Cari Farver

Case background and investigation

Cari Lea Farver was a 37-year-old computer programmer and single mother from the Omaha, Nebraska area when she disappeared in November 2012. That fall she had begun casually dating David Kroupa, a man she met at an auto-repair shop and connected with through a dating site. Kroupa had also been casually seeing Shanna 'Liz' Golyar; his two children were from an earlier relationship with his former partner, Amy Flora, not with Golyar. Farver was last known to be alive on November 13, 2012, while she had been staying at Kroupa's apartment. Around that time, Kroupa and others began receiving a barrage of hostile text messages and emails that appeared to come from Farver, and her family grew alarmed when she stopped showing up for work and abruptly cut off all normal contact with the people who loved her.

For nearly four years, messages purportedly from Farver continued to circulate — texts, emails, and Facebook posts claiming she had suddenly left town, taken a new job, or wanted nothing to do with her loved ones. In reality, investigators would later determine, Farver was already dead, and the sprawling digital trail was an elaborate deception. Shanna Golyar had murdered her romantic rival and then hijacked Farver's online identity, impersonating her across multiple accounts to make it appear she was still alive. Golyar used the ruse not only to cover up the killing but also to relentlessly harass Kroupa and other women he dated, and even to stage crimes — including an arson at her own home and a claimed shooting — that she blamed on the supposedly vengeful, still-living Farver.

The case finally began to unravel when Pottawattamie County and Omaha-area investigators, led by detectives who reopened the file in 2015, dug deeply into the digital evidence. They traced the threatening communications back to devices and online accounts controlled by Golyar herself. A fingerprint belonging to Golyar was found on a mint container inside Farver's abandoned car, and — most damning of all — investigators recovered photographs on Golyar's own devices showing a deceased body with a tattoo matching Farver's, along with evidence of Farver's blood. The layered forensic and digital case allowed prosecutors to charge Golyar with murder in December 2016, even though Farver's body has never been recovered.

Golyar was tried at a bench trial, and on May 24, 2017, a judge found her guilty of first-degree murder and second-degree arson. In August 2017 she was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, plus a consecutive term of 18 to 20 years for the arson. Golyar appealed, arguing that the circumstantial case was insufficient without a body or a murder weapon, but in November 2018 the Nebraska Supreme Court unanimously upheld her convictions, ruling that the overwhelming circumstantial and digital evidence was enough to establish both Farver's death and Golyar's guilt. The bizarre catfishing murder — in which a killer stole her victim's very identity for years — has since become the subject of numerous true-crime documentaries and a bestselling book.