her device’s IP address was tied to a remote computer.
By the time the investigation was done, Special Deputy Anthony Kava would put in over 3,000 unpaid hours, unraveling Liz’s web of deception as he tracked her Internet activity and sorted through over 20,000 emails and texts. Liz had dozens of email addresses via various servers, and this created a tremendous amount of work for him. While it takes minutes to create a fake email account, it takes hours to debunk it and trace it to its source.
Faced with a staggering mountain of data, Deputy Kava realized it was too much for his computer. “There’s no ‘Microsoft Homicide’ type product,” designed to sort a deluge of digital evidence. “Midway through the case, I built a new machine with sufficient capacity. I ended up creating a database from scratch and writing code to input the tens of thousands of emails, texts, social media logs, etc. into a system that I could query to find correlations between accounts, dates, IP addresses, and other details. I called the system DEX, as in ‘index,’ of course, but also a reference to Dexter.” It’s a deliciously ironic twist that a machine named for one of Liz’s favorite shows would assist in her downfall. Liz was captivated by Dexter, the Showtime series about the blood-spatter expert who worked both sides of the law, solving murders and killing people he deemed worthless.
Did Liz draw inspiration from Dexter? Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that in a case of “life imitating art” Liz’s actions echoed Lila’s, a character obsessed with Dexter, just as Liz was obsessed with Dave. In episodes that first aired in 2007, Lila, a dark-haired beauty who vaguely resembled Liz, set fire to her own loft to gain Dexter’s sympathy when he drifted away from her. Lila stalked Dexter, staged catastrophes to get his attention and attempted to frame people close to him for crimes they didn’t commit. Lila and Liz, and Dexter and Dave, even shared first name initials. Deputy Kava had no inkling that Liz was a Dexter fan when he custom designed the machine to aid in her demise. In early December 2015, Kava was still months away from breathing life into DEX and was just beginning to decipher data that Liz was certain she’d destroyed.
* * *
The first week of December had come and gone, and Cherokee realized it had been a while since she’d talked to Shanna. “When I don’t hear from her for a while, I text her and say, ‘Are you okay?’ If she doesn’t hear from me, she does the same thing. We would call it, ‘checking in with assholes,’” Cherokee says, explaining that it was a standing joke between them. She never expected Shanna to not be okay. Usually she’d text back and say she’d been busy. This time, however, Shanna had alarming news. Someone had shot her!
Cherokee rushed to Shanna’s house and found her propped up in a living room chair, cleaning her wound. “It was gross. She was pulling out gauze from the inside of it and putting in more gauze.” Cherokee listened to the terrifying story but found nothing unusual about the fact Shanna had visited the park at night. “She told me she and Dave got into an argument, so she was trying to clear her head, gather herself together.” Shanna seemed to be in a lot of pain, wincing as she shifted in her chair, and Cherokee’s heart went out to her as she asked, “Why would someone shoot you?”
It wasn’t a robbery, Shanna explained. And it wasn’t a predator planning to rape her. In fact, her attacker was a female. “All I saw was her shadow,” Shanna said. “I heard a female voice. She said to get on the ground, or she’d shoot me. I got down on the ground, and she shot me anyway!”
“Who would do something like that?”
“I can’t be certain,” Shanna said slowly. “But I think I recognized the voice. It sounded like Amy.”
“That crazy assed bitch!” Cherokee shuddered, picturing Shanna as her attacker’s shadow loomed over her. It was like a scene from a scary movie! Cherokee didn’t realize that Big Lake Park was not lit. At night, it was engulfed in one big shadow, and there was no way for a single shadow to emerge.
* * *
When Cari’s car was discovered in January 2013, crime scene technician Katie Pattee was instructed to process it as a recovered stolen vehicle. Now, investigators asked her to take another look.