by Leslie Rule
While Garret had expected his girlfriend to stay in his room, she immediately laid claim to the basement, and he got the sense she didn’t want him to invade her space. The warmth Liz had radiated in the previous days was replaced by cool indifference. It became painfully obvious that she saw the new situation as a roommate arrangement—one where she didn’t have to pay rent.
He was dismayed to discover that she didn’t clean up after herself. Soon her space downstairs was buried beneath heaps of dirty clothes and trash. Crumpled up fast food bags, with the leftovers rotting inside, became a permanent part of the décor. “There was crap everywhere. You couldn’t see the floor. It was a complete mess. For somebody in the cleaning business, she was not a clean person. When she moved in, I immediately regretted it. I was thinking, ‘Okay, how do I get her out?’”
But Liz couldn’t afford to live on her own. Garret figured if he helped her out for a while that she could save enough money to move out. With that in mind, he didn’t ask her to chip in for utilities. It was another generous move that he hoped would help her build her savings faster so that he could get her out of his house. But no matter how much he helped, Liz always claimed to be broke.
One of the kids stayed in a room on the main floor, and the other slept in a downstairs room “that was not intended to be a bedroom. It was essentially a storage room, so it wasn’t very big.” They switched around from time to time, and though they shared some of their mother’s sloppy habits, the children were never the problem. Liz spent most of her time downstairs. “She usually confined herself to the basement, or more specifically, to her room in the basement. She was down there roughly eighty to ninety percent of the time she was home.”
As time went on, Garret realized that he and Liz had few shared interests. One thing they definitely did not have in common was their taste in movies. “Liz loved horror movies.” He recalls how she gravitated toward gory films. In the past, he’d had no aversion to horror films, “but I hated what they had become—which is a gore fest!” The realistic special effects and the emphasis on killing didn’t appeal to him. He preferred Hitchcockian suspense that focused on psychological tension. But Liz relished violent scenes. “Everyone else would be bothered by the blood and guts, but it never affected her at all.” He found himself cringing as they watched one of the ultra-violent Purge flicks that Liz had chosen for the night’s entertainment. He didn’t want to see people hurt even if it wasn’t real. He glanced at his girlfriend during a particularly gruesome scene and was startled to see her staring blankly at the TV without a flicker of reaction. He soon realized that was her standard response to violent scenes. “She was emotionless,” so unaffected that she sometimes fell asleep in the middle of a shocking movie. “She was almost proud of the fact that horror movies didn’t affect her,” he remembers, adding that she claimed she found them funny in the same way that most people would be amused by a comedy.
Liz also enjoyed crime programs and once posted on a social media site that Criminal Minds was a favorite show. She was also a big fan of Dexter and watched the show regularly with her kids. The TV series features a most unusual character who both solves murders and commits them. A vigilante killer, Dexter chooses victims he feels deserve death. “Bones was another one she liked.” The popular drama centers around a forensic anthropologist who studies victims’ bones for clues about their lives and deaths. As for books, Liz liked true crime, but Garrett can recall the subject of only one book he noticed on her nightstand. It was the story of the Craigslist Killer. Philip Markoff, a clean-cut Boston medical student, had a dangerous side few were aware of. He met his victims via online ads for massages on Craigslist. His arrest in 2009 opened the public’s eyes to the hazards of meeting strangers on the Internet.
When Garret and Liz were first dating, he wasn’t disturbed by her fascination with murder. Millions of people, after all, are drawn to movies and books with dark subjects. If they weren’t, producers wouldn’t make violent films and publishers wouldn’t print crime books. But most people also have other topics that intrigue them. It’s only in retrospect that Garret wonders why Liz didn’t occasionally choose a comedy over a horror film or a coming-of-age novel over a murder story. Why was she interested only in horrific things? He acknowledges that he wasn’t with her every minute and that it’s possible that Liz did sometimes choose lighter fare. He isn’t the only one, however, to say that Liz favored the most gruesome of horror flicks available.
After Liz moved in, Garret noticed that she didn’t like to cook and rarely made dinner. When she did cook, it was just for her and the kids. He hadn’t expected her to make his meals or clean his house. She was his girlfriend, not his servant. He wished, though, that she would pick up after herself and the kids.
She loved fast food, and when she was hungry, she often texted him from the basement, dropping hints until he got the message. “A lot of times I got suckered into driving to McDonald’s.” Liz expected him to pick up the tab, and while fast food should have been easier on his wallet, the cost tripled because the children needed to eat, too. He always bought enough for everyone. At least Liz purchased her own groceries, so Garret didn’t have that expense.
Even though they were under the same roof, most of their communication was through text. “When she texted me, our conversations were typically very pleasant.” Face to face, she was usually cold and distant. The friendly person texting him was “almost never the same person when she was physically around me.”
The house had just one bathroom, and Liz went out of her way to dodge him when she came up to use it. “If I was in the living room, she would go through the kitchen and dining room to the bathroom. If I was in the kitchen, she would go the opposite way, through the living room to the bathroom. Either way, it was to avoid me. She would be short with me or barely even look at, talk to, or notice me, unless she wanted something, and then the sweetness really came out.”
The situation was confusing because she claimed she wasn’t seeing anyone else. And while Liz and Garret did not sleep together—not literally—they continued with their sexual relationship, though it was somewhat infrequent and still not particularly passionate. With kids around, not many opportunities for intimacy presented themselves. It was clear that Liz’s kids weren’t aware that Garret was her boyfriend. He’d learned not to show affection when they were watching because she’d instantly tense, pull away and glare at him.
He never considered marriage because she’d said from the start she wasn’t interested. But she pouted when Gabe got engaged, and she was angry that Garret hadn’t proposed to her. She pointed out to him that they’d been together longer than Gabe and his fiancée. “She was upset by this, and I literally laughed,” says Garret. The fact that Garret’s friend had fallen in love shouldn’t have been an issue for Liz. Yet, it seemed to draw her attention to the fact Garret had failed to make the ultimate commitment to her. Garret remembers thinking, “Was she serious? Why would I get engaged to someone who had made it clear she had no intentions of getting married anytime soon?”
Garret didn’t want to marry Liz. He cared about her, but he wasn’t in love with her, and he didn’t completely trust her. But it would have been nice if his girlfriend wasn’t so uptight about showing him affection.
When Liz and Garret were alone in the house, and she was in the mood for sex, she would let him know in an unusual way. She wore a revealing outfit, such as a skimpy nightgown, and joined him as he watched TV in the living room. “She’d pretend to fall asleep,” Garret recalls. As she played possum, she would twist around until her clothing became “accidentally” rearranged to strategically reveal parts of her body. It was an obvious invitation, but for a reason Garret could not quite fathom, she didn’t want it to appear she was making the overture.
While he sometimes made the move that he knew she was waiting for, and they would end up tangled together in intimacy, other times he ignored her and went to bed by himself, leaving Liz feigning sleep with
her private parts exposed.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DAVID KROUPA. GARRET SLOAN. NANCY RANEY.
Though their lives were irrevocably connected by a web of seemingly tenuous strands, none of them realized how tightly they were bound in the same intricate trap. They were vaguely aware of the others’ existence but still so unfamiliar that if they had passed on the street, it would be as strangers.
The predator sat smug, smack in the middle of the web that only she could see. She amused herself, spinning lies, entangling her victims as she fed on their confusion and distress. She was so like a spider with her invisible snare, but for the fact a spider’s intention is not cruelty. A spider is driven by instinct to survive.
Shanna Elizabeth Golyar was deliberately cruel.
In the thick of the summer of 2013, she plotted new ways to deceive, to harm, and destroy. Her victims were numerous, but in this evil spate of deceptions, she favored David, Garret, and Nancy. Three innocent people, their destinies intertwined, endeavored to struggle free of the trap without realizing exactly what it was that held them. Sometimes one of her victims wiggled free, and she had to work extra hard to trap them again. Dave seemed to be slipping away from her that summer. He’d once again become fed up with her jealous nagging and dumped her. While no one can guess exactly what was going on inside Liz’s head, the plan she concocted and was about to implement indicates her desperation was immense.
She would do anything to get Dave back. Anything. She would kill for him. That is not just idle talk but the raw and hateful truth. She had killed for Dave before, and her plan had worked out exactly as she’d hoped—for a while. But every time she almost had the guy where she wanted him, a fat-assed whore would waddle in and ruin everything. She warned them again and again, but they never learned.
Yes, she had killed for Dave once and was about to kill again. No one is sure exactly when Liz crept into the dark house and set the fatal fires, but it was probably very late at night on Friday, August 16, 2013, or very early the next morning. Omaha Fire Department’s Station 61 was alerted at 8:14 A.M. that Saturday to a possible house fire, two miles south of their facility. The crew rushed to their big ladder rig, donned safety gear, climbed aboard, buckled their seat-belts, and radioed dispatch that they were en route to the fire. It was 8:15 when they pulled out of the station—well within their one-minute turnout time goal.
Truck Captain Mark Sidener, with the Omaha Fire Department since 1998, worked twenty-four-hour stints, along with the rest of the crew. They started each shift at 7 A.M. and finished the next day at the same time and were only an hour and a quarter into their day when the alarm sounded. “On a possible house fire, we have a standard protocol for how many rigs we send to a fire call,” he explains. “Three pumps, a truck company, two battalion chiefs and a med unit.”
The Station 61 crew arrived at the scene in five minutes and six seconds—twenty-one seconds after first responders from Station 60. Slightly closer to the emergency destination, Station 60 had had a head start. In the firefighter’s world, speed, of course, is crucial. A few seconds can make the difference between life and death. Neither team had wasted a moment, but this morning, it made no difference. The fire was already out, the victims long dead.
When Sidener’s rig pulled up to the house just south of Omaha’s West Center Road, “I hopped out of the truck with my firefighters. There was a female standing in the front yard area, and I made contact with her and asked if anybody was still in the house.” Shanna Golyar told Sidener that while no humans were inside, four pets were in the home—two dogs, a cat, and a snake. When firefighters entered the house, it was no longer burning. The atmosphere was hazy with smoke, and much of the interior was charred and blackened with soot. They searched the building from top to bottom for possible victims. The only victims they found were the poor pets, discovered in the rooms where Liz had said they would be. All had perished from smoke inhalation.
Garret Sloan would not learn of the deaths of the animals until years after the fire, and when he did, he was heartsick and angry. “I helped her get the dogs,” he remembers bitterly, explaining that he had “loaned” her the adoption fee. He had met the dogs just once, a pair of small breed canines. According to Garret, the snake had belonged to Peter’s father, Dirk. Garret didn’t know the pets’ names or anything else about them. As an animal lover, it was painful enough to learn of their deaths, and he preferred to not know the details.
Whatever heat the fire had generated had dissipated by the time firefighters arrived. Sidener verified that fact with his thermal imaging camera, a device that reads the temperatures of materials, and the rescuers determined that nothing was burning. They measured the temperature of the walls, too, to be sure nothing continued to smolder within them. Readings showed that all surfaces had cooled. No flames, no burning embers remained.
“After we did the primary search of the residence, we went downstairs and checked that too and found nothing down there. And we came back upstairs and started opening windows to assist with ventilation to remove some of the smoke out of the building.” Positive pressure fans were placed in the exterior doorways to push fresh air into the house, forcing the smoky air out the open windows.
If a fire is deemed suspicious, investigators are called upon to determine the cause. Two fishy things had immediately jumped out at the first responders—a gas can on the floor of the living room, and evidence that the fire had originated in multiple spots. Sidener noted two couches with fire damage in the basement. Clothing and other material, now somewhat charred, had been piled in front of the furniture. The couches were not close together, and it was obvious that the fire had not spread from one to the other. The area surrounding the sofas was untouched. Sidener points out, “A fire doesn’t start in different areas unless it’s made to start in different areas. It starts in one spot and travels across material.”
Even a perfunctory assessment of the damage screamed arson. The suspicions were relayed to dispatch, and Battalion Chief Michael Shane McClanahan was sent to investigate. By the summer of 2013, he’d been with the Omaha Fire Department for seventeen years, and had spent the last four assigned to the Fire Investigation Unit. McClanahan’s extensive education includes a degree in fire science, intense studies with the National Fire Academy, and multiple courses related to the forensics of fire.
McClanahan must determine the source of each fire he investigates, assigning a cause from one of four classifications—incendiary (intentional), accidental, undetermined, and natural. An accidental cause could be an electrical malfunction, while a natural cause might be a lightning strike. Incendiary fires are deliberately set, and when an investigator cannot identify a fire as accidental, natural, or incendiary, it is classified as undetermined.
Chief McClanahan arrived on the scene at 8:37 that Saturday morning. After he was briefed by the commander on duty, he “did a quick walk-through of the structure to familiarize myself with the layout and what was inside.” Most of the smoke had cleared, and the structure had cooled, so no protective gear was necessary on this day. With a notebook and pen in hand, he made notes on everything that stood out, paying particular attention to burn patterns.
The Chief noted that heavy soot covered everything on the main level of the house but that he saw no signs of thermal damage—damage resulting from intense heat—on that floor. “As I moved to the basement of the structure, the smoke damage became heavier, and I found multiple points of origin,” he recalls. The basement also showed signs of thermal damage. An aquarium, holding the deceased snake, sat on a desk, and the structural framing of the container had “been degraded and warped due to the heat damage, and the glass of the aquarium was actually cracked and broken.”
Liz still waited, and she soon joined the Chief in his vehicle for an interview.
She sat beside him and shared her tragic story. She explained that she was in the process of moving to a friend’s house in Council Bluffs, but she failed to mention the f
act she’d been evicted. She said that she’d stopped by the house the day before, sometime between 1 and 3 P.M., to collect some things for herself and the kids. She confirmed that the big garage door had been unlocked at that time, but that she was certain she had locked the door that led to the house, as well as all the other exterior doors.
After arriving that morning between 7:30 and 8:00, “She stated that she went to the front door, unlocked it, opened the door and encountered a large volume of smoke, immediately shut the door and called 911.”
Liz told the frightening tale of the woman so insanely jealous that she’d stop at nothing to destroy her and win the love of David Kroupa. She handed McClanahan a business card for Detective Prencer, explaining that the OPD had been working with her to catch “Cari.”
McClanahan asked Liz standard questions and took careful notes. How many sets of house keys did she have? “She stated two, one that she possessed and one that her daughter possessed. She then told me there were originally three sets of keys to the house. The locks had been changed by the owner of the house, the Omaha Housing Authority, sometime near the end of 2012 or the beginning of 2013, when she had reported the stalking incidents. They changed the locks for her, and she was given three sets of keys at that time. Shortly after receiving the three sets, she stated, one of those sets came up missing.”
Did any of the residents smoke? Had anyone lit candles or incense? She confirmed that while her boyfriend, Dave, did smoke, it was always outside because she didn’t allow smoking in the house. No one had recently lit candles or incense.
The investigator asked about recent utility work or remodeling that might have been done in the home. Liz told him that other than some plumbing repairs ordered by the home’s owners, there had been no recent work on the house.
