Dateline Originals - Something About Cari - Ep. 4: A Shot in the Dark

Episode Date: February 4, 2026

Liz calls 911 to report being shot in a park. Police search for the assailant… and come to a stunning conclusion about who really pulled the trigger. This episode originally published on December 11, 2025. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

December 5th, 2015, more than three years after Carrie Farber disappeared. It was the day after Liz Gullier visited police to turn the case on its head. By telling the police that the stalker terrorizing her and Dave Krupa was not Carrie Farver at all, but Dave's ex-girlfriend and the mother of his children, Amy. As Liz said later, she needed some time alone to think. So, late afternoon, she got in her car and drove to the park by the river, a big lake park, it's called. And then she got out and took a walk along the trail there and sat down on a bench. It was quiet.

Liz was alone in the gathering cold and dark of a December evening. And that was when the silence was. was snapped by the deafening bark of a gun and the pain tearing through her thigh. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is Something About Carrie, a podcast from Dateline. Episode 4, a shot in the dark. I've been shot in the lake. Is the assailant still nearby? I don't think so I took all morning.

Do you know if it's male or female? A female. help. It was just after 6.30 p.m. when the Council Bluffs PD roared out to Big Lake Park and found a wounded and bleeding Liz Gawleyer and packed her off to the hospital. Well, a chopper trained down a searchlight

and cops on the ground scoured the paths and bushes for the shooter. A detective checked on Liz at the hospital. His name is Matthew Coleman. You could tell that she was in pain from the obvious wound to her leg. But Liz was lucky. When the bullet went clean through her leg,

it missed bones and arteries, an inch or two one way or the other she could have bled to death in minutes. She told the detective what happened. She said she came out here to clear her mind and she walked out to a bench and sat down. And then a female stuck a gun to her back told her to get on the ground

and then shot her in the leg and then ran off. Who was this shooter? The woman who had tried, it seemed to take Liz's life, but ended up only wounding her. Well, Liz said she knew. She knew all right. Was it Carrie Farver? No, said Liz. It was not, not Carrie at all.

It was, she said. The same woman who'd recently been stalking her. The mother of Dave Kruppas' children. His former partner, Amy Flora. A little later, a city police task force surrounded. Amier's apartment. And I kind of seen somebody lean in against my building, and I said, who's there? And all I heard was open up police.

What was that like? Traumatizing. I was freaked out. I didn't know why the police were at my door and told me to open my door. I had no idea what was going on. So I opened the door, and they had two officers with guns drawn. And pointing at you. Yes.

Yeah. What did they say to you? They had said that I was accused of shooting Liz. I thought that I was going to go to jail. I would lose my kids. I wasn't really sure what would happen. But, I mean, I guess if you're accused of shooting somebody, I mean, first thought in your mind is you're going to jail.

I've never been in trouble my whole life, so I really, I mean, that was my first thought. And somebody would come and take your kids away. Yeah. I didn't know what would happen to my kids. kids if I had to go to jail, you know. The police came right into Amy's house. They searched it. And later they sat Amy down in an interview room and hooked her up to a polygraph.

They strapped you into a machine. Yep. What did it feel like in there? Horrible. Officers asked her questions like this one, among others. Did you go to Big Lakes Park that day? Um, no. Amy denied that she shot Liz.

over and over and over again. But you failed the lie detector test. Yeah, they told me that I didn't pass it. All I could do was cry, like, because I know I didn't do this. I didn't shoot her, and I knew that, but this test was saying I did. And all I can remember is the detective just kept yelling at me, telling me, there's something you need to tell us, and I didn't know anything. Still, something didn't add up.

For example, when investigators arrived at Amy's place right after the shooting, one of them felt the hood of her car. It was ice cold, hadn't been driven for a while. And during the canvas for witnesses, a neighbor insisted that Amy was home all afternoon. So was Amy so nervous she blew the polygraph? Or was something else going on? Amy's ex-Dave Krupa, when he heard Liz had named Amy as the shooter?

He could barely believe it. Now, at that point, my thinking gets pretty twisted, because I know Amy didn't shoot her. Amy's afraid to even pick up a pistol, let alone handle one. So suffice to say, now everything is what I believe was going on for three and a half, four years, is taking a wild movie-like twist. Back at the hospital, Liz was well enough to pick up a phone and call Todd. Remember him, the helpful, hopeful roommate?

Liz told Todd about the shooting. First question is when I found out where it happened, why are you down at Big Lake after dark? Nobody goes down there in their right mind. That's just not a place to go. It's not safe. To which Liz responded. Why are you questioning me when I'm sitting here a shot, I'm hurt? In fact, Liz would have to stay in the hospital for several days,

and the police had confiscated her cell phone. So she had a request for Todd. She asked if I could go home and get her a tablet. Something that she could use while she was out there when she was bored. So I went to her room to look for one, and lo and behold, I'd see barely sticking out from under the bed, this laptop. So I grabbed it because I knew what it looked like. I flipped it over.

And lo and behold, Todd realized what he had in his hands. It was one of the many electronics that he had reported stolen from his house those many months before. I was like, this is my laptop. But to confirm, I'd double check. When you look at the bottom, there's two stickers. There's the one with the serial number, and there's the one with the operating system license, which had been ripped off. I had kept the box the laptop originally came in,

and all boxes that computers come in have serial numbers on them as well. So I grabbed the box and I compared the two, and they were the same exact serial number. Well, well, Liz had stolen his computer. Todd reeled. You'd have to confront her, of course. Which he did later, when Liz got her phone back via text. and Liz responded this way.

I get this text and it's sorry I didn't know that was yours. I picked it up from a pawn shop. Okay, whatever. At this point, no, I wasn't believing it. But was it true? Strange events and odd coincidences fell down like rain on a picnic some days, especially whenever Liz was around. Detective Avis, investigating the shooting,

went to see Liz at the hospital, his recorder rolling. That's how it gets just written on the wall. What it is. It's Amy shot you where he's gone, isn't it? Pretty much. It's a run thing, he's still done the thing so. Seems like the friendly cop. Or the dumb one.

I'll be whatever she wanted as long as she kept telling us information. Why? Because Ryan Davis and his partner could not help but scratch a suspicious itch, a truly shocking idea. Something beyond twisted, beyond deviant.

Something that sounded crazy. But crazy had long been the only way to describe this case, except the detectives hadn't seen the half of it. Let us turn now to the Bible, the New Testament Book of Acts, chapter 9, verse 18. Stay with me a moment. The story concerns the Apostle Paul, blinded on the road to Damascus, before, quoting here,

There fell from his eyes something like scales, and he received his sight. Or, as the great crime novelist Agatha Christie put it, many, many, many years later, the scales fell from his eyes, meaning, in her case, some baffling mystery suddenly fell away to reveal the deadly truth. Sadly, in real life, the truth all too often remains hidden. Those scales stay firmly affixed. as they had in Omaha, Nebraska and Little Macedonia, Iowa, for three long years. Blinded by hope, perhaps, that Carrie Farver could be persuaded to reveal and explain herself.

Except, in the troubled minds of a young man and his grandmother, something was beginning to poke through, all hazy and half-seen and quite terrible. Carrie Farber's mother, Nancy, and her son Max, were coping with the most confusing set of emotions imaginable. Emptiness, fear, gnawing uncertainty, and just to name a few. Nancy had sent Carrie's so many pleading messages asking her to please, please come home. Writing, for example, Carrie, you're my daughter, and I'll always love you no matter what. We just need to see you to hear your voice, know where you are. Carrie never called, never responded in any way.

For a parent, for a mother. I don't know, how do you characterize this episode in your life? How do you talk about those feelings and make sense of them? There was no making sense of it. Total loss. As for Carrie's son, Max, he had by this time formed a suspicion, tentative at first, but held on to for years. And it was stronger by the day, week, month,

as he poured over those messages from his mom, the wording, the phrasing, the spelling. Max couldn't help but wonder if the person sending those texts was actually his mom, or was not Carrie Farver at all. But if that wasn't her, well then, what did that mean? Max and his grandmother tried to stay positive.

It wasn't easy. So what heaven's name did you think it happened to her? Someone was, well, we pretty much already knew that someone was just posing as my mom on there. Which meant? Which meant something happened. We knew she didn't just run away. We knew that we all kind of hoped for a while that at least she was okay. But we all knew.

By the end of 2015, scale. were beginning to fall away elsewhere, too. Sheriff's investigators in Council Bluffs, Iowa, had come to suspect that maybe they, and detectives at many other agencies investigating all these different cases involving Carrie and Liz, had been bamboozled, played for fools, lied to. Why?

Well, after Liz's shooting, detectives had questions. For instance, why did Liz decide to hang around the dangerous park after dark on a cold winter night alone. Made no sense. Why, when police got to that park, in no time flat, why couldn't they even find a trace of the shooter? But maybe the reddest flag was this. Remember, for years, Liz had been claiming

that the woman stalking her, making her life hell, was Carrie Farver. But now, she was saying, the woman who shot her in the park, was Amy Flora. Crazy, as Amy had told them. I didn't even know what to think at the time, like why I was being accused of shooting somebody. The detectives checked out Amy's alibi, of course.

And it was rock solid. And one question? Well, Amy was nervous, yes, but seemed absolutely befuddled, too. I couldn't harm a fly. I know it was just very traumatizing. And that is when the scales fell from the eyes of Potta Wattama County, Iowa Sheriff's Detectives, Ryan Avis and Jim Doty.

Was Liz Gawyer creative enough, crafty enough, cruel enough to have concocted every bit of this year's long harassment scheme? And if she was, was she diabolical enough to shoot herself through the leg? and then invent a second villain? Not carry now, but Amy? Detective Avis. She shot herself was what I thought. She would be so thoroughly into this con

and cover-up that she would be prepared to put a bullet through her own leg? That was what you thought. And burn her own house down. Vandalize her own car. Wow. Well, surely that was enough

to go out and arrest her. Couldn't prove that she shot herself. So, detectus Doty and Avis decided to leave the shooting case to other investigators and stay in their own lane. After all, their assignment was to find Carrie Farver, missing all those three years. They had come on board to put fresh eyes on the case and to test the prevailing theory, which had always been this, that Carrie suffered some sort of mental health break and then launched a long-term covert campaign of harassment against her ex-Dave Krupa and Dave's ex-girlfriend. friend, Liz. But they had come to suspect that they could not believe anything that Liz Gawleyer told them. And now they believe Liz slipped up big time by shifting the bullseye

from Carrie to Amy. And the detectives now thought they knew why Amy had suddenly become Liz's target. Dave Krupa had moved out of Omaha back to Council Bluffs, and that was the same town where Amy and their two children lived. Dave and Amy were starting to kind of spend some more time together. They were maybe talking about possibly moving in with each other. Oh, boy. But if Doty and Avis were going to confirm all their suspicions and build a criminal case against Liz, they needed proof.

So they went back to the one thing that never lies, the digital evidence. And that cell data, that Liz had allowed police to collect, offer phone numbers. back at the very beginning, that was more than three years before, they'd been working on it the whole time. They'd gone through most of the data on that phone, and they found something. It was, well, confusing. First, on that phone three years before,

Liz had uploaded a photo of Carrie Farver's Black Ford Explorer, which didn't make any sense at all, because? We looked at the date that was taken. It was taken on Christmas Eve of 2012. Wasn't that when her car was actually missing? Yeah, hadn't been recovered until January of 2013. Mm-hmm.

So we thought that's weird that the police couldn't find it. Dave didn't know where it was, but somehow Liz was able to take a picture of it. Strange, all right, but that wasn't all. Remember, at one point, Carrie sent Dave a threatening photo. of a woman bound and duct-taped in the trunk of a car, kidnapped, maybe? Dave guessed that Carrie took the picture, suggesting the woman in the trunk could be Liz some kind of Carrie-invented threat.

But when investigators got hold of Liz's phone, they discovered she took that scary picture. It wasn't Carrie at all. Which made them wonder, was it possible all those wild and scary texts and emails, those thousands of them, all sent in Carrie's name? We're actually sent by Liz.

Tricky, even for a computer whist to nail that bit of jello to the wall. It's beyond our expertise, and that's when we... Well, I was going to say, how well do you know computers and social media and all of that nonsense? We never had a phone and call Tony Kava and tell him that he's got a lot of information to look at.

Tony Kava? Who's he? Well, Tony Kava is what you. call an IT superhero. I work in the county's IT department where I manage a, I guess, a team of seven IT geeks. And I also work in the sheriff's office. I'm a special deputy, which is a reserve deputy in the sheriff's office. I'm a digital forensics examiner.

I don't have a degree for any of this. I pretended to go to college for about two weeks. And I wasn't very good. I wasn't a very good student. I've never been a good student, but I love learning. So I guess I found my calling, though, because I went straight to work and started doing technical work, and that led to where we're at today. And where Tony Kava was at in 2015, when detectives Doty and Avis needed him to do a forensic deep dive on Liz Gawyer's electronics, was at the ready, ready to spend hours and hours and hours on the case. I mean, how much stuff did you have to go through?

It was terabytes worth of information, maybe about three dozen email accounts, a dozen Facebook accounts, and a number of different apps. And so in his tiny office, Tony Kava sat hour after hour, hunched over his workstation late into the night, deciphering enormous amounts of digital data. It might take her five minutes to create a fake email account. It might take me, you know, 15 hours to prove that it's actually hurt. And among those many Internet inventions was a YouTube account. to which Liz uploaded personal videos. And what did Tony Kava discover about the IP address where Liz's YouTube videos were uploaded?

It was linked straight to the home of Liz's new live-in boyfriend, Todd Butterbaugh. Tony Kava did a double-take, maybe two of them, because Todd Butterbaugh is also an IT guy who worked in the same department as Tony. In fact, Tony was Todd's boss.

Crazy. Bizarre. But apparently, true. Here's Todd Butterball. I got pulled in the office and told me being put on administrative leave because she was being investigated. And they made to come to my house and serve a search warrant. Because of the fact that she was living with me

and that I worked at the county, they needed to remove any potential perception that I had access to anything and I could do anything. Plus, they also had to make sure the top wasn't involved. Todd told them, of course, that he knew nothing about these videos, uploaded from his home while Liz lived there. And he told investigators about Liz stealing his laptop. Here's Tony Kava. So again, it was another arrow pointing at Liz. painstakingly, arrow by arrow, Kava compiled a quiverful of evidence.

His conclusion? Every single one of those YouTube videos, threatening emails and texts and Facebook posts, came from Liz Gawyer, and he could prove it. Meanwhile, detectives Doty and Avis busied themselves with good old-fashioned earthbound evidence. Remember that one unidentified fingerprint found on a mint container? In Carrie Farber's otherwise spotless Ford Explorer, again, Detective Doty. We asked our crime scene tech, hey, can you compare that fingerprint to the known prince of Liz? See what you come up with.

It was a match. This lady who should have had very little interaction with Carrie, she had no reason to ever be in her vehicle. Only met her in passing one time, but now her fingerprint is in her car. Proof of Liz and Carrie's SUV. Proof of Liz impersonating Carrie online. There was no logical explanation for any of it. Unless...

We think Liz may have been involved with taking carry disappear. It seemed this case was about to dive right through the looking glass. And on the other side, well, hard to believe. By the time those two county sheriffs started looking into the strength, case of Kerry Farmer and what seemed to be thousands upon thousands of jealousy-fueled texts and emails and threats, even arson. Nearby, in the small town of Macedonia, Iowa, Carrie's son, Max, was getting ready for high school graduation. He hadn't seen his mom in three years, though she, or someone pretending to be her, had contacted him on Facebook occasionally. But ever the optimist,

Max overcame his doubts and decided one more time to reach out to her. I was, at that point, it was just a last-ditch effort, just hoping something would happen. Max wrote to his mom, quote, If this is really you, please come back. I want you to be at my graduation, end quote. When she didn't respond, how did that feel? And I wasn't really surprised, because, like I said, I knew. It wasn't her.

Max and his grandmother Nancy Kerry's mom suspected that all those digital rants were not actually from Carrie. They just didn't know that detectives Jim Doty and Ryan Avis had come to the same conclusion, that they, in fact, had proof that Liz was impersonating Carrie online. But the detectives also suspected something much more dreadful. Remember, their investigation began with one basic question. question, was Carrie Farver alive or was she dead? One clue to finding the answer involved Carrie missing major life events. Her father died.

Yeah. And she didn't go to the funeral. He missed her son's birthday, all these things. I mean, it didn't take Ryan very long at all to come to a dead end where he couldn't find anything to show that she was alive. So, Carrie Farber must have been the victim, not the villain. And the woman who'd claimed to be the victim, Liz Goliere, was the prime suspect in Carrie's disappearance. Because why else would you disguise yourself as, Carrie, if you weren't responsible for it?

Why would you be in Carrie's vehicle if you weren't responsible for it? All of that is so counterintuitive and so bizarre that, you know, you wouldn't. It wouldn't be expected to believe such a thing. No. It was stunning, really. Liz impersonating Carrie for years, sending thousands of texts and emails in her name. But now, investigators had a bigger question and a much bigger problem. I guess part of the worry was if even if we could prove that it's Liz sending all this stuff out as Carrie,

well, that doesn't prove murder. Murder? Yes. Detective Sergeant Doty and Corporal Avis were now firmly convinced that Liz had killed Carrie out of jealousy, simply because Carrie had started dating Dave Krupa, impersonated Carrie in order to win Dave back, and then tried to frame his ex-partner Amy Flora for everything,

even going so far as to set her own house on fire and kill the family pets, shoot herself in the leg. Wild stuff. But could they prove it? We didn't need something more, so we still weren't quite sure how to get to that point. And then, Liz herself, by accusing Amy of shooting her, gave detectives their big idea.

Liz had already met Corporal Ryanavis, but she had no idea who Sergeant Jim Doty was. And that's when we had... introduced Jim to Liz. Well, Investigator, Doty, I worked in the sheriff's office. A little over a week after the shooting in the park, Liz limped into the sheriff's department. I told you I was looking to a missing person that skates briefly on the phone. Detective Doty had good news for Liz.

There had finally been a break in the case of the missing Carrie Farver. There have been some remains that had been located. Okay. It was a ruse, of course. We're waiting on the lab results to make a positive ID, but the initial indication of Peter May and Darg Carey. Okay. Well, they waited, said Detective Doty.

He was hoping Liz could help them establish a firm timeline of Carrie's disappearance. Like, when was the last time that Liz saw Carrie? Well, that was easy, said Liz. They'd had only one brief encounter when Liz showed up unannounced at Dave Kruper's apartment back in 2012 and found Carrie and Dave together. I didn't know he was dating anybody else at the time. So she came out and I was going in and she made a smart comment to me. What she said?

Yeah. Called me a bitch. Okay. And it was a big deal. I didn't really care. At the time, I just wanted to get my stuff and then I left him at home. Okay. That's the only time you've ever seen her in person?

Okay, you haven't seen her in person since? Nope. Liz told Detective Doty that it was Dave who blamed Carrie for all those harassing messages over the years. So she just assumed he was right. But, just as she had told Detective Avis earlier, Liz said she now believed that Dave's ex-partner, Amy Flora, was really the one behind it all. She was with him for 12 years

And she still goes in and out of this life all the time So you think she could have a person that did some of that stuff I'm just saying as another person who would be possessive of Dave It would be her So I mean I wouldn't put it past her Detective Doty pretended to agree I'm thinking if she was bold enough to go And then shoot you

Okay She could easily be bold not to be done something to carry. Of course, Doty told Liz, he would still need to prove it. We had messages from her saying, hey, I did this or I did that. You know, I could easily start building that case. Right. I told her, hey, I believe you.

I believe Amy's after you. And we want to build a case against Amy. We want to get Amy thrown in prison, which we were hoping was music to her ears. And apparently, it was. Liz agreed to help with the investigation and then limped out of the office. And she became a little deputy for you. Yeah. No telling what Liz might come up with next.

In the next episode of Something About Carrie, when a tangle of lies will collide with a whole other tale. And that one, though hard to believe, will be true. I was blown away. Absolutely blown away. It was hard to swallow. I didn't know what to think. I always call it divine intervention.

My first thought when I saw those photographs was that this defendant had taken a trophy of the person she had killed. 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.