A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  Whenever his stalker vandalized property, she sent a gleeful text or email, claiming credit for her destruction. Today was no exception. It was maddening! He felt threatened no matter which way he turned. Whether he was at work or play, he couldn’t relax. He couldn’t predict what the stalker would do next. He could be sure of only one thing. It would not be good.

  It was around this time a year earlier when the lady with the sparkling eyes had come into the shop. He remembered how his heart had quickened as they stood in the parking lot, smiling at each other. Now, as the sun came up, he stood in that same spot, scrutinizing the windows as daylight hit the glass. He had to be sure he’d wiped away every last trace of the tell-tale paint.

  He reported the vandalism, and Omaha Detective Paul Prencer responded. He was as baffled as Dave. How had the stalker managed to strike again without being seen? The men contemplated the odd situation. The culprit had to be watching, because she seemed to know Dave’s every move. Where was her hiding place? “I surveyed the area to try to ascertain if there was someplace where someone could have been living that had a view of his place of employment,” Prencer recalls. Dave’s residence was to the east of the shop, and there were also apartments to the west. Detective Prencer went to there to talk to the manager. “I showed a picture of Ms. Farver, and they said she didn’t live there, they didn’t recognize her. Nobody by that name lived there. They didn’t know who she was.” The stalker was as elusive as a ghost in the autumn mist.

  The close call had nearly cost Dave his job, and he was upset. At least he had Liz to talk to. The attacks brought them closer together. “That’s what kept bringing us back together so to speak, because I broke it off numerous times. And then something would happen. A window would get broken, there’d be fresh threats, or there’d be a house burned down.”

  He felt obligated to Liz because, “Of course, I’m the bad guy who brought this crazy lady into our life, and it’s my fault.” Liz never let him forget that. She asked why he couldn’t have been satisfied with her? Didn’t he realize how good he’d had it? Why did he have to go out and hook up with a nut? Dave felt defeated. He hardly recognized his own reflection. He’d gained forty pounds, and dark circles had formed beneath his eyes. In the past, he’d been a casual, social drinker. “I had one drink that lasted me four hours.” Months of vandalism and nonstop threats had made him jittery and depressed, and now he drank to numb his anxiety. “There was a bar between the shop and my apartment, and I got to the point where I knew all of the regulars, and I knew the owner real well. I knew what day of the week it was by who was coming through the door! I spent too much time there. Too much time and too much money.”

  As the one-year anniversary of his first date with Cari approached, Dave remembered how thrilled he’d been to meet such a lovely and brilliant woman. Now, he could hardly believe it was the same person sending him twisted messages.

  On November 1, 2013, an email arrived at 7:54 P.M., sent from leakroupa@gmail. Lea was Cari’s middle name, and he assumed she’d combined that with his last name to make it appear she was his wife. The email began, “To my husband, David Kroupa.” She claimed she’d purchased a knife and had been creeping around “in your building.” The attached photo showed a large knife, Cari Farver’s driver’s license, and an envelope for a bill with her name on it. Was she attempting to prove it was really her tormenting him? He’d never doubted the identity of his stalker and didn’t question it now. Was the photo of the knife supposed to be a threat? Once again, he escaped to the familiar bar and grill and drank more than he knew he should.

  * * *

  It was hard for Cari’s family and friends to accept that a year had passed since she’d disappeared. The holidays were upon them again, and they went through the motions, but none of them felt much joy. It was a difficult time for Cari’s friend Amber. After months of disturbing texts from someone claiming to be Cari, Amber could take it no longer. It had become clear that whoever was texting her was definitely not Cari. “My main problem with it all, was she never once mentioned my child. She was so, so, so excited about my pregnancy,” she explains, adding that her friend couldn’t wait to “be Auntie Cari.” Amber changed her phone number.

  Cari’s birthday came and went, uncelebrated on November 30. If still alive, she was now thirty-nine. December 10, was Maxwell’s sixteenth birthday, another huge milestone that he knew his mother would not have missed if it were within her power to be there. The little house Cari loved had sat vacant for too long. Her family packed up her possessions and moved them to a storage unit. Nancy didn’t like driving past the house. It appeared cold and dark and so obviously empty that it gave her a lonely feeling in the pit of her stomach. They rented it out to a nice young woman, Marina Estes, and she moved in that December. She would take care of the place, and it was somehow comforting to see the windows lit at night. The family had little hope that Cari would ever return, but if she did, her home would be in good shape.

  December 12, 2013, was the one-year anniversary of Denny Farver’s funeral. It was also the day that Police Officer Tim Huffman was dispatched to Dave’s apartment at 1:10 P.M. Huffman had been with Omaha Police Department’s Uniform Patrol Bureau since July 2000. He handled crimes reported via 911 calls and had started his shift that morning at 6:00. The dispatcher advised him that a break-in had occurred in the first-floor unit of a large apartment complex. Officer Huffman went to the scene where he was greeted by Dave and Liz.

  Liz told him she’d left earlier that day and returned to a shocking mess. “She said she was at the apartment until approximately 10 A.M.” Huffman recollects. Liz said she’d returned “sometime around one o’clock in the afternoon. She found a screen to a bedroom window on the floor and then some items that were destroyed and writing on the wall.”

  It appeared an intruder had crawled through the window, tracking in the leaves that littered the dresser top. Liz pointed to a pile of clothing, slashed with a sharp instrument and dumped in a heap on the floor. An angry message, clearly aimed at Liz, was scrawled on the wall in red crayon: “Go away whore.” Liz’s destroyed garments included two shirts and a pair of sweatpants, but Dave’s clothing had not been touched. This latest vandalism would eat up many hours of Omaha law enforcement’s time. Detective Prencer soon became involved, and investigators processed the scene. Officers canvassed the area but couldn’t find a single person who’d noticed anything suspicious on December 12. Not only were there no witnesses, the intruder had left no fingerprints. The police didn’t guess that Liz had staged the scene, that she’d cut her own clothing, removed the screen from the window, and written the message on the wall. She had everyone fooled and told her dark secrets to no one.

  Most of the people in Liz’s life were aware she had problems but had little understanding of how deeply those troubles ran. They didn’t really know who she was, and as of this writing, neither does she. Liz is unaware that the middle name she has embraced as her own for most of her life is not the one her mother gave her. She was not born Shanna Elizabeth. She was Shanna Kay. Her mother called her that, all in one breath. Never just Shanna, but always Shanna Kay.

  Liz was very young when she was separated from her biological family. She knows of her mother’s fate, but not her mother’s birth name. She is unaware of her father’s identity and might be surprised to realize he was alive until 2007, residing in Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the same apartment he’d moved into with her mother three decades earlier.

  Liz is still unaware her aunts have been searching for her since the state of Michigan cut their ties with her in 1978, days before her third birthday. After long hours of research, I found one of those aunts. I wrote to her, hoping my letter wouldn’t come as a shock. I wasn’t sure if I had the right family, but if I did, I figured they surely must be aware of Shanna’s conviction. Even so, I chose my words cautiously. I mentioned prison but not murder. I gave the aunt my phone number, and sent the note off to the ten different email addresses I had
found online, hoping that one of them was correct.

  Fifteen minutes later, my phone rang. Shanna Kay’s Aunt Camila had no idea what had become of her, and it was up to me to tell her. She knew that Shanna was in prison but was aware of that fact only because she’d just learned it from my email. I stalled, reluctant to speak words I knew would hurt her. “It’s pretty bad,” I warned. “A tragedy.”

  “My whole life’s been a tragedy,” Camila replied with a sigh. “I can take it.”

  “Shanna was convicted of murder,” I said.

  Camila gasped, and I was relieved when she didn’t ask for details. She was remembering the sweet little girl she’d spent decades searching for. How could I tell her that that child had grown up to be a monster? Over the next days, we spent hours on the phone. Little by little, Camila began to ask questions, and I gave her the answers as gently as I could, never volunteering details she had not asked for. I knew she needed to digest the information slowly, but it didn’t take long for Camila and her sisters to find the episodes about the murder produced by NBC’s Dateline and the Oxygen Channel’s Snapped.

  In my long conversations with Shanna’s aunts, we talked about what causes an innocent child to grow up to be a killer. Is it nurture or nature? They, too, hope to find answers and opened their hearts to share some very personal and painful things. While I knew they’d be shocked by the things I had to tell them, I wasn’t expecting to be shocked by the things they had to tell me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  MOST OF WHAT I’VE LEARNED about Shanna’s roots came from her birth family. While they did their best to recall the past, their memories of long-ago events sometimes differed from each other’s. Scandalous accusations were made against relatives, both living and dead. Pseudonyms are used for most of Liz’s birth relatives, and some horrendous details about things impossible to prove have been omitted. The dead can’t stand up and defend themselves, and it would be unfair to repeat some of the worst and possibly untrue things told to me.

  By exploring Shanna’s past, I hoped to find events that might explain why she had traveled such a stormy and treacherous trail. Was violence in her genes, or was she warped by early trauma? I found ample evidence of both.

  * * *

  Despite their sometimes contradictory viewpoints, Shanna’s relatives agreed on one thing: Her mother was kind and gentle. It was in the spring of 1978, a lovely afternoon in Kalamazoo, Michigan, when Delores “Dee” exited the laundromat. She carried a big basket of laundry, still warm from the dryer. She didn’t have a car, but it was only four blocks to her apartment. Many people were out and about that Monday, enjoying the sunshine as temperatures climbed into the seventies. It’s not known what Dee was thinking, but it’s unlikely she was concerned for her safety. She was in the middle of the sidewalk in broad daylight, doing the most ordinary of tasks. No one expects a trip to the laundromat to be hazardous. But for Dee, on that tragic day, it was.

  Troy Samuels knew he wasn’t supposed to be driving. The eighteen-year-old was epileptic and couldn’t predict when a seizure would overtake him. He had no warning on that ghastly afternoon, and probably no memory of what occurred. His car left the road, veered onto the sidewalk, and plowed straight into Dee.

  She was twelve days away from her twenty-ninth birthday, but her young life ended on that sidewalk, with the freshly laundered linens scattered around her. Because of Troy’s bad decision, many lives were altered. His selfishness caused a chain-reaction of dark events with consequences that reached into the next century.

  Dee’s sisters remember that she was happy on the day she died. She was about to be reunited with her two youngest children, Shanna Kay, almost three, and fifteen-month-old George. Employees of the state of Michigan had removed the toddlers from her home two months earlier because of her abusive boyfriend, Alva “Al” Jenkins. Al was also Shanna Kay’s father, and while Dee’s sisters insist that he never physically harmed the children, they recall that he beat Dee daily. She was caught up in the classic cycle of the battered woman, trying and failing repeatedly to break free from her abuser. But this time, she had somehow mustered the strength to convince Al to move out. Social workers had approved the return of the toddlers, and Dee was elated to learn they’d be coming home soon. She wanted the place to be perfect for their return and had walked to the laundromat to wash the children’s bedding.

  How did Dee become involved with a violent man? It probably seemed normal to her, her sisters suggest. Abuse was a family pattern, and Dee witnessed her father’s cruelty to her mother. Fabian Zaragozate was born in Puerto Rico in 1917, the twenty-third child of Adela Zaragozate. His siblings had all arrived via multiple births, twins and triplets. Adela’s first singular birth should have been easier, but there were complications, and she did not survive. Fabian was raised by his older sister, Francis, an allegedly abusive woman who took her anger out on him with harsh punishments. They moved to Michigan, where Fabian met Ruthie Anne Maples at a Kalamazoo bowling alley where they both worked. “My mother was a pin setter,” Camila explains. It was her job to set the pins upright after each game.

  Fabian was a musical genius, and according to family lore, he could play any instrument without training and quickly mastered the horn, piano, and guitar.

  He was a dozen years older than eighteen-year-old Ruthie Anne, and her parents didn’t approve of him because of his dark skin. But she rebelled and married him in the summer of 1948. They had seven children in quick succession. “We were stairstep kids,” Camila notes. “Some of us weren’t even a year apart. Before I was born, my father ran the dump here in town, and our family lived next to it. My mother told my father that it wasn’t healthy for kids to be playing around all that garbage, so they moved to a house on twenty acres on the outskirts of town.”

  Camila’s earliest memory was captured on film—seven beautiful children, posing in front of the Christmas tree. Three brothers and four sisters, most of them grinning for the camera, appear excited about the holiday. “It was Christmas Eve,” she remembers. “Our mother let us each choose one present to open that night.” The two oldest sisters, Dee and Isabella, picked the biggest gifts with their names on them. The boxes contained matching dolls with tight, blond curls and blinking, blue eyes. The girls are proudly holding their new dolls in the old black-and-white photograph. The children’s father was absent that night, but he returned on Christmas morning.

  “I remember it because of all the blood flying around,” says Camila. “My father broke my mother’s nose.” Fabian hit his wife because he was enraged that she had given the dolls to the girls without him there. “He left us that day. I heard he already had a new girlfriend, and he had kids with her, too. Sometimes he came around to see my brothers, but he told them he didn’t want to see us girls.”

  Ruthie Anne was not even thirty, and she was all alone with her brood of seven with no one to support them. “We were her slaves,” Camila recalls bitterly, alleging that not only did her mother force the kids at a young age to cook all the meals and clean the house, she also beat them. At least one of her children “hated her,” though one daughter seemed to have a good relationship with her. The other siblings claim that that daughter was their mother’s favorite and not treated as badly as they were.

  Camila was humiliated when she was a young teen and had a friend over for a visit. “We were laughing about something, and I said, ‘That’s funnier than sin.’ My mother started hitting me, screaming, ‘You think sin is funny? Sin isn’t funny!’” Ruthie Anne was a strict Mormon and took sin and hell very seriously. Camila remembers that they had a record album with a song that mentioned hell. “My mother inked out the word ‘hell’ on the album cover, and when the song played, she pushed the record player’s needle down to scratch the record wherever the singer said ‘hell.’” As a result, the record forever after skipped over that part of the song, and Ruthie Anne’s ears were spared the sound of the offensive word.

  Camila confides that her mother
whipped her most often with an old electrical cord with copper woven into the cloth coating. “When I was in labor with my first child, they told me to lie on my back, but I couldn’t do it. It hurt too much.” The nurses were shocked to find that Camila’s back was imbedded with little bits of copper, pieces that had broken off during the many whippings with the old cord. “They picked the copper out of my skin while I was in labor.”

  While some of her offspring describe Ruthie Anne as sadistic, at least one of her kids is less critical and “marvels at her strength in raising seven children on her own.” While many today view corporal punishment as abusive, when a 1954 Gallup Poll asked Americans about the most effective punishment of their youth, forty percent answered “whippings,” a category that included everything from spankings to beatings with a stick. The fact that corporal punishment of children was common doesn’t mean it was not abusive, but it does mean that some of the abuse discovered in Liz Golyar’s biological family was not so unusual that it could be convincing evidence of a genetic predisposition toward violence.

  Horror stories about the Zaragozate family include accusations of incest, rape, and murder. All of Camila’s brothers have rap sheets, and some of their offenses are violent. These are Shanna’s uncles, men she’s never met, and one has been described as an evil genius. He escaped from prison twice, once eluding authorities for five years before he was recaptured when an acquaintance snitched. “His IQ is just two points below Einstein’s” says Camila. “He could have used his brains to accomplish something positive. But he went down a different path.”

  Their sister, Dee, however, was a joyful soul. Though her given name was Delores, when she was little, everyone called her Dee Dee. As she matured, she thought it sounded babyish, so the nickname was shortened to Dee. She loved to laugh, remember her sisters. “And she was a fixer. If someone had a problem, she wanted to fix it.” When a pregnant dog in the neighborhood was killed by a vicious dog, a veterinarian delivered the puppies in an emergency cesarean section. “Dee got one of the puppies, and it was so tiny. I remember she stole my doll’s bottle, so she could feed him!” Dee named the puppy Duke, and with her nurturing, he grew to be a big brown dog, resembling a chocolate lab.