Dateline Originals - Something About Cari - Ep. 1: The Family Wedding

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

When single mom Cari Farver skips out on a planned trip with her son, family and friends wonder if it has something to do with the new man in her life. This episode originally published on December 2, 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The lights of the city skyline seemed to wink as they picked up the ripples on the river, and the muted hum of city sounds drifted across the Missouri to the Iowa side, as if those winking lights knew something, as if that hum was gossip. A jet plane descended to Epi Airfield, broke the spell, because, of course, cities don't really know secrets, or when something is about to happen. Though something certainly was any minute now. It was unusually mild for Midwest evening so late in autumn. Snow was sparse and threadbare in the park on the Iowa side of the Missouri River.

It was the first week of December in the year of Our Lord 2015, just past 6.30 p.m. Quite dark now. And then, no question what that was, it was followed by this. a severe emergency. Oh, yeah. I've been shot in late. It was a woman in pain, obviously. She told the 911 operator

she had come to the park alone in her car. How are you in the park, Sam? I'm in the most of the side. I have a little rent Toyota and I'm playing at two kids. Okay. Is the estate still nearby? I don't think so it took on burning. Okay, okay.

Okay, we're getting help started, okay, ma'am. The woman said the bullet had gone clean through her thigh, in one side and out the other. Through and through is what first responders call that kind of wound, so a quick response would be crucial. Is there any serious bleeding? Oh, my... My son, she's a way to kill the blood?

Oh, Jesus. And the shooter, or shooters? Long gone, said the woman. You know who did it? No. An attacker roaming free with a gun in a city park? Well, that gets some immediate attention. So the dispatcher quickly called in squad cars from the Council Bluffs Iowa Police Department.

Hold on. It's radio traffic. Okay, you're not going to hear me for a second. Oh, Jesus. An agency assist came from across the river. The helicopter from the Omaha PD was in the... the air with its spotlight, scouring a city park the size of 150 football fields, for any sign of a suspect. Back and forth it flew, looking for whoever had fired the shot, looking essentially for a drop of water in a pitch black pond. How many people were there?

Oh, I don't know. I only heard one. About whom the victim offered at least one clue. You know if it was a male or female? I was female. The shooter was a woman. The fact that flew in the face of all those statistics that law enforcement collects about gun violence. All cards are responding to a big leg area.

We don't have any such information. Officers arrived. This is a recording from their dash cam. Where'd you go? Who is it? Who is it? I don't know. Asking their questions as the victim was bundled into an ambulance.

Did you run down the trail? And why fire at this victim, an unassuming mother of two who'd made her living as the owner of a business that cleaned houses? She had just gone to get five minutes' peace in a quiet place and got a bullet in the leg. She would live, by the way, but the shooter? Okay, we need to know which way she went. Yes, and well, we imagine them looking for a woman with a gun in the dark in that giant park by the river, across from the hum of the city with its sparkling towers. A mystery as opaque as the night black river began finally to reveal itself in all its confounding weirdness.

Had you ever encountered a thing quite that elaborate before? No, nothing like this. This is a unique case, to say the least. Here was harassment, stalking, assault, arson, and of course, murder. All I heard was open up police. What was that like? Traumatizing. I was freaked out. And of all the smart investigators who worked on the case couldn't connect the dots, well, perhaps it was understandable.

Detective 101 rarely covers this sort of diabolical scheming. But whatever the reason, it went on and on and on, for years. You're on edge as to what's going to happen next. Until that night by the river, This night. This night. Finally, it began to make some sort of sense. Finally, it began to make some sort of sense.

The best part of it was being able to tell her we've arrested somebody for the murder of your daughter. That was what made work in this whole case worth it. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is something about Carrie, the podcast from Dateline. Episode one, the Family Woman. The Family Wedding To begin

Three years before that shooting in the park The question was simple and urgent Where was she? It was a question that 14-year-old Max Farber Had been asking for days now About his mom There was a family wedding to attend In Des Moines, Iowa

Max's uncle was getting married Max was to be an usher Third week of November, 2012 Max, with his mop of dark hair and his good manners and his all-round kindness, was as close as could be to his mom, Carrie Farmer. She, the 37-year-old computer programmer, had been planning her road trip with Max for weeks. They were going to make it fun, drive from home in a tiny farming town called Macedonia to the big city, two hours away, singing along with their favorite playlists.

You two were pretty close. Who are. Close, all right. The kind of you and me against the world thing. A single mom and her only child is her son. It's like that, right? Yeah. Almost like one person in a way.

Yeah, we were definitely really close. Like, after she would bring a guy home to meet me, and she would always ask what I thought of him. And I knew that if I said anything bad, she'd end it right there. I knew she would. Max and his mom loved reading together, watching Disney movies. She nicknamed him short round from the Indiana Jones films.

On the subject of your mom, what springs to mind first one? I'd just say that. How much she kept track of me and made me keep my grades up. Carrie was fierce, bright, determined. But there was something else about her, too, and it mattered. in her life and in our story. Carrie was not always her own best friend. Two husbands had come and gone.

Sudden decisions had sometimes gone wrong. Behaviors were frequently unpredictable. But this weekend, the third weekend in November 2012, was to be about mother and son, the two of them. Carrie had booked a hotel for the weekend with two queen-sized beds and seemed to be looking forward to it. When pick-up time arrived, Max waited and waited,

but Carrie failed to show. So Max had to get a ride to the wedding from his grandmother. And I never got any texts once that, like, the wedding started. I kept texting or I tried calling her or nothing. Do you remember what you're feeling at that point? I was worried. You couldn't really enjoy the wedding, knowing something was going on.

It was all so confusing, especially since the wedding date had been moved up several months because Carrie's dad, the groom's dad, was on hospice, suffering from stomach cancer. Was she close with her dad? Oh, yeah, very. Very close. So yeah, she wouldn't have been a weird night.

That must have been a weird night. That was a very weird night. Very weird. Because people kept asking where she was, and I couldn't give an answer. Nor could he, for a very long time. long time. Something wasn't making sense. Family was important to the farmers.

To Carrie, her son, Max, their family went back generations in southwestern Iowa. Carrie's mom, Max's grandmother, was herself, born and raised on a farm just outside Macedonia. A sweet and even-tempered woman, stolid, Midwestern Nice. Her name is Nancy Rainey. It's a very small town.

I think there's only around 250 people that live there now. It's very, it's just home. It's quiet there. It's not a lot that happens. Nancy had always known there was something a little different about Carrie. She was all business about school, but yet? She didn't really want to go with the norm. She didn't want to just go along with what the other girls were doing.

She felt like she wanted to do her own thing. And sometimes that doesn't always go well. Yeah. School was easy for her. But then so were boys. Enticed by Carrie's big hazel eyes. Her mischievous grin and natural beauty that came effortlessly, said her friend, Holly Drummond. She was so shiny.

She was. I mean, she was very pretty. Guys were just drawn to her. And she liked it? Yeah, she did. Why shouldn't she? But there was that other something about Carrie, the tendency to sometimes make dubious choices.

Well, you know, like I said, you know, she was a... Carrie, Carrie knew how to have fun. Like the time when Carrie was away at college and there was this guy, one of a parade of guys. I mean, she made it sound like... She made it sound like a romantic movie. But the romance didn't laugh. Even when Carrie found out she was pregnant, again her mom, Nancy.

Did it come as a surprise? Yes, yeah. She named the baby Maxwell. Everybody called him Max. Carrie's friend, Holly. I got to the hospital after work. She had him laying in her lap, and she said, oh, gosh, you're all mine. I don't have to share you with anybody.

And she marked the occasion, did Carrie, by getting a tattoo on the top of her left foot. A very unusual tattoo, the Chinese symbol for mother. A tattoo was for you. Yep. Sorry, she reminded me of it, too. But now, how painful it was when she stood him up, skipped out on the wedding, and the special trip they'd planned. He told himself, if she'd be back, she would get over. whatever it was, it kept her away, and he watched the driveway for her and tried to calm himself.

No idea that his life was already utterly changed. In the days after that wedding, Carrie missed on November 17, 2012. Max tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out what happened to his mother. What was she doing that was more important than him, than the wedding? I wasn't sure what was going on. Except maybe, thought Max, maybe it had something to do with a new guy in his mom's life. A guy Max had heard of, but only knew as Dave. Dave, who lived in Omaha in an apartment that happened to be very close to Carrie's office.

I just had heard of a Dave that was about it. She didn't talk about him. No. Usually things like that, she didn't really talk to me about. She didn't plan on bringing him home to family or anything. Wasn't that kind of relationship? Yeah. No, it wasn't.

It was just kind of an in-between thing, nothing real serious. Mm-hmm. So she didn't bother with bringing him home because she knew it wouldn't be a long-term relationship. And I knew that she was going to stay with someone in Omaha just because she'd be working from, like, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. And she didn't want to drive 45 minutes home, go to sleep, drive 45 minutes back.

Yeah. Which seemed normal to me. Sure. It wasn't weird. So you wanted to stay with your grandma? Yeah. No real big deal. I had to stay with her in the past a few times, like not often.

Yeah. But often enough that it wasn't weird to me in my own room. So Max had spent that week before the wedding with his grandma, Nancy. And now? Well, Carrie's mom, Nancy, said she had no idea either. None at all. This is just too weird. Yeah, it was all too weird.

Except Nancy had already been handed a clue. of sorts. It was a text message from Carrie that week before the wedding. Nassie didn't tell Max about it, didn't want to worry the boy. And anyway, she was worried enough for both of them. For one thing, Carrie's text said she'd broken up with her boyfriend, the mysterious Dave, perhaps? That was unclear, but then Dave was the one she'd been talking about. Do you know how to reach this guy or even what his last name was? But that was classic Kerry, and that wasn't what worried her. It was this.

The text also said she was thinking about checking into a mental hospital. I didn't know how to start looking for. So what does that like? It's hell. It's just frustration and just helplessness. That's scary. Yes, it scared me tremendously. scared, said Nancy, because after college in her mid-20s,

Carrie had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, what used to be known as manic depression. Carrie's condition manifested mostly as extreme debilitating depression. She got real down, real depressed. When she did that, she just would go under the covers and sleep, and she'd just, you know, she'd hibernate. She'd close herself off from everything. But it was tormentor, really.

Yeah, yeah. It's hard for a mother to watch it. Yeah, it is. And to, you know, talking to her and just trying to get it out of her, you know, what can I do? And there's really nothing that I can do or say she's the one that has to help herself. Carrie's medication helped keep her stable. But now her mom wondered had she gone off her medication and thus maybe right off the rails. So when she failed to make her date with Max to drive to the wedding,

Nancy contacted the county sheriff's office to file a missing persons report. For good measure, she also reported Carrie's Ford Explorer stolen. Though, who knew, really? Did somebody steal it? Or was Carrie at that very moment driving off to some imagined new life? They took down all the information, of course, and they couldn't... They didn't really offer too much? Well, I guess they thought what she's...

grown woman, she can leave if she wants to leave. Yeah, right. Nancy, of course, told the deputies about Carrie's struggle with bipolar disorder. And here's what they told her, said Nancy. Well, she's probably off her medicine and, you know, these things happen. And so that happens a lot. It felt like a brush off. So Nancy just kept trying to reach Carrie, called her again and again and again.

But her daughter just wouldn't pick up. And then, sudden release. Nancy got another text message from Carrie. Short-lived relief. There were at least some answers, but not exactly the answers Nancy had been hoping for. Carrie wrote that she had quit her job in Omaha and was on her way to Kansas,

to a brand new home and a brand new job, and Dave was with her. They were moving in together. Oh, and Carrie said she had sold her furniture. All of it. She attached a photo of a $5,000 check from the buyer. Carrie wanted Nancy to let the buyer pick up the furniture from the home where Carrie and Max lived out in Macedonia.

Clean it out. Well, you can just imagine how Nancy reacted to all that. And I said, absolutely not. I said, either you call me, you come to see me. I'm not doing anything until I hear you. And that's when the nasty text started coming. What did she say then? that I was a bad mother.

She said, I'm going to take Max. We're going to, we're going to leave. After the wedding, Max received text from Carrie, too, letting him know of her plans. Max was well aware that his mom took medication for her bipolar disorder, of course. But this new aggressive tone suggested she'd stop taking it. You're coming with me.

You have no choice. I'm the adult here in what I say goes. I'm just trying to imagine what it was like to be. you in the middle of that situation. It was a bit scary because we all thought that someone might come at school to try to get me, because the school would legally have to let them let me go with them. Them, meaning maybe this Dave guy, if Kerry sent him. I was thankful to have my cousin as one of the teachers at school because he's a big guy.

He's probably 6'2, 280, 300 pounds. Wow. So every time that my name got called in the intercom, I'd kind of glance in the office real quick just to make sure that it was okay to go in. Because if it wasn't, I was supposed to go get him and have him come with me because he wasn't going to let me want to take me.

And frankly, the way his mom was acting, Max didn't want to go anywhere with her, or her friend, Dave. Max was upset because he didn't know this person, either. Never met him. No. And I thought, there's no way he's going to take, she's going to take him with the person that I don't even know. I've heard all of these horror stories about people having these personality changes and going off the deep end. And I thought, I've got to do something about Max. I've got to keep him safe. Nancy took a drastic step. Two weeks after the

wedding, she got temporary guardianship of Max. That must be so weird. Oh. Frot. Yes. And just wondering, what am I doing to my daughter? If we were doing this, the lawyer said, now this is just temporary.

Now, if she comes back, you know, you can always undo this. Is it okay? Meanwhile, surely the sheriff could find her daughter get some help, right? She showed them carries text about the furniture. The phone company told investigators the text were coming from a cell phone in Omaha. Officers went to the address and found no sign of carry or her car. They found nothing at all. Sergeant Jim Doty and Corporal Ryan Avis of the Pottawatomie County Sheriff's Office

joined the investigation much later, said the obvious step was to find the person who'd written carry a check for that furniture. That was a woman Nancy had never heard of. Her name was Liz Gawleyer. Liz was a mother of two. She also lived in Omaha. Here's Corporal Lavis. They called her, left her voicemail.

Would she return that call the next day? Liz jumped at the chance to help. Maybe because she knew a thing or two about the mysterious Dave. In fact, she too had once gone out with Dave and on again, off again, sort of thing. Well, anyway, just as you'd expect in a story this strange, Liz told the cops that check she'd supposedly written to buy Carrie's furniture, that wasn't her.

She didn't write any check for $5,000, but somebody had recently broken into her house, and what was one of the things the thief or thieves took? It was her checkbook. Liz had a lot more to tell those law officers, too, and we'll get to that, but... The most important thing she told the deputies, who were, remember, searching for Carrie, was how to contact Dave, the man seemingly in the middle of all this mess

with the now very in the wind, Carrie Farver. She's with him, and then suddenly she goes off the rails and starts doing weird stuff like this, so he must know something, right? Yeah. Definitely a person you wanted to talk to. And detectives didn't know it yet, but Dave, a 36-year-old tattooed, auto mechanic who worked at a shop in West Omaha, and who had, some would say, an extreme fear of commitment, was about to tell them a story that might have rivaled a Harlequin romance novel.

In Chapter 1, anyway, the rest of the story? Certainly not what they expected. Not at all. There's an old saying in police work goes something like this. Good people wonder who's coming to the door. Bad people know who's coming. But in Omaha, Nebraska, auto mechanic Dave Krupa seemed to have no such worries when a co-worker at the auto shop told Dave that he had visitors.

It was a winterish morning, a week after Carrie's vanishing act. Four days after that wedding she'd missed, November 21st, 2012. I think I was out back, and one of the guys just like, hey, the police are here looking for you. I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Okay, you know, I didn't know what's going on. Well, at first I didn't think anything of it. I thought, oh, maybe there's a abandoned car on the parking lot or something.

I didn't realize it was detectives. I'm thinking it's a black and white, you know. But nothing was black and white that morning. Not when those detectives appeared out of the blue. They just showed up. Oh, yeah, there was no warning the first time they came. They just showed up to the shop. The detectives wanted Dave to step out.

side. One started things off. And it tells me, hey, do you know Carrie? Yeah? Okay, so where is she now? We're no idea. Dave claimed Carrie up and left about a week ago. And now her whereabouts were a mystery. That's what Dave told the detectives anyway. Not that the investigators seem to buy it. He was drilling me with them policeman eyes, them ones that are like, uh, you know, we feel like you're in the principles of us. pulls up. And where were you at 6'3 on that morning? Yeah, and that was how he approached me,

was as if I'd already done something and he already knew it and it's time to deal with it, you know, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Slow down because Dave Krupa had a story to tell. And what a story it was about a relationship that began quite sweetly, innocently. And now, somehow it apparently ended very, very badly. It all started about three months earlier, back in the late summers, said Dave, when Carrie stopped at his garage, looking for someone to repair her Ford Explorer.

She walks in, I see her, we meet eyes, and just for a moment I kind of stop. And I go, well, hello. You know, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, wow, she's gorgeous. But I'm at work. I'm representing the company I work for. That's off the table. It's not a possibility. And so, properly restrained by the mere prospect of doing something in the way,

improper. When Carrie drove away, Dave went back to work. But then, a couple of weeks after Carrie stopped into the garage, and it seemed like fate. Dave went on a dating website, as he was wont to do. And there she was. Her profile, her picture, her name, Carrie. He started typing. I just said, hey, I know you, ha, ha. And she replied, same time. And one day, not long after, Dave looked up from his work at the garage, and Kerry, in the flesh, was looking right at him. Without saying anything, there's kind of some spark to fly, and we're looking at each other like we're both trying and wanted to say something. And we did, and we exchanged phone numbers. Dave said, how about dinner? And he knew she'd say yes.

It was October 29th, two weeks before she disappeared, said Dave. They met at Applebee's that first evening. The food didn't matter much. And we were very, I would say, enthralled with each other. And then both caught up in that glow. They went to Dave's place. But timing. Dave wasn't exactly what you'd call a one-woman man.

And moments after he ushered Carrie into his apartment, the doorbell rang. It was one of his ex-girlfriends. She'd stopped by to pick up some things she'd left. in his bedroom closet. Awkward. But Carrie, proving to Dave just how cool and how different she was, just laughed, volunteered to show herself out. She said, I get it.

It's not a big deal. I'm going to go home. You call me when you're done dealing with this mess. So Dave escorted Carrie to the door and then waited impatiently for his previous woman of passing interest to gather up her things and get out the door. after which Dave called Kerry to apologize and regroup. And she invited me out to her place, which was like an hour drive outside of town.

When I got to her place, we were there 20 minutes making coffee, BS. And of course, pretty soon we're on the couch, and we're getting a little closer. Now at this point, we haven't even chipped. And she turns to me and she said, look, if we're going to have sex, That's all it is.

Period. There's nothing more to it. And ask me, are you good with that? Is that going to be a problem? And, of course, my eyes lit up, and I'm like, ping, I hit the powerball. Because Dave? Well, Dave felt exactly the same way. As a man, I want companionship, so I'm always looking for a girlfriend, but never a committed

relationship. And you let them know that this is the way it's got to be. That was the first conversation. and take her leave it, that's how it is. But with Carrie, he didn't even have to bring it up. It was all her, and we hit it off right from there. Carrie told him she was a computer programmer. Her office was in Omaha,

and by happy coincidence, it was just a few blocks from his garage and his apartment, where no strings, no messy commitments. They met, often, made love, talked. She was extremely intelligent. She was much smarter than I am, just in general. She had a brain on her. Different than the women you had dated before? The majority of them, yeah.

Yeah, she, well, for instance, what she did for a living, programming, I consider myself a little bit of a computer nerd, but compared to her, I didn't even know what a computer was. In some of the more amorous moments, Dave even began to reconsider his no-comitment rule. He'd been determined about that rule ever since he broke off a 12-year relationship with the mother of his two children.

But after a couple of weeks with Carrie, was he weakening? Would he? All this day related to the detectives who'd come to see him. They listened intently as he finally got to the important bit the strange events during the second week of November 2012. That is, the week before,

Carrie blew off the big family wedding in Des Moines. That week, said Dave, Carrie told him she had a big project at work. So, instead of driving all the way home to Little Macedonia, Iowa every night, could she stay at his place? Absolutely, said Dave. And so that Monday, November 12th, they began their work week together. And Carrie came over after work. They spent the night together.

Someone looking in on that happy scene could be forgiven for assuming they were taking more permanent cohabitation for a test drive. That would be wrong, of course, as no commitment Dave would have told them. Anyway, next morning, Tuesday, November 13th. Dave said he left, as he always did, a few minutes before 6.30 a.m., to walk to work at his garage. Carrie had been up early on her computer, and Dave said when he left, she was still getting ready for work or cell. I gave her a kiss on the way out the door. You know, like, hi, see you later, honey.

That kind of thing. You know, it was almost like that sort of 50s TV show garbage. That doesn't sound like a guy who's got no attachment. Well, I didn't say, honey, but that's the way it came across, you know. But she brought that out of me. That's why I say it with Cherry, it was potential that long term. It might have been different. So when you went off to work out, that you were a pretty good mood.

Yeah, it was in a great mood. I had this beautiful lady who was going to be in my house when I got home. I don't know who wins fall about. that. But Dave wasn't smiling now as he met with those detectives. Because what he would tell them next. Oh, you couldn't make it up. A story straight out of left field. Coming up in future episodes of something about Carrie, Dave Krupa's big surprise. By 10 o'clock, I received a text from her that says, do you want to move in with me? Weird. Very weird. Very what is doing. on him. So in the back of my line, I'm thinking,

phew, I dodged a bullet there. Seemed like the friendly cop. Or the dumb one. I'll be whatever she wanted as long as she kept telling us information. It was exciting because this, I think, was about as close as we got to having a smoking gun in this case.

Something about Carrie is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Shane Bishop and Jessica DeVera Lapid are the producers. Brian Drew, Marshall Housefeld, and Greg Smith are audio editors. Brittany Morris is field producer. Molly DeRosa is assistant producer.

Adam Gorphine 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.