difficult for spectators not to gasp when she read aloud the threat, “I will cut your kids’ throats, and yours, while you sleep.”
Liz, however, appeared unmoved. Cheyann noticed that Liz showed emotion only twice during the trial. Her eyes lit up when a slide of the Freaker’s Ball was shown. Liz and Dave appeared on the screen, a cozy couple in matching togas. Liz stared at the image, mesmerized, as Beadle emphasized that the night had been special to the defendant. It followed the 30-day commitment she’d forced upon Dave, and she’d pinned all of her dreams on what she hoped would be a magical evening.
Obviously moved by the photo, Liz perked up even more when Dave himself appeared. She was clearly still infatuated and gazed at him longingly as he was sworn in. He was extremely uncomfortable. It had taken him a long time to accept the truth. The woman he’d feared and despised for years was actually the victim. The woman he’d felt obligated to protect was the real monster. When he realized an innocent person had died because of Liz’s obsession with him, the guilt ate at him. He was forced to glance at Liz to identify her for the record. She’d been staring but quickly looked away.
When Beadle asked about his dating situation in early 2012, he said, “I was not in a committed relationship of any type. I was seeing multiple women.”
“Is that kind of how you rolled then?”
“Correct.”
He described their relationship as, “Casual, on and off. We would be hard and heavy for a month or two, and then I would back way off. And generally, we would break up for a little while, and pretty soon we’d be back together again for a little while.”
“During the time you were on with her, were you seeing other women as well?”
“Correct.”
A picture of their tumultuous relationship emerged as Dave answered questions about the breakups and makeups, and his desire for freedom as Liz pressured him to commit. He was handed emails Liz had sent and asked to read them aloud. Some she’d sent as herself, but in others she impersonated Cari, and the wording was crude. Conscious of Cari’s mother watching him, he tried to censor the foul language, but Beadle explained he had to read the letters as is. He cringed inwardly and forged ahead.
On cross exam, JMD said, “I think you indicated that you met Shanna Golyar in 2012?”
“Correct.”
“And that was on Plenty of Fish?”
“Correct.”
“And although you saw Cari Farver at Hyatt, you also saw her on Plenty of Fish, right?”
“Correct.”
“That’s where you did your fishing, right?”
“There you go.”
“You didn’t know there were sharks in the water, though, did you?”
“Apparently not.”
JMD brought up Dave’s texts with other women. “There were texts going back and forth with Sue, right?”
“Yep.”
And Pam, right?”
“Yep.”
“Joanne, right?”
“Yep.”
“Kelly, right?”
“Yep.”
JMD went on, naming multiple women Dave had known, and then went through the names again, asking if they’d had threats made against them. This group of women had not been threatened. With that shrewd line of questioning, Liz’s attorney demonstrated that she had known about many other women, and nothing had happened to them.
He asked Dave if he’d ever been afraid of Liz, and he said no.
As uncomfortable as it was for Dave to testify, it was worse for Amy Flora. “It was the scariest thing I ever had to do,” she confides. “I was having panic attacks. Brenda told me, ‘Don’t look at Liz. Look at us. The only time you have to look at her is when you’re asked to point her out.’”
Amy’s testimony came about halfway through the ten-day trial, on the morning of Tuesday, May 16. She fixed her eyes on Jim Masteller as he asked about her Internet server, her email address, and her cell phone number. She answered easily, but his next question stumped her.
“Now,” said Masteller. “You said you have Internet access at your residence. Do you ever use VPNs?”
“I don’t know what that is,” she replied.
“Have you ever used a Surf-Easy VPN?”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“How about Hotspot Shield VPN?”
“No.”
Amy didn’t know what a Virtual Private Network was because she had no reason to hide her location. Liz had sometimes used VPNs when impersonating her. It was clear that Amy had not sent the confession emails. She hadn’t even heard of some of the technology Liz had used to conceal her crimes.
Amy dreaded reading aloud the confessions Liz had written in her name. She was worried Cari’s family would believe the