parked outside and sat in her car. Sometimes they glimpsed her driving by. Even when she wasn’t keying Melissa’s car, leaving antagonizing messages or presenting her with suspect cookies, the threat was always there. It was almost worse when things were quiet. What was she planning to do next? Melissa’s normally calm demeanor was replaced by a chronic case of the jitters. “At the time I was a pharmacy tech. And all of a sudden, guess who’s in the pharmacy tech program at Vatterott College?”
The college had recently established a new campus in Omaha, and Shanna Golyar enrolled there and began training to become a certified pharmacy technician. Of all the careers she could have pursued, why did she pick the exact one Melissa had chosen? Was it just a weird coincidence?
When Melissa looks back on her relationship with her stalker, she divides it in her mind into phases. “First it was the rage period,” she explains, adding that the next phase was so peculiar she wasn’t sure how to classify it. It began when Shanna decided to become a pharmacy tech. Melissa tried to shrug that off as a fluke, but then Dirk mentioned that Shanna had extensions put in her hair.
“What does it look like?” Melissa asked him.
“Well,” Dirk said slowly, “now that I think about it, it kind of looks like your hair.”
Melissa felt a prickle of dread. Surely this was not a coincidence! The same job and now the same hair? What was Shanna up to? “I never saw the extensions because they didn’t last long. They fell out. Dirk said that they were put in by a friend of hers who was in cosmetology school. She was still learning, and it didn’t turn out right.”
The fact that Shanna’s extensions had fallen out didn’t give Melissa pause, but the mention of a friend did. Somehow, she could not picture the hostile woman hanging out with a pal, sharing giggles and gossip. “She has a friend?” Melissa asked.
“Well, they’re not really friends. Shanna doesn’t really have friends,” Dirk said, explaining that the budding cosmetologist was an acquaintance who lived in the same apartment complex.
“Don’t you find it weird that she never has friends?” Melissa pressed.
He admitted that it struck him as little odd but that he hadn’t given it much thought. He also felt that there was nothing alarming about the fact Shanna was shopping for a black Mitsubishi. Dirk was relieved to know his son would be riding in a more reliable car, and he agreed to cosign on it.
“But I have a black Mitsubishi!” cried Melissa. “Dirk, can’t you see what’s going on here? She’s going to have the same car as I do, she tried to make her hair like mine, and she’s going to college to be a pharmacy tech!”
“What’s your problem?” Dirk countered. “She’s trying to better herself!”
Melissa was frustrated that he couldn’t see what was so obvious to her. She told him, “I don’t have any problem with her wanting a better car. I don’t have a problem with her wanting an education. I don’t have a problem that she’s trying to make herself feel better by looking nice. But it bothers me that she’s doing all of these things to portray me! Dirk, there is something really, really wrong with her! This is so unhealthy. She needs help!”
“You’re overreacting,” said Dirk. “She’s just jealous of you because you’re with me, and she wants to be with me. That’s all it is.”
Except for their difference of opinion on Shanna, Melissa and Dirk got along great, and in the middle of the stalker drama, they married, and Melissa gave birth to a baby boy, Craig. Melissa was thrilled to be a mother, but now she had a biological link to her stalker. Their sons were brothers!
When they moved to a bigger apartment, Melissa had strict criteria. “Me being the nervous wreck that I was, I said ‘Okay, I want an apartment that requires controlled access. I don’t want it on the first floor. I want it on the second or third floor.’ I wanted it higher up, so that she couldn’t just get in through a window. She would need a ladder—if she were going to go to that length. After we moved to the new apartment, we got letters from her about how much better her life was now that she was no longer with Dirk.”
It would have been nice to believe that Shanna was sincere, that she’d finally let go