On the morning of January 8, Dave was driving through his parking lot when he noticed a single vehicle, heaped with snow. The other cars had long since shed signs of the storm, but this vehicle obviously hadn’t been driven for days. He took a closer look. It was a black Ford Explorer. Cari’s car! He was certain it hadn’t been there all along. How was Cari getting around without her car? Had she really moved into his apartment complex? Is that why the SUV was here? Dave called police, and they towed the Explorer to the Omaha Police Department impound lot.
While Cari had been reported missing in Iowa, she’d vanished from Nebraska. The mystery overlapped several police jurisdictions from two counties and two states, and that created some confusion. Despite their separate databases, police from the various offices were keeping each other in the loop. Iowa police reviewed Liz’s reports of threats and vandalism in Omaha. Liz had accused Cari, and that fit their theory that Cari was in hiding because she’d flipped out. Deputy Phyllips and Omaha Detective Travis Oetter went to see Dave at Hyatt Tire. Dave showed them the text from “Cari,” claiming she’d moved into Unit Twelve near him. But that apartment didn’t exist. The nut was still playing games.
Both Dave and Liz showed the investigators the hostile texts sent to them by their elusive tormentor. The sheer volume was overwhelming. It would take time to pore over the thousands of messages to find clues that might lead to the missing woman. Dave and Liz cooperated, signing waivers to allow investigators to download the contents of their cell phones. The process, known as a “phone dump” is accomplished using a Cellebrite, a small hand-held device that facilitates the transfer of files from cell phones to jump drives through cables. The gadget can be used to accomplish both logical and physical downloads. Logical downloads retrieve data that has not been deleted, while physical downloads recover the entire contents of the memory of the phone, even deleted items.
Worn down by the stalker’s hostile rants, the last thing Dave wanted was another email. But Liz probably didn’t realize that because she continued to send him long letters. In one email, she invited him to a tattoo show and prattled on about how he didn’t have to entertain her and how easy it was for them to just hang out and “chill.” She mentioned commitment several times, insisting it was not an issue for her. She wrote: You have to stop thinking that I’m trying to get you to commit to me, and stop thinking that I’m mad.
Liz wanted a day each week, set aside for the two of them. I guess I feel like that, geez, seven months gets me a few extra privileges, is all. It was a variation on the one-month commitment she’d asked for in September. Now, instead of a month, she requested one day a week—fifty-two days per year. While she’d had “four months invested” when she asked for the month, now she stressed that she’d put in “seven months.”
She pointed out how the “past has been a little challenging,” and how happy she was that they weren’t “rushing into things.” She said she didn’t “want to get in the way of your dating,” immediately contradicting herself to say that “parts of me do, LOL,” but never in a “psycho” way. She felt she “wasn’t good enough,” and that a lot of men had told her that. The email seesawed between emotions, at times sounding confident, and in the next sentence, insecure. She insisted she wanted no commitment, but demanded he compromise and promise her one day each week. Somehow, she managed to wrangle that day from him. He might have been too overwhelmed to argue, or maybe he gave in because the stalker had scared off his other dates. He had to admit he was impressed by Liz’s loyalty. She was the only woman willing to stick by him in the midst of the nightmare. Even when “Crazy Cari” was vandalizing Liz’s home and threatening to harm her, Liz was steadfast.
She was pissed at him for inviting a lunatic into their lives, but she was still there. In fact, the stalker had actually brought them closer. “We bonded over it,” Dave explains. Liz was the only one who understood what he was going through. They spent countless hours talking about their frightening situation, comparing notes