In the Cari Farver case, a woman murdered in 2012 remained 'alive' through 14,000 fake text messages, emails, and online accounts maintained by her killer for five years, demonstrating how sophisticated digital deception can mislead investigations and how forensic analysis of communication patterns, IP addresses, and device identifiers can ultimately reveal the truth even without a body.
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She Was Dead For 5 Years… She Never Stopped Texting
Added:When I'd get text messages, I would just say, "Please call [music] me.
I just need to hear your voice." And she would say, "Uh well, this has got to be good [music] enough for you."
>> She was absent for her own birthday. She missed Thanksgiving. [music] She wasn't around when her son, Max, turned 15.
>> She even missed her [music] own father's funeral.
>> I would regularly receive [music] 60-plus texts a day. 100 emails a day was not uncommon.
>> For 5 years, investigators were looking for the wrong person. They had evidence.
Thousands of pieces of it. Text messages, emails, new accounts created and active, sending communications in real time. A digital trail so dense, so persistent, so alive, that the possibility Cari Farver was dead barely registered. She was messaging people.
She was threatening people. She was watching people. Dead women don't do that. Except Cari Farver wasn't doing any of it. Cari Farver, investigators would eventually conclude, had been dead since the morning she [music] disappeared. And every single one of those messages, all 14,000 of them, had been written by her killer. For 5 years, a murderer spoke in a dead woman's voice.
For 5 years, it worked. This is how.
November 14th, 2012, Omaha, Nebraska, before dawn. Cari Farver got dressed in the dark of a borrowed apartment, said goodbye to the man she had been casually dating and walked out into the cold. She got in her car. She drove away. Nobody saw her again.
Three days later, her car turned up. It was sitting at a park and ride facility in Council Bluffs, Iowa, just across the Missouri River. Right where she had left it. Keys inside. No signs of a struggle.
No note. No explanation. Just a car and no Carri. [music] Investigators looked at it, documented it, moved on.
They would later come to believe that car, and what it did and didn't contain, told a story they weren't yet prepared to read. But in November 2012, nobody was looking for a murder scene.
Because within hours of Carri's disappearance, she started texting. The first ones were calm. "I'm fine. I needed space. Don't look for me." From Carri's number. In something like Carri's voice. On the surface, it was [music] plausible. She was an adult. She had the right to go.
And the messages kept coming, proving, or seeming to prove, that wherever she was, she was alive. But her mother, Pam Renner, wasn't buying it. Pam knew her daughter. She knew Carri's rhythms, her habits, the way she talked, the things she cared about. And above everything else, Pam knew how Carri felt about her son, Maxwell, then 11 years old, waiting at home in Macedonia. Carri Farver did not leave Maxwell.
That was not something she did. "This isn't her," Pam said. "Something has happened." Pam filed a missing person's report. She pushed investigators [music] to look harder. She drove the same routes Carri drove. She contacted Carri's friends, her colleagues at West [music] Corporation, anyone who might have heard from her. Every door she knocked on led back to the same place.
The messages. She's fine. She left. She said so herself. Pam didn't believe it for a single day. She would spend 5 years being told she was wrong. She was right about everything. Because by the time investigators might have looked harder at the case, the messages had already changed [music] the story. They turned dark almost immediately. Within days, what had been calm became hostile, threatening, obsessive. The texts targeted the man Carrie had been dating, a mechanic named Dave Kroupa. They targeted another woman in his life.
They came at midnight, at 3:00 a.m.
They referenced things happening in real time, as if the sender was watching. Not just watching, tracking. One lie became 10. 10 became 100. 100 became 1,000. And every new message made it harder to ask the question that mattered most. If Carrie is sending all of these, where is she? Before the messages, before all of it, there was a woman. Carrie Lee Farver was born on June 30th, 1975 in Western Iowa. She grew up in Macedonia, a small town in Pottawattamie County [music] where the population fits on a single census page and ambition tends to stand out. She had built a career [music] as a computer programmer.
She worked for West Corporation in Omaha, a real, demanding job in a technical field, commuting across the Missouri River, building something she could be proud of. People who worked with her described someone who was sharp, capable, independent. She was 37 years old. She had a mother who was her anchor and a son who was her world.
Maxwell was 11 in November 2012.
He expected his mother to come home.
People who knew Carri would say the same things over and over in the years that followed. She wouldn't leave Maxwell.
The messages don't sound right.
Something happened to her.
They were right about [music] all of it.
But the messages kept coming and the people receiving them kept being told the same thing.
Carri is alive. Carri is angry. Carri chose this.
Maxwell was 11 when his mother disappeared.
He would be 16 before anyone told him the truth.
Dave Krupa was the last known person to see Carri Farver alive.
He was a mechanic in Omaha. A father himself. Divorced, focused on his kids, navigating the same complicated arithmetic of single parenthood that [music] Carri knew well.
He had met Carri through an online dating platform in the fall of 2012.
They connected quickly.
>> [music] >> According to accounts that would later emerge, Carri had seemed enthusiastic, perhaps more so than the casual framing of their arrangement suggested. There were messages from Carri, people close to the case later noted, indicating she was developing serious feelings.
One message reportedly suggested she wanted to move in with him.
Krupa found that intensity surprising.
They had known each other only a matter of weeks.
He was also, at the time, seeing someone else, a woman named Liz Golia, whom he had met not long before Carri. He had been upfront with both women.
He wasn't looking for [music] something serious.
He had told them as much. That honesty would [music] not protect him from what came next.
When Carri disappeared, Dave Krupa became the obvious focal point. He was the last confirmed contact. His apartment was the last confirmed location. And the messages that started arriving almost immediately, messages full of accusation, obsession, blame, were addressed to him, >> [music] >> circled him, returned to him again and again.
Investigators knew all of this. Karry's family knew all of this.
And in the months and years that followed, many people who followed the case found themselves asking the same question. Did Dave know more than he was saying? He filed police reports documenting [music] the harassment. He cooperated with every request investigators made. He documented messages, provided records, answered questions. But the suspicion is a natural thing. Proximity to a missing woman casts a long shadow. And the obsessive quality of the messages, the way they fixated on Dave, tracked his movements, raged at him [music] for things he did and didn't do, suggested a level of attachment that pointed somewhere close to him.
Here is what investigators [music] eventually concluded. Dave Kroupa was innocent. Completely, unambiguously innocent. He wasn't a [music] suspect.
He was something more unsettling than that. He was the [music] target. The entire campaign, thousands of messages, years [music] of harassment, a surveillance operation that tracked his movements, his relationships, his daily life in real time, wasn't random. It was aimed at him.
Precisely. Deliberately. By someone who had been in his life from the very beginning.
Someone who, even as the investigation stumbled forward, was standing close enough to watch it fail.
And close enough to make sure it kept failing. To understand what happened to Karry Farver, you have to understand the woman investigators would eventually conclude [music] killed her. Liz Goliar had met Dave Kroupa shortly before Carrie did through the same online dating [music] landscape. She was a mother herself, someone working through her own difficulties, [music] someone who on the surface appeared to be living the quiet, complicated life that a lot of people in their 30s live. But from the start, people who knew her would later say >> [music] >> her attachment to Dave Kroupa ran deeper than he knew. Kroupa had been upfront with her. He wasn't looking for something serious.
He was seeing other people. Liz was one of them.
>> [music] >> What investigators and prosecutors would later argue, and what the evidence would eventually be used to demonstrate, [music] was that Liz Goliar's feelings about that arrangement were not what she allowed Dave to see.
That behind the casual exterior, she had fixed on him in a way that was [music] consuming. That the idea of someone else having his attention, genuinely having it the way Carrie seemed to, had produced something in her that didn't have a name until the case was over.
When Carrie Farver arrived in Dave Kroupa's life and started to matter, Liz Goliar appeared publicly to accept it.
She was cooperative, reasonable. She knew the arrangement. And then Carrie disappeared. And then the messages started. There's a question people ask about cases like this, about people who do what Liz Goliar apparently did, and it's a question the evidence can answer only partially. How do you maintain a life of 5 years?
Part of it [music] is desperation.
Once you begin, stopping means exposure.
Every message is a commitment to the next one.
Every fake account is a wall that has to be maintained. Part of it is control.
The campaign gave Goliar something, proximity to Dave's life, information, influence. Every threatening message she sent in Carrie's name kept Dave unsettled, kept him in contact with the police reports she was filing alongside him, kept her positioned as someone in his orbit rather than someone he might have moved past entirely. And part of it, the part that makes this case genuinely [music] disturbing, is that it appeared to work. For 4 years and 11 months, it worked. The people around Liz Golyar [music] saw a woman who had been targeted, who was suffering, who was cooperating with investigators [music] and handling a nightmare with patience and composure. They did not see what was underneath.
To understand how investigators got this wrong for so long, you need to understand what the harassment actually [music] looked like. It wasn't just angry texts. It was a campaign. Messages arrived demanding immediate responses.
If Dave didn't reply within minutes, [music] more messages followed, escalating, accusing, threatening. The tone shifted constantly, sometimes pleading, sometimes threatening, sometimes both in the same exchange. Any woman Dave spent time with became a target. New contacts [music] in his life received communications warning them away. Texts that knew details, [music] names, locations, recent events that should have been impossible for someone who had supposedly left and gone off the grid. When Dave began seeing someone after Carrie's disappearance, the messages intensified.
They knew who she was. They knew where she lived. They knew what she drove. The new woman in Dave's life started receiving threatening communications directly. Messages that made her feel watched, [music] followed, messages that knew things, because someone was watching. At the same time, Liz Golyar's property [music] was being targeted or appeared to be.
Her car was vandalized.
Threatening messages arrived for her as well.
A fire broke out at her home. She reported all of it to police.
She was cooperative, distressed, appeared to be enduring exactly the same harassment campaign that Dave was.
For investigators juggling the complexity of the case, this made a kind of sense. If a disturbed, [music] missing woman was targeting Dave, it followed that she might also target his other girlfriend. It was a logical reading of the evidence.
It was completely wrong. The fire at Liz Golyar's home, [music] the vandalism to her car, the threatening messages she received, investigators would eventually conclude that Golyar had staged [music] or arranged all of it herself.
To look like a victim. To direct suspicion outward. To ensure that no one looked inward. And while all of this was happening, 1 month became 6.
6 months became a year. The messages didn't stop. They multiplied. By the time investigators finally mapped the full scope of the campaign, they had recovered messages across dozens of platforms and hundreds of accounts.
What they showed was a picture of obsession operating at a level that most people [music] struggle to imagine.
Early messages in the first weeks after disappearance [music] presented themselves as Cari, angry, confused, blaming Dave for her decision to leave.
They were crafted to sound like a troubled woman lashing out. They were designed to be believed. But they escalated. Messages began arriving that threatened Dave's relationships.
When he spent time with anyone new, the texts identified [music] that person by name within days.
Sometimes within hours. One communication warned a woman Dave had recently started seeing to stay away and included details about her that she had not shared publicly. Her address, her vehicle, the route she drove to work. The implication was clear. Someone knew where she was and someone was [music] willing to say so. Other messages targeted Dave's employment, his family, people at the periphery of his life who had no involvement in the situation whatsoever. The campaign spread outward, finding new targets, [music] establishing new contact points, as if the goal wasn't simply to threaten, but [music] to colonize every corner of Dave Kroupa's world with a presence that couldn't be ignored. And always, relentlessly, without pause, the messages circled back to the same theme.
You belong to me. Everyone else will leave. I am the only constant. What investigators eventually [music] understood, reading thousands of these messages in sequence, was that they weren't the communications [music] of a woman in crisis.
They were the communications of someone who believed, genuinely, deeply, with a conviction that had overridden everything else, that Dave Kroupa was hers. And that Carrie Farver had tried to take him.
Here is something the case record makes uncomfortable to look at directly.
Investigators had opportunities to ask questions earlier. They didn't. The first reports about the harassment were filed weeks after Carrie's disappearance.
Police documented the messages, took statements, [music] and treated the situation as a harassment matter, an unusual one, given the missing person's [music] report, but not necessarily a criminal one beyond that. The volume of messages should have been a red [music] flag. A person experiencing a normal emotional crisis does not send thousands of communications across months. The sheer number suggested something other than grief or rage. It suggested management, operation, deliberate sustained effort.
The adaptability of the messages should have been a red flag. They responded to real-time events with a specificity that required active monitoring of the people being targeted. A woman who had walked away from her life and gone off the grid doesn't know that a specific person started seeing [music] someone new last Tuesday. The technical sophistication should have been a red flag. Rotating [music] accounts, burner numbers, platforms chosen for their difficulty of attribution. These aren't the choices of someone acting impulsively. These are the choices of someone who has thought carefully about how investigators work.
Each of these things was noted, to some degree, in the case record. None of them, individually or together, pushed the investigation toward the conclusion that would eventually prove correct.
Part of this is understandable.
Investigators encounter harassment cases constantly. The digital landscape of the early 2010s was less well mapped than it is now. And the active digital communication from Carri's accounts created a presumption of [music] life that was genuinely difficult to overcome without much stronger countervailing evidence. But the window [music] in which Carri Farver's death might have been discovered sooner, the months in which a more aggressive response to the early warning signs might have saved years of deception, is something the people closest to this case have never stopped thinking about. Pam Renner has never [music] stopped thinking about it.
She knew something was wrong on day one.
She was told, again and again, that the messages proved otherwise. She was right, and nobody listened. Whoever was running the campaign, and that word running is the right one, was operating [music] with a discipline that strained comprehension. Texts from Carries number, emails from accounts in her name, fake profiles, burner numbers, anonymous platforms rotated before investigators could pin them down. The infrastructure was constantly refreshed, constantly adapted, constantly alive.
And all of it responding.
When Dave spent time with someone new, the messages [music] knew. When investigators got close to something, the messages shifted. This wasn't grief.
This wasn't rage. This was someone who understood, with cold precision, exactly what they were doing and why they needed to keep doing it. And while they did it, Pam Renner spent every available hour trying to find her daughter. She contacted investigators [music] repeatedly. She raised the same concerns again and again. The messages don't sound like Carrie. The behavior doesn't fit. Something has [music] happened to her. Every time, the answer came back to the messages. She's in contact. She says she's fine. She's an adult. Pam knew her daughter was dead. She couldn't prove it. And meanwhile, Maxwell grew up. 12 years old, then 13, 14, 15, starting middle school without her, celebrating birthdays without her, finishing entire school years without a phone call, without a visit, without [music] a mother at the door. And every year, messages arrived from the woman he had been told abandoned him. Messages that explained why [music] she left.
Messages that said she was doing fine.
Messages that told a child, again and again, in the voice of the person who had taken her from him that his mother had simply chosen not to come back.
Every single one was a lie. Every single one was written by the person who had taken her from him. By the time investigators finally started pulling [music] the right thread, there were more than 14,000 of them. 14,000 messages.
>> [music] >> 14,000 opportunities to stop. 14,000 chances to tell the truth.
The truth never came. Not from those messages. It came from a photograph.
[music] October 2016.
For years after Carrie Farver disappeared, Liz Golyar called police.
She had been shot, she said. Her stalker. Connected to everything that had been happening. She provided photographs as evidence.
She was cooperative, detailed, consistent. She had always been cooperative. Investigators examined the photographs. Something was wrong. The timestamps [music] didn't match. The location data didn't match. And for the first time, four years into the case, investigators seriously entertained the possibility [music] they had never allowed themselves before.
What if Liz Golyar wasn't a victim [music] at all? What if the woman who had spent four years filing police reports alongside them, cooperating, >> [music] >> providing documentation, appearing devastated, was the one who had been running the entire campaign?
Investigators eventually concluded that Liz Golyar had shot herself in the leg.
She had inflicted the wound deliberately to reinforce a story she had been telling for four years that she was a target.
>> [music] >> That Carrie Farver was alive, dangerous, somewhere out there, still threatening, still watching, still making everyone's life a nightmare. It was the most extreme thing she had done to protect her secret. It was also the thing that ended it. Because once investigators doubted Goly as account of her own shooting, they went back to the digital record with fresh eyes. And this time, they followed it all the way. What investigators found when they went back through the records properly, methodically, with the right tools and the right questions was staggering in its scope. Every message sent from an account in Korry Awad's name left a trace. Not an obvious trace. Not a simple one.
The accounts had been created carefully, rotated [music] frequently, and used on platforms specifically chosen to make attribution difficult. Whoever was running them had understood at a functional level how digital communications [music] worked and how investigators typically tried to trace them. But understanding [music] something and defeating it completely are different things. IP addresses, the numerical identifiers that mark where an internet connection originates, had been logged by service providers each time the accounts were accessed. Individually, some of those records led to dead ends. But investigators weren't looking at individual messages anymore. They were looking at thousands of them mapped across years and patterns began to emerge. Account creation records showed consistent behaviors, the same methods, [music] the same timing windows, the same sequence of steps that pointed toward a single operator rather than multiple people.
Device identifiers linked separate accounts to the same hardware even when accessed through different platforms.
Cell tower records placed Goly's phone at locations consistent with the timeline investigators were building.
[music] And then there was something simpler, almost elegant in its obviousness once someone finally looked for it. The messages stopped when Liz Goliad was asleep. Every night for years.
>> [music] >> They stopped when she was known to be somewhere without her phone. They resumed reliably when she returned.
Investigators mapped thousands of messages against years [music] of records. What had felt like something vast and coordinated, something almost impossible for a single person to maintain, collapsed when viewed this [music] way into something much smaller.
One person. One phone. One obsession.
The IP addresses didn't lead to Kary Farver. They led to Liz Goliad. Not some of them. Thousands. The woman who had spent four years filing police reports as a victim, who had provided documentation, cooperated with investigators, appeared devastated by the harassment, had been writing every message. [music] Every one. The angry 3:00 a.m. texts.
The threats. The fake profiles. The emails in Kary's name. The communications that [music] had told Maxwell his mother didn't want him. All of it. Liz Goliad. For nearly five years. And if Goliad had been sending those messages since the week Kary disappeared, if there had never been a living, furious Kary behind them, then the investigation had just become something different. Something worse. It was no longer a harassment case with a missing woman somewhere in the background. [music] It was a murder case. It had always been a murder case. What happened on the morning of November 14th, 2012? [music] Investigators conducted a full forensic examination of Liz Goliad's devices.
They were looking for the architecture of the harassment campaign. They found something [music] else. Buried in the deleted files of Golia's phone, files most people assume are gone forever, files she had tried to erase, were photographs.
Photographs that appeared to show human remains. Cary Farver's body has never been found. It has still never been found. But those images, recovered from the phone of the woman who had spent 5 years speaking in her voice, told investigators something the absence of a body alone could not. Cary hadn't left.
She hadn't chosen a new life somewhere.
She had been killed. [music] Almost certainly on the morning of November 14th, 2012, within hours of walking out of Dave Kroupa's apartment, [music] Cary Farver was murdered. And then Liz Golia had put on her voice [music] like a coat. She had worn it for 5 years. She had used it to speak to Cary's mother. She had used it to speak to Cary's son.
She had used it to misdirect a murder investigation while standing close enough to watch it fail.
14,000 times. Liz Golia was charged with first-degree murder in the death of Cary Farver. The trial, held in Douglas County, Nebraska, was unlike most murder prosecutions, and the prosecutors who built the case knew exactly how unusual it was. No body. No confirmed crime scene. No established cause of death. No eyewitnesses.
Prosecuting a murder without a body is one of the most difficult things a prosecutor [music] can attempt. Defense attorneys in such cases have a powerful tool, reasonable doubt rooted in the most basic question a jury can ask. How do we know she's dead? Without remains, without forensic evidence of the killing itself, that question has no clean answer. Deputy Douglas County Attorney Brenda Beadle built her case on the only foundation available, the digital record reconstructed in full. The forensic reconstruction [music] of the harassment campaign was presented in its entirety.
Thousands of messages traced through IP records, account creation patterns, and device identifiers [music] mapped back to Golea's devices over nearly 5 years.
Cell tower records.
The metadata from the stage shooting photographs.
The pattern analysis showing that the campaign's activity aligned precisely with Golea's movements and availability.
And then the deleted photographs, the images recovered from Golea's phone pulled back from deletion by forensic extraction, were presented to the jury.
>> [music] >> Their existence was significant. Their deletion was more significant. The fact that they could be recovered at all was a function of something Golea apparently hadn't accounted for. Deleting a file doesn't destroy [music] it. It marks the space as available.
The data remains until it's overwritten.
Forensic tools can reach [music] into that space and retrieve what was supposed to be gone. A computer programmer would have known that.
Liz Golea, it appeared, did not. The defense contested everything.
The digital evidence.
The forensic methodology. The conclusions investigators had drawn from patterns and metadata.
Without the body, without a confirmed death, they argued, how could the jury be certain?
>> [music] >> The jury deliberated for approximately 5 hours.
Then they came back. Guilty.
First-degree murder. Life in prison.
Without the possibility of parole.
The verdict closed [music] something. It didn't close everything. Karry Farris' remains have never been [music] found.
There is no grave. No confirmed resting place. Pam Renner, who spent 5 years receiving fabricated messages from her daughter's accounts, who was told over and over that Carri had simply chosen to leave, who knew from the very first day that something was catastrophically wrong, knows the truth now. The truth doesn't give her daughter back. Maxwell Fava is an adult now.
>> [music] >> He knows what those messages were.
He knows who sent them. He knows that the woman who killed his mother then spent 5 years writing to him in her name, telling him, >> [music] >> year after year, in birthday messages and explanations and excuses, that she had abandoned him. There is no word adequate to that. Dave Krupa cooperated fully with investigators throughout. He had been used, his life surveilled, his relationships tracked, his daily movements monitored, by the person who was simultaneously filing police reports beside him. He had been the fixed point around which the entire deception orbited, and he had never known it. And investigators who had spent years working the case had to reckon with a simple, painful question. What if we had looked harder earlier? There are no clean answers.
The deception was sophisticated.
The volume was staggering.
The positioning of Golea as a cooperative victim witness had been almost perfectly constructed. But the question remains. And it sits unresolved alongside the other question this case can never fully answer. Where is Carri Fava? Go back to the beginning. November 14th, 2012. A woman walks out of an apartment in the dark. She gets in her car. She drives away. She never comes home. And then she starts talking. For nearly 5 years, Carri Fava's voice circulated through the lives of the people she had known, through her mother's inbox, through her son's messages, through the phones of investigators and lawyers and the man she had briefly [music] dated. Her voice, but not her words. Her name, but not her thoughts. Her identity used, worn, weaponized to hide the fact that she was gone. 14,000 messages. Not one of them from Cari. Every one of them from the woman who killed her. The Cari Farver case changed how investigators approach digital communication in missing persons cases. It changed how courts think about murder prosecutions without a body. It became a warning about obsession, [music] about patience, about what a person willing to maintain a lie for 5 years can do to an investigation that isn't looking for a lie. But more than any of that, it is a story about a woman who was real. Cari Lee Farver. Programmer.
Mother. Daughter. 37 years old. She drove to Omaha on a November morning in 2012 and she never came home. For 5 years, someone tried to make the world forget she had ever existed by making it believe she still did. That person is in a cell in Nebraska now. Silent. And Cari Farver, the real Cari Farver, not the ghost that was used to hide her, is no longer missing. She is known. She is remembered.
>> I would just want people to remember her as the fun-loving, talented, smart woman that she was.
>> And she loved her son and she was [music] a tremendous mother and she was a hard worker.
>> If I could talk to Cari right now, I'd say I love you.
I'm so glad that you were in my life.
And I miss you [music] terribly.
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