through her window? Had she mentioned threatening emails?
The answer to each question was “No.” Liz had told him nothing about being terrorized. The prosecutor asked about texts exchanged with someone claiming to be Cari. “After you get a text from this Cari, do you then go back and tell the defendant, who is your girlfriend at the time, about these texts from Cari?”
“I’d mentioned it to her, yeah.”
“What did she say to you?”
“Essentially she corroborated what Cari was telling me—that they were friends.”
“And Liz told you that?”
“Yes.”
When it was JMD’s turn to question Garret, he was at an awkward disadvantage. Liz had told him that their romance was a figment of Garret’s imagination. “Good afternoon, Mr. Sloan. Now you indicated that you thought Shanna was your girlfriend. True?”
“Yes.”
“But during the entire time she lived with you, you had sex with her, what, maybe three times?”
“During the entire time?”
“The time she lived at your house.”
“No, it was more than three times.”
“Not many, though, right?”
“It wasn’t often, no.”
“Once in your apartment and then maybe once or twice a year while she lived with you?”
“No, it was more than that.”
“You can’t tell us any specific numbers?”
“No, I didn’t keep a tally of it.”
“Well, before she moved in, you said she never stayed over at your house or apartment, right?”
JMD had planned his strategy based on Shanna’s lie that Garret had only imagined their romance. If indeed Garret had been delusional, he could have discredited him and everything he said. Why Shanna didn’t want her attorney to know she’d had an ongoing sexual relationship with Garret was anybody’s guess.
Her lie backfired, and she slid a sheet of paper to Cheyann with a note on it. “It said maybe she had had sex with him more than a couple of times,” Cheyann remembers. Shanna might have had the best defense attorney in Omaha working for her, but she wasn’t helping herself by misleading him. JMD was unable to discredit Garret. If anything, the questions he asked Garret made it appear that Shanna had lied to her own attorney—and of course, she had!
Garret’s testimony included a tidbit prosecutors knew would inspire a disturbing image. Investigators believed that Cari’s remains had been burned, and not only had they found photographs of burned tarps concealing something the size of a body among Liz’s deleted images, they had noted a consistency in the confession emails Liz had written to frame Amy. She had made multiple references to burning her victim.
Beadle asked Garret about something he’d mentioned during the January 2013 interview with detectives—the same meeting when they’d revealed Liz had labled his photo “fat ass.” “Do you somehow mention to them in the course of the interview something about a fire at the defendant’s house?”
Garret acknowledged he’d told detectives he’d smelled a burning odor at Liz’s house.
“And that’s obviously prior to the arson that happened in August at her house, correct?”
“Yes.” Unfortunately, he couldn’t recall the date he’d noticed the odor. He remembered only that it had been during the fall or winter of 2012. Cari had vanished in mid November, within the time frame Garret had indicated.
Investigators had varying opinions about the burning. Some believed her remains were only partially burned and then thrown in the garbage, while others suspected she’d been cremeated in a burn barrel in Liz’s backyard. It was a horrific thing for those who loved Cari to contemplate, but it was a grim reality that had to be addressed. The subject came up again during Battalion Chief Michael Shane McClanahan’s testimony. Jim Masteller asked him about a burn barrel discovered in Liz’s backyard after the August 2013 fire. It was visible in a photograph admitted into evidence as Exhibit 194. “It’s a black metal barrel, approximately fifty-five-gallon drum,” Chief McClanahan acknowledged. But no one had searched the barrel for human remains. By the time Liz became a suspect in Cari’s disappearance, almost two years had passed since the fire, and the barrel was long gone by then.
Detective Schneider thinks it’s unlikely that Liz would have been bold enough to burn a body in her backyard. While her yard was so overgrown that neighbors couldn’t peek over the fence, there was nothing to stop a neighbor from ambling over to see what she was up to. Detectives Doty and Avis, however, lean toward that possibility. No one but Liz knows for sure.
Jessica McCarthy testified after Garret, and she gave details about the week of terror she’d endured when she’d friended Dave on Facebook. It was