“This time they wanted it to be processed to see if we could locate some latent blood inside of the vehicle,” explains Pattee. “This time, specifically, in that rear cargo area.”
The Explorer had been sold, and the new owner lived in Malvern, Iowa, about a thirty-mile drive southeast from Council Bluffs, but he granted permission, so Avis and Doty picked up the car and brought it the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, December 8, 2015. The first time Pattee had seen the Explorer, nearly three years earlier, it had been exceptionally clean, but now the opposite was true. The car’s new owner had dogs, and they’d tracked in mud and shed so much that everything was coated with fur. Pattee removed the vehicle’s contents and photographed both the exterior and interior. She sprayed every accessible inch of the interior with Bluestar, a blood detecting chemical reagent. “When Bluestar indicates a positive reaction for blood, it will luminesce a blue color.” She dimmed the lights to observe the results. In the cargo area, near the latch, she spotted an eerie blue glow. “That reaction ended up being a false positive. I located some small copper wires in that area. Bluestar will have a false positive reaction with copper.” No new evidence was discovered, and the SUV was released back to its owner.
While Sheriff’s Office detectives worked the Farver case, CB Police investigated the shooting. On the same day Pattee reexamined Cari’s Explorer, Liz agreed to go back to Big Lake Park to help with the CB Police probe.
Detectives Kuhlmann and Harris drove her to the park. They pulled into the parking lot, stopping where her car had parked on Saturday night. It was easy to find the spot. The pavement was stained with her blood, a stain that would remain for years to come. Liz told them she’d left her phone in the car when she’d ventured into the darkness and had had to hobble all the way back to her Toyota to call for help.
Detective Roberts and Investigator Salter soon arrived, armed with a metal detector. They hoped to find projectiles, casings or maybe even the weapon itself if it had been discarded in the park. In order to make the ordeal easier on the injured woman, Kuhlmann had parked in the lot closest to the bench where she’d told Burns she’d been shot. That bench was about 100 yards away, and Liz limped in that direction, but she surprised them when she passed it and led them to the other side of the lake. There was a bench there, too, and another parking lot. They scoured the area but found nothing. There were no projectiles, no casings, and no weapons.
Liz’s story shifted, changing a little with each telling. In some versions, she’d spotted people on the trail before her attacker appeared. In one version, she’d seen a truck in the parking lot, and in yet another, it was too dark to see other vehicles. Sometimes she indicated she’d been shot on the bench, and other times claimed she’d been on the ground. In one telling, she’d seen Amy running away, and in another, she’d not actually seen anyone but had heard a familiar female voice, coldly ordering her to get down on the ground.
Both Council Bluffs PD and the Pott County Sherriff investigators suspected Liz had shot herself. “We were concerned for Amy Flora’s safety at this point,” Doty emphasizes. A blond wig had been found in the backseat of Liz’s car on the night of the shooting. They realized the wig could be a disguise, part of an abandoned scheme to shoot Amy. Had her original plan been thwarted? Had she shot herself out of desperation because, for whatever reason, her murder plot had gone awry?
Amy was still in the crosshairs of Liz’s wrath, and police made a plan to protect her. A warrant allowed them to place a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker on Liz’s vehicle. They covertly secured the magnetized tracker to the underside of her car on December 11. Doty explains, “With the GPS program, we put a geofence around Amy’s apartment complex, so if Shanna’s vehicle entered that complex, we’d get text notifications.”
The tracker alerted them many times each day. Liz usually looped through Amy’s parking lot and left. The safety plan counted on the CB Police. If Liz should pause for “an extended period of time” near Amy’s apartment, officers would rush to the scene. Meanwhile, Amy was going about her business,