Liz Golyar Murdered the Other Woman in Her Love Triangle — Then Pretended to Be Her for 2 Years. Here's Where She Is Today By Jessica Sager and Samantha Stutsman

Dave Kroupa’s love life took a dark turn in 2012.

At that time, Kroupa, a man from Omaha, Neb., began dating two women — Cari Farver and Shanna “Liz” Golyar. However, after Farver suddenly vanished on Nov. 13, 2012, Kroupa and Golyar began receiving thousands of threatening messages from someone claiming to be her.

For years, police believed Farver was stalking them — until investigators uncovered a shocking truth: Golyar had murdered Farver and then impersonated her online in an elaborate effort to torment Kroupa and cover up the crime.

“I thought I’d seen it all,” retired Omaha Police Department Detective Chris Legrow, who investigated the case, said in Lover, Stalker, Killer. “I hadn’t seen anything like this.”

In December 2016, Golyar was arrested and charged with first-degree murder, per ABC News. She was later sentenced to life in prison without parole. The case is the subject of Netflix’s documentary Lover, Stalker, Killer, which premiered on Feb. 9, 2024.

Here’s everything to know about Liz Golyar’s crimes and where Dave Kroupa is today.

Who is Dave Kroupa?

Kroupa and his longtime partner, Amy Flora, had a son and daughter together after meeting in 2000 while working together at a truck stop. After their split, Flora moved back to her hometown of Omaha with their children, and Kroupa relocated too so he could be close to their kids.

Kroupa soon got a job as a mechanic and began online dating.

“I was starting over as a single person,” Kroupa said in Lover, Stalker, Killer.

Days later, he connected with Golyar, a recently single mother of two.

Who is Liz Golyar?

Golyar was one of the first women Kroupa met through the dating site Plenty of Fish.

“She seemed very cool, very down to Earth,” Kroupa said in Lover, Stalker, Killer. “Very smiley, very energetic, very full of life.”

He recalled that Golyar owned a cleaning company and had a lot of pets. She and Kroupa shared passions for motorcycles, heavy metal music and sci-fi movies, and they bonded over each other having a son and a daughter.

“We were both lonely,” Kroupa said. Their first date went well, and they began seeing each other somewhat regularly in downtown Omaha, although they kept their relationship casual.

He added, “As early as my first date, I had made it clear to Liz [that] I absolutely was not going to be tied down.”

Who was Cari Farver?

Amid Kroupa’s on-and-off relationship with Golyar, he met Farver, a 37-year-old single mom who came into the auto shop that he managed. A few weeks later, he saw Farver’s profile on a dating site and reached out.

Kroupa recalled in Lover, Stalker, Killer that Farver was “smart and sexy” and “out of [his] league all the way around,” but invited her to his place anyway after their first date. When they arrived at his apartment, Golyar was there unexpectedly picking up some of her things and passed Farver in the building’s hallway. It was a chance encounter that would prove to be fatal.

They agreed that neither of them wanted to be monogamous, and spent much of the next two weeks together because she worked three blocks from his apartment.

“We were involved,” he said, adding that neither of them wanted to get “that involved.”

What happened to Cari Farver?

On Nov. 13, 2012, Kroupa headed to work and kissed Farver goodbye. Hours later, he got a text from her saying they should move in together. He replied, “I thought we talked about this,” then got a barrage of texts back from Farver’s number saying she never wanted to see him again.

“All morning my text messages were pinging, pinging, pinging, and it’s all this nasty stuff,” Kroupa recalled to PEOPLE in February 2024.

When he went home, Farver and all of her things were gone from his apartment. Kroupa said he was “a little sad” that it didn’t work out, but tried to move on with his life. Within days, he began receiving cruel and threatening messages from Farver.

At the same time, Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, received a message from Farver, first saying she had gotten a new job in Kansas and would be leaving her son, Max, with Raney. Raney then reported Farver missing.

Investigators looking into Farver’s disappearance noted that Farver had been diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder and first attributed her vanishing as “the result of a mental health crisis.”

Shortly after, Golyar, whom Kroupa continued to date, started showing him harassing messages she’d allegedly received from Farver over text and email, and said that her car had been keyed.

“We’d be hanging out on a Saturday and both of our emails would start blowing up at the same time,” Kroupa told PEOPLE.

Kroupa began getting 30 to 40 text messages and more than 100 emails daily from different numbers and aliases. “I could tell they were all Cari because the verbiage was all the same,” he said.

Some of the emails had specific details about customers he’d spoken with outside of his workplace. Eventually, she sent him photos from inside Golyar’s house, where there were spray-painted insults on the wall of Golyar’s garage. In late November 2012, Golyar reported the incident to police, according to ABC News.

“I felt like Liz was being harassed because I dated this woman who’s now making her life hell too,” Kroupa said in Lover, Stalker, Killer. “I felt like she was the real victim in all of things, and I wanted to try to protect her. We felt safe together and our relationship rekindled.”

In January 2013, Kroupa recognized Farver’s car in a nearby parking lot and reported the sighting to police.

What other crimes did the stalker commit?

The stalking escalated, targeting not just Kroupa and Golyar, but also Kroupa’s ex Flora and their children. Flora wouldn’t allow the children to visit Kroupa at his apartment, making him come to her home instead out of fear for their safety, Kroupa recalled in Lover, Stalker, Killer.

At one point, Golyar called Kroupa at work and said one of her windows was smashed in, her walls were vandalized and her clothing was “stabbed and slashed with a knife, like murder-style.” Detectives had probable cause to arrest Farver in a stalking case, but couldn’t find her.

“Your normal slowly descends to abnormal,” Kroupa said in the documentary. “The paranoia is your life. You’re thinking about the ‘what-ifs’ all the time. It was hard to know sometimes what was real and what I was imagining.”

Kroupa said he began drinking to “take the edge off” during the stalking, explaining, “I was on the road to having a mental breakdown.”

In August 2013, Golyar’s house burned down with all of her pets and belongings inside, though she and her kids weren’t home at the time. Detectives suspected Farver was behind the arson. After the fire, Golyar moved and didn’t tell Kroupa where.

“I had lost my partner, the one person who understood what I was going through,” he said in Lover, Stalker, Killer. “I felt like the only thing I could do was pack up and move. I changed phones and got a new job. I wanted to rebuild my life away from Cari, but in the back of my mind, I knew that she was still out there.”

Kroupa eventually made a profile on a new dating site, but his tormenter found him there and escalated their stalking of his family.

“I did feel that it was only a matter of time before someone gets hurt for real,” Kroupa said in the documentary.

Who was David Kroupa’s stalker?

In spring 2015, Farver hadn’t been seen for more than two years, but was still harassing Kroupa and Flora.

Ryan Avis and Jim Doty, investigators from the Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Office in Council Bluffs, Iowa, began looking into Farver’s disappearance. They enlisted an IT specialist, deputy Tony Kava, to examine the messages from Farver’s numbers and accounts. He connected an IP address to his colleague Todd Butterbaugh’s home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Butterbaugh revealed his on-again-off-again girlfriend, Golyar, had been living with him since her house burned down.

In a shocking twist, Golyar had been impersonating Farver all along. She had relentlessly stalked Kroupa and his family for years and burned down her own house.

Kroupa said in Lover, Stalker, Killer that investigators came to the auto shop where he was working and told him Golyar was behind the harassment, stalking and arson.

“My brain was spinning,” Kroupa said. “I went to the back of the shop where my toolbox was, and just leaned on it and cried. I’m tryin’ to go through the pieces of the puzzle and put them together … It was Liz stalking me this whole time. It was such a mind f—.”

“It didn’t take me long, checking the boxes in my head, to figure out that Cari was probably dead,” he added. “And that’s tough to swallow. That’s beyond tough.”

How did Liz Golyar get caught?

In early December 2015, Kroupa arrived home at his apartment and discovered that his gun was gone.

At the same time, Golyar met with Avis and Doty to file a harassment complaint against another one of Kroupa’s exes, Flora. During her talk with Doty and Avis, she described Kroupa’s gun in detail and said Flora likely stole it.

Investigators then put a tracker on Golyar’s vehicle to monitor her location at all times and found her circling around Flora’s home daily. The next day, Golyar called 911 and said she’d been shot at Big Lake Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

“I found it highly suspicious that the day before she felt the need to tell me that Dave Kroupa’s gun had been stolen … and less than 24 hours later, she is shot,” Avis told ABC News. “It was pretty quickly determined that most likely Liz Golyar had shot herself.”

Two weeks after the shooting, Golyar met with Doty and Avis again, pressuring them to investigate and arrest Flora. Avis and Doty pretended to believe Golyar and told her that if she could provide proof that Flora was sending threatening and harassing messages and emails, they’d be able to build a better case against her.

Falling for the ruse, Golyar forwarded the investigative team messages purportedly from Flora, rife with details about Farver’s murder. Investigators then searched Farver’s vehicle and found blood under the fabric cover of the passenger seat.

While they didn’t have Farver’s body, the blood and digital evidence were enough for them to arrest Golyar. She was charged with first-degree murder, though she denied any wrongdoing or involvement.

Investigators asked Kroupa if he had any electronics lying around that they hadn’t seen yet, per the documentary. He found an old tablet in a storage unit, and Kava found 11,000 deleted photos on the tablet’s micro SD card. Among the photos was one of a foot of a dead body. A tattoo on the foot matched Farver’s.

Where is Liz Golyar now?

Despite the lack of Farver’s body, the digital evidence and the blood from the vehicle were enough to sway the jury. KETV Omaha reported that Golyar was found guilty of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole, plus an additional 18 to 20 years for arson and trying to frame Farver for burning down her home.

Golyar is serving her prison sentence at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women.

“She ruined my life,” Kroupa told PEOPLE of Golyar. “As much as you can without actually killing me.”

Where is Dave Kroupa now?

Kroupa has kept a low profile since Golyar’s apprehension, and he said he feels somewhat responsible for Farver’s death.

“I don’t feel blameless in all of this. A lot of bad things happened to good people, all because of a series of events that I’m at the center of,” he explained in Lover, Stalker, Killer. “The woman that I dated had goals, and was smiley and wanted to do something. She was just trying to make her way in this world.”

Kroupa added that he’s “very sorry for what happened.”

“If I hadn’t met Cari, she wouldn’t have met Liz and this all  wouldn’t have happened,” he continued. “If I’d have known the choice was this craziness or tell Cari I’m not interested, I would’ve told Cari I’m not interested. But you don’t get that choice.”

Kroupa still lives in Nebraska, per WOWT.