Dave and Mason. When Mason learned to talk, he called his siblings’ father, “My Dave.” The little boy was a charmer, and Dave was fond of him.
“We’d always had Christmas at my house,” Amy explains. “But that year Dave wanted to do it at his place. The little guy and I went over there, and the kids were waiting for us. We were all having a good time, the kids were opening presents and Mason was checking out everybody’s stuff. And then Liz came walking in the door.”
Her visit was unannounced, and she hadn’t bothered to knock. Like Dr. Seuss’s Grinch who stole Christmas, Liz seemed determined to destroy the holiday. Amy cringed as Liz stomped in. “You could just feel the negativity as soon as she got there. She took Dave into the dining room, and I could hear that she was angry that I was there.” Dave spoke in a subdued tone, trying to keep the argument quiet. Liz sounded mad, her voice rising as she spoke Amy’s name.
“It was very uncomfortable,” Amy recalls. “I don’t like confrontation, and it was Christmas!” Amy scooped up a protesting Mason. “I told the kids I’d see them when he brought them home later, and I left.” They were disappointed to see their mom leave, but Amy knew if she stayed that Liz’s tantrums would ruin what was left of the day. Though Liz had never heard of her Grandfather Fabian or his tirades, she continued his tradition of ruining Christmas for children. Just as Fabian had broken his wife’s nose in a tantrum over dolls more than half a century earlier, Liz, too, was behaving badly, though no blood was spilled on that day.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
AFTER OVER TWO YEARS of harassment from the stalker, Dave moved across the river to a place he hoped his tormentor wouldn’t find him. On February 1, 2015, he settled into his new apartment in Downtown Council Bluffs, near historic Bayliss Park. He lived closer to his kids now, too, and looked forward to seeing them more often. Dave’s stalker, of course, knew exactly where to find him, because he had given her his address. Dave was not stupid. And neither were the many other people Liz had fooled. Many, many intelligent people—mostly males—had been tricked by Liz. Some were professionals who dealt with criminals on a daily basis, but Liz managed to thoroughly manipulate them, too.
How is it possible that Liz got away with murder for so long? Some people who’ve read the news stories are bewildered by that, assuming that her crime was so obvious that they could have solved it, even if they’ve had no training in law enforcement. The truth is that the Golyar case is one of the most complex and confusing crimes to ever challenge detectives. It might have gone unsolved if not for those who spent months painstakingly untangling the killer’s snarled web. They sorted out the facts and presented them in an exquisitely linear fashion that made sense out of nonsense. This was done first by the investigators who captured her, then by the prosecutors who convicted her, and finally by the media who parroted the professionals who worked so hard to get justice.
By the time the case was served up in a neat package for public consumption, the facts were so well organized that it appears far simpler than it actually was. Online chatter unfairly criticized the first round of investigators for being fooled by a killer. But those investigators reacted as probably 99 percent of their peers would have if confronted with the same crazy illusion, and they shouldn’t be faulted for that. They didn’t solve the case, but they did collect and preserve valuable evidence. This initial group of investigators did exactly what was expected of them. The second wave of investigators, however, did more than what was expected—much, much more! And it is this group that should be singled out as extraordinary.
In order to get justice for Cari Farver, they worked thousands of hours without pay, sacrificed important relationships and even risked their health. While several brilliant people worked endless hours to nab the killer, this complex endeavor called for so much more than brains and hard work. The case could not have been solved without vision, creativity, and heart. It took vision to see the truth that so many others had missed, creativity to devise traps to trip up the predator, and heart to feed the passion required to see a difficult case