Why didn’t Liz talk about him? And why was her friend so intent on communicating that fact to him? He didn’t know what to make of it. The texts continued with so many popping up over the next week that Garret was often too busy to answer. “Cari” seemed bothered by this and in pouting mode suggested that he didn’t want to “talk” with her. He told her that wasn’t so and graciously explained he had to work and could not spend every minute of the day texting.
On January 9, 2013, Garret took Liz out to lunch, and the conversation took an interesting turn when she mentioned that someone had been harassing her. She had talked to a detective at the Sheriff’s Office about it, and they were trying to help her. “They had downloaded her phone,” he remembers. “So, she asked me casually what they could get from the phone—can they download everything from it, from the SD card if you had one in there.”
Though Garret worked in the county’s IT department, he was uncertain how much data a phone dump could acquire, and he told her so. After lunch, he was surprised to get a call from Deputy Randal Phyllips at the Sheriff’s Office. Garret and the detective were acquainted, though they didn’t know each other well. After five and a half years working for the county, “I had gotten to know a lot of people there, even at the Sheriff’s Office.”
When the deputy asked Garret to come in for an interview, he was puzzled and called Liz. “I contacted her because I had just talked to her about this, and I said, ‘Why are they contacting me?’ I didn’t get to talk to her very long about it, and that’s when I went in and found out about everything that was going on.” Garret was escorted to a small room where he met with Deputy Phyllips and Lieutenant Dwayne Riche. He got the sense that something serious was happening, and it felt a little like being summoned to the principal’s office. Garret had always been an honest guy who tried to do the right thing, and now he had an added incentive to cooperate. Pottawattamie County was his employer, and he would never do anything to jeopardize his career. It was an odd, almost surreal situation, as the detectives asked him personal questions. They asked about his relationship with Liz, and Garret explained that she was his girlfriend.
Remembering Liz’s question, Garrett asked how much information a download could glean. They explained it depended on the type of download, but it was possible to absorb everything. In fact, they’d learned about his association with Liz when they recognized his photo among images on her phone. The detective handed Garrett a picture they’d printed of him with his family. He was shocked when they told him that Liz had labeled it “fat ass.” The printed image had no label, and he wasn’t sure if he believed the investigators but could think of no good reason for them to lie.
“Are you and Liz exclusive?” Phyllips asked.
Garret confirmed that they were. “That’s when they started telling me about Cari, about this missing woman. They told me about what was going on with at least Liz, that she was allegedly getting threats.”
Deputy Phyllips revealed that Cari appeared to be jealous of Liz because they were both dating Dave Kroupa. It was the first time Garret had heard the Kroupa name, and the first time he’d heard that his new texting pal was a stalker. He felt queasy. They were implying that his girlfriend was cheating on him! That was bad enough, but the punch they delivered next nearly knocked him out of his chair. “I was told that Liz and David devised this plan to give my information to Cari and hopefully ‘sic’ her on me, diverting her attention away from them to me.” If the scheme unfolded as planned, Garret and “Cari” would fall for each other, and the crazy lady would no longer feel the need to terrorize Liz and Dave.
It was a lot to digest. Had Liz really been unfaithful to him? And did she think so poorly of him that she believed he could actually develop romantic feelings for a woman who, by all accounts, was stark, raving mad? Was he nothing more than “a fat ass” to the woman who swore up and down that he was her one and only?