usual. “She was texting somebody all night. I could see it. She was trying to be sneaky about it. I asked her about it, and she said, ‘Oh it’s a guy I met, and he’s helping me with my car.’” It was his first hint that David Kroupa had entered their lives, though Garret didn’t yet know his name and was only beginning to suspect that his girlfriend had been unfaithful.
* * *
“I have never thought that someday my life may be written down on the pages of a book, and if I did, I can certainly tell you I never thought it would be in this capacity,” Garret confides, adding that it’s “not really the thing a person wants to think about in regards to the legacy they will leave and how their story will be told.”
Garret had indeed found himself written into a real-life script that was more nightmare, heartache, and drama than he could have imagined. Decent folks don’t expect to be swept up into the dark plots of dangerous people, and Garret is about as down-to-earth, honest, and kind as a human being can be. He’d lived three and a half decades of a relatively calm existence before Shanna Elizabeth Golyar stepped into his life and slowly attempted to dismantle it. Her mistake was confusing his kindness with weakness, maybe because kindness was something she did not understand. She had certainly been on the receiving end of kindness many times, but being kind was a foreign concept. It is only in retrospect that these observations can be made, for Garret would have to wander through a baffling maze of deceptions before he could comprehend the depth of her duplicity.
Garret Sloan’s story began in Council Bluffs, where he was born in 1973 and has lived most of his life. The Sloans were the typical nuclear family, and Garret had a sister, four years older. His parents’ marriage remained intact until long after he was grown. His father’s second marriage would give Garret a beloved little sister, one who is young enough to be his daughter, but he “was the baby of the family” throughout the 1970s and 80s. The kids were smart, college bound from the beginning, his father made a good living, their house was comfortable, and the family went to the Lutheran Church every Sunday.
Garret achieved “decent grades” with minimal effort, and he spent his time after school hanging out with friends. “It was back in the day when you really didn’t have to worry about kids being abducted,” he notes, describing a quiet, suburban neighborhood where the ranch-style houses were built close together. “When your parents wanted you to come home, they wouldn’t call you on a cell phone or text you. They would walk out onto the deck or the front porch and yell across the neighborhood for you.”
The family loved dogs and usually shared their home with a four-legged, furry member. Garret fondly remembers two bulldogs, Ginger and Pebbles, and a Boston Terrier named Angel. Up until fifth grade, Garret was thin “as a stick. That’s when the genetics kicked in.” All the Sloan males had a tendency to gain weight in their teens, and he was no exception. He had more padding than he would have liked, but his bigger challenge was dealing with Perthes Disease, a rare childhood condition that affects the hip. “I had to wear braces that made me look and walk bow-legged.” Complications included a slight discrepancy in leg length that resulted in an uneven gait, despite surgery in the ninth grade to slow the growth of the longer leg. That leg experienced another growth spurt after the operation, but he learned to compensate, and now no one notices the difference unless he points it out. It may have been that physical anomaly that sparked his interest in the workings of the body and inspired him to earn his Bachelor of Education in Exercise Science.
As Garret entered the workforce, computers were becoming ubiquitous, and career opportunities in electronics were abundant. Not only was he drawn to computers, he also had the ability to grasp the complexities of Information Technology (IT), and he soon found himself working in that field. Hired by Pottawattamie County in 2006, he has been employed by their IT department ever since.
For most of his life, Garret has been unattached, and that may have something to do with the fact his weight has yo-yoed over the years. During periods his weight peaked, he felt