A Tangled Web Read online

  As much as it helped, the dream was not absolute proof. It didn’t banish all of her doubts and fears. She was still plagued with confusion and worry and frustration. Her remaining doubts were amplified by the fact that Nancy did not want to believe the dream, for she still possessed a whisper of hope that her daughter walked among the living. The devastated mother still needed answers.

  The families of the missing are rooted in place, unable to move forward without knowing the fate of their loved ones. While it hurts to learn someone we care about has died, it hurts more to not know what became of them. When we can grieve a death, most of us eventually recover enough to live fulfilling lives and maybe even discover joy again, but if even a slight possibility exists that the absent person is alive, then healing is impossible. The mystery is akin to an open wound incessantly picked at, never allowed to heal.

  Is the victim suffering? Waiting to be rescued? Or did they leave voluntarily, not caring about those they left behind? Each of these questions is painful to ponder, and each haunts the relatives of the missing. The unanswered questions would have been agonizing for Cari’s family even without the tortuous teasing of the stalker who continually picked at the scab. They were at it again on Sunday, January 6, 2013. Nancy logged onto her Facebook page and felt a rush of adrenaline when she saw the message from “Cari.” It was not sent from her daughter’s usual page, but from a new page created in her name. Nancy noted it featured actual photos of Cari, and she couldn’t help her racing heart.

  Mom, why are you not talking anymore?

  Nancy typed: Is this really you?

  Yes, Mom. The other account was hacked. I’m sorry I missed the funeral.

  Nancy wrote: The only way I’ll know it’s you, is if you call me, and I hear your voice. She waited, hopeful, but when the response came it was defensive, filled with grammar errors, and sounded nothing like her thoughtful daughter. Everything is about phone calls. I was just heading to bed. Who else would know about Dad? Fine, I will call you sometime. I just wanted you to know I’m okay. I am happy. I may not be the greatest person in the world right now, but I am talking. Fine, I will call you, but I’m done after that. You have Max, and I am grateful, but after the cop stuff from before, I am done. I am not ten years old, Mom. I can leave him and move on with someone new.

  Move on with someone new? It was an odd way for a mother to speak of her son, and Nancy felt sure that her daughter had not written the message. “I don’t care what man is out there.” Nancy shakes her head. “She would have never left Max!” A startling post soon popped up on the new page. It was a photo of a hand with a sparkling engagement ring, and the caption read: Dave and I got engaged.

  “It was absolutely not my daughter’s hand.” Nancy emphasizes that Cari’s fingers were long and slender, and the photograph depicted a squat hand with short fingers. This new Facebook page in Cari’s name was obviously the work of an impostor. Impostor or not, the owner of the new page had managed to friend a few people associated with Cari’s original page. Some who did not know her well assumed that the posts were genuine, and they clicked “like” and commented enthusiastically over the news of her engagement.

  Nancy alerted Deputy Phyllips, and he contacted Dave, who was still single and intended to stay that way. He was certainly not anyone’s fiancé, but he had something even more bizarre than a fake engagement to share. At 12:30 A.M. on January 6, Dave had received an unsettling email from someone claiming to be Cari. You will do exactly as I say, and then I will let her go, the letter began. The attached photo showed a woman in a car trunk with duct tape covering her mouth, her hands tied behind her back. The email stated that the victim was Liz, but her face was turned at such an angle her features were not discernable. She looked a bit like Liz, but she could have just as easily been some other dark-haired woman.

  The instructions were clear and to the point: You will dump Liz, and you will start seeing me again. He was to call Liz and break up with her via voice mail. Kidnapped Liz would then play that message for her abductor to verify that he had followed orders. If he did not comply, Liz would die, locked in a trunk where no one could find her. In a phrase that sounded like it was plucked straight from a low-budget late-night TV movie, the stalker added: So, tick tock.

  Tick tock? The implication was that Dave had better hurry or he would never see Liz again! If the email was meant to frighten him, it didn’t work. “I called B.S. on it right away.” More words popped up: I am sick of her getting what belongs to me. You can’t play with my feelings, understand? Do it, or say good-bye to her.

  Though Dave doubted that Cari had kidnapped Liz, he had to admit that the woman in the photo certainly looked like Liz. Just to be sure, he texted her. “She’s potentially in a trunk, tied up. It was the least I could do.” But Liz didn’t respond.

  It was late, and she was probably sound asleep. It would be ridiculous to take this seriously, Dave told himself. She texted him the next morning and asked why he had been trying to reach her in the middle of the night.

  He tapped out a reply: Psycho was playing games. Was just checking on you. Pleased that he cared enough to be concerned, Liz texted: So sweet. What’s up today, handsome?

  The stalker was especially active that second week of January, and Dave was drawn into numerous text conversations. When a female friend, Lisa, left his apartment after visiting on January 7, the tormentor immediately sent him a message threatening to follow her, but nothing came of that. Apparently, she realized that Lisa was not her competition. Dave and Lisa weren’t dating, and he received no more warnings about her.

  In another text, “Cari” claimed she’d moved into his apartment complex. She toyed with him, first suggesting they meet, then backtracking when he agreed. He pretended to flirt, hoping to lure her out of the shadows, so the cops could nab her, but she wasn’t easy to trick.

  On the morning of January 8, Dave was driving through his parking lot when he noticed a single vehicle, heaped with snow. The other cars had long since shed signs of the storm, but this vehicle obviously hadn’t been driven for days. He took a closer look. It was a black Ford Explorer. Cari’s car! He was certain it hadn’t been there all along. How was Cari getting around without her car? Had she really moved into his apartment complex? Is that why the SUV was here? Dave called police, and they towed the Explorer to the Omaha Police Department impound lot.

  While Cari had been reported missing in Iowa, she’d vanished from Nebraska. The mystery overlapped several police jurisdictions from two counties and two states, and that created some confusion. Despite their separate databases, police from the various offices were keeping each other in the loop. Iowa police reviewed Liz’s reports of threats and vandalism in Omaha. Liz had accused Cari, and that fit their theory that Cari was in hiding because she’d flipped out. Deputy Phyllips and Omaha Detective Travis Oetter went to see Dave at Hyatt Tire. Dave showed them the text from “Cari,” claiming she’d moved into Unit Twelve near him. But that apartment didn’t exist. The nut was still playing games.

  Both Dave and Liz showed the investigators the hostile texts sent to them by their elusive tormentor. The sheer volume was overwhelming. It would take time to pore over the thousands of messages to find clues that might lead to the missing woman. Dave and Liz cooperated, signing waivers to allow investigators to download the contents of their cell phones. The process, known as a “phone dump” is accomplished using a Cellebrite, a small hand-held device that facilitates the transfer of files from cell phones to jump drives through cables. The gadget can be used to accomplish both logical and physical downloads. Logical downloads retrieve data that has not been deleted, while physical downloads recover the entire contents of the memory of the phone, even deleted items.

  Worn down by the stalker’s hostile rants, the last thing Dave wanted was another email. But Liz probably didn’t realize that because she continued to send him long letters. In one email, she invited him to a tattoo show and prattled on about how he didn’t h
ave to entertain her and how easy it was for them to just hang out and “chill.” She mentioned commitment several times, insisting it was not an issue for her. She wrote: You have to stop thinking that I’m trying to get you to commit to me, and stop thinking that I’m mad.

  Liz wanted a day each week, set aside for the two of them. I guess I feel like that, geez, seven months gets me a few extra privileges, is all. It was a variation on the one-month commitment she’d asked for in September. Now, instead of a month, she requested one day a week—fifty-two days per year. While she’d had “four months invested” when she asked for the month, now she stressed that she’d put in “seven months.”

  She pointed out how the “past has been a little challenging,” and how happy she was that they weren’t “rushing into things.” She said she didn’t “want to get in the way of your dating,” immediately contradicting herself to say that “parts of me do, LOL,” but never in a “psycho” way. She felt she “wasn’t good enough,” and that a lot of men had told her that. The email seesawed between emotions, at times sounding confident, and in the next sentence, insecure. She insisted she wanted no commitment, but demanded he compromise and promise her one day each week. Somehow, she managed to wrangle that day from him. He might have been too overwhelmed to argue, or maybe he gave in because the stalker had scared off his other dates. He had to admit he was impressed by Liz’s loyalty. She was the only woman willing to stick by him in the midst of the nightmare. Even when “Crazy Cari” was vandalizing Liz’s home and threatening to harm her, Liz was steadfast.

  She was pissed at him for inviting a lunatic into their lives, but she was still there. In fact, the stalker had actually brought them closer. “We bonded over it,” Dave explains. Liz was the only one who understood what he was going through. They spent countless hours talking about their frightening situation, comparing notes on the latest threats and trying to figure out how to get out of the horrific mess.

  The least Dave could do was give Liz her day.

  CHAPTER TEN

  ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 10, 2013, Deputy Phyllips asked crime scene technician Katie Pattee to process the recovered vehicle. With degrees in Criminal Justice Administration and Forensic Science, she was also a Certified Crime Scene Analyst with hundreds of hours of training in crime scene processing, photography, and fingerprint identification. Though the Explorer had been found in Douglas County, Nebraska, and towed to the Omaha Police Department impound lot, it had been reported stolen in Iowa, so the theft was under the jurisdiction of Pottawattamie County.

  As the sole crime scene technician for the Pottawattamie County Sherriff’s Office, Pattee was busy investigating everything from criminal mischief to burglary to homicide. On this day she was not investigating a homicide. She was assigned the task of examining a recovered stolen vehicle. She had never heard of Cari Farver nor the worried mother who had reported her missing seven weeks earlier.

  As far as law enforcement in Iowa was concerned, Cari was an unbalanced woman who had shirked her responsibilities to take off on a thoughtless adventure, leaving a paranoid mother behind to fret. From the perspective of the Nebraska police, Cari was a malicious stalker, obsessed with Dave Kroupa.

  It was not Pattee’s job to know about any of that. She had more than enough responsibility just examining evidence. She did her job well, and now she meticulously followed the procedural steps to process the recovered car. First, she verified that the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN) matched the one in the theft report. Since 1981, each new on-road vehicle in the United States has been assigned a unique code of seventeen digits used to track ownership and accident history. Just as people have only one Social Security number, vehicles have just one VIN, etched or printed on various parts of a vehicle and also displayed on stickers, usually found inside the car’s door jam on the driver’s side.

  Next, Pattee photographed the exterior, noting a scratch on the side. She dusted the exterior for fingerprints and found none. When she moved to the inside of the car, she was immediately struck by how clean it appeared. The cloth seats had recently been vacuumed and still bore the telltale marks of a vacuum attachment tool. She noticed a faint, pink stain in the middle of the front passenger seat. It looked as if someone had spilled a strawberry-flavored drink. She photographed every inch of the Explorer’s interior, including that stain. It was not unusual to find stains from spilled food and beverages in recovered cars.

  The floor was not nearly as clean as the seats. There was some light debris, apparently tracked in by shoes, but nothing out of the ordinary. She dusted the car’s interior, paying attention to the windows, door handles, and other smooth surfaces that are conducive to retaining fingerprints. The Explorer held very few contents. A parking permit for West Corporation was tucked into the visor on the driver’s side, and that, too, was dusted for prints. The glove compartment was empty, but the rear cargo area held jumper cables and empty grocery bags. Pattee painstakingly documented all of it.

  Sometimes she found cigarette butts or cups with straws that could be tested for DNA that might lead to the car thieves, but there was nothing like that here. She couldn’t find a single fingerprint on the car itself. The Explorer had been wiped clean. She found no fingerprints on any of the contents except for an empty mint container left in the cup holder between the front seats. After dusting the tin, she observed fingerprint ridge detail on the top of the container as two fingerprints emerged. She carefully placed lifting tape atop the prints, peeled the tape away, and secured it to lift cards that she labeled with the subject, date, and time.

  Pattee later used a magnifier to examine the prints to determine if there was enough ridge detail to warrant running them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). A national computerized database of fingerprints maintained by the Criminal Justice Information Services Division of the FBI, the AFIS contains the palm and or fingerprints of over fifty million subjects—people arrested for a variety of crimes but not necessarily convicted. With their distinctive patterns of arches, loops and whirls, fingerprints are unique to individuals, and prior to recent discoveries about DNA, were the most damning of all physical evidence.

  She had one viable print. She didn’t know the age or gender of the subject, information that helps narrow results in database searches. She scanned and entered the print into the system, but there was no match.

  With the processing of the Explorer complete, it was released to the Raneys. Nancy had never dealt with a stolen vehicle and didn’t know what to expect. “I remember looking inside and thinking, ‘Boy, this is clean!’ My daughter had a spotless house, but not so much her car.” It didn’t cross her mind that there could be a sinister reason for the car’s pristine appearance. She assumed it was standard procedure for county employees to clean recovered vehicles before returning them. She found it odd, however, that the car was empty. “There was absolutely nothing in it. There were no papers, no insurance, no registration, nothing in there.”

  Now that Cari wasn’t driving it, the Explorer would be used by Max who was taking Driver’s Ed and would turn sixteen this year. His mother had been so excited about fixing up the sporty Volkswagen for him. The 1984 Rabbit GTI now sat abandoned at Hyatt Tire, still far from roadworthy, but with unpaid bills for the work done.

  It’s always a shock to realize that life goes on when someone we love dies, that the Earth keeps spinning as it always has and always will. Those who grieved for Cari had no choice but to get up in the morning and face agonizing days, fraught with anxiety and uncertainty. They still had to go to work or school. They still had to be polite and smile at people and try to behave as if nothing had changed. They still had to pay bills, do housework or homework and then get up the next day and do it all again. Even Cari’s responsibilities had to be seen to. Nancy applied for and was awarded conservatorship over her daughter’s affairs. She took over her bills, managed her Rolling Hills Bank account, and filed her taxes.

  Nancy saw that West
Corp had deposited Cari’s last paycheck into her checking account, bringing her balance up to about $10,000. There had been no withdrawals, though someone from the bank had left a message about two transactions deemed suspicious because they strayed from Cari’s normal habits. Her debit card had been used twice in mid-November, once at Walmart and once at a dollar store, both in Omaha. When Cari didn’t respond to the alert, the bank froze her card. Nancy passed the information on to police.

  It was painful for Cari’s family to go to her house, so empty and cold and quiet. Nancy threw out the spoiled food in the refrigerator, and Maxwell packed up the rest of his clothes. They had the power shut off and made sure that the little house was buttoned up tight against the weather.

  * * *

  Dave continued to be bombarded by texts and emails, and the troublemaker continued to be fixated on Liz. On the twenty-eighth of January, he opened the nut’s latest email and read: You tell Liz to stay away from you, or I will come after her again . . . I don’t want to find out you two had sex. I better not find out you two are texting or calling each other, either, or I will go after her. If I find out someone else is around, I will go after them also. I am mainly after Liz. She ruined everything.

  Dave was not about to let the bully tell him what to do. If Liz was brave enough to keep seeing him, she was welcome to come around. The lady had guts, he realized. Twice in the month of February, she filed police reports about vandalism to her vehicle. The vandal struck again on the first of April—April Fool’s Day—and apparently used a key to scratch the words “Whore, stop seeing Dave” into the side of her car. Despite the constant threats and damage to her car, Liz didn’t abandon him. As promised, he gave Liz her day. He saw his kids on the weekends and on every Tuesday and Thursday. Monday and Friday were Dave’s days to do what he pleased after work. Wednesday night belong to Liz.