A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  The cops told Amy that Shanna was alive, and what they told her next hit her like a bucket of ice cubes. “She said you did it!”

  If Amy hadn’t been so terrified, she might have laughed. She hated guns! The idea of her shooting anyone was ridiculous. “I was in shock,” she remembers. “I didn’t expect to open my door and have police there with guns pointed at me.” She burst into tears as the officers scrutinized her.

  “It doesn’t look like you just shot someone,” one of them said.

  “Of course, I didn’t!” Amy exclaimed, stressing she’d been home for hours. “My son just woke up from his nap!”

  They asked if they could look around, and Amy stepped aside. “Do whatever you have to do,” she said. The sooner this nightmare was over, the better.

  * * *

  Council Bluffs PD Detective Matthew Kuhlmann interviewed Liz at Mercy Hospital. She appeared drawn, her face pale against her long black hair, splayed out on her pillow. The bullet had gone straight through her thigh. She was lucky it had missed major arteries and bone. Even so, Liz was in pain. Shaken but coherent, she told him she’d been nervous earlier that night when she noticed a silver car parked near her house. It looked like Amy Flora’s car, but by the time she got outside for a closer look, it had vanished. The whole story came pouring out—the years she’d suffered as the stalker tried to destroy her, the constant threats, the vandalism, the arson, Dave’s stolen gun, and now this.

  Asked if they could search her car, Liz gladly signed a waiver. While still at the hospital, Kuhlmann got a call from Officer Jarzynka, one of the officers who’d confronted Amy. “He advised me that it didn’t appear she was involved, and I mentioned that to Liz.”

  “Well,” Liz told him. “It sounded like her.”

  * * *

  When Liz called Garret to tell him she’d been shot, he was shocked. How did that happen on a trip to Walmart? She asked him to come to the hospital, but he wasn’t about to leave her kids alone. He didn’t know what kind of trouble Liz had gotten herself into but suspected the shooting hadn’t been random. What if the shooter came to the house? Garret called Dirk, who was understandably alarmed and rushed over to get the kids.

  At the hospital, Garret “walked in and saw Liz there, and one of the first things I said was, ‘Does this have something do with the Dave and Cari thing?’ She started bawling. She pulled out some real tears.” He’d hit a nerve. Liz was on the verge of hysteria, so he dropped the topic. “I didn’t want a scene at the hospital.” But he had to know why she went to the park at night. “I asked her, ‘What the hell were you doing there?’ It’s not a place people go at night!” Liz had no reasonable answers and was getting groggy from the pain medicine. She asked him to retrieve her car and bring her some things from home.

  He figured Liz had gotten “mixed up with something and pissed somebody off.” He’d give her time to heal, but Liz had to go. As he gathered the items she’d asked for, he found something he hadn’t expected to see again, something that strengthened his resolve to make a clean break. Liz wanted her Samsung Tablet to play games on, and he found that quickly, but the charger was missing. He descended into her unkempt quarters to search for it. When he peered under her bed, he was stunned to see his Gateway laptop that had been stolen in the burglary two years earlier. He still had the box with the serial numbers printed on it and admits he opted for “a passive-aggressive” approach rather than a confrontation. He left the box next to the laptop where Liz would see it. “Of course, she didn’t find it till she got home, and then I got a text. She said, ‘Oh, damn, sorry. I guess I’m out five hundred bucks.’” She wanted him to believe that in an incredible coincidence she’d purchased his stolen laptop from a pawnshop. He knew it was a lie. Police had given the computer’s serial number to the pawnshops, and they were required to report known stolen items.

  Garret had begun to suspect Liz was behind the burglary when he’d noticed her wearing Gabe’s distinctive Notre Dame sweatshirt. He’d had a chance to examine it when he’d found it crumpled on the bathroom floor. He showed it to Gabe, who instantly recognized it. While a missing sweatshirt could be explained away as a borrowed item, there was no good argument for why his stolen laptop had materialized beneath her bed, though she’d made a feeble effort with the pawnshop story.

  Dave Kroupa was just as shocked as Garret to learn Liz had been shot. “It was awkward because we were done, and I didn’t have any desire to rekindle that, but I also didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, that sucks you got shot. I don’t care. Tell somebody who cares,’ so I went down to see her.” Looking back on that visit, he doesn’t remember if Liz told him Amy was the shooter. “If she did tell me, I absolutely would not have believed it.” Amy was kind and gentle, and she hated guns! The whole incident had left Amy thoroughly rattled. “Amy was pissed and scared. Probably more so than I’d ever seen her before.”

  If the most frightening moment of Amy’s life was opening her door to find three cops with guns pointed at her, the second scariest was just hours later. Police asked Amy to take a lie-detector test, and she agreed. She had nothing to hide and wanted to cooperate. It didn’t occur to her that she could flunk the test!

  She was shaken when the examiner said she’d failed. He angrily confronted her, pounding his fist on the desk, shouting, “We know you shot her!” Amy was terrified, not for herself, but for her kids. If she went to prison, they would grow up without a mother. She knew what that was like, and she’d vowed to always be there for her children.

  Amy had assumed, as most people do, that the test results would be accurate and prove her innocence. But the polygraph, often referred to as a lie-detector test, can’t really confirm whether or not a person is lying. The machine measures physiological reactions such as blood pressure, perspiration, and breathing rate, responses that are heightened under stress, and the assumption is that lying causes stress. While that is usually true, just taking the test can make some people so nervous they fail.

  According to a September, 2018, CNN report, the National Polygraph Association (NPA) claims that polygraph results are accurate 87 percent of the time when examiners follow proper procedures. Critics insist that number is too optimistic, but even if the NPA’s percentages are correct, that means that at least one in ten times, the results are wrong. Some honest people, including Amy, can appear to be deceptive, while some liars outsmart the machine.

  Despite the fact she failed the polygraph exam, Amy was quickly eliminated as a suspect. Her neighbors verified she’d been home all evening. And within minutes after the shooting, a cop had felt the hood of Amy’s car. It was ice cold. It was clear she’d not driven for hours.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  WHEN MOST PEOPLE THINK of Anthony Kava, the first word that comes to mind is “genius,” but his official title in December 2015 was Information Technology Supervisor. He’d been working that full-time job for Pottawattamie County since 2003 and is also known as Special Deputy Kava, toiling countless hours for the Iowa Crimes Against Children Task Force, but it isn’t the extra pay that motivates him. He earns one dollar per year for that second full-time job. “Iowa Law prescribes that reserve peace officers be paid at least a dollar per year to make them formal employees of a law enforcement agency,” he explains, adding that this allows for legal benefits such as qualified immunity. He is driven by the fact that victims need him. Most often, those he helps are children. Imagine, he says, if “the worst moment of your life is captured and replayed over and over again.” The cyber exploitation of innocence via Internet videos is rampant, but thanks to Kava’s investigations, multiple pedophiles have been arrested and countless children saved.

  Deputy Kava’s expertise in digital forensics was essential to nabbing Liz Golyar, who had used electronics to both commit and conceal her crimes. But even with his extensive skills, it was no easy task. Like Detective Ryan Avis, Deputy Kava was also a married father with young children, and there were not enough hours in the day to be a perfe
ct father and husband and do all of the work necessary to get justice for Cari Farver. It was a frustrating dilemma for investigators dedicated to their work, and they constantly struggled to create a balance but admit their families were shortchanged.

  When Liz walked into the Sheriff’s Office on December 4 and handed over her phone for download, she was unaware deleted data could be recovered. Back in January 2013, a logical download of her phone had found only existing data, but now Deputy Kava performed an all-encompassing physical download and soon found himself staring at incriminating evidence that Liz believed was gone forever. She had used an app called Textie, tying it to fake email accounts she’d set up in Cari’s name and then sent hundreds of threats to Dave while pretending to be Cari. Liz had deleted those messages, but Kava revived them. When he realized what he had, he immediately stopped searching and asked Avis to get a search warrant, so he could legally scan the phone’s data for evidence to use against Liz in the murder of Cari Farver. The warrant was in place within a few days, and he resumed his search.

  Liz’s voluntary 2015 phone dump was “the major development that opened doors for us, in terms of probable cause to get dozens of search warrants,” says Deputy Kava. The investigators submitted warrants to sites used by the Cari impostor, including Facebook, Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, PayPal, MeetMe, OKCupid, Twitter, Etsy, Pinger, Amazon, Pinterest, and LetterMeLater. They sought information on IP addresses, associated email addresses, and the dates accounts were created. The warrants were sealed to prevent them from becoming public record, and the investigators added a second seal to prohibit managers of Facebook and other sites from tipping off their suspect. Without that extra seal, users of social media sites are often warned about pending warrants and immediately rush to delete evidence. Detective Doty stresses, “We were working the case on the downlow because we didn’t want her to know we were looking into her.”

  Liz Golyar had no idea that the investigators were on her tail, and they wanted to keep it that way. She believed she could outfox detectives, perhaps because she’d so far managed to troll the Web unfettered while hiding her identity and Internet Protocol (IP) address. An IP address is a unique identifier, assigned to each device engaged with the Internet and contains a string of numbers, separated by periods. Liz often used proxy servers to conceal her IP address, and also Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) to make it appear that her device’s IP address was tied to a remote computer.

  By the time the investigation was done, Special Deputy Anthony Kava would put in over 3,000 unpaid hours, unraveling Liz’s web of deception as he tracked her Internet activity and sorted through over 20,000 emails and texts. Liz had dozens of email addresses via various servers, and this created a tremendous amount of work for him. While it takes minutes to create a fake email account, it takes hours to debunk it and trace it to its source.

  Faced with a staggering mountain of data, Deputy Kava realized it was too much for his computer. “There’s no ‘Microsoft Homicide’ type product,” designed to sort a deluge of digital evidence. “Midway through the case, I built a new machine with sufficient capacity. I ended up creating a database from scratch and writing code to input the tens of thousands of emails, texts, social media logs, etc. into a system that I could query to find correlations between accounts, dates, IP addresses, and other details. I called the system DEX, as in ‘index,’ of course, but also a reference to Dexter.” It’s a deliciously ironic twist that a machine named for one of Liz’s favorite shows would assist in her downfall. Liz was captivated by Dexter, the Showtime series about the blood-spatter expert who worked both sides of the law, solving murders and killing people he deemed worthless.

  Did Liz draw inspiration from Dexter? Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that in a case of “life imitating art” Liz’s actions echoed Lila’s, a character obsessed with Dexter, just as Liz was obsessed with Dave. In episodes that first aired in 2007, Lila, a dark-haired beauty who vaguely resembled Liz, set fire to her own loft to gain Dexter’s sympathy when he drifted away from her. Lila stalked Dexter, staged catastrophes to get his attention and attempted to frame people close to him for crimes they didn’t commit. Lila and Liz, and Dexter and Dave, even shared first name initials. Deputy Kava had no inkling that Liz was a Dexter fan when he custom designed the machine to aid in her demise. In early December 2015, Kava was still months away from breathing life into DEX and was just beginning to decipher data that Liz was certain she’d destroyed.

  * * *

  The first week of December had come and gone, and Cherokee realized it had been a while since she’d talked to Shanna. “When I don’t hear from her for a while, I text her and say, ‘Are you okay?’ If she doesn’t hear from me, she does the same thing. We would call it, ‘checking in with assholes,’” Cherokee says, explaining that it was a standing joke between them. She never expected Shanna to not be okay. Usually she’d text back and say she’d been busy. This time, however, Shanna had alarming news. Someone had shot her!

  Cherokee rushed to Shanna’s house and found her propped up in a living room chair, cleaning her wound. “It was gross. She was pulling out gauze from the inside of it and putting in more gauze.” Cherokee listened to the terrifying story but found nothing unusual about the fact Shanna had visited the park at night. “She told me she and Dave got into an argument, so she was trying to clear her head, gather herself together.” Shanna seemed to be in a lot of pain, wincing as she shifted in her chair, and Cherokee’s heart went out to her as she asked, “Why would someone shoot you?”

  It wasn’t a robbery, Shanna explained. And it wasn’t a predator planning to rape her. In fact, her attacker was a female. “All I saw was her shadow,” Shanna said. “I heard a female voice. She said to get on the ground, or she’d shoot me. I got down on the ground, and she shot me anyway!”

  “Who would do something like that?”

  “I can’t be certain,” Shanna said slowly. “But I think I recognized the voice. It sounded like Amy.”

  “That crazy assed bitch!” Cherokee shuddered, picturing Shanna as her attacker’s shadow loomed over her. It was like a scene from a scary movie! Cherokee didn’t realize that Big Lake Park was not lit. At night, it was engulfed in one big shadow, and there was no way for a single shadow to emerge.

  * * *

  When Cari’s car was discovered in January 2013, crime scene technician Katie Pattee was instructed to process it as a recovered stolen vehicle. Now, investigators asked her to take another look. “This time they wanted it to be processed to see if we could locate some latent blood inside of the vehicle,” explains Pattee. “This time, specifically, in that rear cargo area.”

  The Explorer had been sold, and the new owner lived in Malvern, Iowa, about a thirty-mile drive southeast from Council Bluffs, but he granted permission, so Avis and Doty picked up the car and brought it the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, December 8, 2015. The first time Pattee had seen the Explorer, nearly three years earlier, it had been exceptionally clean, but now the opposite was true. The car’s new owner had dogs, and they’d tracked in mud and shed so much that everything was coated with fur. Pattee removed the vehicle’s contents and photographed both the exterior and interior. She sprayed every accessible inch of the interior with Bluestar, a blood detecting chemical reagent. “When Bluestar indicates a positive reaction for blood, it will luminesce a blue color.” She dimmed the lights to observe the results. In the cargo area, near the latch, she spotted an eerie blue glow. “That reaction ended up being a false positive. I located some small copper wires in that area. Bluestar will have a false positive reaction with copper.” No new evidence was discovered, and the SUV was released back to its owner.

  While Sheriff’s Office detectives worked the Farver case, CB Police investigated the shooting. On the same day Pattee reexamined Cari’s Explorer, Liz agreed to go back to Big Lake Park to help with the CB Police probe.

  Detectives Kuhlmann and Harris drove her to the park. They pulled
into the parking lot, stopping where her car had parked on Saturday night. It was easy to find the spot. The pavement was stained with her blood, a stain that would remain for years to come. Liz told them she’d left her phone in the car when she’d ventured into the darkness and had had to hobble all the way back to her Toyota to call for help.

  Detective Roberts and Investigator Salter soon arrived, armed with a metal detector. They hoped to find projectiles, casings or maybe even the weapon itself if it had been discarded in the park. In order to make the ordeal easier on the injured woman, Kuhlmann had parked in the lot closest to the bench where she’d told Burns she’d been shot. That bench was about 100 yards away, and Liz limped in that direction, but she surprised them when she passed it and led them to the other side of the lake. There was a bench there, too, and another parking lot. They scoured the area but found nothing. There were no projectiles, no casings, and no weapons.

  Liz’s story shifted, changing a little with each telling. In some versions, she’d spotted people on the trail before her attacker appeared. In one version, she’d seen a truck in the parking lot, and in yet another, it was too dark to see other vehicles. Sometimes she indicated she’d been shot on the bench, and other times claimed she’d been on the ground. In one telling, she’d seen Amy running away, and in another, she’d not actually seen anyone but had heard a familiar female voice, coldly ordering her to get down on the ground.

  Both Council Bluffs PD and the Pott County Sherriff investigators suspected Liz had shot herself. “We were concerned for Amy Flora’s safety at this point,” Doty emphasizes. A blond wig had been found in the backseat of Liz’s car on the night of the shooting. They realized the wig could be a disguise, part of an abandoned scheme to shoot Amy. Had her original plan been thwarted? Had she shot herself out of desperation because, for whatever reason, her murder plot had gone awry?