisdom of an outsider’s retrospect, they quickly disintegrate as fakes, particularly in the case of the Garret letters. What man proposes setting up a double date so that he can see if his new love interest still has feelings for another? It’s the kind of scheme a pair of giggling preteen girls might come up with, not a forty-year-old man. And why would a casual male friend of Liz’s write to Dave, begging him to treat her right? For someone so good at manipulating males, Liz had some curious gaps in her understanding of them. What was Liz trying to accomplish with the Garret letters? While it’s possible she had a complex plan that went beyond the obvious, a reasonable guess at her motive suggests two goals. One, she hoped Dave would take to heart “Garret’s” plea for him to treat her better. Maybe it would be just the nudge needed to inspire him to embrace his true, deep feelings and finally commit to her.

  Also, Liz hoped that the letters from Garret would confirm for Dave that Cari was alive. If he believed Cari was hanging out with Garret, then he’d have no reason to suspect she had died. While Dave showed no sign that he doubted the stalker’s identity, Liz needed to make sure that he would never question that. So far, Dave had told the police exactly what Liz had wanted him to. He had unwittingly served as her alibi. He was so sure Cari was terrorizing him, that he spoke of it as fact, with all the certainty of an eyewitness.

  While the phony emails that Liz had written in Garret’s name showed an embarrassing lack of understanding of male behavior, they didn’t exactly radiate insight into female behavior either. The second fake Garret letter claimed that Cari was pestering him to ask Dave to treat Liz better. Why would the so-called stalker, so wildly jealous of Liz, suddenly become her advocate and implore upon Garret to convince Dave to embrace Liz? Dave didn’t question t
he discrepancy. The world had stopped making sense to him six weeks earlier on November 13, 2012, when the wonderful woman he’d clicked with had seemed to morph into a vicious enemy. Dave was already so overwhelmed that he didn’t stop to ponder the lunacy of the Garret letters. Liz was confident that she had Dave and Garret fooled so thoroughly that their heads would never stop spinning.

  While she continued to control Dave by making him feel guilty, she was unaware that her grip on Garret had somewhat loosened. He admits he was still unsure. He would waiver over the next months. “But the seed of doubt had been planted,” he confides. The meeting with the detectives made a lasting impact, and he could not completely dismiss the things they’d told him.

  Garret still had a helluva ride ahead of him. It would not be fun, but he would do it again if he had to, for he believes God placed him in the middle of the horrific situation for a reason. He had a noble role that he would not recognize until much, much later. He would never ask for fame, fortune, or even for thanks for the part he played. Though he won’t step forward to make the claim, it would certainly be within his rights to do so. Few people can say, “I helped stop a killer.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  SHANNA ELIZABETH GOLYAR’S HANDS were stained with blood—figuratively speaking. No one would glance at her soft little hands and see anything amiss. They appeared just like every other thirty-eight-year-old woman’s hands, though her fingers were quicker than most as they danced over her cellphone’s tiny keyboard because they had had so much practice.

  When Shanna’s dainty hands were not engaged with a cellphone, they did all of the things that most hands do. Delivered food to her mouth. Gripped a steering wheel. Curled around a doorknob. Waved hello and good-bye. Caressed her lovers. Brushed a strand of hair from her child’s eyes.

  Yes, Shanna’s hands did normal, everyday things, but they had also done something shockingly abnormal. They had killed a human being. While only metaphorically stained in blood today, there was a day when they were likely covered in actual blood. Tuesday morning, November 13, 2012, to be precise. Probably before 11 A.M. detectives would one day pinpoint that morning as the dark window of time when she brutally took the life of an innocent person.

  Perhaps more frightening than the realization that Shanna’s soft hands committed murder, is the idea that her heart felt no sorrow over what her hands had done. She went on with her life as if nothing at all had happened. No one could have looked into her eyes and guessed the truth. Because she fooled so many people, she probably believed she was brilliant. She had, after all, gotten away with murder. But the reality is, she wasn’t brilliant. She wasn’t even smart. Some areas of her intellect were sadly lacking. Liz was no genius. But she did have two things going for her that helped her conceal her evil deeds. First, she could count on our ignorance. We don’t expect females to be dangerous. This writer includes herself among the ignorant masses, because even though I went to many trials with my true-crime-author mother, and had a front-row seat as deadly women took the stand, I still can’t grasp the fact that women can and do kill.

  Certainly, I can understand on an intellectual level that females can be just as dangerous as males, but if a murderous woman with a smiling face walked up to me on the street tomorrow and said hello, I would not shrink away. My natural inclination would be to trust her. I’d likely feel a warning on a gut level, because most of us do when confronted with evil. But we almost always ignore it, because we allow our eyes, and what we perceive to be our common sense, to override our intuition. If we see a dangerous but feminine, smiling creature with soft, little hands, most of us dismiss the cold, prickle of warning that shivers down our necks. Female sociopaths know this. They have spent their entire existence incognito as gentle beings, and they know how they are perceived. Many heartless sociopaths are mothers, and that intensifies the illusion of softness. Shanna Golyar was well aware of the fact that no one would expect her to be dangerous.

  She also had a big bag of tricks—or rather, a big bag of electronic applications—to aid her in the concealment of her malicious charade. She favored an app called Letter-Me-Later that does exactly what the name implies. It allows a message to be written in advance and sent at a chosen time. Often when she was hanging out with Dave and nowhere near her phone, he or she, or both, received threats from the stalker. Dave had no idea that Liz was sending herself threats.

  Even as we embark upon the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are still as naïve about the many ways that electronics can be used to deceive us as we are about the deadly females who walk among us. Liz was two steps ahead of most of us. She educated herself about the myriad cyber applications designed for deception. In January 2013, she still had many more months of freedom ahead of her, many more months to play vicious games and harm innocent souls. No one looked at her and saw a killer. Not the detectives. Not David Kroupa. And not Garret Sloan.

  While Garret suspected that his girlfriend wasn’t always truthful, he wasn’t aware of the depth of her treachery. He was hesitant to flush the relationship down the toilet over things he couldn’t prove. He wanted to believe in her. And that’s why he agreed to help her out again about three weeks after his disturbing meetings with the detectives. Liz told him she had to work all night. It was Wednesday, January 30, 2013. Peter was with his father, but Liz had no one to watch Trina. As usual, Garret allowed her to stay at his place. He didn’t mind. She was a nice girl and spent most of her time reading. He was blissfully unaware of the significance of Wednesday.

  Liz had insisted that Dave was nothing more than a friend, and while Garret was not entirely confident that that was true, it was more comfortable to believe her than to doubt her. He had no idea that his girlfriend was David Kroupa’s Wednesday Girl. Trina spent the night while Liz “worked” on Wednesday night. When Garret left his house early Thursday morning, Trina was waiting for her mother to pick her up and take her to school. They expected Liz to arrive any minute.

  Garret arrived home that night to an unpleasant surprise. “When I got off work, I came home, and the first thing I noticed when I walked into the living room was the TV was missing.” After looking around and noting more missing things, he called the police and then his roommate. The missing items included the TV, a PlayStation, a computer monitor, a laptop, and, oddly, some of Gabe’s clothing—a pair of jeans and his favorite Notre Dame sweatshirt he’d had for years.

  There were no broken windows, no sign of forced entry. Had Trina forgotten to lock the door when she left? If so, then why was the door locked when Garret got home? Someone had locked that door, and it seemed unlikely that a stranger would burglarize his home only to conscientiously lock up when they were done. He was also puzzled by what he discovered in his garage. “I noticed this big black thing behind a piece of wood, so I pulled it out and, lo and behold, it was the television. Apparently, when it was being taken out of the house, it was dropped and the screen was broken. They had attempted to hide it behind a piece of wood.” Garret had kept meticulous records of his valuables and gave police the serial numbers for the stolen electronic equipment. The numbers were added to the lists circulated to local pawn shops.

  Other than the burglary of his home, nothing much about the first months of 2013 stood out, though Garret was on the list of people contacted on April 17 by someone claiming to be Cari. It was the same Siena/Francis House hoax that the others had been drawn into. Garret had passed the information along to police, and it was the last time “Cari” contacted him. He was unaware that Dave Kroupa and Liz continued to report cyberstalking and vandalism in the following months. Though he’d hoped to help detectives locate the missing woman, he wasn’t privy to any part of their investigation and wasn’t told about Phyllips’s search of Cari’s Macedonia home, the suspicious activity on her fake Facebook page or the vicious threats against Dave’s new friend, Jessica McCarthy.

  As the summer of 2013 approached, Liz complained to Garret that she was unable to pay her bill
s and might become homeless. She received a deep discount on the rent from the Omaha Housing Authority’s Section 8 program, and as part of the agreement, it was her responsibility to pay the utilities. Garret had already picked up so much of Liz’s slack that this time he didn’t offer to help. She fell so far behind on the electric bill that the power was turned off. She managed to have it turned back on by using an alias, but the company caught on and shut off the power for good. She knew that once the landlords caught on that she’d breached the contract by failing to pay utility bills, they could evict her, but they were required to give her a 30-day written notice. She expected to be kicked out but knew she had weeks to find a new place to live.

  Though Garret wouldn’t realize it for some time to come, Liz was still seeing Dave, and she was always warmer to Garret during the times Dave pulled away from her. Dave was doing his darndest to break free from her. Suddenly, Liz was smiling more at Garret, listening more intently to him and was much more affectionate than she’d been in a long time. To Garret, it seemed like their relationship was improving, and he began to feel closer to her. When he saw how hard she was struggling to make ends meet, he not only worried about her, he was concerned for the kids. “I knew they needed a place to stay.” His roommate had recently moved out, and Garret had lots of space. When he asked Liz to move in with him, he saw it as a commitment “to take the relationship to the next level.” Around the end of June 2013, Liz and her kids moved in. She took her time moving her things out of the old place, well aware that the eviction process could take weeks. As it turned out, the eviction notice was not sent until July 30, so she had until August 30 to collect the rest of her possessions.