first determining that the car had not been in Cari’s possession before August 2012. “It wouldn’t have been menstrual blood,” Nancy testified. “She had a hysterectomy in March of 2012.”
As for the fact Shanna knew about the yin-yang tattoo, something she revealed while concocting the Amy confessions, JMD scoffed at the notion his client couldn’t have learned about that tattoo from somewhere other than an encounter with Cari. Perhaps David Kroupa had mentioned it to her, he ventured. A prosecution witness expressed serious doubt about that. Why would Dave mention the tattoo on the missing woman’s thigh to his very jealous girlfriend?
JMD also shrugged off the fingerprint evidence. So what if Liz’s print was found on the mint container? “There is no indication that my client is the one that put the mint container in the car.” The mints happened to be a brand Cari favored, and the same brand and flavor had been found in a drawer at her house, documented by Deputy Phyllips’s camera when he’d searched her home in April 2013. Investigators believed that the mints had been in Cari’s vehicle and that Liz had thoroughly cleaned the car after her vicious crime. She’d likely picked up the container to scrub the console, and then set it back down when she was done, not realizing she’d left a perfect, crisp fingerprint for detectives to find.
JMD emphasized that his client’s prints were not found on the car itself. Not “on the dash, on the steering wheel, on the windows, or on the doors.” He was not impressed by a print on a small, easy to carry tin that Liz might have handled in Dave’s apartment before he picked it up and left it in Cari’s car. JMD stressed that significance should be placed on “the absence of all the other fingerprints that would have been there, should have been there, could have been there if my client was in there and committed a homicide there.”
That argument would have been much stronger if the car had not been wiped clean. Nobody’s fingerprints had been found on the vehicle itself, not even Cari’s.
Other evidence presented by the State included the photo from the January 2013 kidnapping hoax. Dave had not been certain that the bound woman in the trunk was Liz because her face was turned away in the image sent to him. But Liz had taken several photos before she selected that one and was recognizable in the rejected images Kava had recovered. When investigators found those practice photos, they realized Liz had placed duct tape over her own mouth, crawled into the trunk of a car, looped rope around her wrists, and posed as a damsel in distress. She’d apparently set the camera’s timer to give herself time to pose.
JMD didn’t dispute it was a bizarre game. But it didn’t prove his client was guilty of murder, and he stressed that Liz was not on trial for stalking or for the burglary of Cari’s home. The State could choose to charge her with burglary later, he noted, emphasizing that it had nothing to do with the murder charge. He was adamant that the so-called confessions Liz had written to frame Amy were nothing more than fantasies, He also brought up the size difference between Liz and Cari. Liz was 5’3” and 110 pounds, while Cari had been 5’7” and 145 pounds. How could Liz have overpowered the larger woman? And how could such a petite lady dispose of a body all by herself? It was actually not that difficult to imagine, but JMD was casting shadows of doubt wherever he could. No one could say he did not give his best effort. He was on his toes, quick to object to hearsay testimony and the occasional leading question by the State.
Liz could have made her attorney’s job easier and spared herself grief if she hadn’t lied to him about insignificant things. It was clear that she had misled her own attorney on the third morning of the trial, shortly after Garret took the stand. Brenda Beadle asked about his relationship with the defendant, and he explained they’d met in September 2010, been together for five years, and that he’d believed the relationship was exclusive. Beadle questioned him about his awareness of the alleged harassment of Liz. Had she told him about the vandalism in the garage? Did he know Liz had made a police report about that? Did Liz tell him that a stalker had photographed her daughter