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Dateline Originals
Something About Cari - Ep. 4: A Shot in the Dark
00:31:26
Liz calls 911 to report being shot in a park. Police search for the assailant… and come to a stunning conclusion about who really pulled the trigger. This episode originally published on December 11, 2025.
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We're back in the Miller's yard early spring and their Trugreen lawn is already in good shape. Their lawn started looking like a golf course and PGA Tour golfer started showing up like this pro swinging on grass done right from the start. Has to clear the patio furniture and the sandbox. Oh, perfectly struck Trugreen the easiest way to get a golf course quality lawn. Don't wait. Click the screen now to sign up@trugreen.com exclusions apply. See trugreen.com for details. Try Angel Soft for your tushy. It's made by Angels Soft and Strong Budget friendly. The choice is simple. Pick up a pack today. Angel Soft Soft and strong simple. December 5, 2015 More than three years after Carrie Farver disappeared. It was the day after Liz Golia visited police to turn the case on its head by telling the police that the stalker terrorizing her and Dave Krupa was not Gary Farver at all, but Dave's ex girlfriend and the mother of his children, Amy. As Liz said later, she needed some time alone to think. So late afternoon she got in her car and drove to the park by the river. Big Lake park, it's called. And then she got out and took a walk along the trail there and sat down on a bench. It was quiet. Liz was alone in the gathering cold and dark of a December evening. And that was when the silence was snapped by the deafening bark of a gun and the pain tearing through her thigh. I'm Keith Morrison and this is Something About Carrie, a podcast from Dateline episode 4 A Shot in the Dark. I've been shot in the lake. Is the assailant still nearby? I don't think so. I took off. Warning do you know if it's male or female? It was just after 6:30pm when the Council Bluffs PD roared out to Big Lake park and found a wounded and bleeding Liz Goliar and packed her off to the hospital. While a chopper trained down a searchlight and cops on the ground scoured the paths and bushes for the shooter, a detective checked on Liz at the hospital. His name is Matthew Coleman. You could tell she was in pain, obvious wound to her leg. But Liz was lucky. When the bullet went clean through her leg, it missed bones and arteries an inch or two. One way or the other, she could have bled to death in minutes. She told the detective what happened. She says she came out here to clear mind and she walked out to a bench and sat down. And then a female stuck a gun to her back, told her to get on the ground and then shot her in the leg and then ran off. Who was this shooter? The woman who had tried it seemed, to take Liz's life, but ended up only wounding her. Well, Liz said she knew. She knew, all right. Was it Carrie Farver? No, said Liz. It was not. Not Carrie at all. It was, she said, the same woman who'd recently been stalking her. The mother of Dave Krupa's children, His former partner, Amy Flora. A little later, a city police task force surrounded Amy's apartment. And I kind of seen somebody leaning against my building. And I said, who's there? And all I heard was, open up, police. And what's that like? Traumatizing. I was freaked out. I didn't know why the police were at my door and told me to open my door. I had no idea what was going on. So I opened the door. And they had two officers with guns drawn and pointing at you? Yes. Yeah. What did they say to you? They had said that I was accused of shooting Liz. I thought that. That I was gonna go to jail. I would lose my kids. I wasn't really sure what would happen. But, I mean, I guess if you're accused of shooting somebody, I mean, first thought in your mind is, you're going to jail. You know, I've never been in trouble my whole life, so I really. I mean, that was my first thought. And somebody would come and take your kids away? Yeah. I didn't know what would happen to my kids if I had to go to jail, you know? The police came right into Amy's house. They searched it, and later, they sat Amy down in an interview room and hooked her up to a polygraph. They strapped you into a machine? Yep. What did it feel like in there? Horrible. Officers asked her questions, like this one, among others. Did you go to Big Lakes park that day? No. Amy denied that she shot Liz over and over and over again. But he failed the lie detector test. Yeah. They told me that I didn't pass it. All I could do was cry, like, because I know I didn't do this. I didn't shoot her. And I knew that. But this test was saying I did. And all I can remember is the detective just kept yelling at me, telling me, there's something you need to tell us. And I didn't know anything. Still, something didn't add up. For example, when investigators arrived at Amy's place right after the shooting, one of them felt the hood of her car. It was ice cold, hadn't been driven for a while. And during the canvas for witnesses, a Neighbor insisted that Amy was home all afternoon. So was Amy so nervous she blew the polygraph, or was something else going on? Amy's ex, Dave Krupa. When he heard Liz had named Amy as the shooter, he could barely believe it. Now, at that point, my thinking gets pretty twisted because I know Amy didn't shoot her. Amy's afraid to even pick up a pistol, let alone handle one. So suffice to say, now everything is what I believed was going on for three and a half, four years, is taking a wild movie like twist. Back at the hospital, Liz was well enough to pick up a phone and call Todd. Remember him? The helpful, hopeful roommate? Liz told Todd about the shooting. First question is when I found out where it happened. Why are you down at Big Lake after dark? Nobody goes down there in their right mind. That's just not a place to go. It's not safe. To which Liz responded, why are you questioning me? I'm sitting here shot. I'm hurt. In fact, Liz would have to stay in the hospital for several days, and the police had confiscated her cell phone. So she had a request for Todd. She asked if I could go home and get her a tablet, something she could use while she was up there. But she was bored. So I went into her room to look for one, and lo and behold, I'd see, barely sticking out from under the bed, this laptop. So I grabbed it because I knew what it looked like. I flipped it over, and lo and behold, Todd realized what he had in his hands. It was one of the many electronics that he had reported stolen from his house those many months before. I was like, is my laptop? But to confirm, I double check. When you look at the bottom, there's two stickers. There's the one with the serial number, and there's the one with the operating system license, which had been ripped off. I had kept the box the laptop originally came in, and all boxes that computers come in have serial numbers on them as well. So I grabbed the box and I compared the two, and they were the same exact serial number. Well, well, Liz had stolen his computer. Todd reeled. He'd have to confront her, of course, which he did later, when Liz got her phone back via text. And Liz responded this way. I get this text and it's, sorry, I didn't know that was yours. I picked it up from a pawn shop. Okay, whatever. At this point, no, I wasn't believing it. But was it true? Strange events and odd coincidences fell down like rain on a picnic some days, especially whenever Liz was around Detective Avis, investigating the shooting, went to see Liz at the hospital, his recorder rolling. I feel like it's just written on the wall, but it is. It's Amy shot you with Dave's gun, isn't it? Pretty much. That's what I'm thinking. They still don't think so. Seem like the friendly cop or the dumb one. I'll be whatever she wanted as long as she kept telling us information. Why? Because Ryan Avis and his partner could not help but scratch a suspicious itch. A truly shocking idea. Something beyond twisted, beyond deviant, Something that sounded crazy. But crazy had long been the only way to describe this case. Except the detectives hadn't seen the half of it. Adobe Acrobat Studio, your team's home base. Collaborate within a shared PDF space. You've got your docs, your plans, your specs, and then invite the crew to build what's next to talk off the teamworks. They think that this design could be a contender. And when somebody wonders what's the next steps, AI helps you finish the rest. Bolts are tight now. Your plan's refined. Run a smoother business when you're all alive. Do that with Acrobat. Learn more@adobe.com do that with Acrobat an all new season of the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is coming to Hulu and Hulu on Disney plus on March 12th. Mom Talk has just been blowing up. Whitney and Jen are on Dancing with the Stars. Taylor is a bachelorette. Saying that out loud is crazy. Like that is huge. But all the cool opportunities could pull us apart. It's causing issues in everyone's marriage. My whole world is falling apart right now. It's chaos. Watch the Hulu Original series the Secret Lives of Mormon wives March 12th. Coming to Hulu and Hulu on Disney for bundle subscribers Terms of ply oh no, my coffee. Bronnie here. New brawny 3 ply is now more absorbent. Wow. Got a clean shirt. Do you wear plaid? Summon the strongest. Let us turn now to the Bible, the New Testament. Book of Acts, chapter 9, verse 18. Stay with me a moment. The story concerns the Apostle Paul, blinded on the road to Damascus. Before quoting here, there fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight. Or as the great crime novelist Agatha Christie put it, many, many, many years later, the scales fell from his eyes. Meaning in her case, some baffling mystery suddenly fell away to reveal the de. Sadly, in real life, the truth all too often remains hidden. Those scales stay firmly affixed, as they had in Omaha, Nebraska, and Little Macedonia Iowa, for three long years. Blinded by hope, perhaps, that Carrie Farver could be persuaded to reveal and explain herself, except in the troubled minds of a young man and his grandmother, something was beginning to poke through. All hazy and half seen and quite terrible. Carrie Farver's mother, Nancy, and her son Max, were coping with the most confusing set of emotions imaginable. Emptiness, fear, gnawing uncertainty. And just to name a few. Nancy had sent Carrie so many pleading messages, asking her to please, please come home. Writing, for example, carrie, you're my daughter, and I'll always love you no matter what. We just need to see you, to hear your voice, know where you are. Carrie never called, never responded in any way. For a parent, for a mother. I don't know. How do you characterize this episode in your life? How do you talk about those feelings and make sense of them? There was no making sense of it. Total loss. As for Carrie's son, Max, he had by this time formed a suspicion. Tentative at first, but held onto for years. And it was stronger by the day, week, month. As he poured over those messages from his mom, the wording, the phrasing, the spelling. Max couldn't help but wonder if the person sending those texts was actually his mom or was not Carrie Farver at all. But if that wasn't her, well, then, what did that mean? Max and his grandmother tried to stay positive. It wasn't easy. So what heaven's name did you think happened to her? Someone was. Well, we pretty much already knew that someone was just posing as my mom on there, which meant. Which meant something happened. We knew she didn't just run away. We knew that we all kind of hoped for a while that at least she was okay. But we all knew by the end of 2015, scales were beginning to fall away elsewhere, too. Sheriff's investigators in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had come to suspect that maybe they and detectives at many other agencies investigating all these different cases involving Carrie and Liz had been bamboozled, played for fools, lied to. Why? Well, after Liz's shooting, detectives had questions. For instance, why did Liz decide to hang around a dangerous park after dark on a cold winter night, alone? Made no sense. Why, when police got to that park in no time flat, why couldn't they even find a trace of the shooter? But maybe the reddest flag was this. Remember, for years, Liz had been claiming that the woman stalking her, making her life hell, was Carrie Farver. But now she was saying the woman who shot her in the park was Amy Flora. Crazy, as Amy had told them, I Didn't even know what to think at the time. Like why I was being accused of shooting somebody. The detectives checked out Amy's alibi, of course, and it was rock solid. And when questioned, well, Amy was nervous, yes, but seemed absolutely befuddled too. I couldn't harm a fly. I know. It was just very traumatizing. And that is when the scales fell from the eyes of Potawatoma County, Iowa Sheriff's detectives Ryan Avis and Jim Doty. Was Liz Goliar creative enough, crafty enough, cruel enough to have concocted every bit of this years long harassment scheme? And if she was, was she diabolical enough to shoot herself through the leg and then invent a second villain? Not Carrie now, but Amy. Detective Avis. She shot herself is what I thought. She would be so thoroughly into this con and cover up that she would be prepared to put a bullet through her own leg. That was what you thought? And burn her own house down? Vandalize her own car. Wow. Well, surely that was enough to go out and arrest her. Couldn't prove that she shot herself. So Detectives Doty and Avis decided to leave the shooting case to other investigators and stay in their own lane. After all. Their assignment was to find Kerry Farver missing all those three years. They had come on board to put fresh eyes on the case and to test the prevailing theory, which had always been this, that Carrie suffered some sort of mental health break and then launched a long term covert campaign of harassment against her ex, Dave Krupa and Dave's ex girlfriend Liz. But they had come to suspect that they could not believe anything that Liz Goliar told them. And now they believe Liz slipped up big time by shifting the bullseye from Carrie to Amy. And the detectives now thought they knew why Amy had suddenly become Liz's target. Dave Krupa had moved out of Omaha back to Council Bluffs. And that was the same town where Amy and their two children lived. Dave and Amy were starting to kind of spend some more time together. They were maybe talking about possibly moving in with each other. Oh boy. But if Doty and Avis were going to confirm all their suspicions and build a criminal case against Liz, they needed proof. So they went back to the one thing that never lies. The digital evidence. And that cell data that Liz had allowed police to collect. Offer phone back at the very beginning. That was more than three years before. They'd been working on it the whole time. They'd gone through most of the data on that phone and they found something. It was well Confusing. First, on that phone, three years before, Liz had uploaded a photo of Carrie Farver's black Ford Explorer, which didn't make any sense at all because we looked at the date that was taken. It was taken on Christmas Eve of 2012. Wasn't that when her car was actually missing? Yeah. Hadn't been recovered till January of 2013. So we thought that's. That's weird that the police couldn't find it. Dave didn't know where it was, but somehow Liz was able to take a picture of it. Strange. All right, but that wasn't all. Remember, at one point, Carrie sent Dave a threatening photo of a woman bound and duct taped in the trunk of a car. Kidnapped, maybe. Dave guessed that Carrie took the picture, suggesting the woman in the trunk could be Liz. Some kind of Carrie invented threat. But when investigators got hold of Liz's phone, they discovered she took that scary picture. It wasn't Carrie at all. Which made them wonder, was it possible all those wild and scary texts and emails, those thousands of them, all sent in Carrie's name, were actually sent by Liz? Tricky. Even for a computer whiz to nail that bit of jello to the wall, it's beyond our expertise. And that's when I was gonna say, how well do you know computers and social media and all of that nonsense? We know how to pick up a phone and call Tony Kava and tell him that he's got a lot of information to look at. Tony Kava? Who's he? Well, Tony Kava is what you'd call an IT superhero. I work in the county's IT department, where I manage, I guess, a team of seven IT geeks. And I also work in the sheriff's office. I'm a special deputy, which is a reserve deputy in the sheriff's office. I'm a digital forensics examiner. I don't have a degree for any of this. I pretended to go to college for about two weeks, and I wasn't very good at that. I wasn't a very good student. I've never been a good student, but I do. I love learning. So I guess I found my calling, though, because I went straight to work and started doing technical work. And that led to where we're at today and where Tony Kava was at in 2015 when detectives Doty and Avis needed him to do a forensic deep dive on Liz. Goliar's electronics was at the ready, ready to spend hours and hours and hours on the case. I mean, how much stuff did you have to go through IT was terabytes worth of information, Maybe about three dozen email accounts, a dozen Facebook accounts, and a number of different apps. And so, in his tiny office, Toni Kava sat hour after hour, hunched over his workstation late into the night, deciphering enormous amounts of digital data. It might take her five minutes to create a fake email account. It might take me, you know, 15 hours to prove that it's actually her. And among those many Internet Inventions was a YouTube account to which Liz uploaded personal videos. And what did Tony Cavett discover about the IP address where Liz's YouTube videos were uploaded? It was linked straight to the home of Liz's new live in boyfriend, Todd Butterbaugh. Tony Kabba did a double take, Maybe two of them, because Todd Butterbaugh is also an IT guy who worked in the same department as Tony. In fact, Tony was Todd's boss. Crazy. Bizarre, but apparently true. Here's Todd Butterball. I got pulled in the office until I'm being put on administrative leave because you're being investigated. And they need to come to my house and search. Serve a search warrant. Because of the fact that she was living with me and that I worked at the county, they needed to remove any potential perception that I had access to anything and I could do anything. Plus, they also had to make sure that I wasn't involved. Todd told them, of course, that he knew nothing about these videos uploaded from his home while Liz lived there. And he told investigators about Liz stealing his laptop. Here's Tony Kava. So again, it was another arrow pointing at Liz. Painstakingly, arrow by arrow, Kava compiled a quiver full of evidence. His conclusion? Every single one of those YouTube videos, threatening emails and texts and Facebook posts came from Liz Gollier. And he could prove it. Meanwhile, Detectives Dodie and Avis busied themselves with good old fashioned earthbound evidence. Remember that one unidentified fingerprint found on a mint container in Carrie Farber's otherwise spotless Ford Explorer? Again, Detective Doty. And we asked our crime scene tech, hey, can you compare that fingerprint to the known prince of Liz? See what you come up with. It was a match. This lady, who should have had very little interaction with Carrie, should had no reason to ever be in her vehicle. Only met her in passing one time. But now her fingerprint is in her car. Proof of Liz and Carrie's suv. Proof of Liz impersonating Carrie online. There was no logical explanation for any of it. Unless we think Liz may have been involved with making Carrie disappear. It seemed this case was about to dive right through the looking glass and on the other side, well, hard to believe. Hi neighbor. Welcome to Birch Lane, your home for classic furniture and decor. Make the most of every special moment this spring with new beds and dressers, home reno essentials and more. Our time timeless styles are crafted to bring joy for years to come and delivered fast and free so you can celebrate what matters most. Its classic style for joyful living. Shop Birch Lane a Wayfair specialty brand@birchlane.com here@blue Apron we know exactly how hectic school nights can be. That's why we created Assemble and Bake delicious one pan meals that make family dinner simple. Just assemble the pre chopped ingredients and put the pan in the oven to bake. Then you're free to help out with that last minute diorama. Shop Assemble and bake@blueapron.com get 50% off your first two orders with code apron50. Terms and conditions apply. Visit blueapron.com terms for more. If you ever needed to be persuaded that bad things can happen anywhere, then take a journey with us. From compelling mysteries to in depth investigations, our Dateline episodes are available as podcasts. You can hear the latest stories every Tuesday. For more, follow Dateline NBC on Amazon Music or just ask Alexa. Play the podcast Dateline NBC on Amazon Music. Great storytelling with a twist from the True Crime original. By the time those two county sheriffs started looking into the strange case of Carrie Farver and what seemed to be thousands upon thousands of jealousy fueled texts and emails and threats, even arson, nearby in the small town of Macedonia, Iowa, Carrie's son Max was getting ready for high school graduation. He hadn't seen his mom in three years, though she, or someone pretending to be her, had contacted him on Facebook occasionally. But ever the optimist, Max overcame his doubts and decided one more time to reach out to her. I was at that point it was just a last ditch effort, just hoping something would happen, max wrote to his mom. Quote, if this is really you, please come back. I want you to be at my graduation. End quote. When she didn't respond, how did that feel? I wasn't really surprised because like I said, I knew it wasn't her. Max and his grandmother Nancy Kerry's mom suspected that all those digital rants were not actually from Carrie. They just didn't know that detectives Jim Doty and Ryan Avis had come to the same conclusion, that they in fact had proof that Liz was impersonating Carrie online. But the detectives also suspected something much more dreadful. Remember, their investigation began with one basic question. Was Carrie Farver Alive or was she dead? One clue to finding the answer involved Carrie missing major life events. Her father died, and she didn't go to the funeral. Missed her son's birthday. All these things. I mean, it didn't take Ryan very long at all to come to a dead end where he. He couldn't find anything to show that, no, she was alive. So Carrie Farber must have been the victim, not the villain. And the woman who'd claimed to be the victim, Liz Goliar, was the prime suspect in Carrie's disappearance. Because why else would you disguise yourself as Kerry if you weren't responsible for it? Why would you be in Kerry's vehicle if you weren't responsible for it? All of that is so counterintuitive and so bizarre that, you know, you wouldn't be expected to believe such a thing. No, it was stunning, really. Liz impersonating Carrie for years, sending thousands of texts and emails in her name. But now investigators had a bigger question and a much bigger problem. I guess part of the worry was if, even if we could prove that it's Liz sending all this stuff out as Carrie. Well, that doesn't prove murder. Murder? Yes. Detective Sergeant Doty and Corporal Avis were now firmly convinced that Liz had killed Carrie out of jealousy simply because Carrie had started dating Dave. Krupa, impersonated Carrie in order to win Dave back, and then tried to frame his ex partner, Amy Flora, for everything. Even going so far as to set her own house on fire and kill the family pets. Shoot herself in the leg. Wild stuff. But could they prove it? We didn't need something more. So we still weren't quite sure how to get to that point. And then Liz herself, by accusing Amy of shooting her, gave detectives their big idea. Liz had already met Corporal Ryan Avis, but she had no idea who Sergeant Jim Doty was. And that's when we introduced Jim to Liz. Well, Investigator Dodio, working for the sheriff's office. A little over a week after the shooting in the park, Liz limped into the sheriff's department. I told you I was looking into a missing person's case. Briefly on the phone, Detective Doty had good news for Liz. There had finally been a break in the case of the missing Carrie Farver. There have some. Been some remains that have been located. Okay. It was a ruse, of course. We're waiting on the lab results to make a positive ID but the initial indication that these remains are Carrie. Okay, okay. Well, they waited, said Detective Doty. He was hoping Liz could help them establish a firm timeline. Of Carrie's disappearance. Like, when was the last time that Liz saw Carrie? Well, that was easy, said Liz. They'd had only one brief encounter. When Liz showed up unannounced at Dave Krupa's apartment back in 2012 and found Carrie and Dave together. I didn't know he was dating anybody else at the time. So she came out and I was going in, and she fell. Smart comment to me. What she say to you? Called me a. Okay. And it wasn't a big deal. I didn't really care at the time. I just wanted to get my stuff, and then I left and went home. Okay. That's the only time you've ever seen her in person? Okay. You haven't seen her in person since? Nope. Liz told Detective Doty that it was Dave who blamed Carrie for all those harassing messages over the years. So she just assumed he was right. But just as she had told Detective Avis earlier, Liz said she now believed that Dave's ex partner, Amy Flora, was really the one behind it all. She was with him for 12 years, and she still goes in and out of his life all the time. Yeah. So you think she could be the person that did some of that stuff? I'm just saying, as another person who would be possessive of Dave, it wouldn't be her. So, I mean, I wouldn't put it past her. Detective Doty pretended to agree. I'm thinking if she was bold enough to go and then shoot you, okay, she could easily be bold enough to have done something to Carrie. Of course, Dodie told Liz he would still need to prove it. We had messages from her saying, hey, I did this or I did that. You know, I could easily start building that case, right? I told her, hey, I. I believe you. I believe Amy's after you. And we want to build a case against Amy. We want to get Amy thrown in prison, which we were hoping was music to her ears. And apparently it was. Liz agreed to help with the investigation and then limped out of the office. And she became a little deputy for you. Yeah. No telling what Liz might come up with next. In the next episode of Something About Carrie, When a tangle of lies will collide with a whole other tale. And that one, though hard to believe, will be true. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. It was hard to swallow. I didn't know what to think. I always call it divine intervention. My first thought when I saw those photographs was that this defendant had taken a trophy of the person she had killed. Something about Carrie is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Shane Bishop and Jessica Devera Lapid are the producers. Brian Drew, Marshall Housefeld and Greg Smith are audio editors, Brittany Morris is field producer, Molly DeRosa is assistant producer, Adam Gorfin is co executive producer, Paul Ryan is executive producer and Liz Cole as senior executive producer from NBC News. Audio Sound mixing by Rich Cutler. Hey neighbor Celebrate all things Spring with Birch Lane. Our timeless furniture and decor are delivered for free in days, not weeks. It's classic style for joyful living. Shop Birch Lane, a Wayfair specialty brand, @birch lane.com.