to consider the confusing facts. It had, after all, taken them a long time to get their minds around it. But they weren’t worried about Golyar making bail. She had no wealthy friends lining up to help.
On Wednesday, January 18, 2017, Douglas County Judge Craig McDermott oversaw Shanna Golyar’s preliminary hearing, a process that lasted nearly four hours. A brilliant litigator, Masteller expertly presented the State’s case. Judge McDermott ruled that Golyar would go to trial on a first-degree murder charge. Her arraignment was eight days later, at 2:30 on a Thursday afternoon, and by then the media had caught on that something big was going down. TV news cameras were rolling in the hallway outside of District Court Judge Timothy P. Burns’s fifth-floor courtroom as the defendant appeared, clad in the infamous orange jumpsuit, chains around her waist, wrists, and ankles. She wore glasses, and her long dark hair had been woven into a single braid. Flanked by two female guards, the prisoner glanced at the cameras and quickly looked away. She did not look happy.
Shanna waived her right to a jury trial, choosing instead to allow a judge to decide her fate. Judge Burns tentatively set the trial for May 10, 2017. The defendant was excused and remanded back to the custody of the Sheriff. It was 2:33 P.M. The entire process had taken three minutes.
May 10 was less than four months away! Beadle had hoped for more time to prepare. “On murder cases, it’s not uncommon for us to go to trial maybe a year after we file, and maybe longer, but certainly not four months.” She understood JMD’s strategy. “He didn’t want us to find the body or have more evidence come forward. We were going to have to push hard. Thankfully, we were very lucky that Pott County gave us the guys at our beck and call, and they were awesome. They had lived with this case for years, and we were just coming in. We had so much to quickly learn and get up to speed on.”
Kava was eager to help. “Corporal Avis and I were approved in March 2017 to be one hundred percent dedicated to trial prep, and he moved into my office. Later, the two of us began working out of the Douglas County Courthouse to prep, a few weeks prior to the trial.” The longer the team worked together, the more they respected each other, and, in fact, felt genuine affection for each other. More than one of them notes, “We became like family.” Everyone was concerned about one member. Deputy Anthony Kava had a serious health issue. He’d learned about it in August of 2013, when he began to see aurae around lights, and his doctor ordered an MRI. The visual anomaly turned out to be “some transient thing, like an infection” and quickly cleared up, but the scan revealed an unrelated problem—a tumor, “near my brainstem, sheathed around a nerve—a schwannoma.”
The fleeting infection had been a lucky thing. Without the MRI, the tumor could have remained hidden until it did real damage. Schwannomas are usually benign and often operable, but the proximity of Kava’s tumor to his brainstem made surgery riskier. Doctors monitored the tumor with regular MRIs, and when it began to grow, “I received radiation treatment with the understanding that surgery would likely be the next step.” By the spring of 2016, he suffered headaches as the tumor expanded, but he was immersed in the Golyar case, still unraveling her tangled web as he prepared for trial. Kava was to be the State of Nebraska’s star witness and was adamant that justice for Cari Farver should take precedence over his health.
When Brenda Beadle learned he was delaying treatment until after the trial, she urged, “You need to get on this.” But Kava was steadfast. “I wasn’t going to do anything that might jeopardize the case. Certainly, someone could read my report and give testimony about the findings, but I felt I knew the material best.” With surgery, “I could expect short-term neurological issues that might affect my memory and ability to concentrate. I did not want to risk losing what was in my head that I intended to turn into testimony,” he stresses, adding that if he testified while recovering from brain surgery, a defense attorney could “argue I was not in my right mind.”
Beadle asked Detective Schneider to learn what he could about Liz’s past, so he traveled to Battle Creek, Michigan, over six hundred