A Tangled Web Read online

  With this story, I hope to warn readers about crimes my great-grandfather could not have imagined as he embarked upon his police career over a century ago. In his pre-computer world, cyber stalkers did not yet exist. Murderers have not changed since the 1920s when he began arresting them. They remain as cold-hearted as they were in the 1960s when my mother first began to write about them. Killers have not changed, but their methods have. They now have an arsenal of electronic devices they can use to dupe us, but we can outsmart them by learning their tricks.

  INTRODUCTION

  Oh, what a tangled web we weave,

  when first we practice to deceive.

  —SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771–1832),

  SCOTTISH NOVELIST, PLAYWRIGHT,

  AND POET

  A SPIDER, SOME BELIEVE, cannot be trapped in its own web. While rare, a careless spider can be caught in the net it constructed to capture prey. The fact it happens so seldom is a mystery that scientists have yet to solve. One theory suggests that the nimble creatures avoid becoming tangled in their webs by dancing lightly across the sticky strands with only the hairs on the tips of their legs making contact with their clever traps.

  While A Tangled Web is not the story of an actual spider’s web, it does follow the wicked journey of a predator who showed no more compassion for victims than a spider shows for the hapless fly caught in its web. The predator in this account used a different kind of web to commit cruel crimes. The World Wide Web! The majority of us using the Web today are still in awe of the fact that billions of people around the globe have the ability to connect instantaneously with a soft tap of a finger on a computer keyboard—that we can access an electronic system interlinking millions of information venues sooner than we can inhale our next breath.

  Invented in 1989, the Web has become an integral part of most Americans’ lives in only the last two decades. As of this writing, it is still so new that most of us are too naïve to realize the extent of the myriad ways it can be used to set traps designed to deceive us. We often fail to recognize the predators that prowl there, intent upon stealing our money and sometimes our lives. The killer in A Tangled Web developed an expertise in the electronic world and used it to assist in not only committing crimes, but in the concealment of them. Like the rare spider caught in its own web, the human counterpart in this tragedy spun deceptions so complex that they eventually became trapped in a web of their own making. Unfortunately, it was not before blood was shed and many hearts were broken.

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN CHEROKEE MONTOYA HEARD that her friend had been shot, she was stunned. The violence occurred on December 5, 2015. The 911 operator took the call at 6:41 P.M., and she soon dispatched emergency vehicles to the scene, Big Lake Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

  Most people called Shanna Elizabeth Golyar by her nickname, Liz, but to Cherokee she had always been Shanna. Cherokee was not surprised to hear that Shanna had gone alone to a deserted park after dark. “She was trying to clear her head—trying to gather herself together. It’s what she usually did, quite often. She would just go somewhere silent, so she could think.”

  Cherokee is still unclear about what occurred that night. “I don’t have all the facts,” she admits, and there is a hint of bitterness in her voice as she describes what happened, exactly as it was told to her. “She saw the shadow first. They told her to get on the ground. If she didn’t do it, they were going to shoot her,” she explains, adding that Shanna got down on the cold ground as instructed. “They shot her anyway.”

  Cherokee and Shanna had met while working in a distribution warehouse about a year earlier in Omaha, Nebraska, and had hit it off immediately. Though Shanna was about a decade older than Cherokee, they seemed to have a lot in common. Both were mothers, and she noted that Shanna appeared to work as hard as she did. “We met, and we bonded really quickly. We just started hanging out. She’d come over and watch my kids, and I’d watch her kids.”

  She has no problem recalling the good times, but Cherokee is still bewildered by the shooting and the craziness that led up to it. “I don’t watch the news,” she confides. No one can blame her for being confused about the dark sequence of events that led to crimes so complex that they confounded seasoned detectives. And no one can blame her for turning away from the news. Friends had told her bits and pieces, and that was upsetting enough, especially because Cherokee blames herself. “I didn’t stop it. I didn’t see it. I could have said something . . .” Her voice trails off, as she shakes her head.

  In reality, there was nothing she could have done to prevent the horror that tiptoed so quietly into the lives it ruined that no one saw it coming. It, in fact, began long before Cherokee entered the picture.

  * * *

  Dave Kroupa liked women. He made no secret about that, and he made no apologies. He was upfront with every woman he met. He was not looking for a commitment, and he made no promises to the contrary.

  He had, after all, recently ended a twelve-year relationship with Amy Flora, the mother of his two children, and he was just getting used to being on his own again. Both Dave and Amy had tried very hard to make it work, to hold their family together for the kids’ sake. In the end, they came to the painful realization that they just weren’t meant to be together. They agreed to remain friends and to work together to make the transition as easy as possible on the children.

  The summer of 2012, Dave was still smarting from the breakup and a little bit lonely. He was glad to have regular visits with his kids, but he was otherwise alone. He lived in a barebones Omaha apartment in a huge complex near Hyatt Tire, the shop he managed. At age thirty-four, he was healthy, attractive, and faced years of empty nights if he didn’t make an effort to socialize. He realized very quickly that it wasn’t hard to meet women. They were as close as his laptop computer, and with the press of a key, he could bring up the profiles of hundreds of attractive females who were hoping for friendship and romance.

  Most computer-savvy singles looking for companionship are aware of the many dating websites they can join. Match.com, Coffee Meets Bagel, OKCupid, eHarmony, Tinder, and Plenty of Fish, are among the more popular sites where those seeking romance can view the profiles of thousands of others looking for the same.

  Dave was drawn to Plenty of Fish, a website claiming to be the largest dating venue in the world. Founded in 2003, the site boasts 80 million members, with 14 million daily visitors, 60,000 new people joining each day, and over a billion messages exchanged between singles each month. A basic membership is free, and visitors to the site can search for new friends by gender, age, ethnicity, and location, and then scroll through the results like a kid leafing through a toy catalogue, though no one is for sale, of course, and the interest must be mutual before arrangements for dates are made.

  Each profile features a photograph, a nickname, and whatever general information the poster is willing to share such as: Nonsmoker with average body type, born under the sign of Gemini, Caucasian, no kids, works in the service industry or Curvy single mother, loves to dance and eat chocolate, just looking to have some fun on Friday nights when the ex has the kids.

  As with any dating website, there are risks. There is no guarantee that the poster’s information is accurate. There is no guarantee that the attractive, seemingly charming individual with the enticing description is not a dangerous felon. While the majority of people seeking dates are harmless, not everyone is truthful. Most of the fibs are benign—a few years or pounds shaved off or a photo that was taken last century represented as recent. Sometimes those trolling for romance are married, pretending to be unattached.

  One dissatisfied member of Plenty of Fish recently lashed out online, complaining, “I was guaranteed a single man. The company did not screen this person well! I am very angry! This site needs to do better!” The grumbler clearly felt betrayed, but she was naïve to think that website managers had the capability to screen out liars. It is simply not possible to vet 60,000 new members each day. Even if thous
ands of website employees worked around the clock to try to verify information supplied by members, they would fall short. It is far too easy to create fake profiles in online venues.

  Females are particularly vulnerable when it comes to dating strangers met online. Many women refuse to meet a first date anywhere but a public place, and some even snap photos of the license plates on the cars of their new beaus, sending the images via text to friends, a somewhat morbid precaution should they go missing. Dave Kroupa understood why women were cautious. He couldn’t really blame them. He had heard the news stories about women attacked by men they met online. He didn’t argue when the women he was interested in suggested coffee in a public place for their first dates.

  It did not occur to Dave that online dating could be hazardous for him. A former member of the National Guard, he could take care of himself. “I don’t think of myself as really bad ass. But I’m not going to hide under a rock. You do what you do, and hopefully it turns out alright.”

  Dave knew some of the ladies he chatted with had jealous ex-boyfriends. Were any of these men so possessive that they would resort to violence to eliminate the competition? It was not something he worried about. He saw nothing risky about online flirting.

  For every online dating horror story, there are thousands of romantic connections so successful they result in marriage. According to a June 2013 article in the New York Daily News, a study by researchers working with Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) found that more than one-third of marriages in the U.S. began with online dating. But marriage was the furthest thing from Dave’s mind. “I wanted to have a little fun,” he confides. “I did my thirteen, fourteen years. I was never married, but it was as good as. We had the house, and the two kids, and the white picket fence.”

  Few breakups are not painful, and Dave had barely begun to process the end of his relationship when he made the decision to start dating. He wanted to cut loose and enjoy the company of like-minded women. He found lots of profiles for attractive women on the Plenty of Fish website, and he dated his share of them. Sue. Pam. Joanne. Kelly . . .

  Not in his worst nightmares could Dave have imagined there would come a day when an attorney in a murder trial would rattle off the names of the women he had met that summer of 2012.

  Mary. Cathy. Joyce. Beth. Margaret. Sandra . . .

  If the chemistry was there, and the woman was willing, Dave was more than happy to explore a sexual relationship, but he had standards. “I wouldn’t say I have exceptionally high morals. I’m not against hooking up or booty calls, but I like to know the woman.” Not everyone subscribing to online dating sites has manners, he notes. “A couple of times I responded to somebody I met online, went over to her house, and immediately she was jumping on me. That’s a little off-putting for me. I’m crazy. I’m kinky. But I’m not that wild.”

  Jenna. Diane. Megan. June. Lori. Tracy . . .

  When the names are read from a list, it seems like Dave has had a lot of dates, but it was not as if he had sex with all of them. In fact, in most cases it was only a coffee date. The chemistry just wasn’t there, and they quickly parted.

  Females are drawn to Dave. He exudes the kind of masculine confidence that comes with humility. At his core—even if he does not consciously recognize it—he is so sure of who he is that he has no need for arrogance, and the self-effacing comments come easily. He is attractive with or without the beard he sometimes allows to grow. With his intense blue eyes and the kind of wavy, blond hair that women are tempted to rake their fingers through, he gets his share of looks from the ladies, but it may be his laugh that is most endearing. He likes to have fun, and his laugh is rich and warm and frequent.

  While Dave had a healthy sex drive, he wasn’t seeking casual sex with a large number of women or a monogamous relationship. He was looking for something somewhere in between. Ideally, he would date several women he enjoyed spending time with, and none of them would put demands on him. They, too, would be as free as he was, and it would be none of his business what they did when they weren’t with him. Unfortunately, few women seemed to be seeking this type of arrangement.

  Dave did not want to hurt anyone, and he made it clear to the females he met that he was not looking for a commitment. Despite the fact he tried to be careful not to hurt the ladies’ feelings, sometimes they got hurt anyway. He hated it when they cried. He was upfront about his desire to maintain his bachelor status, and most of the women had nodded and smiled, seeming to understand when he laid down the rules. But when he pulled away after a few dates, they were too often offended. Did they think he was playing hard to get when he insisted he wasn’t looking for a commitment? Did they think he was playing a game? Dave was not playing a game. But someone else was.

  A very dangerous game, indeed.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DAVID ALEXANDER KROUPA was born on October 9, 1976, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, the first child of Tom and Trish Kroupa. As he gulped in his first breath of air, news of Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford’s debates was dominating headlines. The presidential candidates accused each other of “telling untruths,” in what by today’s standards would be considered gentlemanly allegations but were seen as controversial enough to be newsworthy at the time. Headlines were also buzzing with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to reinstate the death penalty after a nine-year nationwide ban. Gary Mark Gilmore, convicted of killing motel manager Ben Bushnell in Provo, Utah, was the first death row inmate to trudge to his doom after the moratorium was lifted. He faced a firing squad in Provo twelve weeks later.

  But none of the controversies or evils in the world touched young David’s life. He was the eldest of three boys. Brother Adam was born in 1978, followed by Max in 1983. “We had a Leave it to Beaver family,” Dave remarks, referencing the Cleavers, the fictitious squeaky-clean family in the popular television drama that debuted in 1957. The Kroupa family, however, was not only formed a whole generation after the Cleavers, they were also far more devoted to their religion than the TV family who were vague about their beliefs. “We grew up going to church. Southern Baptist. We went three times a week, once on Wednesday and twice on Sunday.”

  The Southern Baptist Church is considered to be much more strict than the Baptist Church, and followers believe that each word in the Bible is the truth, while Baptists allow for looser interpretations. Their many differences include their stance on female clergy. The Baptists allow it, but Southern Baptists forbid it. Leaders of both denominations encourage old-fashioned family values, and neither is a fan of divorce or promiscuity. Southern Baptist ministers often preach the virtues of marriage and monogamy, but despite the indoctrination in their formative years, neither Dave nor his brothers embraced it. “My brothers never married, and I’m the only one who had kids.”

  Their parents, however, have been happily married for over forty-five years. Tom and Trish worked hard to give their boys everything they needed. “My father worked at a printing company for forty years, and my mother was a county veteran-service officer for thirty-seven years,” says Dave, explaining that she processed documents to help veterans obtain their benefits.

  The Kroupa home was inviting with its shuttered windows, peaked roof, and a big backyard for the boys to play in. It sat on a quiet, gently curving street where the sidewalks were shaded by American elms, hackberry, and sycamore trees. Yards were kept up in the family-oriented neighborhood where gardens bloomed in the summertime with bright red and yellow daylilies. Jack-o’-lanterns grinned from the porches in October, and nearly every house on the block wore strands of twinkling lights in December. Neighbors knew each other’s names, and they smiled and waved to each other.

  It was an innocent era in Dave’s life, one that seems almost surreal when he looks back on it from the perspective of someone exposed to an evil he could not have imagined as a kid. The biggest crime to touch his life had been the theft of his father’s fishing tackle. Back then the Kroupa family looked forward to warm days when th
ey could take their sixteen-foot boat out on one of the area’s many lakes. Between fishing trips, the boat was parked in front of their home. As the family slept one night, someone climbed onto their boat and stole the fishing tackle. It certainly wasn’t a violent crime, and it wasn’t even a mystery. The thief was a kid from down the street “who was always in trouble.”

  “I grew up in the perfect household.” Dave is grateful for the good times and his idyllic childhood. His parents had a harmonious marriage, and the brothers usually got along pretty well with each other, too. His parents not only made their sons feel secure, they also encouraged their interests.

  Dave gravitated toward sports, playing football on a City League team. “I was a football jock up until my freshman year of high school. I was good enough, but I wasn’t the fastest or the biggest or the smartest. I got plenty of trophies, but they hand out trophies to everybody. One year we won the championship. We beat the hell out of a team from Minneapolis. Some fancy team. Must have been seventh grade.”