Detective Jim Doty always knew he wanted to work in a helping field. The Council Bluffs native graduated from York College with a Bachelor’s in Psychology and was employed as a counselor in a group home for troubled children when he heard Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office was hiring. He applied on a lark and wasn’t expecting a written test. Applicants were presented with various scenarios that could arise on patrol and asked how they’d respond. He must have done well, because he was invited in for an interview. Two months later, “They called and said, ‘We’ve got one spot, and we want to give it to you.’”
He hesitated. “I don’t really know what you guys do,” he admitted and asked if he could shadow a deputy before accepting the position. But they needed someone immediately, so he had to pass. He later signed up to go on a ride-along with a patrol deputy and realized “I could still help people like I wanted to as a mental health counselor, but I didn’t have the monotony of doing the same thing every day.” A few months later, in August 2007, another position opened up, and he went to work as a deputy.
Ryan Avis also went into law enforcement because he wanted to help, though his path was more treacherous than Doty’s. Avis’s parents struggled with drug addiction and ran with a dangerous crowd. “I had a really rough childhood. I saw a lot of things that most people don’t see in their whole life before the age of ten. I never had good encounters with police when I was a kid because they would arrest my parents, and I went to that place where he worked,” he says, nodding toward Doty. “That group home—that’s where I would go for a night or two because I had no one to care for me.”
The police he encountered as a boy were cold and indifferent. “I grew up with disdain toward police. They’d never helped me out.” Born in Houston, Texas, Avis moved to Iowa with his family when he was four. Soon after, his parents divorced, his father overcame his heroin addiction and got custody of Ryan and his sister. The fact he survived “is proof enough of a higher power,” says Avis. He lived in Treynor, Iowa, throughout most of his childhood. Morningside College in Sioux City offered him a scholarship when he was recruited to play football. Later, he went to Western, working to pay for school.
He was employed as a guard at the Pott County Jail for about a year and a half and went to work as a road patrol deputy in March 2008. He joined the Investigation Unit in May 2014 and was promoted to corporal in the spring of 2015, around the time Randal Phyllips was promoted to sergeant. Detectives Avis and Doty had heard “water-cooler talk” about the Farver case. They were intrigued by the peculiar mystery, and they asked to have the case reassigned to them. Sergeant Phyllips gladly handed over his case file.
When they teamed up to investigate the disappearance of Cari Farver, Doty and Avis devised a unique strategy to avoid tunnel vision. They approached the case from opposite angles. Avis worked it as if Cari were alive. Doty worked it as if she were dead. “We started from scratch,” notes Avis. But they found nothing to suggest Cari was alive. She’d dropped out of the lives of her dying father, her teenage son, and everyone else who loved her. No one had seen or talked to her for two-and-a-half years. She had abandoned her house, her car, and all of her possessions. She had not withdrawn money from her bank or used her credit or debit cards. It appeared they were investigating a homicide.
If Cari was deceased, then who was sending messages in her name? Only the killer would have a motive to make it appear Cari was alive, but it was an unusual scheme. It would have made more sense for the culprit to distance themselves from the whole situation. Why in the world would they impersonate their victim for over three years? One thing was clear. This was not a typical homicide, and the killer was not a typical suspect.
When it comes to female victims, 58 percent of the time the killer is either an intimate partner or a family member, according to a 2018 global study published by the United Nations Office of Drugs