Single mom Cari Farver was last seen alive on November 13, 2012 by Dave Kroupa, a man she had been casually dating for a couple of weeks. Farver had spent the night at Kroupa’s home in Omaha, Nebraska, which was about 40 minutes from her residence in Macedonia, Iowa. She was still in his house when Kroupa left for work that morning.
Three days later, Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, reported her daughter missing after Farver didn’t show up to pick up her son. Around the same time, Kroupa began receiving strange, threatening text messages from someone claiming to be Farver after he had rejected her request that they move in together on the same day she had stayed at his house.
The harassment escalated over the next three years.
Kroupa received tens of thousands of threatening messages, ABC News reported. One message said, “I hate you so much that I want to drive a knife in your heart.” Another text warned Kroupa, “I will destroy your life and take your happiness.”
[Stream an episode of American Justice about the Cari Farver case in the A&E app.]
Even though Kroupa changed his phone number and email address, the electronic threats didn’t stop. The culprit, whom Kroupa and Omaha law enforcement authorities at the time believed was Farver, also sent threatening messages to another woman Kroupa had been dating around the same time he met Cari: Shanna Elizabeth Golyar, who went by “Liz.”
The threats turned real when Golyar’s house was intentionally set on fire in August 2013, killing all four of her pets. Kroupa and Golyar received emails purportedly from Farver claiming responsibility for the fire.
Meanwhile, Raney was receiving cryptic messages from social media accounts belonging to her daughter telling her mom not to look for her. Yet, law enforcement authorities were unable to track down Farver.
Investigators Identify the Mysterious Messenger
In 2015, detectives with Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, took over the investigation into Farver’s disappearance and the threatening messages. The team, led by Sgt. Jim Doty, pored over the original case file, including the contents from phones belonging to Kroupa and Golyar that were downloaded in 2013.
With assistance from Special Deputy and Digital Forensics Administrator Anthony “Tony” Kava, Doty and his co-investigator, Ryan Avis, identified Golyar as a person of interest.
“Right off the bat, Tony was able to point out that Liz was posing as Cari,” Doty tells A&E True Crime. “But the evidence didn’t tell us what happened to Cari or where Cari was.”
Between 2012 and 2015, Golyar had done a good job at hiding her electronic trail, using applications and digital proxies to conceal her IP addresses, making it more difficult to trace her online and phone activity to a place she lived, Kava tells A&E True Crime.
“When we picked up the case, [Golyar] had learned how to get better and better at hiding her trail,” Kava says. “For instance, she was using a website that allowed her to send emails and text messages on a certain day and time when she was with [Kroupa]. They would both receive messages at the same time from Cari.”
Kava also found Golyar had set up more than two dozen fake email addresses that all had some variation of Farver’s name. Using a program he developed, Kava was also able to narrow down a list of top IP addresses linked to the threatening emails Kroupa and Golyar received. One of them traced back to the house that burned down.
“Being able to trace an IP address to a place [Golyar] was actually laying her head was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack,” Kava says. “It turned out to be a lucky break for us.”
More Evidence Confirms Farver’s Murder
In December 2015, the investigation took a bizarre twist when Golyar was shot in the leg. She told police officials that the assailant was Kroupa’s ex-wife, Amy Flora, who had allegedly stolen her ex-husband’s gun. Golyar also told investigators she was now convinced Flora had been pretending to be Farver, and she was the one sending the harassing messages, Kava recalls.
“For years, Liz pretended she was the victim and Cari was doing all the stalking,” Kava says. “Then all of sudden, it’s Amy who is doing this to Liz.”
The investigators suspected Golyar had taken Kroupa’s gun, shot herself and was trying to pin the shooting and Farver’s demise on Flora, Doty adds.
The detectives pretended to believe Golyar even though she was their main suspect. They convinced Golyar to help them get Flora to incriminate herself. Soon, the detectives received emails purportedly from Flora that they traced back to Golyar. She forwarded them emails in which “Flora” confessed to stabbing Farver in her own car.
Investigators also found traces of Farver’s blood in the passenger seat of her car, which had been recovered about a month after she had disappeared. During a search of Golyar’s residence, Doty and his team recovered some of Farver’s belongings, including a digital camera and a camcorder that contained a video of Farver talking about how someone had vandalized her car. The clip was time stamped two days before she went missing.
A year later, Golyar was arrested and charged with Farver’s murder. Her defense attorney told the Des Moines Register that his client denied killing Farver and noted that police had not found Farver’s body or the murder weapon.
Before Golyar’s non-jury trial began in 2017, investigators caught another break when Kroupa provided them with a tablet he had owned since he had started dating Golyar and Farver five years earlier. Kava found a memory card in the tablet that had also been in Golyar’s phone around the same time Farver disappeared.
Kava meticulously scanned through thousands of thumbnails of deleted images in the memory card. He found one image of a human foot with the tattoo of a Chinese character for the word “mother.” Raney, Farver’s mother, confirmed that her daughter had the same tattoo on her foot. A medical examiner also determined that the foot in the photo belonged to a deceased person.
On August 15, 2017, Judge Timothy Burns found Golyar guilty of first-degree murder.
“Cari Farver did not voluntarily disappear and drop off the face of the earth,” Burns said, according to a video of the proceedings. “Very sadly, she was murdered.”
A year later, Golyar lost an appeal. She is currently serving a life sentence in a Nebraska state prison.
Farver’s body has yet to be found.
“I don’t think we will ever have another case like this one,” Kava tells A&E True Crime. “None have been as challenging in terms of complexity and scale.”
In addition to Golyar facing justice, their investigation also restored Farver’s name and reputation, Doty says.
“Cari was from a small town in Iowa,” Doty says. “Everybody had heard about this case. It totally tarnished her image and reputation. Our investigation set the record straight that it wasn’t Cari sending the harassing messages. It was Liz pretending to be Cari.”
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