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True-crime is everywhere it seems. Podcasts, internet sleuths and TV shows fill the landscape. However, a documentary like Lover Stalker Killer, streaming on Netflix, may seem like it’s a basic run-of-the-mill story, but Dave Kroupa, the man at the center of the story is your basic run-of-the-mill mechanic. Maybe that’s why these true-crime stories appeal to so many people. The victims and the aggressors are people you pass by multiple times and don’t think. Statistically, the average person comes in contact ever so slightly with about 36 murderers in their lifetimes if they pass by them in the grocery store aisle or if they’re a part of a church or civic organization. I went to school with four people in prison the rest of their lives for murder
My former colleague in the news business was so close from becoming a kidnapped abductee and didn’t know it until reading the police report. And she was a news reporter/editor like me. Apparently, someone saw her outside a bank getting into her car and started to approach her before he thought secondly about it. He ended up abducting someone else who was later rescued, thankfully. But what did the man have in mind is the question no one really wants the answer to?
Kroupa would find himself at the center of a deadly love triangle in America’s Heartland when he moved to the Omaha area in 2012. Newly single after a divorce, he put himself out there on the dating site Plenty of Fish. He met Shanna “Liz” Goylar and they began a “no-strings attached” relationship. Neither seemed to be looking for anything more serious. However, Kroupa would also meet Cari Farver at his auto shop in Macedonia, Iowa and they would also begin dating. The town was a flyspeck on the map that doesn’t even have a population of 300. You’re reminded of the tagline for Fargo, “A lot can happen in the middle of nowhere.”
However, things went from good to awkward when Kroupa had Farver at his place for the first time and Golyar showed up saying she needed to get something she had left at his apartment. Everyone was cordial, Kroupa says. Then, just two weeks after they had been seeing each other, Kroupa says Farver left his apartment on the morning of Nov. 13, 2012 to go to work. A few hours later, she sent him a text saying they should move in. Kroupa responded that it was going to fast and they needed to discuss it more.
That was when Kroupa said Farver responded saying she hated him and he had ruined her life. Farver had apparently returned to his apartment to clear out all her personal items. And it went stranger from then on as he began to send more menacing texts from her. Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, said she was getting texts that seemed off from the usual communications between her and her daughter. Raney says her daughter was moving to Kansas and would need her to look after her 15-year-old son, Max, for a while.
And then Golyar became the subject of violence by Farver, reportedly. Her car was vandalized and her house was burned down, killing all her pets. The police investigated but they couldn’t locate Farver. No one could. Not Raney, her son, nor Kroupa could find where Farver was. Kroupa says he tried to move on and start over, even trying to meet new partners. However, he was continuing to receive threats from texts from multiple numbers.
At one point, he met someone on a dating site and talked more with them before setting up a meet. However, the person never showed up at the designated location. And guess what? Kroupa says the person claimed to be Farver using a fake profile to get back at him. SPOILERS AHEAD!! Eventually, police began to research more of the digital history on the texts to discover a lot things weren’t making sense. And it led back to Golyar herself.
Yes, it had been Golyar all along and she had been doing some really outrageous stuff. You have to see it for yourself. Some of the best Hollywood writers couldn’t submit a script like this because it would be considered very unrealistic. Golyar had stabbed Farver and then made it out Farver was terrorizing Kroupa and herself. Talk about the calls are coming from inside the house.
The documentary doesn’t really give much of an explanation to Golyar’s madness. Maybe it was because she saw Kroupa dating Farver as just another disappointment in her life she couldn’t handle. But to go through such an extreme is definitely a sign of mental illness. But this isn’t temporary insanity. Golyar did this over a long period of time. If she got angry at Farver the first time she saw her, that could be argued as temporary insanity. No, this was very premeditated and malicious.
Thankfully the filmmaker Sam Hobkinson shows Kroupa and law enforcement hoping to restore the reputation of Farver. For years, her memory has been dragged through the mud. But she was as innocent as Kroupa and more innocent.
On a side note, the documentary seems to fall inline with other great thrillers of the past which were warning signs of the time. The movies Play Misty For Me and Looking for Mr. Goodbar were warning signs of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Then, Michael Douglas devoted a good portion of his career to warning people on the dangers of adultery in Fatal Attraction, mixing business with pleasure in Basic Instinct and the changing business landscape involving women in the workplace and flirting in Disclosure.
But you never know. Just like an employee applicant, a profile may look good on paper – or screen in this case. However, we never do know what happens in the mind of a stalker, even if they seemed normal before.
What do you think? Please comment.