of the first things I said was, ‘Does this have something do with the Dave and Cari thing?’ She started bawling. She pulled out some real tears.” He’d hit a nerve. Liz was on the verge of hysteria, so he dropped the topic. “I didn’t want a scene at the hospital.” But he had to know why she went to the park at night. “I asked her, ‘What the hell were you doing there?’ It’s not a place people go at night!” Liz had no reasonable answers and was getting groggy from the pain medicine. She asked him to retrieve her car and bring her some things from home.
He figured Liz had gotten “mixed up with something and pissed somebody off.” He’d give her time to heal, but Liz had to go. As he gathered the items she’d asked for, he found something he hadn’t expected to see again, something that strengthened his resolve to make a clean break. Liz wanted her Samsung Tablet to play games on, and he found that quickly, but the charger was missing. He descended into her unkempt quarters to search for it. When he peered under her bed, he was stunned to see his Gateway laptop that had been stolen in the burglary two years earlier. He still had the box with the serial numbers printed on it and admits he opted for “a passive-aggressive” approach rather than a confrontation. He left the box next to the laptop where Liz would see it. “Of course, she didn’t find it till she got home, and then I got a text. She said, ‘Oh, damn, sorry. I guess I’m out five hundred bucks.’” She wanted him to believe that in an incredible coincidence she’d purchased his stolen laptop from a pawnshop. He knew it was a lie. Police had given the computer’s serial number to the pawnshops, and they were required to report known stolen items.
Garret had begun to suspect Liz was behind the burglary when he’d noticed her wearing Gabe’s distinctive Notre Dame sweatshirt. He’d had a chance to examine it when he’d found it crumpled on the bathroom floor. He showed it to Gabe, who instantly recognized it. While a missing sweatshirt could be explained away as a borrowed item, there was no good argument for why his stolen laptop had materialized beneath her bed, though she’d made a feeble effort with the pawnshop story.
Dave Kroupa was just as shocked as Garret to learn Liz had been shot. “It was awkward because we were done, and I didn’t have any desire to rekindle that, but I also didn’t want to say, ‘Oh, that sucks you got shot. I don’t care. Tell somebody who cares,’ so I went down to see her.” Looking back on that visit, he doesn’t remember if Liz told him Amy was the shooter. “If she did tell me, I absolutely would not have believed it.” Amy was kind and gentle, and she hated guns! The whole incident had left Amy thoroughly rattled. “Amy was pissed and scared. Probably more so than I’d ever seen her before.”
If the most frightening moment of Amy’s life was opening her door to find three cops with guns pointed at her, the second scariest was just hours later. Police asked Amy to take a lie-detector test, and she agreed. She had nothing to hide and wanted to cooperate. It didn’t occur to her that she could flunk the test!
She was shaken when the examiner said she’d failed. He angrily confronted her, pounding his fist on the desk, shouting, “We know you shot her!” Amy was terrified, not for herself, but for her kids. If she went to prison, they would grow up without a mother. She knew what that was like, and she’d vowed to always be there for her children.
Amy had assumed, as most people do, that the test results would be accurate and prove her innocence. But the polygraph, often referred to as a lie-detector test, can’t really confirm whether or not a person is lying. The machine measures physiological reactions such as blood pressure, perspiration, and breathing rate, responses that are heightened under stress, and the assumption is that lying causes stress. While that is usually true, just taking the test can make some people so nervous they fail.
According to a September, 2018, CNN report, the National Polygraph Association (NPA) claims that polygraph results are accurate 87 percent of the time when examiners follow proper procedures. Critics insist that number is too