A Tangled Web

by Leslie Rule

  Liz was quiet.

  “The reason why you’re in this chair, right now, today, is because you have a lot of questions you need to answer for me. Very important questions. You’re in a very serious position here. For almost four years now, this woman’s son hasn’t had his mom, a mom hasn’t had her daughter—”

  “I know!” Liz interrupted. “That’s why I’m concerned, too. Because, I’m just like, she’s missing and for her family—”

  “It’s tragic,” Schneider cut her off. “They’re all tragic, but some are worse. The reason I want to talk to you specifically is her phone was at your house right after she disappeared.”

  “My house?”

  “Yeah, her phone, when she went missing was at your house. The location data showed specifically it was at your house on 116th. I want to ask you how you can explain that to me, please.”

  “She’s never been to my house.”

  “Exactly. So, after she’s done disappearing, her phone is at your house. When her vehicle is located, guess what was found inside her vehicle?”

  “Hmmm,” said Liz.

  “Your fingerprints are inside her vehicle. If you’ve never been inside her vehicle, how would your fingerprints be inside her vehicle?”

  “I don’t know. Because I’ve never been in her car.”

  “For years and years, people have been sending emails under Cari’s fictitious accounts. The location on that data sometimes is masked by different apps, but we have ways around that. A lot of times it wasn’t masked. The IP addresses show up to whose house? Your house. Okay. Liz, this is where I want you to think hard, okay, about what direction you’re going to go in here. Are you going to sit in this chair and be remorseful? Are you going to sit in this chair and be cold-blooded? Because right now, after four years, this family’s been looking for answers.” Schneider reminded her they had her prints in Cari’s car and could place Cari’s phone at her house. He said they had proof she’d impersonated both Cari and Amy, adding that he’d read all of the messages and noticed that the writing style and grammar in the impersonations was nothing like Cari’s. “That doesn’t matter,” he said. “The physical evidence is what matters. Inside her car, we found, guess what? Besides a print, what else do you think would be in a homicide investigation?”

  Agitated, Liz snapped, “I don’t know, but I’ve never been in her car. I don’t even know what car she drives.”

  While Schneider continued to speak in a manner so calm it was almost soothing, Liz was talking faster and faster, her voice higher pitched as she grew more irritated. Schneider explained, “Now, when you give permission to download your phone, they can extract deleted data from those things. There is a picture of Cari’s car that you had deleted on your phone.”

  “What car? I’ve never seen Cari’s car.”

  “Her Ford Explorer. A picture of her car, with her plates, her Explorer, is on your phone.”

  “I’ve never seen her car!” She was emphatic. “Ever!”

  “You’ve been in her car. You drove her car.”

  “No, I didn’t!” Liz’s voice rose in anger. “I’ve never been inside of her car. I’ve never been around her car! Ever!”

  “Your fingerprints are in there.”

  “No, I haven’t! I’m not lying. I’ve never been around her car. I’ve never even seen it! I had to ask a sheriff.”

  “Where do you think the IP addresses come back to?”

  “What IP addresses?”

  “When Amy Flora sent these emails to you, these confession emails—let me just give you a head’s up. The Pott County Sheriff’s Office, has got your phone right now. They’ve done warrants on your house. They’ve seized this morning while you were at work. They’ve seized all of this data. All of this information. They’ve downloaded it. They know where these emails were created from specifically. The ones that you’ve been forwarding to him from Amy. You created all of those.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “You can’t explain that.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Why would you create all of these emails?”

  “I haven’t created any emails!” Her fury had escalated to rage, but Schneider continued speaking softly, as he said, “They’re coming from you.”

  “No, they’re not!”

  “All of these have been coming from you, over the years.”

  “No, they’re not!”

  “All of these have been coming from your—”

  “No, they’re not.”

  “Your house.”

  “And I’m not going to be accused of something I didn’t do.”

  “The finger’s pointing right at you.”

  “Then I’m done talking, and I’m going to have my attorney, because I didn’t do anything.”

  “Okay.” The interview was over.

  * * *

  James Martin Davis is one of Omaha’s most celebrated attorneys. Voted the city’s best criminal lawyer for nine years in a row, he was also a highly decorated Vietnam combat veteran and a former Secret Service Special Agent whose duties included riding in parades with U.S. President Richard Nixon—a job memorialized in a framed 8 x 10 photograph hanging on his office wall. After over thirty-five years of practicing law, he’s defended his share of clients, but none has been as secretive as Shanna Elizabeth Golyar. “I’ve never had a client who kept things as close to the vest as she did,” he notes. In fact, Golyar was so reticent, she revealed very little to him about her involvement in the case when he was called upon to help in her February twenty-fifth arrest. JMD, as he is affectionately known in the Gateway to the West, quickly took care of the matter with the unpaid citation, and Shanna was released from jail.

  Shanna had stood firm with Detective Schneider and refused to admit anything. Maybe she thought he was bluffing and that she’d won. Maybe she thought the trouble would blow over. She’d gotten away with evil deeds for such a long time, why shouldn’t she believe she could continue to do so?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  GARRET HAD CHANGED THE CODE on his burglar alarm immediately after Liz moved, and he hoped to never see her again. When she called to ask about items she’d left behind, he was wary. “I told her to contact the Sheriff’s Office to make arrangements to meet me in a public place, and I would bring her the rest of her stuff. She asked why, and I told her because I was being investigated because of her.”

  Liz was unsympathetic, and when he added that he was off work because of her, she snapped, “Don’t blame me for your problems!”

  She was surprised to learn he still had the pets. She seemed unable to grasp the idea he’d grown attached to them. It was the last time she contacted him. Though both Garret and Dave had dumped her, Liz’s dance card was full. Cherokee recalled a couple of young guys Liz dated. “She got together with Charlie for a little bit. He was a younger kid. He just wanted to get laid.” Both guys were in their early twenties, and Liz worked with one of them at the pet food company.

  While Liz often pretended to be monogamous, she usually had many boyfriends. Even as she’d begged Dave for the thirty-day commitment in October 2012, she was sleeping with two other guys. There was Garret, of course, and there was also Fred. Investigators learned about him after downloading her phone. Liz had spent the weekend with Fred, just a few days before Cari vanished. She had gone out of her mind with jealousy over Cari, and all the while, Liz had multiple sex partners. Fred wasn’t the only surprise detectives discovered in the phone data. As if tormenting all of Cari and Dave’s friends and relatives wasn’t enough, Liz had also broken the heart of an Omaha woman. To this day, Sandra is unaware that “the guy” she’d exchanged love letters with for eight months was actually Liz.

  Investigators aren’t sure if they spoke, but if they did, Liz would have used a voice deepening app. Avis felt horrible for the cat-phished lady because “They even said ‘I love you,’ to each other.” Liz and Sandra exchanged nude photos, but Liz, of course, didn’t send photos of hers
elf. The images of the naked man were either random photos she’d pulled off the web or pictures of one of her lovers.

  Sandra was a single mom in her mid-thirties, eager to settle down and believed she’d found the man of her dreams. Then one day, Liz simply vanished from her life with no explanation. Liz, who couldn’t bear rejection, had gone out of her way to cat-phish and reject a stranger. Sandra was hurt and confused. Avis considered contacting her to reveal the truth but feared it would make her feel worse.

  In March 2016, detectives received Cari’s Rolling Hills Bank records. “We noticed two transactions that posted on November 19, 2012,” remembers Doty. “One was for Family Dollar, and one was at Walmart. And we continued to try to get these records. Family Dollar didn’t have records going back to 2012. Walmart did.” The purchases had actually been made on November 16, but reflected the approximate three-day delay before the bank posted the transactions. Both stores were in Omaha, and records revealed that Cari’s debit card was used for a $167 purchase at Family Dollar. No other details were available. But the information for the Walmart purchase was very specific. Three days after Cari vanished, someone had strolled into the huge discount store, filled a shopping cart and at 11:48 A.M. swiped Cari’s debit card at the cash register.

  The Universal Product Code (UPC) identified the items purchased. The mysterious shopper’s loot included winter clothing, cleaning supplies, and a shower curtain featuring huge black and white flowers. That curtain—or one exactly like it—was visible in photos Liz had snapped in her bathroom, two days after the Walmart purchase. “What stuck out is that that shower curtain seemed to be new because you could still see the folds in it,” says Doty. But lots of people shopped at Walmart, and thousands had purchased that same shower curtain. The shower-curtain evidence could be explained away as a coincidence.

  A few weeks had passed since Pattee sent samples to the lab for DNA tests on the blood found in the car. The results were in, and the news was far more compelling than the revelations about the shower curtain. There was only a one in 288 trillion chance that someone other than Cari had bled in her SUV.

  Cari Farver had been attacked in her car and probably died there. Now they had a crime scene. Kind of. The evidence indicated she’d been stabbed in her vehicle, but no one knew the location of the car at the time. The phone pings suggested the attack had occurred in Omaha. But where in Omaha? At least one of Liz’s emails claimed the murder had happened in a Walmart parking lot, but that seemed too public for a clandestine crime. Maybe the killer had driven to a secluded area. Or maybe it had happened in Liz’s garage. For all they knew, the Explorer could have been racing down the highway when Liz attacked, though that scenario was rife with complications.

  Investigators had yet to find a body, a witness, or a murder weapon. Detective Schneider realized few prosecutors would be willing to take on such a difficult case. This very peculiar, twisted crime demanded the attention of someone who thrived on challenge and was so passionate about justice they would draw upon every ounce of energy to put a killer behind bars. He knew just such a person. Brenda Beadle. Schneider had worked with her on several cases and watched her convict killers he had captured. She’d successfully prosecuted a number of high-profile Douglas County homicides.

  Beadle was intelligent, articulate, and determined. Admittedly skeptical when she heard about the Golyar case, she recalls, “When it was first pitched to me by Detective Schneider, it was hard to believe it was true.” Eventually, Schneider convinced her that Shanna Golyar was a diabolical killer.

  Brenda Beadle joined forces with fellow prosecutor Jim Masteller. He was known for his honesty, even temperament, and ability to tackle complex cases. Beadle had earned her law degree from Omaha’s Creighton University—the same school where Masteller had earned his undergraduate degree, though he achieved his law degree at the University of Chicago. The two had worked together for years at the Douglas County Attorney’s Office. “But this was the first time we prosecuted a case together,” Brenda reveals. Their styles are different but complement each other. “I think Brenda is very empathetic, but I don’t think I’m nearly as much,” Masteller admits. Beadle points out that, “He’s structured, organized, and methodical.”

  Brenda Beadle had worked with and trusted Jim Masteller and Dave Schneider, but admits she was apprehensive about the Iowa investigators. Violent crimes were rare in Pott County, and Detective Doty had assisted in just one prior homicide investigation. The Golyar case was Avis’s first. Would their lack of experience with homicides be a hindrance? She soon realized that Doty, Avis, and Kava made a phenomenal team. “It was a pleasure to work with them. They would do anything we asked. They were very, very good at what they did.”

  Even with an extraordinary group of professionals working to get justice for Cari Farver, it wouldn’t be an easy case to prosecute. Jim Masteller stresses that in a typical homicide, “Someone hears gunshots, they look outside to see a body on the ground, the police show up, and right off the bat, you know when the crime happened, you know how it happened, and you know where it happened. These are things you take for granted.” With the Golyar case, “We didn’t know when it happened, we didn’t know where it happened, and we didn’t know how it happened. One of the things we have to show beyond a reasonable doubt is venue—that the crime occurred in Douglas County, Nebraska,” he explains, adding there were also challenges in proving premeditation with no witnesses. “How do you do that when you don’t even know how the person died?”

  While the pinging of Cari’s phone helped establish location, Beadle emphasizes that Cari’s last Facebook post is “what we hung our hat on.” Investigators strongly suspect that Cari was intercepted at Dave’s apartment, shortly after signing onto Facebook. Liz had a key to the apartment, and could have entered when Cari was in the shower. But the team doesn’t rule out the possibility that Cari was confronted as she was getting into her car. It’s also possible Liz feigned illness and asked Cari for a ride home. Kind hearted Cari would have had no reason to suspect Liz was dangerous, and it was in her nature to help someone in need.

  The killer left a digital trail as damning as bloody footprints in the snow. Not only were Liz’s cyber activities helpful in tracking her travels, some of it reflected premeditation. Days before Cari vanished, Liz posted a “joke” on Facebook: My doctor told me to start killing people. Well, not in those exact words. He said I had to reduce stress in my life, which is pretty much the same thing.

  To Ryan Avis, the Golyar case seemed like “a slam dunk.” It seemed obvious that Liz had killed Cari. “But I started to lose faith around Beadle and Masteller. They’d say it was going to be tough. I’d say, ‘Your doubt is making me doubt that this can be accomplished. ’ Maybe I went into it naïve. I knew it so well, that I thought there was no way people wouldn’t believe it.”

  If they moved too fast and arrested Golyar before there was enough evidence to convict, she could get off scot-free. She had a constitutional right to a speedy trial, and could be prosecuted only once for Cari’s murder. If Liz was found not guilty because of lack of evidence, there would be no do-overs, no matter how compelling evidence found in the future might be. Beadle and Masteller weren’t confident they could successfully prosecute. They didn’t have enough evidence. Not yet.

  Homicides without bodies are notoriously difficult to prosecute. But they couldn’t wait too long for remains to be recovered. Liz’s rage was building. Her regular loops through Amy’s parking lot made everyone nervous. Brenda emphasizes, “Amy is lucky she wasn’t another victim.”

  Anthony Kava was working every possible minute to gather more digital evidence to prove that Liz was the stalker and that she had been impersonating Cari for the past four years. Kava’s new evidence, together with the blood in the SUV, Cari’s possessions found in Liz’s apartment, and the confession emails made their case strong enough that the State was finally ready to go forward.

  Thursday, December 22, 2016, was the da
y investigators had been waiting for. “I was at work that morning when I got the call we had an arrest warrant,” Kava remembers. “By 11 A.M., Avis and I were in position watching Liz’s apartment.” Doty, Schneider, and Ambrose arrived with a Harrison County deputy around noon. Six cops to arrest one small woman! The men filed up the narrow stairway to Liz’s apartment. When she opened the door, it was obvious they’d woken her. She didn’t resist or even appear surprised to hear she was under arrest for first-degree murder. Kava remembers, “Doty put the cuffs on Liz, and he later notched them as a memento.”

  Liz was in the most serious trouble of her life. She was eligible for a public defender but wanted Omaha’s best. She asked JMD to defend her, assuring him she could afford it. “She showed me her tax returns,” he says wryly. According to the form, Liz had earned a huge sum of money via her cleaning business and was expecting a hefty refund. It was another of her forgeries and probably never filed. But it convinced JMD that she was good for the money, and he agreed to wait for payment. He laughs now, admitting she stiffed him.

  Most of Liz’s deceit had played out in cyberspace as she hid behind her computer screen, but she could hide no longer. Inquisitive eyes watched as she took center stage at the Douglas County Courthouse. The Omaha landmark on Farnum Street is a stately beige structure built in 1912 in French Renaissance style. Designed for justice, it has also seen injustice, most notably in September 1919 when an innocent man was denied his day in court. Willie Brown, a black man falsely accused of assaulting a white woman, was attacked by vigilantes who stormed the courthouse and abducted him from the fifth-floor jail. The mob also set fire to the building and hung Mayor Edward Parsons Smith from a lamppost when he tried to intervene. The mayor was cut down before he was strangled to death, but poor Willie was murdered by the mob. The old courthouse still bears the scars of the horror, though few who pass through the grand entryways are aware of the bullet holes in the marble walls. The interior of the six-story courthouse is stunningly ornate with enormous murals depicting scenes from the city’s past and a central rotunda reaching 110 feet high to a domed stained-glass skylight. But Liz was probably not appreciating the beautiful architecture that day. She listened quietly as the judge set bail at five million dollars.