clear.
Dave immediately moved in with Amy, just as the investigators had hoped. It was part of their strategy to drive their suspect to the edge of despair. If the plan worked, Liz would come unglued. She’d be so desperate to get rid of Amy that she’d reveal incriminating clues. Dave had no idea he’d been manipulated by detectives. The police were watching over Amy and didn’t need his help. They’d been honest when they said Liz was dangerous but had twisted the truth when they said he needed to move in with Amy to protect her. While it might seem like a dirty trick to deceive an innocent person, their motives were pure. Amy was not at risk at the moment, but ultimately, she would be if Liz remained on the loose. When Dave moved in with Amy, it was to protect her, even if it wasn’t in the way he believed.
The detectives realized their strategy had worked when an enraged Liz called Doty on February 1, 2016. Half sobbing, she cried, “Looks like the only person that benefitted was her! So, she gets to shoot somebody, and then she gets to kill another person! And then she gets to move in with Dave, and she gets to be free, and you guys aren’t arresting her!”
“I’m sorry,” said Doty, though he really didn’t sound very sorry. He explained that he needed more specific information in order to build a case against Amy. “It’s really tough right now, because Amy’s not really talking,” he stressed.
If the dumb cop could not build a case from everything Liz had sent them, she would just have to make it easier for him. Doty wanted Amy to talk? She’d talk all right! “Amy” would talk her way right into a cold, gray prison cell and Liz would do a celebratory jig as the doors clanged shut behind her. She rolled up her sleeves, prepared to write a confession that would leave no doubt Amy was the killer.
She decided that Doty would be more impressed by “Amy’s” confessions if he discovered them himself. Later that day, she dropped by his office to offer access to her Google account, explaining it was too much trouble to forward Amy’s emails. Liz gave Doty her password, and he began to monitor her emails.
Within hours, more confessions from “Amy” appeared. Some of it sounded like pure fantasy, but a few details were chillingly accurate. The killer described Cari’s tattoos, including a yin-yang image on her thigh. While Cari’s missing person flyer indicated she had four tattoos, the yin yang symbol was not mentioned. In fact, investigators were unaware of it until they read about it in the “Amy” impostor email, penned by Liz. Cari’s family verified that she did indeed have a yin-yang tattoo, but it was in a private area, and no photos of the tattoo had been posted on the web, and no posts referenced it. Anthony Kava thoroughly searched the Internet to rule out the possibility that the letter writer could have learned about the tattoo in an innocent way. He concluded that only someone who’d come in close contact with Cari would know about it. The emails also described the inside of Cari’s home—the small, all-white bathroom, the leather couch and loveseat, and the wooden bedroom furniture. Doty knew the description was accurate because he’d seen the photos Phyllips had taken.
“I noticed several consistencies in the emails after reviewing them all,” Detective Doty recalls. “Cari was stabbed in the chest or the stomach area, the incident happened in her vehicle, the body was burned, it was disposed of in the garbage, the vehicle was cleaned after the fact, the vehicle was returned to Dave’s apartment, the perpetrator posed as Cari after the fact, she contacted Cari’s mother after the fact, she went to Cari’s residence and took some of her possessions.”
As more details came to light, the investigators realized that the murder had probably occurred in Omaha. That meant it was under the jurisdiction of Douglas County, Nebraska, and couldn’t be prosecuted without cooperation from their friends across the river. On February 10, 2016, Deputy Kava and Detectives Avis and Doty gathered at the Omaha Police Department’s Homicide Unit to brief Detective Dave Schneider.
A member of OPD’s cold-case squad, Schneider is investigating three to four dozen murders at any given time and doesn’t mind admitting they sometimes “move me to emotion.” He feels special empathy for parents of victims, maybe because he’s a father himself. He