prohibitive. She was a known fugitive from justice but didn’t make it onto any “most wanted lists.” No one realized she was dangerous.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
DAVE KROUPA HAD A CLOSE CIRCLE of pals in Sioux Falls, friends he’d known since high school, and they’d kept in touch over the years. Some of the guys in the group dated some of the girls, but others were platonic friends. Tayandy Braver was a platonic friend, but her best friend, Heather, describes herself as Dave’s “friend with benefits,” though romance between them occurred only when they were both single. They cared about each other, but their relationship had never been serious. It was simply a fun, comfortable friendship with a strong physical attraction.
In January 2014, they were both single. Heather had recently broken up with her boyfriend, so Dave invited her to visit. She made the three-hour drive from Sioux Falls to Omaha and remembers that “It was the coldest day of the year.” Shortly after she arrived, one of Dave’s male friends stopped by. “We had a few beers with him,” Heather remembers. The guy soon left, and she noticed Dave’s cellphone was blowing up with texts and calls. “What’s going on?”
Dave sighed. “This girl, Cari, won’t leave me alone. She keeps stalking me. The cops haven’t been able to do anything about it.”
It was upsetting news! She wished he’d warned her. Dave tried to reassure her, and they moved into the bedroom but were interrupted by a rattling noise. “It sounded like someone was trying to open the patio door.” Heather shudders at the memory. Dave told her not to worry. The stalker’s shenanigans were commonplace. It might have been normal for him, but she was scared. She screamed as glass shattered. They found a brick on the bathroom floor, amidst shards of glass, as the icy winter air poured through the broken window.
Dave was surprised by how frightened Heather was, and she couldn’t understand why he was so calm. “Call the police,” she cried, but he balked. There was no point, he told her. The stalker was long gone by now. But Heather was adamant, so he made the call. The police showed up to take the report, but just as Dave had predicted, there was nothing they could do. The only sign of the stalker was a jumble of footprints in the snow, some outside the bathroom window, and others outside the patio door. Dave told Heather more of the story, explaining that “Cari” was also stalking Liz, one of his girlfriends. He added that he and Liz had an open relationship, but he kept Wednesdays reserved for her.
The whole scenario struck Heather as fishy, and she ventured, “Maybe Wednesday Girl threw the brick.” It made no sense that this Cari would not want to see him face to face. If she was so in love with him, why hadn’t he seen her in over a year? Dave knew it was a whacky situation, but it had been going on for so long he’d stopped trying to make sense of it. He shrugged off Heather’s suggestion that Liz was the real culprit. He and Liz had been together many times when she’d received threatening texts, and he’d seen with his own eyes how frightened she was. He was worried about Liz now because it was unusual for the stalker to break a window when he was home. Why had she suddenly changed her pattern? The nut must be extra riled up. “We need to check on Liz to make sure she’s okay,” he said. They went by Liz’s place, but there were no cars in the driveway and no tracks in the snow. No one had been there for hours. Heather found that suspicious, but Dave wasn’t interested in her theories.
Heather was annoyed, frightened, and miserable. It was so cold with the broken window that it was impossible to sleep. She grew more irritated when she spent the next day alone in the freezing apartment when Dave went to work. She would have been even more frightened had she known Cari had disappeared from that very apartment. Heather felt the same visceral terror Melissa Strom had experienced a decade earlier when Liz trapped her in her boyfriend’s apartment. Both Heather and Melissa had been dismissed by men who suggested they were overreacting. Both women survived because they trusted their own instincts. Heather cut her visit short, and she and Dave parted on a sour note. He knew she was shaken but