our necks. Female sociopaths know this. They have spent their entire existence incognito as gentle beings, and they know how they are perceived. Many heartless sociopaths are mothers, and that intensifies the illusion of softness. Shanna Golyar was well aware of the fact that no one would expect her to be dangerous.
She also had a big bag of tricks—or rather, a big bag of electronic applications—to aid her in the concealment of her malicious charade. She favored an app called Letter-Me-Later that does exactly what the name implies. It allows a message to be written in advance and sent at a chosen time. Often when she was hanging out with Dave and nowhere near her phone, he or she, or both, received threats from the stalker. Dave had no idea that Liz was sending herself threats.
Even as we embark upon the third decade of the twenty-first century, we are still as naïve about the many ways that electronics can be used to deceive us as we are about the deadly females who walk among us. Liz was two steps ahead of most of us. She educated herself about the myriad cyber applications designed for deception. In January 2013, she still had many more months of freedom ahead of her, many more months to play vicious games and harm innocent souls. No one looked at her and saw a killer. Not the detectives. Not David Kroupa. And not Garret Sloan.
While Garret suspected that his girlfriend wasn’t always truthful, he wasn’t aware of the depth of her treachery. He was hesitant to flush the relationship down the toilet over things he couldn’t prove. He wanted to believe in her. And that’s why he agreed to help her out again about three weeks after his disturbing meetings with the detectives. Liz told him she had to work all night. It was Wednesday, January 30, 2013. Peter was with his father, but Liz had no one to watch Trina. As usual, Garret allowed her to stay at his place. He didn’t mind. She was a nice girl and spent most of her time reading. He was blissfully unaware of the significance of Wednesday.
Liz had insisted that Dave was nothing more than a friend, and while Garret was not entirely confident that that was true, it was more comfortable to believe her than to doubt her. He had no idea that his girlfriend was David Kroupa’s Wednesday Girl. Trina spent the night while Liz “worked” on Wednesday night. When Garret left his house early Thursday morning, Trina was waiting for her mother to pick her up and take her to school. They expected Liz to arrive any minute.
Garret arrived home that night to an unpleasant surprise. “When I got off work, I came home, and the first thing I noticed when I walked into the living room was the TV was missing.” After looking around and noting more missing things, he called the police and then his roommate. The missing items included the TV, a PlayStation, a computer monitor, a laptop, and, oddly, some of Gabe’s clothing—a pair of jeans and his favorite Notre Dame sweatshirt he’d had for years.
There were no broken windows, no sign of forced entry. Had Trina forgotten to lock the door when she left? If so, then why was the door locked when Garret got home? Someone had locked that door, and it seemed unlikely that a stranger would burglarize his home only to conscientiously lock up when they were done. He was also puzzled by what he discovered in his garage. “I noticed this big black thing behind a piece of wood, so I pulled it out and, lo and behold, it was the television. Apparently, when it was being taken out of the house, it was dropped and the screen was broken. They had attempted to hide it behind a piece of wood.” Garret had kept meticulous records of his valuables and gave police the serial numbers for the stolen electronic equipment. The numbers were added to the lists circulated to local pawn shops.
Other than the burglary of his home, nothing much about the first months of 2013 stood out, though Garret was on the list of people contacted on April 17 by someone claiming to be Cari. It was the same Siena/Francis House hoax that the others had been drawn into. Garret had passed the information along to police, and it was the last time “Cari” contacted him. He was unaware that Dave Kroupa and Liz continued