showed an embarrassing lack of understanding of male behavior, they didn’t exactly radiate insight into female behavior either. The second fake Garret letter claimed that Cari was pestering him to ask Dave to treat Liz better. Why would the so-called stalker, so wildly jealous of Liz, suddenly become her advocate and implore upon Garret to convince Dave to embrace Liz? Dave didn’t question the discrepancy. The world had stopped making sense to him six weeks earlier on November 13, 2012, when the wonderful woman he’d clicked with had seemed to morph into a vicious enemy. Dave was already so overwhelmed that he didn’t stop to ponder the lunacy of the Garret letters. Liz was confident that she had Dave and Garret fooled so thoroughly that their heads would never stop spinning.
While she continued to control Dave by making him feel guilty, she was unaware that her grip on Garret had somewhat loosened. He admits he was still unsure. He would waiver over the next months. “But the seed of doubt had been planted,” he confides. The meeting with the detectives made a lasting impact, and he could not completely dismiss the things they’d told him.
Garret still had a helluva ride ahead of him. It would not be fun, but he would do it again if he had to, for he believes God placed him in the middle of the horrific situation for a reason. He had a noble role that he would not recognize until much, much later. He would never ask for fame, fortune, or even for thanks for the part he played. Though he won’t step forward to make the claim, it would certainly be within his rights to do so. Few people can say, “I helped stop a killer.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SHANNA ELIZABETH GOLYAR’S HANDS were stained with blood—figuratively speaking. No one would glance at her soft little hands and see anything amiss. They appeared just like every other thirty-eight-year-old woman’s hands, though her fingers were quicker than most as they danced over her cellphone’s tiny keyboard because they had had so much practice.
When Shanna’s dainty hands were not engaged with a cellphone, they did all of the things that most hands do. Delivered food to her mouth. Gripped a steering wheel. Curled around a doorknob. Waved hello and good-bye. Caressed her lovers. Brushed a strand of hair from her child’s eyes.
Yes, Shanna’s hands did normal, everyday things, but they had also done something shockingly abnormal. They had killed a human being. While only metaphorically stained in blood today, there was a day when they were likely covered in actual blood. Tuesday morning, November 13, 2012, to be precise. Probably before 11 A.M. detectives would one day pinpoint that morning as the dark window of time when she brutally took the life of an innocent person.
Perhaps more frightening than the realization that Shanna’s soft hands committed murder, is the idea that her heart felt no sorrow over what her hands had done. She went on with her life as if nothing at all had happened. No one could have looked into her eyes and guessed the truth. Because she fooled so many people, she probably believed she was brilliant. She had, after all, gotten away with murder. But the reality is, she wasn’t brilliant. She wasn’t even smart. Some areas of her intellect were sadly lacking. Liz was no genius. But she did have two things going for her that helped her conceal her evil deeds. First, she could count on our ignorance. We don’t expect females to be dangerous. This writer includes herself among the ignorant masses, because even though I went to many trials with my true-crime-author mother, and had a front-row seat as deadly women took the stand, I still can’t grasp the fact that women can and do kill.
Certainly, I can understand on an intellectual level that females can be just as dangerous as males, but if a murderous woman with a smiling face walked up to me on the street tomorrow and said hello, I would not shrink away. My natural inclination would be to trust her. I’d likely feel a warning on a gut level, because most of us do when confronted with evil. But we almost always ignore it, because we allow our eyes, and what we perceive to be our common sense, to override our intuition. If we see a dangerous but feminine, smiling creature with soft, little hands, most of us dismiss the cold, prickle of warning that shivers down