A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  When McClanahan inquired about the home’s utilities, “She stated that she had the power turned off on Wednesday,” August 14, but that the gas and water were still on. Liz didn’t mention that the electric company had turned off the power because she’d failed to pay the bill.

  She also answered questions about the gasoline container on the living room floor and a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid found on the kitchen counter. Both items were out of place, she insisted. A gas can was kept on the back porch for the lawn mower, and the bottle of lighter fluid was normally kept next to the grill on the back patio.

  According to Liz, “Cari” had set the fire, intending to murder her and her children. She had proof, a threatening email that she now pulled up on her phone and showed to the Chief. It had been sent at 12:56 A.M., about six hours before Liz opened the front door to find her home thick with smoke.

  Nasty whore, Dave doesn’t want you talking to him anymore. He wants to be with me. We are trying a new relationship. We have had sex recently. He loves me and always will. He doesn’t want you back, you nasty, fat, whore, Liz. Hope you and your kids burn to death.

  The last line of the email was “a red flag,” as far as the investigator was concerned. He took a photo of the email and began his comprehensive evaluation of the scene. The rules of fire investigation are orderly and strictly followed. To avoid cross-contamination, all equipment is thoroughly cleaned after each incident, and disposable items are not reused. A fresh pair of gloves is donned before each piece of new evidence is examined. Everything is photographically documented. Rooms are shot from various angles, and each step of the evidence-collecting process is recorded as proof that protocol was followed. Even the discarded gloves are photographed to show that the investigator did indeed wear new gloves before handling evidence.

  Investigators measure depth of char and examine fire patterns to identify areas of origin. One indicator is known as a flash point. “We use that to describe an area where potential accelerant may have been, and it flashed, burning off the gas from the accelerant, but did not burn long enough for the surrounding combustible materials to start consuming themselves and continuing combustion.”

  McClanahan explains that when it comes to examining a burned structure, he first looks at the areas where there is the least amount of damage, and ends by scrutinizing those with the most damage. With Liz’s house, “We started with the exterior of the structure where there was virtually no damage and moved to the interior towards the basement.”

  Absorbable gauze is used to extract liquids from vessels holding possible accelerants. McClanahan took samples from the gas container on the living room floor and also from the bottle of charcoal lighter fluid, leaving the containers themselves behind. Each piece of gauze is first removed from an individual sterilized package before it’s dipped into the vessel holding the questionable liquid. After it soaks up some of the liquid, the gauze is placed in a sealed metal container, labeled, and later sent to the lab for testing.

  McClanahan identified six separate areas where fire originated in Liz’s house. All were in the vicinity of the basement. One was on the staircase leading to the basement—the third step from the bottom. Another was on the threshold of the door leading to the garage. Two piles of clothing in the laundry room were also determined to be places where fires originated. In addition, McClanahan found that the two couches, noted earlier by Sidener, were also areas of origin.

  There was no question that this was an intentionally set fire, but the arsonist was obviously an amateur. Because all of the windows in the house had been shut, the fire was starved for oxygen and quickly squelched.

  Dave was at work at Hyatt Tire when he answered Liz’s frantic phone call. “She was distressed, upset, telling me her house is on fire, and there are fire trucks there. I was at work, and it was very, very busy. She asked me to come over.” He was hesitant to leave work when it was so busy but felt guilty when Liz told him “Cari” had set the fire. When things slowed down a little, he left for a while to check on Liz. Three or four firetrucks were parked on the street, and he saw “fire hoses all over the place” as firefighters entered and exited the house. “Liz was standing in the middle of the road, crying.” She was a forlorn figure, all alone, staring at her house as tears streamed down her cheeks. Dave put his arm around her and tried to comfort her.

  It’s all gone, she told him, hopelessly. She had lost everything.

  “Do you have renter’s insurance?” he asked.

  “No.” Liz’s lower lip trembled as she swiped at her tears with the back of her hand. Dave stood by awkwardly. He wanted to be supportive but was unsure of what to say. “It’s hard to be comforting in that situation, so you try to just be there.”

  It was obvious she needed him. Though they’d broken up, he couldn’t abandon her in the middle of this latest trauma and did what he could to help over the next days. While some of her possessions were charred, others were salvageable. The couches were destroyed, but some pieces of furniture just needed a little cleaning. Dave helped her drag them out onto the lawn to hose down. Liz made it clear she blamed him. “Your stalker did this to me,” she reminded him more than once. As usual, he felt guilty, and they began to spend time together, sliding back into their usual pattern. Dave’s Wednesday Girl was back.

  He didn’t know Liz had moved in with Garret weeks before, and she’d left nothing she treasured behind. Nothing destroyed in the fire, including her pets, mattered much to her. In her mind, all of it was replaceable.

  Two days after the fire, on Monday, August 19, Detective Paul Prencer was in his Omaha office on Harney Street, when Liz asked to speak with him. “She said she had found some sort of cleaning fluid or a bottle on a table in her house that may have been used in the arson.” She showed the detective a photograph she’d taken of the bottle in question. She told him that she was familiar with the brand of cleaning fluid, and the color was wrong, as if someone had replaced the original solution with another liquid.

  “She said it didn’t quite match what it was supposed to look like, and she thought it might have been used to start the fire,” Prencer remembers. He wasn’t involved in the arson investigation “and was very hesitant to pursue that too much. I wanted to contact the arson investigator.” He called Captain McClanahan, and the two of them went to the burned house. Liz met them there, and inside pointed at the kitchen table. It was blackened with soot, but there was a round, clean spot, in the place where the suspect bottle had been. Photos taken earlier clearly showed a bottle sitting in that spot.

  “That bottle was now missing,” remembers McClanahan.

  Liz denied removing the bottle, and she expressed concern about the situation. Someone had come in and taken the bottle containing the very liquid she suspected had been used to start the fire. She seemed to be suggesting that the arsonist had returned to the scene to get rid of incriminating evidence. The timing was odd. No sooner had Liz discovered the suspicious liquid, photographed it, and rushed to report her findings to Detective Prencer, than the damned thing disappeared. It was almost as if the arsonist had been watching Liz and had seen her discover the evidence. In the time it took her to go see Prencer and for him to alert McClanahan and meet her at the house, the stalker had slipped in and snatched the one thing Liz hoped could convict the maniac.

  Chief McClanahan was no slouch. He had thoroughly investigated the scene, gathered the appropriate evidence, and sent every potential accelerant to the lab for testing. Gasoline was the obvious choice, and he had discovered traces of it when examining the fires’ points of origin. Careful lab work would soon confirm the presence of gasoline in suspect areas. The seasoned investigator certainly did not need Liz’s help.

  In the days following the fire, Dave did his best to comfort Liz. She told him she was frightened. What would the maniac do next? When Liz refused to give Dave her new address, he couldn’t really blame her. “I don’t want your stalker to know where I am!” she exclaimed. Dave wa
sn’t all that interested, anyway. He was just making polite conversation when he asked her where she was going. He thought she was smart to not tell him, because his tormentor seemed to have the ability to peer over his shoulder and see everything he was doing. If he jotted Liz’s new address on a slip of paper, somehow the stalker would find it.

  Dave couldn’t guess Liz’s real reason for being secretive about her new place. She was living with her boyfriend—the boyfriend Dave didn’t know she had. He had heard her mention Garret’s name, and they had the long-standing joke about setting “Cari” up with the unsuspecting guy. It was actually Liz’s joke, and Dave laughed along with her to be a good sport, but it wasn’t all that funny. He didn’t know much about Garret. He was just some guy Liz knew, and Dave wouldn’t wish his stalker problems on his worst enemy, let alone an innocent bystander.

  If Dave had known Liz had another boyfriend, he would have been elated. He was very tired of feeling responsible for her and longed for the day he could be free of his obligation to try to fix all of the problems his mistake had caused her. Liz never missed an opportunity to remind him that if he hadn’t been as horny as a tomcat on the prowl, her life wouldn’t be in shambles.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  BY LATE AUGUST 2013, Liz seemed to have sprouted permanent roots in Garret’s basement, and she was not budging. She was very comfortable, and her focus was on producing hundreds of emails and texts each week, most designed to taunt Dave. The more off-balance he became, the easier he was to control, and Liz was constantly scheming to come up with new ways to keep him off-kilter. She had accomplished quite a bit that month, and capturing his attention was at the top of her list.

  When she had summoned fire to solve her problems, most likely it was not with the sole purpose of winning back her lover. She was so far behind on her bills that she was being evicted, and the fire might have been an act of spite. If I can’t live in this house, no one can! Whether it was her intention or not, when she freed herself from the burden of the house, she had gotten revenge on the “jerks” who’d evicted her. It would not be cheap for the Omaha Housing Authority to pay for the repairs necessary to make the home suitable for the next renter.

  It’s also possible that the house held secrets—ghastly, unthinkable secrets that, if discovered, could threaten Liz’s very existence. As long as she had stayed at that house, she could monitor who came and went. She had invited police in when she reported the vandalism, allegedly caused by her stalker, but it had been on her terms. The cops hadn’t been nosing around, searching for evidence of murder. They had come in to take Liz’s reports, and she had always directed the conversations. In her mind, the police had been as easy to fool as Garret and Dave.

  If the house contained evidence that she feared she could not scrub away, she would have been reluctant to give up her control over the environment. As Liz surely must have learned from the many crime shows she watched, blood can seep into cracks in a floor, splatter across a ceiling, or drip down a wall, carrying with it DNA that can settle into crevices, waiting to be discovered weeks, months, or even years after a murder. If her victim had died in the house, Liz might have feared what future residents could uncover. If the house had held evidence of a homicide, Liz had quite possibly incinerated some of those clues right into the belly of oblivion.

  Liz could also congratulate herself for finding a place to live rent free with a built-in-babysitter. She no longer had to worry about paying bills. Garret would take care of everything! Not only that, she had what she believed was an excellent excuse for her unemployment. Her business had been destroyed in the fire. She claimed she had to give up cleaning because all of her supplies had been destroyed. Considering that housework relies mostly on elbow grease and that the cost of a broom, a mop, and a can of scouring powder is not prohibitive, some wondered what prevented her from working. Others wondered exactly when it was that she had last worked—if she had ever worked at all. Many times, when she had told Garret she had to clean houses all night, she had really been on an overnight date with Dave.

  Dave! Liz had guilted him right back into her arms when she complained to him that his stalker had burned her out of her home. She reminded him more than once, “Your stalker could have killed me and my kids!” Each time she had taken drastic measures to turn Dave’s attention to her, it had worked exactly as she had hoped. It was almost too easy for her to manipulate him.

  The fire also bolstered Liz’s victim image, and many felt sorry for the single mother who had lost so much. In reality, she’d removed everything she wanted from that house before lighting the first match, and she’d acquired a few more items of value because of the fire. Every expensive thing Garret had loaned her was “lost in the fire,” including an iPod Touch.

  With nothing to distract her, Liz had countless hours to cyberstalk Dave, and the sheer volume of texts and emails she sent him suggests that she probably didn’t sleep much. But she did not forget about Nancy. She also took the time to jab at her.

  On August 28, 2013, Nancy received the following text: I’m in Omaha. I’m not hurt, Mom. I miss everyone too. I just had a breakdown, and I think I’m getting over it. I should have come to my senses sooner and realized the guy wasn’t worth it.

  Nancy stared at the message. As usual, it was filled with grammar errors, and she doubted that Cari was the one texting her. Despite her reservations, she felt a rush of excitement. Her heart pounding, Nancy texted back, “Is this really you? I need to hear your voice! I’m not going to answer texts.”

  The texter agreed to talk to her, typing, “Let me pull over.”

  Nancy could not stop her hopes from soaring. Maybe this was Cari! Maybe her daughter was about to call her! She waited, and as the minutes passed, she knew it was once again someone playing a sick game.

  Nancy, of course, had never heard of Liz and didn’t know she was the one impersonating Cari. Liz wanted Nancy to believe that Cari was driving along the highway and texting at the same time, an awkward and dangerous habit. It’s possible that Liz was driving when she decided to taunt Nancy. She seemed to enjoy causing pain. She had no qualms about her slow torture of a grieving mother and wasn’t worried that her reckless behavior might cause an accident that could harm or kill someone. Or perhaps Liz was not driving at all, but lounging in her messy basement quarters, compulsively texting away as Garret made another McDonald’s run to fetch her the greasy meal she craved.

  In addition to giving Liz a place to live, he’d been helping her out with her transportation for quite some time. Her credit was bad, and early on in their relationship Garret had cosigned on a loan for a Jeep Liberty and had also put her on his insurance. Liz had ended up totaling the Liberty when she crashed it. Garret is unsure how the car was wrecked, but she claimed that the accident had happened while she was on her way to a cleaning job. She said she had clients who wanted her to clean their place in Utah, so she had followed them there on a long drive, and very early in the morning she had fallen asleep at the wheel.

  She next purchased a brand new 2012 Honda Civic, partially paying for it with the insurance payout for the wrecked Liberty. Garret cosigned on that loan, too, and he continued to carry her on his insurance. “Liz loved that Civic!” he remembers. She was driving it when a red-light camera captured her ignoring a traffic light. A ticket was automatically issued to Garret because the car was in his name. The ticket arrived via mail, and he got online and followed the instructions to view the video of the Civic as it zipped through the red light. It was clearly Liz’s vehicle, though the driver wasn’t visible because the view was from the rear.

  She was the only one who drove the car, and he knew for a fact she had been in the area on the day the camera caught her. When Garret told her about it, she shook her head. She would never run a red light, she insisted.

  “But you did. There’s a video of you!”

  “I didn’t do it!” Liz swore that it could not possibly be her, and she refused to look at the online imag
es that proved her guilt. It was not the first time she’d failed to take responsibility for a mistake despite irrefutable photographic evidence. A few years earlier, a boyfriend who had dumped her discovered that shortly after their breakup, someone had used his debit card to take cash from his account. The bank had images of every withdrawal, and sure enough, their camera had snapped a picture of Liz taking the cash.

  The guy confronted her, but even when faced with photographic evidence of her theft, she would not acknowledge that she had stolen the money. “It wasn’t me,” she said as she looked him straight in the eye. It was a blatant lie, and the evidence would have stood up in a court of law, but he didn’t want the hassle of getting authorities involved. Garret, too, opted not to fight Liz. He paid her traffic fine and let it go. Not long after that, Liz wrecked the Civic, and the insurance company notified Garret that they would no longer cover her on his policy.

  Liz used the last insurance payout to fix the car. Concerned about the liability of having his name connected to a car she was driving, Garret paid off the loan and gifted the Civic to her. “I told her to get her own insurance and title. That’s when I washed my hands of ever helping her get another vehicle.”

  * * *

  Dave Kroupa’s days always started early at Hyatt Tire. One morning in the middle of October 2013, he was there, as usual, long before the sun was up. As he pulled up to the shop, he was stunned to see a message, spray-painted in fluorescent orange across the big front windows. He realized this was not a random act of vandalism. He was the target. He felt sick as he read the words, “Dave beats women.” The accusation wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter. The store’s owner was not the easiest person to get along with, and Dave knew that the guy would blame him. “Luckily the paint was really fresh. One of my oil change guys, a friend of mine, had gotten there early, too. We were able to wipe it off, but I would have been out of a job if it hadn’t come off. The owner would have canned me on the spot if I hadn’t been able to clean it off.”