and his wife Kendra, an administrator for a public-school district, have three children and make their home in Omaha, where Dave Schneider was born and raised. His father worked in management in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning industry (HVAC), and his mother did clerical work for a grain company. They lived in a middle-class neighborhood in West Omaha where a good night’s sleep was never interrupted by gunfire.
“There was definitely a different world out there that I didn’t know about,” he stresses. “When I was working in North Omaha in the middle of the night, it would be quite common to hear gunshots go off.” He went to work for Omaha PD in 2005, patrolling a high-crime area and often saw the aftermath of violence, something he hadn’t planned on while earning his B.A. in Geography at the University of Nebraska. He played baseball there until he injured his shoulder and was admittedly uncertain about his goals. After graduation, he worked part-time at his old school, Omaha’s West Side High. He coached, worked security, and ran errands for the dean. The school resource officer encouraged him to take Omaha Police Department’s application exam. He followed his advice, aced the test, and after three years working patrol was promoted to detective. In the beginning he approached the job with the competitive spirit that had motivated him when playing sports. “I want to be the best. I want to solve the case. That’s how I went into it.” But his attitude evolved as he learned about the victims, and he realized, “This is somebody’s loved one.” He felt for the victims’ families. Cracking cases was no longer about ego. “You do everything you can to solve it for them.”
By the time a cold-case file makes it to Schneider’s desk, it’s been pored over and picked at and pretty much discarded. Some cases are so old that the detectives who first worked them are dead or retired, but because they carefully preserved evidence, Schneider can use new DNA technology to finally get justice.
When the Iowa team brought the Farver case to him, Detective Schneider was impressed. Despite their lack of experience with homicides, they were handling the case like pros. Schneider was immediately on board, and they worked together to plan their next steps. Schneider agreed that at least one of the confessor’s claims was true: I really did kill Cari, and I did it in her own car. Katie Pattee hadn’t found blood in the car, but she hadn’t been looking for evidence of a stabbing. Now, as she learned about the new suspicions, she suggested they remove the covers on the seats. If a significant amount of blood was shed by a driver or passenger, it would have seeped into the seats.
About two months had passed since Pattee’s last search of the vehicle. The SUV’s owner again allowed access, but it was broken down outside his parents’ home in Malvern. Doty and Pattee drove there on Thursday, February 18. Doty used wrenches to remove the front seats. They set the seats on a tarp, and when they peeled back the cloth cover on the driver’s seat, Pattee says, “I used Bluestar and sprayed the foam area underneath the cloth seat.” They saw nothing unusual, but then they peeled back the cover on the passenger seat. Doty will never forget the moment they saw the large red stain saturating the foam seat. Pattee sprayed Bluestar on it, and they were rewarded with an undeniable luminescing reaction.
Though the SUV’s owner had agreed to the search, investigators now secured a search warrant to make it official and had the Explorer towed to their headquarters. Somebody had bled profusely on the passenger seat. It was possible someone other than Cari had bled there, maybe before or after she had the car. Without proof it was her blood, the evidence was useless. They didn’t have her DNA profile for comparison but hoped her mother had saved a relic, perhaps a toothbrush or a hairbrush Cari had used.
Doty and Pattee went to see Nancy Raney the next day and learned most of Cari’s possessions were in a storage unit in Oakland, Iowa, a few miles from Macedonia. They drove Nancy there and watched as she picked through boxes until she found three hairbrushes with strands of her beautiful daughter’s hair caught up in the bristles, along with a headband with hair still clinging to it. The few strands of hair might be all that was left