Jones and Holly Drummond were among those attending. Holly had met Cari when they worked together years earlier in Council Bluffs at Claire’s, a chain retail store, specializing in costume jewelry and accessories. The loss of her friend cut deeply. “Cari was a great friend,” she says, stressing, “always nonjudgmental.” Holly felt sick as she stared at the back of the defendant’s head. “She never once turned around to look at us.”
She had interacted with the defendant online when Liz was impersonating Cari, and Holly had demanded that she tell her how they met. It was a test. “Few people knew we’d met at Claire’s,” she explains. Holly knew the messenger was definitely an impostor when she responded, “I’m not going to play games.” Holly felt a chill as she sat in the courtroom and realized she was breathing the same air as the twisted woman who had ended her dear friend’s life.
The Golyar trial was huge news in Omaha, a case so bizarre it had caught the attention of media from around the world. Reporters from local news outlets vied for space with NBC’s Dateline crew, who set their cameras up in the vacant jury box.
* * *
Nancy had vowed to be there for every moment, no matter how painful.
But Nancy was a witness, and except in rare cases, witnesses are barred from the courtoom until after they’ve testified. Nancy spent the first day of the trial sitting on the hard wooden bench in the corridor.
She’d known before she arrived that day that she wouldn’t be allowed in but felt she owed it to her daughter to be nearby. The prosecution scheduled her testimony for as early as possible, so she wouldn’t miss much. It wouldn’t be easy to listen to some of the witnesses, and Nancy was grateful to Brenda Beadle for her sensitivity. “Brenda was very good at warning me when something bad was coming up.”
JMD’s assistant, Cheyann Parr, sat between him and Shanna at the defense table. In her twenties and a mother of a toddler, Cheyann was extremely pretty and appeared much younger than she was. When the photograph of the trio at the defense table appeared in the newspaper, Cheyann heard through the grapevine that some who’d seen it assumed she was the defendant and had commented that she looked too sweet and innocent to be a killer. Either the caption had misidentified her, or people hadn’t noticed the frumpy woman beside her. Shanna wore street clothes, appearing the first day of trial in a red shirt, black skirt, black jacket, and white tennis shoes. Her frizzy hair was partially pulled away from her pale face. Glasses completed her schoolmarm look.
Both Garret and Dave would later comment that Liz had gotten fat. The weight gain was likely due to lack of activity and too many calories consumed. Jailexchange.com, a website providing comprehensive information on detention facilities, reports that the Douglas County Jail meals fed to inmates total 2,500 calories daily, far more than the recommended caloric intake for a woman of Liz’s height. If she cleaned her plate, she could easily have put on twenty-five to thirty pounds in the nearly five months she’d been incarcerated. Liz had once delighted in denigrating “fat asses,” and now, she received the cold kiss of karma as she grew into what she despised.
Judges typically warn spectators to behave, especially in cases that attract so many curiosity seekers, and before the trial began, Judge Burns advised the gallery, “You cannot just get up and go when the case is proceeding or we’re in trial. You’re here until we get a break, then you can leave and come back before we start again. But if you don’t get back in time, you will not be allowed back in the courtroom. I expect everybody to sit quietly and listen, no reactions. And if you do have reactions, it may require me to remove people from the courtroom . . .”
It was not the first time the prosecution and defense had faced off in an Omaha courtroom to argue a peculiar case involving a love triangle. In 2010, 19-year-old Ryan Carson killed his father, Brian Carson, when he learned he’d slept with his girlfriend. Investigators suspected that Ryan’s mother, Teresa Carson, conspired with him to murder Brian, Teresa’s ex-husband.
Teresa was JMD’s client, and he’d made a valiant effort to defend her. He insisted she’d been a battered wife—a victim with no knowledge of Ryan’s plan. But Beadle had statements from witnesses