Transcript of Mother

After Cary Farver drove away from Little Masedonia, Iowa, in November of 2012, and never returned, cops and neighbors alike seemed all too willing to believe that her bipolar disorder was to blame. She had some break with reality. Of course, they sympathized with Cary's son, Max, and her mother, Nancy. But what could anyone do? Detective Ryan Avis.

In the small community where she's from, they all believe that, too. And Nancy never could stand up and argue.

Nancy felt lonely indeed. Until one day, three years later, Avis' partner, Detective Jim Doty, knocked on her door.

I was a little bit standoffish because-Been down that road before.

Yeah.

Finally, he said to me, Well, I want you to know that I don't think she left on her own. And I tell you, my attitude just changed.

It was the very thing Nancy had suspected from the start. They saw what you had seen all along. Right.

So then the investigation really got going.

An investigation as unusual and convoluted as the suspected crime. I'm Keith Morison, and this is something about Carrie. A podcast from Dateland. Episode 5, Mother. Back in the city, Liz Gaulier was now eagerly playing a new role, trying to help detect and prove that Amy Flora, Dave Krupa's ex, and also Liz's rival for Dave's time and perhaps affection, Amy was the one who shot Liz and killed Carrie. Of course, all the while, the Detectives knew that Amy was innocent, but they let Liz think they believed otherwise. Well, interviewing Liz, they even dropped hints of what to listen for from Amy so they could arrest her. Broad hints, as you can hear in this exchange.

She made anything, real threatening statements or inferred that she ever did anything to carry because that's gold to me if we have something like that.

And what do you know? Wonder of Wonders. Within days, Liz began forwarding detectives emails from Amy. She said emails that were far more explicit than anything they'd seen before. We had a voice actor read them.

I shot you, Liz, to make sure Dave stayed away from you. I made a couple of those fake emails and numbers you and Dave thought were carried to get rid of you, Liz, but it didn't work too well.

When they first started coming in, they were pretty vague.

So Detective Mr. Doty called in Liz again and told her she was on the right track and offered further guidance.

So you guys want me to try and email her back?

I'm leaving that in your court, Liz. I mean, if that's something you would feel okay doing, that'd be really helpful for us.

Liz was on board, said she would do her best.

Carry family some closure would be nice, Carly.

Yeah, that get that true, get her family some closure. So Liz left, and before long reported that she had sent an email asking Amy to confirm that she really shot Liz, to describe the gun she used and to reveal whether she ever met Cary Farver. And Liz lied, Amy responded.

The gun was Dave's that I used. Don't worry, you didn't get it as bad as Crazy Cary.

And that list showed Detective's this email, supposedly from Amy.

So when I met Crazy Cary, she would not stop talking about Dave and him being her husband. She tried to attack me, but I attacked her with a knife. I stabbed her three to four times in the chest and stomach area. I then took her out and burned her. I stuffed her body in a garbage bag with crap.

Of course, the investigators knew full well that Amy did not write that email, did not send that email, and did not kill Carrie. But the content of the email? That was just a detail that only the actual killer would know. A couple of days later, Dave Krupa called Detective Avis and said he'd heard something disturbing from Liz. Police recorded the conversation. She told me that the Sheriff had found the remain like somebody's dead, and that they thought it was this Thierry, and that supposedly they had all this evidence against Amy, that she's complicit or know something or whatever. Dave was quite understandably shaken up. The detective couldn't tell Dave much, but he did drop a big hint.

I'd be damn near moved in with Amy if I were you. Okay. And since Liz did come and tell you this, I would avoid her like the plague right now.

Dave took that advice, moved in with his ex-partner, Amy, so they could protect each other and their kids. But that outraged Liz. And she called the detectives to tell them she was upset because they had not arrested Amy.

Looks like the only person that benefited was her. She gets to shoot somebody, and then she gets to kill another person, and then she gets to move in with Dave, and she gets to be free, and you guys are arresting her.

At which Detective Doty told Liz he still needed more evidence to arrest Amy. So Liz made a bold move. She agreed to give the cops access to her email account. And over the next month, the emails came pouring in. Allegedly, of course, from Amy.

I got a hold of Carrie, and we drove in her car. I reached over and stabbed her in the stomach. When I wild, Carrie. You know she begged me to call Dave at work. Then she begged to talk to her family before she died.

All of this fairly jumped off the page. What else could it be but a confession? Even though Liz was trying to begin the confession on Amy. But the phrase what else could it be is generally not enough to win a murder conviction or persuade the DA to bring charges.

We had to find evidence that would match what she's telling us to confirm that what she's telling us is true?

The detectives decided they needed to give another going over to Kerry's Ford Explorer, but it turned out Nancy had long ago sold it, so they tracked it down in a whole other county. Not so easy to do. And what they found, that vehicle had been used and used and used. Hard to imagine any evidence would be left in there. Still, they got the key and they took a look.

Took out the passenger seat, pulled off the fabric of that, and there was a dark red stain right on that seat. Large stain.

And when that stain was sent in for testing, DNA confirmed It was human blood. Carrie's blood. That's huge.

It was.

We high-fived. But we didn't really know what to do next for sure.

Except they knew they had to move quickly because they'd put a tracker on Liz's vehicle and discovered she'd been scouting a new target.

We would see her circle Amy's apartment multiple times a day.

So because Doty and Avis believe that Carrie Farber had been murdered in Omaha, where Liz lived at the time, they asked for help from the Omaha Police Department, and they got lucky. Omaha found an active warrant for Liz, a traffic citation. Misdemeanor, still, it was enough to pull Liz over in her car and arrest her and bring her into the station and sit her down for an interview. Can you take a hand, go so forth? Their questions were not about the ticket. They were about Kerry. Liz stuck to her story that she, not Carrie, was the victim of this tragic tale. What do you think happened to Carrie Farber? I don't know.

I don't know if what Amy said is true. I don't know. I'm more scared that something going to happen to me, and then my kids aren't going to have anybody.

The Omaha Detective dialed up the pressure. How, he asked, how did Lizzie his fingerprint get onto that mint tin that had been found in Carrie's car? To which Liz replied.

We don't know, but I've never been in her car. I don't even know what car she drives.

Liz denied everything. The fingers pointed right at you.

I'm done talking, and I'm going to have my attorney because I didn't do anything.

No confession now. And within hours, Liz bonded out. Detectives took what evidence they had to the DA, that and their firm belief that Liz Goliar killed Kerry Farber. The DA asked for time. This was no straightforward case. Months passed, and during that time, Kerry's son, Max, remained completely unaware of any of those developments. Months before, he made a last effort, sending a message, begging his mom to show up for his high school graduation. Now the ceremony came and went without answers and without his mom. That was the real stake in the heart. Yeah. Because Well, God knows if there was any occasion she was going to attend, it certainly would have been your graduation. Yeah. December of 2016 came and went. Another winter set in. And then on December 22nd, 2016, more than four years after Cary Farber vanished, the county attorney finally finished reviewing all the evidence undecided. There was enough evidence to arrest Liz Gaulier and charge her with murder.

The best part of it was being able to go to Nancy and tell her, We've arrested somebody for the murder of your daughter.

That was a big day for her.

That was what made working this whole case worth it.

It would feel like driving out there to see her.

Can't drive fast enough.

The news came as an unbelievable surprise for Dave Krupa, too.

I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. It was hard to swallow. I didn't know what to think.

But with the surprise came relief. Ief.

I just sat in a break room for, I don't know, a long time, trying to wrap my head around it. It was the first time I could go outside and take a breath of fresh air and say, I don't have to look over my shoulder today.

Liz Gaal, you're sat in jail. While the prosecutors prepared for a trial that they knew would not be easy. Chief Deputy, Douglas County attorney, Brenda Beatle. No body cases are tough, right?

Yeah, and circumstantial. It was very circumstantial.

Circumstantial cases can be among the most convincing facing to a jury, but not always. And then, as the trial date was bearing down, Dave Krupa made a trip to his storage unit, and he was sorting things, and he found something, and he knew right away way. Somebody had to see this.

That had been sitting in my storage unit in a box for a year and a half. Boy.

Icing on the cake. It wasn't ever icing on the cake. Butter cream. Right.

Well, that became the cake, and the rest was I think.

It has stood like a fortress for more than a century, the Hall of Justice, also known as the Douglas County Courthouse, is a commanding presence, a 17th in Farnam in downtown Omaha. It's also something of an art piece, all that carved granite and limestone and murals chronicling in color the history of Nebraska. And high above, a dome of stained glass and steel. It stands as an enduring symbol of stability and law and order. Though once early on, it watched over not stability, but chaos. Back in 1919, the place was very nearly destroyed by a white mob intent on lynching a black man accused of raping a young white woman. The lynching was completed. Most terrifically right behind that monument to justice, though the victim turned out to be innocent of any crime. And then decades later, the same building hosted the city's first civil rights sit in. And ever since, thief, con artists, killers, villains of every stripe have stood in its docks to face the various fates imposed upon them by the law. Until in 2017, the woman at the center of our story, Liz Gaulier, entered a courtroom for her turn in the Hall of Justice.

Representing the people, Chief Deputy Douglas County attorney, Brenda Beatle.

I mean, certainly we've had our fair share of homicides and bizarre cases, but this certainly, in all my experience, tops the charts for most bizarre.

Bizarre and complicated was the case against Liz Goliar, a story that would be a challenge for anyone to tell in an understandable and efficient way, even Brenda Beatle. I mean, if you're at a cocktail party or something and somebody says, What are you working on? What do you even tell them?

Yeah, I say, Do you have an hour? Because I think this is one of those cases that if you just have a piece of the story, it's not enough and it doesn't encompass everything that you're trying to get across. You need to tell the whole story. It's just compiled on all the details that come out and all the bizarre actions. It just amounts, and then it culminates into enough to get us to be able to charge.

Prosecutor Beatle would have company at the prosecution table. This was her colleague at the time, James Masteller.

The first time I was briefed on this case, my first impression was, this is the story for a made for TV movie. When you're thinking about this and hearing about this, you're thinking, no one can believe that this actually happened. It's completely unbelievable. And so part of the challenge with our case was trying to explain to the trial effect how this actually had happened, how this was this unbelievable set of circumstances actually had occurred and was believable.

Remember, the charge was murder, murder in the first degree, even though Cary Farber's body has not been found.

Your typical murder case, you know exactly when the murder happened, you know exactly where it happened. When you don't have a body, you don't really have a good date, time, or location.

And one more complication. Liz, awaiting trial, raised the stakes even higher. As was her right, she demanded a speedy trial. Detective Ryan Avis.

She wanted to have a trial within 90 days and didn't waive that. And we then had to hit turbo mode and get everything ready, which I thought it was, but I guess there's a lot more to it after that.

Well, yes. That's a very busy time for you guys, right?

The attorneys more. Normally, if they need us to run something down, we'll do it. But what we did for this I don't know if I'll ever do that type of work again.

Detective Avis and his partner, Jim Doty, as well as reserve Deputy and tech guru, Tony Cava, were essentially loans from the Sheriff's office in Iowa to Nebraska prosecutor Beatle. Well, they needed a case whisperer, right? They needed somebody who knew it intimately.

Tony and I had met with our supervisors and asked if we could just shut down what we're doing at the office and be just dedicated to this. And no questions asked. Said, Absolutely, go ahead.

I know that the prosecutors felt that that was a good circumstantial case, but there was a nobody case, and those are always complicated. So that was potentially a problem. Was it weighing on the two of you?

It was me.

That was Detective Doty, who knew there was good reason to worry without some good solid piece of evidence to connect it all. Because Doty had an encyclopedic knowledge of the case, he would sit with the prosecutors during trial. But as they prepared, both detectives knew their search for evidence could not end. Not quite yet. And so with Liz Gaulier's murder trial just weeks away, the detectives and Tony have a circled back round to all involved, asking if any of the key players and witnesses could think of anything, no matter how minor, that might help the case against Liz. Detective Avis.

Tony and I, I don't know how many times we've done over the years, just every time we see someone involved with the case, Hey, do you have any tablets, phones, computers, anything from back then?

Even though you've already looked for them?

Yeah. And I know I've asked the same person the same question three times. Maybe the fourth time, they'll remember something. So we went back, talked to Dave.

Dave is, of course, Dave Krupa, the Omaha car mechanic, whose brief relationship with Kerry was like a starting gun for all that happened. The state's theory was that Dave liked Kerry Liz got jealous, so jealous she killed Kerry, then covered up what she did by pretending to be Kerry for three years, sending Dave and herself tens of thousands of threatening emails and texts and Facebook messages to make it appear that Kerry was dangerous and unhinged when in reality, Kerry was dead, and the only dangerous and unhinged person was, in fact, Liz. So then, when detectives went back to Dave Krupa asking if he had anything else to help their case, what was Dave's reply?

I was like, No, not really. Nothing I can think of. And then as they're walking out the door, I'm like, You know what? I do have a tablet. He used to use it for playing them stupid app games like you download on your phone. I'm like, 10 minutes of time wasters. That's all I ever used it for. And he was like, When did you get a chance to grab it, it was in my storage unit. It was something I could have given to him two years ago. If they'd have asked and I'd have thought about it. So I gave it to him the next day.

Gave it to Tony Cava, actually, the tech guru.

I took it back to the lab, and I really didn't expect to find much.

Then, as he poked around in the tablet's history of time wasters, as Dave called them, he came across something he didn't expect.

There was a memory card in the tablet, and that memory card, when you put it in the computer, it's been formatted. In 2014, somebody cleared it off, so it looks empty.

Blank, or so it seemed, until he took a closer look.

But when you look through the unallocated space, you look at things that have been deleted that were on there. I found right away evidence that this memory card was actually used in Liz Golier's phone back in 2012 and 2013.

And on the SD card, deleted but yet still visible.

And as I dug deeper, I was able to recover thousands of photographs, including hundreds of selfies that Liz took.

Certainly getting interesting now. Tony scrolled through the photos, carefully examined every one. The selfies? Not so useful, really. But then what was this?

Two of them showed tattoos that we had never seen before. These were not tattoos that Liz had. When I saw the first photo, I wasn't actually sure what I was looking at.

Wasn't sure because it was so unusual.

I saw a Chinese symbol. I didn't know what it meant, and I didn't know what was going on there.

A Chinese symbol? Well, how could Tony Cobben know everything? How could he know about something that happened nearly two decades before, something deeply personal for someone. Do you remember? When Cary Farber gave birth to her son, Max, in 1997, she got a tattoo on the top of her foot. It was the Chinese symbol for mother. We talked to Max about it back at the beginning of our story. That tattoo was for you? Yeah. She reminded me of it, too. But when Tony Cava saw the photo of that tattoo, it wasn't just a symbol that jumped out at him.

The coloring on it was interesting.

Cava showed the photo to Detectives Doty and Avis. Avis described it.

There were dark lines in the picture.

Dark lines? You look more closely. Those lines were veins on what looked like someone's foot, someone's deceased foot, thus the odd color. Avis called Kerry's mom, Nancy.

Nancy was able to email a few pictures, and sure enough, Kerry has that same tattoo on her left foot. Wow. Identical.

It was like finding the Rosetta Stone. The key they didn't know they'd been looking for all along. One look at that picture was all it took. Here was the key to the murder case against Liz Gaulier, Tony Cava.

It was exciting because this, I think, was about as close as we got to having a smoking gun in this case.

Why in the the world would Liz take a picture like that? Prosecutor James Mastellar.

My first thought was that this defendant had taken a trophy or trophies of the person she had killed.

And now, new evidence in hand. The State of Nebraska put Gauhier on trial for the murder of Cary Farmer. It was August 2017 when prosecutor Brenda Beatle stepped to the podium to make her opening statement in the murder trial of Liz Gaulier.

This is a bizarre and twisted case of a fatal attraction. It's about an obsessive woman that would stop at nothing to get what she wanted. She spent her days, her weeks, her months, her years, fomenting many lives during this, spinning the web of deception to keep Carrie alive so she wouldn't get caught. The links that she went to accomplish that are really unfathomable.

But the prosecutor did not explain it to any jury. Liz had made an unorthodox decision. She'd waived her rights to a jury trial, so it was a judge who listened carefully as Beatle piled up the evidence one piece at a time. Cary's blood in her Ford Explorer. Liz's fingerprint on the mint container found in Cary's Ford Explorer. The thousands of emails supposedly from Cary but traced to Liz's phone that read like confessions. The vast trove of digital forensics. The detectives had even tracked down two purchases made on, it turned out, Cary's bank card in the week after she vanished. Sergeant Doty took the stand to describe them.

We noticed two transactions that were posted on November 19th, 2012. One was for a family dollar, and one was at a Walmart.

And what did the Walmart receipt show?

One of the items was a shower curtain. And that shower curtain looked familiar to us because in that phone dump that we did in 2013 of Liz's phone, there's a picture of that shower curtain.

They found that shower curtain in Liz's apartment. They found a photo of Kerry's driver's license with a large knife next to it. That was emailed to Dave. Dave thought it was a threat from Kerry, but the evidence showed it was sent by Liz. Yet, of course, they showed the judge the pictures of what they believed to be Kerry's dead foot with the Chinese symbol tattoo that meant mother.

All these pieces together made a big difference.

And all in, said the prosecutors, They told the story of how Liz Gaulier murdered Kerry Farber. She must have done whatever she did to Kerry on the morning of November 13th, 2012, right after Dave Krupa left for work, Kerry was at his place working on her laptop. Prosecutor must tell her.

We know by examination of Kerry Farber's known Facebook, that she logged into her Facebook at 6: 39 AM that morning.

Carrie was supposed to go to work that morning, but she never made it.

She was intercepted. Something happened. That something was the defendant.

I don't know exactly what Liz did to Carrie, said the prosecutors, but whatever it was.

It didn't take her too long because at 9: 54 AM, Kerry Farber's cell phone is being used to access Facebook.

At that very moment, record showed Kerry unfriended Dave.

The fact that they had the temerity to actually be Facebook friends. This is one of the very first acts the defendant takes to actually eliminate that Facebook friendship.

And that, said the prosecutors, is when Liz became Kerry online.

All for the purpose, for the reason of convincing people, her friends, her family, relatives, everyone, that she was still alive.

Carrie's mom, Nassie, was in court every day, and she heard the details of what happened to her daughter for the very first time.

When I heard all of this, what this person was doing in her name, it just made me so angry because she didn't deserve that at all.

So strong case? The prosecutors hoped so, though no body cases are so tough to prove. The motive, said Brenda Beatle, was a very old one. Jealousy.

It was really all about Dave Krupa. She it because she wanted this man.

Jealousy makes people do strange things, but that's just... Why so much?

Why? I think it snowballed. I think once she did it, she couldn't stop. She had to make Carrie look like she was still alive to keep the heat off of her. It just went on and on and on for years.

From his seating the courtroom, Dave Kruba heard it all and finally understood.

I mean, it makes sense now at the end, but the Tarantino movie always makes sense at the end. It doesn't make any sense getting there.

But of course, it wasn't the end of the trial. Oh, no. To defend her, Liz had hired a man known as one of the best attorneys in town, James Martin Davis. And Davis agreed with Dave Krupa. It was like a Tarantino movie, he said. But remember, those movies, though, perhaps based on actual events, were fiction. And so was the case against Liz Gaulier. It's difficult to to convict somebody of murder without a body because you can't show that there is actually a death. And then you can't show that there's a cause of death. In the next episode of Something About Carrie. You don't have any first-dad knowledge that Carrie was killed or assaulted at all, right? No, I don't.

It was really really happy and really sad at the same time.

I looked at it and I thought, Is that Liz?

Because there was a photo of a 22-year-old Liz, and she was in court at her boyfriend's trial.

Right away, I felt a hunch that something wasn't quite right.

So I'm Something About Carrie is a production of Dateland and NBC News. Shane Bishop and Jessica Devera Lappert are the producers. Brian Drew, Marshall Hausfeld, and Greg Smith are audio editors. Brittany Morris is field producer. Molly DeRosa is assistant producer. Adam Gourfain is co-executive producer, Paul Ryan is executive producer, and Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, Sound Mixing by Rich Cutler.