park on nearby North 8th Street were startled by the jarring clatter of the chopper and its glaring spotlight as it scoured the park from above. For just a flash of a second, one passerby admits, he mistook it for a UFO and feared aliens had returned to Big Lake Park. Some Council Bluffs’ residents had been frightened back in 1977 when they read the newspaper reports on the bizarre thing that had burst into flames over the park. Now, news of the shooting was about to make local headlines, and some people would once again be wary of visiting the beautiful park.
There was no sign of the attacker, and it didn’t seem possible that the shooter could have fled on foot and exited the park before the Able-1 team swept in. The helicopter crew aimed their infrared camera at the dark park below. The device detects body heat, and sure enough, they got a hit. They radioed the location to the team on the ground, and officers rushed to the scene with guns drawn but encountered only startled homeless people, camping in a tent they’d pitched near the park. The camera detected no other warm bodies, no one trying to flee. It seemed the shooter had melted into the shadows.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
IT WAS ABOUT 7 P.M., and Amy was still sitting on her couch, playing games on her iPad, when she was startled by noises outside. It sounded like someone was bumping up against her door. “Whose there?” she called out.
“Open up! Police!”
She opened the door and was stunned to see three police officers with guns aimed at her. “I was terrified!” she confides. “One of them told me that Shanna Golyar had been shot, and it took me a minute to realize who that was. I knew her by Liz, but I’d heard she went by Shanna.” Once she realized who the cops were referring to, Amy had just one question, “Is she all right?” It was the most frightening moment of Amy’s life, but her first concern was for the woman who’d been making her life miserable.
The cops told Amy that Shanna was alive, and what they told her next hit her like a bucket of ice cubes. “She said you did it!”
If Amy hadn’t been so terrified, she might have laughed. She hated guns! The idea of her shooting anyone was ridiculous. “I was in shock,” she remembers. “I didn’t expect to open my door and have police there with guns pointed at me.” She burst into tears as the officers scrutinized her.
“It doesn’t look like you just shot someone,” one of them said.
“Of course, I didn’t!” Amy exclaimed, stressing she’d been home for hours. “My son just woke up from his nap!”
They asked if they could look around, and Amy stepped aside. “Do whatever you have to do,” she said. The sooner this nightmare was over, the better.
* * *
Council Bluffs PD Detective Matthew Kuhlmann interviewed Liz at Mercy Hospital. She appeared drawn, her face pale against her long black hair, splayed out on her pillow. The bullet had gone straight through her thigh. She was lucky it had missed major arteries and bone. Even so, Liz was in pain. Shaken but coherent, she told him she’d been nervous earlier that night when she noticed a silver car parked near her house. It looked like Amy Flora’s car, but by the time she got outside for a closer look, it had vanished. The whole story came pouring out—the years she’d suffered as the stalker tried to destroy her, the constant threats, the vandalism, the arson, Dave’s stolen gun, and now this.
Asked if they could search her car, Liz gladly signed a waiver. While still at the hospital, Kuhlmann got a call from Officer Jarzynka, one of the officers who’d confronted Amy. “He advised me that it didn’t appear she was involved, and I mentioned that to Liz.”
“Well,” Liz told him. “It sounded like her.”
* * *
When Liz called Garret to tell him she’d been shot, he was shocked. How did that happen on a trip to Walmart? She asked him to come to the hospital, but he wasn’t about to leave her kids alone. He didn’t know what kind of trouble Liz had gotten herself into but suspected the shooting hadn’t been random. What if the shooter came to the house? Garret called Dirk, who was understandably alarmed and rushed over to get the kids.
At the hospital, Garret “walked in and saw Liz there, and one