[ad_1]
Spoiler alert! The following contains details from the Netflix true crime documentary “Lover, Stalker, Killer” (now available to stream).
Nancy Raney hadn’t heard her daughter’s voice or seen her bright smile and sparkling hazel eyes in years. Cari Farver virtually disappeared in November 2012, abandoning her teenage son Max in the care of her grandmother. Farver allegedly only showed up to harass, threaten and stalk her brief love, Dave Kroupa, and her current romantic interest, Shanna “Liz” Golyar.
Farver and Kroupa casually dated for two weeks before he called things off, right before she disappeared. In response, he received angry messages from Farver’s phone. “I’m going to destroy the things you care about,” one message said. “Your life will be ruined for ruining mine.” The torment, which persisted for years, is narrated in Netflix’s True Crime Thriller Documentary ‘Lover, Stalker, Killer’ (now streaming).
Farver allegedly broke into Kroupa and Golyar’s homes and spray painted “Whore” on Golyar’s wall. One day, Kroupa received a text message from Farver informing her that he had set Golyar’s house on fire. Golyar’s children were not home, but their pets died in the fire.
Accused of kidnapping fraud,How Denise Huskins and Aaron Quinn Survived ‘American Nightmare’
The baffling case caught the attention of James “Jim” Doty, an investigative sergeant with the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, and his colleague, Deputy Ryan Avis.
“Ryan and I went and asked to see this case,” Doty says in an interview, “because we thought it was strange that this single mother had disappeared and left her son behind.”
Doty and Avis wanted to start from scratch in their research and explore all the possibilities.
“You’ve probably seen on other shows that cops have tunnel vision, and I think the investigators at first had a little bit of tunnel vision,” Doty says. “They just accepted the ‘Cari doesn’t take her medication’ kind of thing. (Farver had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and she did not carry her medication with her.) But we wanted to avoid that.”
So Avis looked for evidence that Farver was alive. She looked for activity in his bank account and people who might have seen it. Doty proceeded as if Farver had died “because no one had seen her in years.”
In a surprising twist, they traced all digital communications back to Golyar, who murdered Farver in 2012 and had been impersonating her since then. Authorities arrested Golyar in 2016 and charged her with first-degree murder and second-degree arson. She was convicted on both charges in 2017 and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In addition to talking about what is shown in the documentary, Doty also revealed to USA TODAY things that viewers won’t see.
What ‘changed the case’ for Doty
Doty says meeting Raney, Farver’s mother, “changed the case quite a bit for me,” intensifying his desire to solve it. “Before, you were trying to get answers about what happened to a lady named Cari, (but) you don’t really know who Cari is,” Ella Doty says. “But once you really get to know her mother and see how much she cares, her mother basically becomes a living victim to you who has had to go through all this bullying and her daughter’s name has been (dragged) by the mud for years.”
In the film, Raney says she cried when Doty suspected foul play in Farver’s disappearance “because no one in authority had told me that.”
Liz Golyar does not exude “not one iota of remorse”
Doty says that in her interactions with Golyar she did not reveal any nervousness (even during interrogation) or regret for killing Farver and what she put Kroupa through.
“This is the level of insensitivity,” Doty says, recalling how Golyar sent messages to Farver’s family from his Facebook account. Hoping to verify her mother’s identity, Farver’s son Max sends some questions to her mother’s Facebook, asking things only she would know, like the name of her family’s first dog.
“Obviously, you don’t get an answer from Liz because she doesn’t know the answer to any of those questions,” Doty says. “So Max at that moment knows: ‘she’s okay, this is definitely not my mom.’ It’s someone else pretending to be her.’”
But time passes and Max, now a high school senior who longs for his mother to witness his milestone, approaches once again. He writes, “Hey, Mom, if it’s really you, please show up at my graduation,” Doty says. “I don’t know how that doesn’t break anyone’s heart, but it didn’t affect (Liz) in the least. He didn’t care that he was hurting Cari’s mother, her son or anything. Not one iota of remorse.”
Anthony ‘Tony’ Kava engaged on a ‘different level’ with the case
Doty says everyone worked tirelessly on the investigation, but he says Special Assistant Anthony “Tony” Kava, a digital forensics investigator, “worked at a different level of effort. He probably put more hours into this than maybe all of us put together.” Kava was instrumental in proving that Golyar was the source of the electronic threats and helped prosecute her, Doty says. In a touching moment in the documentary, Kava shares that he postponed surgery for a growing brain tumor because it would have affected his ability to work on the case.
“When it came time to testify, I just went up on the stand and they asked me questions,” Doty says. But Kava “prepared a 1,000-slide presentation that was used as evidence to explain all the digital aspects of this case. Without that, how can you prove that it’s Liz who’s doing all this without something so demonstrative that it might blow the judge’s mind: ‘Okay, there’s no doubt that Liz is behind this’?
At the end of the documentary, Nancy says she will always be grateful to Doty, Kava, and Avis, explaining that “they saved my sanity and will always be my children.”
Kelly Rizzo,Bob Saget’s widow dating Breckin Meyer two years after her husband’s death
