he added that he was off work because of her, she snapped, “Don’t blame me for your problems!”
She was surprised to learn he still had the pets. She seemed unable to grasp the idea he’d grown attached to them. It was the last time she contacted him. Though both Garret and Dave had dumped her, Liz’s dance card was full. Cherokee recalled a couple of young guys Liz dated. “She got together with Charlie for a little bit. He was a younger kid. He just wanted to get laid.” Both guys were in their early twenties, and Liz worked with one of them at the pet food company.
While Liz often pretended to be monogamous, she usually had many boyfriends. Even as she’d begged Dave for the thirty-day commitment in October 2012, she was sleeping with two other guys. There was Garret, of course, and there was also Fred. Investigators learned about him after downloading her phone. Liz had spent the weekend with Fred, just a few days before Cari vanished. She had gone out of her mind with jealousy over Cari, and all the while, Liz had multiple sex partners. Fred wasn’t the only surprise detectives discovered in the phone data. As if tormenting all of Cari and Dave’s friends and relatives wasn’t enough, Liz had also broken the heart of an Omaha woman. To this day, Sandra is unaware that “the guy” she’d exchanged love letters with for eight months was actually Liz.
Investigators aren’t sure if they spoke, but if they did, Liz would have used a voice deepening app. Avis felt horrible for the cat-phished lady because “They even said ‘I love you,’ to each other.” Liz and Sandra exchanged nude photos, but Liz, of course, didn’t send photos of herself. The images of the naked man were either random photos she’d pulled off the web or pictures of one of her lovers.
Sandra was a single mom in her mid-thirties, eager to settle down and believed she’d found the man of her dreams. Then one day, Liz simply vanished from her life with no explanation. Liz, who couldn’t bear rejection, had gone out of her way to cat-phish and reject a stranger. Sandra was hurt and confused. Avis considered contacting her to reveal the truth but feared it would make her feel worse.
In March 2016, detectives received Cari’s Rolling Hills Bank records. “We noticed two transactions that posted on November 19, 2012,” remembers Doty. “One was for Family Dollar, and one was at Walmart. And we continued to try to get these records. Family Dollar didn’t have records going back to 2012. Walmart did.” The purchases had actually been made on November 16, but reflected the approximate three-day delay before the bank posted the transactions. Both stores were in Omaha, and records revealed that Cari’s debit card was used for a $167 purchase at Family Dollar. No other details were available. But the information for the Walmart purchase was very specific. Three days after Cari vanished, someone had strolled into the huge discount store, filled a shopping cart and at 11:48 A.M. swiped Cari’s debit card at the cash register.
The Universal Product Code (UPC) identified the items purchased. The mysterious shopper’s loot included winter clothing, cleaning supplies, and a shower curtain featuring huge black and white flowers. That curtain—or one exactly like it—was visible in photos Liz had snapped in her bathroom, two days after the Walmart purchase. “What stuck out is that that shower curtain seemed to be new because you could still see the folds in it,” says Doty. But lots of people shopped at Walmart, and thousands had purchased that same shower curtain. The shower-curtain evidence could be explained away as a coincidence.
A few weeks had passed since Pattee sent samples to the lab for DNA tests on the blood found in the car. The results were in, and the news was far more compelling than the revelations about the shower curtain. There was only a one in 288 trillion chance that someone other than Cari had bled in her SUV.
Cari Farver had been attacked in her car and probably died there. Now they had a crime scene. Kind of. The evidence indicated she’d been stabbed in her vehicle, but no one knew the location of the car at the time. The phone pings suggested the attack had occurred in Omaha. But where in Omaha? At least one of Liz’s emails claimed the murder had happened in a Walmart parking lot, but that seemed too