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Emergency services in Omaha, Nebraska received a call at 8:14 on the morning of August 17th, 2013. The caller was a woman named Shanna Elizabeth Gollier, who went by Liz. She reported a fire at her home in Omaha. Shortly thereafter, she called a man named David Krupa, who she'd been dating on and off.
In a panic, she told Dave that her house had been set on fire and her four pets had died in the blaze. Luckily, Liz and her kids had been away from the house overnight. Dave told her that not even 12 hours earlier, he'd received an email from a woman named Carrie Farver. The email read, "I am not lying, I set that nasty whore's house on fire. I hope the whore and her kids die in it." Early that morning, Liz had received a similar message from Carrie Farver.
In it, Farver said she hoped Liz Gollier and her kids burned to death. It was the latest escalation in a harassment campaign perpetrated by Carrie Farver and aimed at Dave Krupa and Liz Gollier. Until the fire, the harassment had mainly come in the form of text messages and emails. Now, things were getting out of hand. Dave and Liz had been seeing each other until earlier that August when they broke things off. As it turned out,
the traumatizing fire brought them closer together. They soon resumed their relationship. Investigators at Goliar's house, which she was in the process of moving out of, quickly determined the fire was set on purpose. An accelerant had been used and there were six different points of origin. The structure hadn't been too badly damaged, but the loss of the pets was certainly traumatic for Goliar and her kids.
At least she could take solace in the fact that she wasn't facing this crazy harassment alone. She and Dave were in this together. Now, more than ever, police had a reason to find Carrie Farver. The only problem was no one had seen her in nearly a year. She'd simply disappeared.
and the only evidence that she was even alive came in the form of threatening messages. But if she was willing to set Liz's house on fire, what else was she willing to do? As would soon become clear, the answer would surprise and horrify everyone involved. Part 1: Be Careful Who You Date Dave Krupa was in his mid-30s when he moved to Omaha, Nebraska in 2012.
He got a job managing an auto shop and was looking for a fresh start. The year before, he split with his girlfriend of many years, Amy Flora. Amy and Dave had two children together and a friendly relationship, but there was no more romance between them. Dave was still involved in the children's lives, but they spent most of the time with their mother. After the hardships of the previous year, Dave was looking to get back out into the dating scene.
He didn't want to jump back into a serious relationship though, so he turned to a dating app called Plenty of Fish. It wasn't long before he met the dark-haired, brown-eyed Liz Gollier through the app. The two went on a date. They seemed to get along well. Dave learned that Gollier was a single mother with two children. He was attracted to her right away, and by the fourth date, their relationship had turned intimate. Dave was upfront with her,
explaining that he wasn't looking for anything serious. He wanted to keep dating other women. While Gollier was purportedly okay with this, she made several indications that she wanted an exclusive relationship with Dave. Despite his attraction and their chemistry, Dave wanted to keep things casual. And near the end of October 2012, Dave Krupa was at work when a woman brought her SUV in for repair. Krupa later said he was immediately smitten with her
The green-eyed woman was attractive and quick with a smile. Her name was Carrie Farver. Dave soon asked her out on a date, and she agreed. He learned that she was a single mother of a teenage boy, and she worked as a computer programmer. During the date at an Omaha restaurant, Dave received several texts and calls from Liz Gollier. At first, he ignored them, but when they kept coming, he stepped away from the table to call the woman.
telling her he was on a date and couldn't talk at the moment. According to Krupa, the date went well. He invited Farver back to his apartment. It was there that she told him she wasn't looking for anything serious. Dave later said that he felt like he'd been lucky to meet Farver. Neither of them wanted anything serious, but there was chemistry between them, and the attraction was undeniable. It was exactly what he was looking for.
But what he first thought of as a stroke of luck would soon turn out to be a living nightmare, because a seemingly insignificant encounter that night would change everything and affect dozens of lives. Krupa and Farver hadn't been in Dave's apartment for long when Gollier showed up at the security door, buzzing to be let inside. Krupa went down to speak with Gollier, finding her upset and wanting to retrieve some things she'd said she'd left in his apartment.
leaving Liz outside. Dave went back up to his apartment and explained what was happening to Carrie, who decided she would leave. Dave walked down with Carrie to show her out and let Liz in. The two women passed each other at the security door, one leaving and one coming. Krupa said it couldn't have lasted more than 10 seconds. Farver got into her black Ford Explorer, the same one Krupa had worked on at the auto shop, and left.
Liz and Dave went up to his apartment so she could grab her things. At the time, it seemed like nothing more than an awkward encounter. Liz wasn't in the apartment for long before Dave asked her to leave. Shortly after, Dave and Carrie talked on the phone. Carrie invited Dave to her house in Macedonia, Iowa. Dave left his apartment for Carrie's house, where he spent the night. After that first date, Krupa and Farver continued seeing each other regularly.
During this time, Krupa was also seeing Liz Gollier. Although Carrie worked in Omaha, her home in Iowa was about an hour away. But Dave's apartment was just around the corner from her job. So when she was assigned a big project, Dave invited her to stay at his house so she wouldn't have to drive for two hours every day.
Carrie arranged for her son to stay with her mother and stepfather for the week. And on Monday, November 12th, 2012, she left her Iowa home and went to work as usual. She left her office around 8 or 9 p.m. and headed to Krupa's apartment, where she stayed the night. The plan was for her to stay there through the week to finish the project, at which point she would head back to her home in Iowa. The next morning, November 13th, 2012, Krupa left his apartment for work.
Carrie was there, and he kissed her goodbye, saying he'd see her that evening. He'd only been at work for a couple of hours when he received a text from Carrie. She said she wanted to move in with him. Finding this strange, Dave rebuffed her gently with a text message, saying that wasn't what he wanted. The two of them had already discussed it, but it seemed that Carrie had suddenly changed her mind. It wasn't long before he got an even stranger response from Farver.
The message read, "Fine, I hate you. I'm dating someone else. I don't want to see you anymore. Go away." Dave was confused. This didn't seem like the Carrie he'd gotten to know over the past two weeks. Then again, two weeks wasn't a long time. Krupa later admitted he didn't know what to think. "I was blown away," he said. When he got home from work that evening, Carrie was gone. There was radio silence for two days before he started receiving aggressive messages from her.
She said that she hated him and that he'd ruined her life. What Krupa originally thought was a brilliant stroke of luck, finding a fun, attractive woman who wanted the same things as him, was actually a dodged bullet. Although disappointed, he felt that if the relationship had continued, things might have been even worse. Unfortunately, the terror was just getting started. Part Two: Something is Very Wrong The same day Krupa received the puzzling text message about moving in,
Carrie's mother received a message from her daughter. The message said that Carrie had found a new job in Kansas. Carrie's mother, Nancy Rainey, found this very odd. She knew that Carrie was happy at her current job, and there had been no indication that she was looking for another one, much less one in Kansas. But she was also well aware that Carrie had been diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder. In past years, Carrie had struggled with taking the medication, saying it made her numb.
But, according to Rainey, things had been going well for Carrie in recent years. Her son was doing well in high school, she liked her job, and she was regularly taking her medication. Still, with all this in mind, something didn't seem right. Rainey texted back, asking questions about Carrie's new job and when she was planning on coming back to pick up Max, her son. Carrie's half-brother was getting married soon, and Rainey asked about plans for the wedding.
She also requested that Carrie call her so they could talk. She didn't receive any response. On November 15th, Carrie's boss received a message from her saying that she was resigning. The message also said that she was sending Shanna Liz Gollier to replace her. Soon after, Gollier filled out an online application. Carrie hadn't been to work since Monday, November 12th. After receiving no word from her daughter for three days, aside from the strange message about the new job in Kansas,
Nancy Rainey reported Carrie Farver missing. According to Rainey, the police shrugged off her concerns when they learned that Carrie was bipolar. They said it was common for people who went off their medication to become erratic. The day after Rainey reported her daughter missing, November 17th, 2012, she received another text from Carrie's phone. It included a picture of a $5,000 check made out to Carrie Farver and instructions to let a woman named Liz Gollier into Carrie's house.
According to the message, the check from Gollier was for a bedroom set Carrie had sold her. Rainey went to the police with the message, telling them something wasn't right. The police subsequently had Carrie Farver's cell phone pinged with an approximate location. According to the ping, the phone was located in Omaha, not far from Gollier's house. But when they went searching for it, they couldn't find it. Meanwhile, Krupa was still receiving threatening messages from Farver.
But it wasn't just him. Gollier told him that she was also getting terrible messages from Farver. One day, Gollier called Dave and told him that her garage had been vandalized. The words, or from Dave, were spray painted on the inside. According to police, Gollier reported the incident soon after it happened. Weeks passed with little movement from the police.
Farver missed her half-brother's wedding. She was nowhere to be found for her own birthday, or her son's 15th birthday. Thanksgiving came and went with no sign of her. Then, when she missed her father's funeral, her mother knew that something was very wrong. Rainey was still getting the occasional text from Carrie's phone, but there were often grammatical and punctuation errors, which wasn't like Carrie at all.
Rainey begged Carrie to call her so she could hear her voice, but those messages went unanswered. Soon, the messages became abusive, telling Rainey that she was a bad mother, among other things. Carrie's son, Max, was also receiving occasional messages from her. She said she was coming to get him more than once, but she never made good on these promises. But those who got the brunt of the hate were Dave Krupa and Liz Golier.
It seemed to drive them closer together. They felt as if they were being attacked and they bonded over this, taking strength in each other. Oftentimes, they would be sitting together when the messages came through. Their phones would buzz or jingle, sometimes one after the other, and sometimes separated by minutes. They would read the messages from the crazy stalker and then compare notes. Most of the messages had to do with Golier. They called her a whore and made threats.
but some of Dave's messages said things like, "We belong together," or "I'll make you suffer." One evening, when Dave was lounging in his living room with his feet up, he received a message from Farver. It described what he was wearing and how his feet were propped up. Needless to say, it had him rattled. He just wanted to be rid of this mentally unstable woman. But one day, when he came home from work, he spotted a familiar vehicle in his apartment's parking lot.
It was a black Ford Explorer, Carey's SUV. He took a picture of the license plate and sent it to the police. Sure enough, it was Carey's SUV. Investigators came out to look at the vehicle. They found only a single fingerprint on the top of a mint container in the vehicle, but the print didn't belong to Farver, and it didn't bring back any hits from the federal database. Whoever the print belonged to wasn't in the system.
Around this time, both Krupa and Goliar agreed to have their cell phone data downloaded by police to help with the case. Still, the information they gathered did little to help the investigation. It had been nearly two months since her disappearance, and the police still had no real leads and no idea of Carrie Farver's whereabouts. Part Three: Years of Harassment. As winter was giving way to spring, nearly five months after Carrie Farver disappeared,
Her mother received a call from a stranger at a homeless shelter. The man on the phone said that Carrie was there and wanted Rainey to come pick her up. Rainey called investigators and rushed over to the shelter, meeting the police there. But it didn't take them long to determine that Carrie had never been there. And they never figured out who the man was that had called the tip in. All over again, Nancy Rainey felt the tremendous loss of her daughter. She'd allowed herself to feel hope again with the phone call.
but that hope was shattered. About a month later, Carrie's son Max messaged his mother via Facebook to see if she would answer. She did, saying hello. So he asked her three questions. What was his middle name? What was the name of their first dog? And what was his best friend's name? He received no response. Back in Omaha, Liz Golyer and Dave Krupa were still dating casually, and they were still both receiving text messages and emails from Carrie.
The messages came from many different phone numbers and email addresses. Prupa said it didn't matter how many times he changed phone numbers or email addresses, she always found him. Sometimes he would receive between 40 and 60 messages a day. At one point, he received a text message from a blurry picture of a woman tied up in a trunk. The woman in the picture looked like Liz Gollier. So Dave called her and asked if she was okay. She said she was.
He also said he received a link to a made up obituary about Golyer, although he didn't see it at the time. Krupa later said these kinds of incidents tended to come when he and Golyer were drifting apart. This was certainly the case when Golyer's home was set on fire in August of 2013. She was away with her kids when it happened, but the four family pets died in the fire, a cat, two dogs, and a snake.
Having just recently stopped seeing each other, the fire brought Dave and Liz back together once again. But it also made Dave paranoid to the point of purchasing a gun. And with good reason. The auto shop Dave worked at was vandalized. And when a female friend from high school was over at Krupa's house one night, a brick was thrown through the window. In fact, Gollier reported incidents of vandalism on four separate occasions.
Krupa also reported three different incidents. Shortly after each of these incidents took place, Gollier and Krupa received messages from Farver taking responsibility for them. Amy Flora, Krupa's ex and the mother of his children, wasn't spared harassment either. She received threatening messages from Farver as well. These messages started in 2013, but it wasn't until 2015 that things came to a head.
It had been over two years since Carrie Farver's disappearance when a couple of detectives from the Pottawatomie County Sheriff's Office started looking into the case. Detectives Jim Doty and Ryan Avis had never officially been in on the investigation, but they both heard about it. They knew something strange was going on there, so they volunteered to take it on. They decided to split things up. Jim Doty approached the case like Carrie had been murdered,
while Ryan Avis looked at it as if Farver had really gone off the rails and was still out there somewhere. Shortly after the detective started poring over the case again, Dave Krupa noticed his 9mm Smith & Wesson pistol was missing. He reported it stolen. Later that year, in December, Liz Gollier showed up at the Pottawatomie County Sheriff's Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, wanting to make a complaint.
It's important to note here that Krupa had broken things off with Gollier in November of that year to pursue an exclusive relationship with another woman. It's also imperative to remember that Amy Flora, the mother of Krupa's children, had been receiving threats from Carrie Farver since 2013. So when Liz Gollier showed up in Council Bluffs to file a complaint against Amy Flora, investigators were intrigued.
Shortly after Gallier left, Detective Avis drove to her house under the guise of talking to her about the complaint. Really, he had an ulterior motive. He listened as Gallier told him how she thought that the years of harassment had actually been perpetrated by Flora, not Farver. According to Gallier, Amy Flora had been harassing her via text and Facebook messages. Gallier also said that she knew Krupa's gun had gone missing
and she accused Flora of stealing it. She even said it was a 9mm Smith & Wesson. How she would know such information was curious. And when Avis asked Moore about the gun, he only got vague answers. It was as if Gollier had realized her mistake. Avis asked Gollier if he could download the contents of her phone so he could get to the bottom of this. To the detective's surprise, she agreed. Once this was done,
Avis told her he'd get back to her the following Monday after the weekend. The next morning, on Saturday, December 5th, Gollier sent Avis yet more threatening messages she'd purportedly received from Flora. Then that night, emergency services received a 911 call from a park in Council Bluffs. It was Liz Gollier. She'd been shot in the leg in the parking lot at first. She said she didn't know who had shot her, but her story quickly changed.
and she insisted it was Krupa's ex, Amy Flora, who'd done it. Police drove to Amy Flora's house and questioned her. They quickly realized that she wasn't the culprit. Her car was cold to the touch, and she'd been at home all night with her infant son. But by this time, detectives Avis and Dodie had a pretty good idea that Gollier was behind the whole thing.
They'd already enlisted the help of a digital forensic specialist named Anthony Cava to go through the data from the phone dumps. So when Avis had gone to question Gollier about Flora, he was hoping she'd let something slip, and she did. Not only did she somehow know about Krupa's gun going missing, but she also agreed to the phone dump. The original phone data from 2013 was included in the case file the two detectives received, so they'd already had Cava going over that.
and he soon found some evidence that pointed to Gollier. Among the data from that original download, Cava found a picture of Carrie Farver's SUV, taken nearly a month before Dave Krupa came home to find it in his parking lot. They asked themselves why she would have had a picture of Farver's vehicle in her phone before the police even knew where it was. And the most likely answers put Gollier in the spotlight.
They also found that Gallier had called Carrie's landline six times in the days before her disappearance. Gallier had used a prefix to try to hide who the calls were coming from. And according to Gallier herself, she'd only met Carrie briefly when the two of them passed at the security door to Krupa's apartment. So why would she have called Farver six times? There were other things too.
When the detectives spoke to Carrie's mother shortly after taking on the case, they learned about the text messages with the picture of the $5,000 check. The check that was signed by Shanna Gawlier, Liz's legal name. If they'd only met in passing, why would Farver suddenly sell her furniture to Gawlier? It didn't make sense. And as far as they could tell,
Goliar was never a part of Farver's life before that night in October 2013, when the two interacted for all of 10 seconds. After that, Goliar's and Farver's names show up in all kinds of police reports, all the harassment charges. They also found that the picture of the woman tied up in the trunk of a car, the one Farver supposedly sent to Krupa, had been taken by Goliar's phone. All signs pointed to Goliar, but none of them were damning.
and none of them told investigators what had happened to Farver, at least. Not until Golyer agreed to the second phone dump. Upon going through the data, Kava quickly found some very unusual activity. Golyer had signed up for between 20 and 30 fake email addresses, and they all were tied to Farver's name in some way.
The digital forensic expert also found that Goliar had been using an app that would allow her to schedule text messages and emails. So when she and Krupa were together, they would both get messages, eliminating any suspicion Krupa might have had that it was Goliar sending them. The police gathered this information gradually, and shortly after Goliar was shot in the leg outside the Council Bluffs Park,
Both detectives had a strong suspicion that Gollier had shot herself. So they started looking at her for Carrie Farver's disappearance. And with a little prompting from the detectives, it was Gollier herself who would volunteer the information to help solve the case. Part four, a full-time job. Detectives Avis and Dodi knew they had to get information on what happened to Carrie Farver. By this time, they were fairly sure that Gollier had killed the woman back in 2012.
but they needed to unearth details about the killing, not only so they could properly investigate, but so they could give prosecutors a solid case with which to proceed. Two weeks after Gollier was shot outside of Big Lake Park, the detectives interviewed her. The woman insisted that it was Amy Flora who was to blame for it all. She was certain that Flora had shot her that night. After this interview, the detectives decided to lean into this
even though they were fairly certain that Amy Flora had nothing to do with it. So they formulated a plan. Then, in early 2016, Dave Krupa moved back in with his ex-wife and their children. Shortly thereafter, Gollier approached the detectives again, upset that Flora hadn't been arrested for the shooting. It was just what the detectives had been hoping for. They said that they believed her story about Flora, but they needed more information if they were going to arrest the woman.
and they wanted Golyer's help. She readily agreed. She even said that she was still getting messages from Flora and allowed the detectives to do another phone dump. They then asked Golyer if she could get information from Flora about Carrie Farver's disappearance. It wasn't long after this conversation that Golyer started sending incriminating emails to the detectives. Emails that she insisted were from Amy Flora.
In these first messages, Flora admitted to shooting Gollier in the park with Krupa's stolen gun. The detectives said that this was good, but they pushed Gollier once again to see if she could get information about Farver's disappearance. Soon enough, Gollier forwarded a message to the detectives in which Flora admitted to stabbing Carrie Farver three or four times before stuffing her body into a garbage bag. And as days went by,
Gollier got increasingly upset when Flora wasn't arrested. The detectives said they needed specifics, things that only the killer would know. Once they had that information, they would have enough to arrest Amy Flora. It wasn't long before more detailed messages came through from Flora. One of these messages described a Yin and Yang tattoo on Farver's hip. Information about this tattoo had not been released to the public.
In another of these messages was an important piece of information that said Carrie Farver had been stabbed in her own Ford Explorer SUV. So they went back and searched Farver's SUV for the third time. But this time, they went deeper. And when they pulled off the passenger seat cover, they discovered a stain on the padding underneath that looked like blood. They soon determined that it was blood and that it belonged to Carrie Farver.
They had also gathered more information on where the messages had been coming from over the years. They found that the point of origin for many of the messages matched IP addresses where Gahlia had been staying at various times during the years of harassment. For much of the time she'd been seeing Krupa, she'd also been dating a man who helped her pay her bills and take care of her children. She'd even lived with the man for a while during the time in question.
The man had been under the impression that their relationship was exclusive. Gollier told him that Krupa was just an old friend. This man's IP address was the source of many of the messages sent, and the timeline coincided with when Gollier was living with him. They also determined that the single fingerprint they'd found on the mint container in Carrie Farver's SUV belonged to Liz Gollier. Since investigators were certain Farver's murder had taken place in Omaha,
the Pottawatomie County Sheriff's Office joined with a cold case detective from Omaha to move forward with the prosecution. The cold case detective, Dave Schneider, brought Gollier in for questioning and confronted her with the evidence they'd gathered so far. Meanwhile, Avis and Dodi were executing a search warrant for Gollier's home. They found a camcorder and a digital camera that both belonged to Carrie Farver.
Their assumption was that Gollier had stolen the items from Carrie's house after the murder. Gollier denied the allegations but was arrested on December 16th, 2016. Over four years after Carrie's disappearance, she was charged with first degree murder. There was only one problem, there was no body. They hadn't found Carrie Farver's remains. This was a challenge that prosecutors would have to overcome.
Gollier's attorney posited that all their evidence was circumstantial. Without a body and a murder weapon, the burden of proof would be that much harder to overcome. But before the trial was set to start, Dave Krupa found an old tablet in storage that he thought might be useful to investigators. He'd been using it around the time he was dating both Gollier and Farver, so he handed it over.
And then Kava, the digital forensic specialist, started looking through the SD card that had been in the tablet. The card had been in Goliar's phone at one point, which allowed Kava to recover thousands of deleted images. And among those images was a close-up picture of a foot with a tattoo on it. Comparing the picture of the foot to pictures of Carrie Farver, they determined that the tattoo was the same, a Chinese symbol for mother.
It was a picture of Carrie Farver's foot and given the signs of decomposition in the photo, it had been taken after she was killed. When it came time to face the music, Gollier waived a jury trial, opting instead for what's called a bench trial. Instead of a jury of her peers deliberating over her guilt, it fell to the judge to decide her fate. Her lawyer felt that this would give them the best chances of success, but it didn't turn out well for the defense.
In August of 2017, Shanna Elizabeth Gollier was sentenced to life in prison. She was also given 18 to 20 years for arson, which she is to serve in addition to the life sentence. The photographs deemed to be of Carrie Farver's body, the numerous fake accounts, and the thousands of messages were all tied back to Liz Gollier during the bench trial by digital forensic specialists.
even without a body or a murder weapon. The judge found the state's evidence to be overwhelming. Carrie Farver's mother, Nancy Rainey, burst into tears when she heard the verdict. She went on to thank the investigators and prosecutors for their work. When all of the considerable information pointing to Gollier was finally compiled and examined, some truly shocking estimates were made. Over a three-year span,
Gollier sent Dave Krupa around 15,000 emails pretending to be Farver. She sent somewhere between 25,000 and 50,000 text messages. It's estimated that she spent somewhere between 40 and 50 hours a week pretending to be Farver and later Flora. Liz Gollier murdered Carrie Farver in cold blood, apparently out of sheer jealousy. She set her own house on fire, killing her four pets in the process.
She staged a picture of herself tied up in the trunk of a car, which she sent to Krupa just to get his attention. And she shot herself in the thigh with a stolen gun in an attempt to get Amy Flora arrested. She's currently in a Nebraska prison for women, serving her life sentence. She will not have the possibility of parole. But perhaps strangest of all, she still maintains her innocence.
In a correspondence with an author who wrote about the case, Liz Golyer said she hopes authorities can find whoever really killed Gary Farver.
