grade, she played the wicked stepmother in Cinderella. She was a really good wicked stepmother!”
Both Cari and Nancy loved Macedonia and The Grist Mill Theater, a creative venue that thrives because of community effort. The residents who aren’t acting in, directing, or designing costumes and sets for the plays can be counted on to fill the audience seats. Some out-of-towners show up to watch the plays, and though they’re welcomed, it’s apparent that they don’t live there. With a population under 250, with many second and third generation residents, Macedonians notice outsiders. Yet a stranger with malice on the mind slipped into town unseen on a cold night in November 2012. Most likely it was too late at night or too early in the morning for potential witnesses to be awake and watching.
Just as it would be years before detectives became aware of the Facebook interactions with Sam Carter and Amber Mildo, it would also be years before they realized that the damage the stranger did that night held special significance. The troublemaker went to Cari’s house, the very house that had once belonged to Bret and Mabel Bisbee, and targeted her Ford Explorer. The black SUV had been in pristine condition, but after the defacing “had silver spray paint scribbles, all over the hood, down the side of the front fender, and a long key scratch down the side,” her son recollects.
Maxwell Farver isn’t sure which night the vandal struck, but it was Sunday, November 11, when he and his mother worked together for six hours, wiping the paint off of the car. They used WD-40 and managed to get all but a bit of the paint off. Nancy stopped by their house that day and saw them working. She noted her daughter wore her signature do-rag tied around her head as she scrubbed. “She was happy. She was upset that the car had been painted,” but was otherwise cheerful.
Cari posted about the vandalism on Facebook. A couple of days later, around the time that Dave Kroupa was deleted from her friend list and Sam Carter was accepted, Cari appeared to make a brief comment beneath her own earlier post about the destruction: It turned out to be just kids.
There were no other details—nothing said about which kids had damaged her car, how they were caught, or if they’d been ordered to make restitution. Neither Nancy nor Max knew how this Facebook revelation had come about. Cari had said nothing to them about learning kids were responsible. But the vandalism of the Explorer was not something Cari’s family dwelled upon. It had been a mean “prank” and very annoying, but they would not connect it to her disappearance for some time to come.
With virtually no evidence Cari was in danger, her case was not a priority for Pottawattamie County law enforcement. They processed her report, and she officially became a missing person, with her information entered into the database for the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Now, if a cop anywhere in the U.S. should encounter her and run her driver’s license info, she would instantly pop up in the search results as a missing person.
Cari Lea Farver was one of 661,593 people reported missing in the United States in 2012. By the end of the year, all but 2,079 would be accounted for. It was an average year, as far as missing person cases go. As usual, many of the absent adults had not met with danger, but had taken off for their own reasons. Once located, many were surprised to learn anyone had been worried.
Law officers are aware of the statistics and can’t be faulted for playing the odds when it comes to the level of priority they place upon the cases of missing, able-bodied adults. They will search immediately for missing children. And if an adult disappears under suspicious circumstances, they act quickly. Though police had yet to grasp it, those close to Cari realized her absence was suspicious. Even so, her relatives were confused. They had no actual proof she wasn’t the one texting them.
In the middle of that bleak winter, only one thing was certain. People were afraid. While Cari’s family was afraid for her, David Kroupa was growing afraid of her. As it turned out, the nutty texts he’d received at work on Tuesday, November 13, did not signal the end of the drama. Within a few days after the hostile breakup text, he began to receive more nonsensical, angry texts, all from