Years of Harassment End in Murder Conviction for Diabolical Killer

36-year-old Dave Kroupa had gotten used to the endless text messages and emails being sent to him by a woman he dated. After all, he’d been getting them for more than three years. At first, they were full of jealousy and hate directed at him and his on and off again girlfriend, but as time passed, they grew increasingly more threatening in nature.

One message proclaimed, “I hate you so much that I want to drive a knife in your heart.” Another declared “I will destroy your life and take your happiness.”

Worst of all, they wouldn’t stop. Kroupa changed his phone number and email many times, but somehow, the messages kept coming. It was baffling.

The messages all seemed to originate with a woman named Cari Farver. Kroupa had met her when he moved to Omaha in 2012. He was separated from his longtime ex-girlfriend with whom he had two children and managing an auto repair shop when he met Farver. They dated for a mere two weeks, but the harassment continued for years after he last saw her.

Rusty at dating, Kroupa had decided to sign up on a few online dating sites. There, he first met a woman named Liz Golyar, whose full name is Shanna Elizabeth Golyar. He found her attractive and set up a date with her. Golyar was a single mother who had two kids about the same age as his. The relationship between Kroupa and Golyar quickly grew sexual, but Kroupa claimed he was upfront with Golyar about wanting to continue to see other women and she seemed okay with it.

Nearly six months after meeting Golyar online, Kroupa met Cari Farver at the shop where he worked. She was a single mother of a teenage son who had brought her vehicle in for maintenance, and he was instantly attracted to her. It seemed mutual so Kroupa asked her out. The two hit it off on their first date and Kroupa invited her back to his apartment after dinner. Things were heating up between the two of them when Farver told Kroupa that she didn’t want anything serious. Since he wasn’t looking for anything serious either, he was happy to hear that they were like-minded on the subject.

One day, as Farver left Kroupa’s apartment, she encountered Golyar, who had stopped by unannounced to pick up some things she had left at his place. It was brief, perhaps only seconds that the two women were face to face with one another. Nothing was thought of the encounter past that and Farver continued to see Kroupa. When she was tasked with a large project at work, he offered to let her stay with him while she completed it, as her office was near his apartment, and she lived nearly an hour away.

On November 13, 2012, Kroupa got ready for work, kissing Farver on his way out and telling her he would see her later that day. He was surprised when he got a text from her later in the morning telling him that she wanted to move in together. It was very out of character based on earlier conversations they’d had about why that wasn’t a good idea, according to Kroupa. He texted her back to tell her that he wasn’t interested in moving so fast, and she grew hostile, telling him that she hated him and was seeing someone else. She told him she didn’t want to see him anymore and told him to go away.

Kroupa says the message was laced with profanity and totally out of character for the pleasant woman he’d gotten to know the past couple of weeks. He didn’t know what to make of it or what to expect when he returned home. When he did get back to his apartment that evening, he was somewhat relieved to find that she was gone. There were a couple of days of silence from her and then she began messaging him again, telling him that she hated him and that he had ruined her life. She told him he was a terrible person. Kroupa’s instincts were that he had narrowly missed things getting really ugly and dusted it off.

Meanwhile, Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, had begun to wonder where her daughter had gone. Farver had been diagnosed with depression in her late twenty’s and bipolar disorder after giving birth to her son, Max. Farver had been seeing therapists and taking medication for her conditions. There were a couple of times when she’d stopped taking the medication because she said it made her feel so numb. However, by the time she had started seeing Kroupa in 2012, she seemed to be thriving at a job she enjoyed and Max was doing well in high school.

So, it seemed a bit odd when she too began receiving strange text messages from her daughter. One of them claimed that Farver had taken a new job in Kansas. Confused by the behavior and concerned for her daughter’s mental health, Raney tried to call her daughter and talk with her directly, but she couldn’t get her to answer her phone. When Farver didn’t show up for her half-brother’s wedding, Raney finally reported her missing.

Police acted as expected when Farver’s mother told them she was bipolar and on medication for it. They seemed to write her off as someone who was likely off her medication and acting erratically. Once the authorities were aware of her mental health issues, they no longer took her disappearance seriously, according to her mother.

At the same time that her worried mother was searching for her daughter, Kroupa continued to get hundreds of harassing text messages and emails from Farver telling him that she would make him suffer and that they belonged together, but she wasn’t just angry with him. Part of her rage was directed toward Liz Golyar, the woman he had previously dated and who had crossed paths briefly with Farver in his building’s hallway.

Golyar told Kroupa that she too was receiving text and email threats and harassment from Farver. One day, she called him to say that her garage had been defaced. She said that when she had pulled into her garage, she found that someone had spray-painted “Whore from Dave” on the inside. She reported the incident to the Omaha Police Department in November 2012.

In the weeks that followed, Farver was nowhere to be found. She missed her birthday, her son’s 15th birthday, Thanksgiving, and her father’s funeral. Still, the texts continued to Kroupa, Golyar, and her mother, who now believed something was horribly wrong. No matter how much she begged for her daughter to call her when responding to her text messages, she never did.

Farver’s son, Max, also began getting messages from his mother telling him that she was going to Kansas and would come to get him, but she never did. Eventually, Farver’s text messages began to lash out at Raney, telling her that she wasn’t a good mother and that she was too controlling. They were full of grammar and spelling mistakes, which was out of character for her daughter and only concerned Raney more.

By now, Kroupa also had new concerns. He was not only getting hate-filled texts and emails — he was being stalked. At one point while watching TV in his recliner, he received a message from Farver telling him that she could see him and describing both what he was doing and what he was wearing.

In January 2013, Kroupa was on his way home from work when he noticed Farver’s Ford Explorer in a nearby parking lot. He took a photo of the license plate and sent it to the Omaha Police Department. Police went out to search the vehicle and found only a single fingerprint on a mint container. They were unable to match it to Farver or anyone else in their database.

As the weeks and months unfolded, neither Raney nor the police had been able to find her daughter. The closest either had even come was an anonymous caller who claimed he’d seen Farver at a homeless shelter and that she wanted her mother to come to pick her up. When Raney arrived, there was no sign that Farver had ever been there. She was devastated.

Six months after she’d gone missing, Max tried to message his mother’s Facebook account to see if he could get a response. He was surprised when she messaged back with just a greeting and asking how he was doing. Max then posed three questions about himself that only she would know so that he could be sure he was talking to his mother. He never received another response.

Still, Kroupa and Golyar, who were still seeing one another on and off, continued to receive constant harassment via text and email. Kroupa said that it was common for the two of them to be sitting beside one another on the sofa and both receive multiple texts and emails from Farver. One email sent to Kroupa while he was alone even threatened to kill Golyar and included a photo of a woman that looked like her tied up in the trunk of a car. He immediately called Golyar, who laughed it off and said she was fine. Later, Kroupa received a link to a fake obituary for Golyar.

Things escalated once again when Golyar’s house caught on fire in August 2013. She lost two dogs, a cat, and a snake in the blaze. Fire investigators believed it was arson and Golyar told police she suspected Farver had done it. At this point, Kroupa became paranoid and bought a 9mm Smith and Wesson pistol for protection. He felt that he needed it in the weeks ahead as strange occurrences began to happen around him. His auto shop was vandalized and in January 2014, a high school friend named Heather Twedt was with him at his apartment when his phone went berserk with hate-filled messages from Farver. Afterward, someone jiggled the door handle, but no one was there when he went to look. Finally, someone threw a brick through the window while he and Twedt were in bed.

The harassment extended further now too. Kroupa’s ex-girlfriend — the mother of his two children — had begun to get threatening messages from Farver. Yet, no one had seen or spoken to Farver in two and a half years.

In the spring of 2015, Detectives Ryan Avis and Jim Doty, of the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, took an interest in the case based on what they’d heard about it around the department. They decided that Doty would approach the case as if Farver was dead and Avis would tackle it from the standpoint that Farver was still out there and harassing people.

The first thing the two detectives noticed was that there had been zero activity on Farver’s checking account since she was last seen. It didn’t make sense for someone with a good job, a nice house, and a son to just up and leave without any money or without accessing any available funds at some point during their absence. Already, Avis felt he would not find Farver alive.

Doty, however, immediately latched on to the presence of Golyar, who had not appeared in Farver’s life until she went missing. It made no sense to him that Farver would be harassing this person she didn’t really even know for such an extended period of time. Yet, Golyar’s name was all over the reports filed about the ongoing harassment. That definitely made her a person of interest, in his book.

Since all contact with Farver had been via electronic means, the two detectives reached out to Anthony Kava, a digital forensics administrator in their department, for help. They already had at their disposal the contents of both Kroupa and Golyar’s phones that had been downloaded in 2013 for the original investigators on the case. This was given to Kava for further analysis.

Kava discovered that whoever was sending the messages had sent Kroupa around 15,0000 emails over a three-year period. Additionally, there were between 25,000 and 50,000 texts sent. As the texting and emailing continued, the person sending them, which by this point was believed not to be Cari Farver, grew more careful about protecting their IP and identity.

One key piece of evidence was a photo of Farver’s Ford Explorer found in Golyar’s phone data. The metadata showed that the picture was taken about a month before Kroupa alerted police to the vehicle’s presence in the parking lot where they recovered it. So, how had Golyar known where it was before even the police did and why had she said nothing about it?

Another was that Liz had called Cari six times at her residence using the *67 prefix to block her number. It was odd for her to be calling a woman she’d met for mere seconds in a hallway. They also found the photo of the woman in the trunk that had previously been sent to Kroupa and a video of someone walking around outside Kroupa’s apartment. It had been uploaded to Farver’s YouTube account, but the IP address it traced back to was registered to Golyar’s house.

In May 2015, the detectives visited Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, and told her that they believed her daughter wasn’t missing by choice and that something had happened to her. Raney said it was the first time she’d felt like anyone was putting effort into finding her daughter. She also told them something else they hadn’t found in the files. When Farver disappeared in 2012, she’d texted her mother that she had sold all her furniture and asked her to let the buyer into the house to pick it all up. As proof of sale, she was also texted a photo of a check made out to Farver and signed by Shanna Golyar.

It didn’t explain what had happened to Farver, but it certainly let the detectives know they had been right to suspect Golyar was involved. Armed with this information, they were now able to match the single fingerprint found in Farver’s car to Golyar.

Meanwhile, Kroupa realized that the 9mm he had bought for protection was missing and reported it to police as stolen.

While the detectives were devising a plan to approach Golyar without alerting her that they’d grown suspicious of her, she surprised them by walking into the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office on Dec. 4, 2015, to file a new harassment complaint. This time, she was there to accuse Kroupa’s ex-girlfriend, Amy Flora. They let her file her complaint and then went to her home, supposedly to follow up on her complaint. She told them that she was now convinced it was Flora who had been sending threatening messages this whole time instead of Farver.

The detectives asked if they could download the contents of her phone again to investigate her claims further and were surprised when she turned it over to them to take in for that purpose. Golyar also mentioned that she knew Kroupa’s 9mm Smith and Wesson had been stolen and that she believed Flora had taken it, but when she realized she had likely not been supposed to know the details about the gun, she grew vague about it when answering any further questions.

The following day, Golyar called 911 and claimed she had been shot in the leg while out walking alone in Big Lake Park in Council Bluffs. At first, she said she didn’t know who might have shot her, but then later she said she believed it was Flora. Based on their conversation with her less than twenty-four hours earlier, the detectives believed she shot herself and tried to blame Flora, who was cleared that same day.

Back at the station, Kava was busy working on the contents of Golyar’s second cell phone data dump. He discovered that Golyar had registered more than two dozen fake email addresses — all with some variation of Cari Farver’s name. He also found that she was using a scheduler to deliver messages on the timetable she set, which explained how she could be sitting beside Kroupa when they both got flooded with hateful messages. It was a large reason why Kroupa never suspected she could be the one sending the messages. By Kava’s estimates, Golyar would have had to spend around 40 or 50 hours each week pretending to be Farver.

Two weeks after Golyar was shot, detectives brought her back in for another interview. She continued to push the narrative that Flora was behind everything with no clue that she was now their primary suspect in the case. The detectives told her that they believed her story and asked for her help in getting Flora to confess to her crimes. They asked her to reach out to Flora and see what she might tell her about Cari Farver’s disappearance and all the messages. She fell for it, fabricating emails she claimed were from Flora to give to police.

The detectives didn’t let on that they knew Flora was not involved, even when they received messages that Liz claimed were from Flora in which she admitted to shooting Liz at Big Lake Park. Instead, they asked her to ask Flora, who they were now certain was Golyar herself, for details about Farver’s death. Golyar was happy to comply.

Soon enough she forwarded an email to them that she claimed was from Flora. It said that Farver had been stabbed “three to four times” and stuffed into a garbage bag. Golyar then became agitated when days went by without Flora being arrested. The detectives told her that they needed more information — things only the killer could know. Within hours they received more emails from “Flora” saying that Farver had been stabbed to death in her car.

Though the vehicle had already been searched twice, this time they went deeper. The fabric was pulled off the passenger seat, revealing a red stain that was tested and came back as Farver’s blood. At this point, it was determined that the murder likely happened in Omaha, so the Omaha Police Department was contacted to get involved. Cold case homicide detective Dave Schneider joined the investigating team.

At this point, Detective Schneider brought Golyar in for formal questioning about the disappearance of Cari Farver. She was presented with the evidence against her. Still, she denied knowing anything about Farver’s disappearance or the later messages. She claimed not to even have internet service at her house. While they had her in the station, officers were sent to search her home per a search warrant they’d requested and received. During the search, they recovered a digital camera and a camcorder belonging to Farver. They believe that Golyar had stolen them from her home. The camcorder contained a video of Farver showing where someone had vandalized her car. It was stamped two days before her disappearance.

On December 22, 2016, Golyar was arrested for first-degree murder.

Douglas County Attorney Brenda Beadle expressed how difficult the case was to prosecute. Who harasses multiple people for years using the name of someone they murdered? Who burns down their home with their pets inside? Who shoots themselves in the leg? The facts of the case were too bizarre to believe.

Apparently, her defense attorney, James Martin Davis, also felt hard-pressed to defend the case with a jury present. He requested to waive a jury trial in favor of a bench trial so that a judge would decide Golyar’s fate. His defense rested on the fact that there was no body, no crime scene, and no murder weapon. He claimed that there was no proof that Farver was even dead. After the case was decided, he revealed that they had waived the jury trial in hopes of trying the case before a body turned up.

In yet another twist to the case, Kroupa remembered that he had a tablet in storage and turned it over to investigators. With only a few months before the trial began, Kava once again got to work and discovered a micro-SD memory card that had been in Golyar’s phone around the time of the murder. The SD card held thousands of deleted images. He was able to recover all of them.

One of the photos was hard to make out, but he soon discovered that it was a human foot. It was in the process of decomposition and had a tattoo visible on it. The tattoo was a Chinese symbol for the word “mother.” It was the same tattoo that Farver had on her foot. Kava was horrified to realize that not only had Golyar killed Farver, but she was taking photos of her deceased body.

Beadle argued that Golyar was “diabolical” and “cruel” at trial. She spoke about how she had killed Farver and then spent years harassing others in the dead woman’s name.

Davis argued that all of the evidence was circumstantial and reminded the court that no body had been found to prove Farver was deceased.

In 2017, Judge Timothy Burns rejected all of the defense’s arguments and found Golyar guilty of first-degree murder. He sentenced her to life in prison. She is currently serving out her sentence at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women. She continues to maintain her innocence and insists that Farver’s real killer is out there.

Cari’s body has never been recovered and it isn’t likely that the incredibly evil woman who killed her will ever reveal where it can be found. We may never know what happened to Cari Farver in her final hours, but there is no doubt that Liz Golyar is her killer.