Cari Farver Disappeared… But The Texts Kept Coming | ASMR Real Crimes. Soothing Fire Sounds 🌙

0:00 Come join me, because I have a story to tell you tonight. It's strange, even hard to fathom, but it's entirely true. Before we settle down, let me know what time it is and where in the world you're listening from. And if you like our little community of night owls, please follow from wherever you're listening. Let's begin. There is a particular kind of stillness that settles over small towns in Iowa as autumn deepens, the kind that arrives slowly, almost without announcement, carried in on a cooling wind that moves through the cornfields and bends the tall grass along the roadside.

0:47 Macedonia, IA, is that kind of town. Modest, unhurried, tucked into the southwestern corner of the state. It is the sort of place where people know their neighbors, where the pace of daily life moves in gentle, predictable rhythms. It was here that Carrie Father had built her life. She was 37 years old in the autumn of 2012, a single mother raising a teenage son. A life that was hers, assembled carefully, with quiet determination. She worked as a computer programmer, commuting each day to Omaha, NE, a city about an hour's drive from Macedonia across the Missouri River.

1:34 It was not a glamorous life, but it was a real one. Coffee before the drive, the familiar pull of a highway, the steady focus of work, and then the return home in the evening to a teenage son who needed her and a house that held the comfortable clutter of a life in progress. By all accounts, Carrie was bright and capable. Her work as a programmer spoke to a mind that was methodical and precise, one that found order in complexity. Those who knew her described A warmth about her and an openness that made her easy to be around.

2:18 You notice Carrie, when she walked into a room, her friend Amy Long would later say. She had a laugh, She had a smile. She lit up a room. It was perhaps that openness that led her, sometime in the autumn of 2012, to bring her vehicle in for repairs. The shop was managed by a man named Dave Krupa, an Omaha resident, personable and easygoing, the kind of person who is comfortable talking to strangers. The two of them spoke, and in that unremarkable everyday setting, something clicked between them.

3:01 The need for connection without the ties of a serious relationship. The low hum of garage equipment somewhere in the background. The faint smell of motor oil and autumn air drifting through the open Bay doors. The connection was made. They arranged to go on a date. It was October 29th, 2012, a Monday, deep into full. The kind of evening when the sky darkens early and the air carries the faint sweetness of dried leaves. Whatever that evening held for Carrie and Dave, Conversation over dinner, the tentative warmth of meeting someone new, IT felt, in the way that first dates sometimes do, like a beginning.

3:51 And it was a beginning only, not the kind either of them could have imagined. Because already, though neither of them knew it, other forces were in motion. There was someone else in Dave Krupa's life, someone who had been closely watching, waiting and wanting. Something that carry Father's arrival now seem to threaten. And the story that would unspool from this quiet October evening would stretch across years, drawing in investigators, forensic experts and the quiet grief of a family left searching for answers that were buried somewhere in the digital dark.

4:37 But that was still to come. For now, there was only Kari, a woman living her life in a small Iowa town, driving to work each morning across a river, coming home each evening to her son, stepping without knowing it, toward the last ordinary days she would ever have. The wind moved through bare branches outside, dry and quiet. Dave Krupa was, by most accounts, an ordinary man living an ordinary life in Omaha. He worked, he managed his days, and in the way that many people do in their 30s, he had found his way onto the dating apps and websites.

5:25 It was through one of those sites that he had first encountered Shana Golia, a woman from the Omaha area who also went by the name Liz, sometime in the spring or early summer of that year. She was a mother like Kari would turn out to be, warm in her own way, at least at 1st, and for a time, the two of them had been seeing each other, spending time together in the loose, undefined way that dating sometimes goes when one person isn't entirely sure what they want. Dave Krupa was that person. He kept things casual.

6:06 He wasn't looking for something serious, and he made that clear, or believed he had. What he may not have fully understood was that Shanna Goliah wanted something more, something deeper, something permanent, and the gap between what she wanted and what he was willing to give had been quietly widening for months. Then came October 29th that evening while Dave sat across from Carrie. Father, this new woman, this programmer from Macedonia. With her steady warmth and easy conversation, his phone began to light up.

6:46 A message from Shanna, then another. Then a call. The kind of interruption that, on a first date, he tried to ignore, gracefully tucking the phone away and offering an apologetic smile. But the messages kept coming, arriving with a persistence that was difficult to dismiss, cutting through the quiet atmosphere of the evening like something insistent and unresolved. It is not difficult to imagine the texture of that night, the low light of wherever they sat, the ambient sound of other conversations around them, the particular awkwardness of a new connection being tugged at from the outside.

7:34 Carrie may or may not have noticed. Dave certainly did. And then, at some point that evening, Shana Golya did not simply keep texting. She got in her car. She drove to Dave Krupa's apartment building, and she showed up there uninvited, waiting in the moment. It might have read as the kind of jealous overreaction that sometimes flares up in the messy overlapping of casual relationships. Uncomfortable, perhaps embarrassing but not necessarily alarming. People make poor decisions when they feel abandoned.

8:14 They act out when they feel replaced. It could have been explained away as exactly that, a woman who cared too much, who struggled with boundaries. That is almost certainly how it felt at the time. But investigators who would later spend years untangling what followed would return to that evening with different eyes. They would see it not as an isolated moment of poor judgement, but as something earlier, the first visible tremor of something that had already taken root deep beneath the surface, a signal, in retrospect, of how tightly Shanagoglia was holding on, and of how far she might be willing to go to hold on still.

9:03 For now, though, the night ended, Carrie went home, and the calendar moved quietly forward, toward November, toward the days that would change everything. November in Nebraska arrives with a particular kind of grey, the color of a world that has let go of warmth for another year. The trees along the roadside stand bare by then, their branches tracing thin lines against the pale sky. Carrie Father had her routines, the drive from Macedonia to Omaha, each day crossing the river, arriving at work, the rhythms of a single mother managing a full life with quiet competence.

9:50 And in the first weeks of November 2012, those rhythms had continued, outwardly at least. But something around the edges of her life had already begun to feel different. Sometime around November 9th or 10th, her vehicle was vandalized outside her home in Macedonia. It is the kind of thing that lands in the stomach with a dull, unsettling weight, a violation of ordinary safety, the kind of thing that makes a person look over their shoulder without quite knowing why.

10:29 And then came the morning of November 13th. Carrie had spent the night at Dave Krupa's apartment in Omaha, and sometime that morning she gathered herself to leave, the way a person does when the day is waiting and there is work to be done. Perhaps. She pulled on her coat in the hallway. Perhaps she said something ordinary in parting, something forgettable, the kind of small goodbye that dissolves into the texture of a normal day before it has even finished being spoken. She walked out of the apartment building and into the Gray November morning, and that was the last time anyone who knew Carrie Father would see her alive.

11:18 There is something about that image that the mind tends to linger on, not because it was unusual, but because it was so completely ordinary. A woman leaving an apartment on a Wednesday morning, coat on, bag in hand, the day ahead of her. Hundreds of people must have done exactly the same thing that morning, within a mile of where she stood. And yet it would become, in the years that followed, one of the most examined moments in the entire investigation.

11:57 Investigators would return to it again and again. She walked away, the door closed behind her, and somewhere a phone was about to begin sending messages that would rewrite the story of who Carrie Father was and what had become of her.

12:19 The morning had been so quiet and ordinary, and for a little while after Curry left, the day continued in that same unremarkable key. And then the messages started. They came to Dave Krupa's phone within hours of Carrie walking out of his apartment building. The first one must have seemed surprising in the way that unexpected emotional requests tend to feel when they arrive out of nowhere on an otherwise ordinary day. The message sent from Carrie's phone asked if she could move in with him permanently.

12:59 It was an abrupt question, one that didn't fit the shape of their relationship. They had spoken openly on their very first date about not wanting anything serious, and in the week since, nothing had shifted that understanding when Krupa responded. No, the reply came almost immediately. Fine, I hate you, I'm dating someone else, I don't want to see you anymore. Go away. Short, blunt, stripped of any context. The kind of words that land with a cold finality, carrying the concentrated heat of something that felt less like heartbreak and more like fury.

13:41 To Dave Krupa, reading those words on his screen, the most natural explanation was probably also the simplest one that Kari had wanted more than he had realized that his refusal had wounded her and that she had walked away. It was an uncomfortable story, but a human 1. And so the day settled into that explanation. But the messages did not stop there. In the days that followed, Krupa's phone was inundated with texts stating how she hated him and how he was a terrible person. And then eventually came something that felt more final.

14:24 A text from Father's phone saying simply, I'm done with you. I'm moving to Kansas. A door apparently closing two days after that. Last morning, on November 15th, Father's employers received texts from her cell phone saying she was quitting her job and moving to Kansas. Brief and business like the kind of message a person sends when they have already made-up their mind and see no reason for further conversation. And then came the detail that, in hindsight, would seem almost impossible to explain away.

15:05 The text went on to say she was sending someone to fill her position and that person was Shanna Golia. Later that same day, Golia sent her application to the company. It is the kind of thing that, taken on its own, might be explained as coincidence. A job becomes available, someone applies. Timing can be unfortunate without being meaningful, but placed alongside everything else, the hostility of the messages, the abruptness of the resignation, the weeks of unease that had preceded it all, it carries a weight that is difficult to sit with quietly.

15:48 To the outside world, however, the picture appeared coherent, if unhappy. A woman had met someone, wanted more than he could give, and when refused, had turned her pain outward and then walked away from the relationship, from her job, from the life she had been building in Macedonia. It was a story people could understand, even if they found it troubling. It would be some time before anyone began to ask the quieter, more unsettling question lurking just beneath the surface of that story. If Carrie Father had simply walked away, then why had no one who loved her heard from her directly?

16:34 What about her son? And why, in all the messages that had poured from her phone in those November days, did not a single one sound quite like her? The phone buzzed once, then went still. Nancy Rainey knew her daughter. She knew the texture of Carrie's messages, the rhythm of her voice, the way she moved through the world. And in the days after November 13th, as text began arriving from Carrie's phone, something about them sat uneasily, not quite right in ways Nancy couldn't fully articulate. The badly spelled messages told her that Carrie had moved to Kansas, that she had taken a new job there, that she would be in touch soon to make arrangements for picking up her teenage son, Max, who was 15 years old and waiting at home in Macedonia for a mother who never came.

17:34 Carrie was capable, independent, the sort of person who made her own decisions. And yet the silence underneath the words felt wrong. The grammar errors, the bad spelling. It just wasn't her. Then there was the absence of a phone call and Carrie's actual voice. Nancy reported her daughter missing, but the messages kept arriving, and they kept providing just enough explanation to give the authorities pause. Rainey was receiving cryptic messages from social media accounts belonging to a daughter telling her not to look for her.

18:16 And when investigators attempted to make contact with Kari directly, she texted a detective from Potawatomi County asking to be left alone to the police. The picture that emerged was of a grown woman who had chosen, for her own reasons, to step away from her life. Uncomfortable, perhaps, but not a crime. Weeks past, Carrie missed her son's birthday. She also missed Thanksgiving. Then she missed her half brother's wedding and her father's funeral. These were the absences of someone who was gone in a permanent and terrible way.

18:58 But the messages kept coming, and each one seemed to paper over the growing cracks just enough to forestall the reckoning that was coming. Because why would anyone else send so many messages in this way? And then in the days that followed, Rainy received a text saying Father had sold all her furniture and asked Rainey to let the buyer into the house to pick it all up. Accompanying the message was a photograph, an image of a check made out to Carrie, signed by the name Shana Golia. The request was transactional code.

19:40 It did not read like a daughter reaching out to her mother. And the name on that check? Shana Golia, a woman Carrie's family barely knew existed. A woman whose connection to Kari ran only through Dave Krupa, through that tangled, unhappy overlap of lives that had begun just weeks before. Nancy Rainey looked at that check, and she went to the police.

20:09 We knew Liz Golia's real name was Shanna, Detective Doty would later say. It didn't give us any answers on what had happened to Kari, but we knew. That Liz knew more than she was telling us. It would take years before the full shape of what Golian knew would come into the light. But Nancy Rainey's instinct, that quiet, insistent maternal certainty that something was deeply wrong, had planted a seed that would not stop growing. In the meantime, the messages continued and they were about to get much darker.

20:46 Dave Krupa lived with abuse for the better part of three years. The messages had begun on November 13th, 2012. They did not stop. Over that period. Krupa would go on to receive around 15,000 emails and as many as 50,000 texts. The messages were rife with jealousy and rage at first. Then, over time, the tone shifted from spiteful to threatening. Some were unsettling in their intimacy, describing his clothing as though the sender could see him. One message read simply, My favorite thing to do is stand outside and stare at you.

21:32 Others escalated into something raw and more frightening. One message said, I hate you so much that I want to drive a knife in your heart. Another warned him. I will destroy your life and take your happiness. Krupa would later testify that it made it very difficult to be social. I couldn't even use my phone, he said. It'd be beeping. All day long. He changed his phone number more than once, he changed his e-mail address. And yet the messages kept finding him. What made it stranger still was that Shana Golia was receiving the same treatment.

22:15 Messages filled with threats and hostility, apparently from Kari, arrived on her phone too. Police, who had by now accepted the working theory that Carrie Father was alive and consumed by obsession, treated both Krupa and Golia as victims of the same disturbed stalker. In January 2013, investigators downloaded the phone data from both of them, building a picture of a woman out of control. But then came something that sharpened the unease. That same month, Krupa was returning home 1 evening when he noticed a familiar vehicle sitting in a nearby parking lot.

23:00 He recognized it as father's Ford Explorer, then took a photo of the license plate and called the police. When officers searched the car, they found it clean, but for one detail, a single fingerprint on a mint container in the cup holder. It didn't match Father and it didn't match anyone in the FB is national database. It would be years before anyone understood whose fingerprint it was. The harassment continued to grow stranger and darker. Messages arrived claiming Father had a spare key to Krupa's apartment and let herself in when he wasn't home.

23:45 In one message, she claimed to have kidnapped Golyard. In another, she said she was planning to move into a building in his apartment complex. On August 17th, Golyard called Krupa in a panic. Her house had been set on fire. Her pets, all four of them, perished in the blaze and shortly afterward a message arrived from an account linked to Carrie Father claiming responsibility. I am not lying. I set that nasty whore's house on fire, the message read. I hope the whore and her kids die in it. It was the kind of escalation that seemed to confirm everything.

24:28 The authorities already believed that Carrie Father had come completely unravelled, that the harassment had crossed into something truly dangerous. For a while, the shared ordeal even drew Krupa and Goliad closer together, and the two rekindled their relationship. There was a grim logic to it, two people bound together by a common thread, finding comfort in the one other person who seemed to understand what they were living through. It was common, Krupa would later recall, for him and Goliad to be sitting together on a couch watching television, and for both their phones to start flooding with messages from Kari at the exact same moment.

25:18 He had no reason to suspect Goliad. He could see with his own eyes that she wasn't touching her phone. What he didn't know was that Goliad had been using scheduling applications to send pre written messages at specific times precisely to create that alibi in real time. And somewhere beneath the sheer volume of the deception, the truth was waiting, patient and still, for someone to look closely enough to find it. By the autumn of 2015, something had begun to shift. Detectives Ryan Avis and Jim Doty of the Pottawattamie County Sheriff's Office had been working the case since spring, approaching it with fresh eyes and a different kind of patience.

26:12 They had been watching Shanna Golia. And Golia, it seems, had begun to sense it. The harassment started to taper. Dave Krupa had moved to Council Bluffs. The relationship between him and Golia had finally and quietly dissolved. The elaborate digital world Golia had spent years constructing was beginning to show, it seems. And so, in the way that a person backed into a corner sometimes does, she reached for something more drastic. She came into the Sheriff's Office and filed A harassment report, not against Carrie Farver this time, but against Amy Flora, the mother of Dave Krupa's children.

27:00 Golia claimed Flora had been stalking her on Facebook and said maybe father had never been the one doing the stalking at all. Like I said, they only dated for two weeks, Goliad told Detective Avis. And I don't understand why a person would still be stalking him almost three years later. I would find it more reasonable to believe that his kids mom is the one. It was a bold pivot. The detectives listened carefully. And then just one day after that conversation, A911 call came in from Big Lake Park in Council Bluffs.

27:40 Golia had been shot in the leg. She described seeing a shadow emerge through the darkness before she was shot in the thigh. She told investigators she wouldn't put it past Amy Flora to have done it. Almost immediately, she began forwarding emails to the sheriff that was supposedly from Amy, emails in which Amy confessed to the shooting. It was an extraordinary claim, but the investigators were already suspicious. They would later conclude that Golia had stolen a gun from Dave Krupa's home and used it to shoot herself in the thigh.

28:22 This made her dangerous, and there was a detail Golia had not accounted for. Amy Flora had a solid alibi. She could not have been at Big Lake Park that night, digital forensics expert Tony Carver would later reflect. For years, Liz pretended she was the victim and Carrie was doing all the stalking, he said. Then all of a sudden it's Amy who is doing this to Liz. But had Liz Golya really shot herself and set fire to her own home? What was next?

29:00 Two weeks after the shooting, Detectives Doty and Avis brought Golya in for an interview. She had no idea at that point that she herself was their primary suspect. The detectives made a careful decision. They would let her believe they found her credible. They told her they believed her account, that Flora had shot her and asked for her help. They wanted Golia to reach out to Flora and see if she could get her to say something incriminating about Kari father's disappearance. Golia almost immediately produced emails she said were from Flora, messages in which Flora confessed to the shooting at Big Lake Park.

29:46 But the detectives already knew those emails hadn't come from Amy Flora. They had come from Golia herself, and buried within them, hidden beneath the layers of accusation and fabrication, were details that no innocent person and no bystander could possibly have known. Details about what had happened to Kari Fava 1 e-mail purportedly from Flora read. I attacked her with a knife. I stabbed her three to four times in chest and stomach area. I took her out and burned her. I stuffed her body in a bag with crap.

30:26 The spelling was poor, the grammar fractured. It was, prosecutors would later argue, a confession. Not Flora's confession. Liz Golias. She had spent three years building a ghost, and in trying to bury that ghost one final time, she had written down the truth. The net was closing now, and what investigators were about to find on a small memory card would leave no room left for doubt. In the spring of 2015, Detectives Ryan Avis and Jim Doty of the Potawatomi County Sheriff's Office had quietly taken up the case with fresh eyes.

31:11 They brought in a third member of their team, Special Deputy Anthony Carver, the office's digital forensics administrator, and together the three of them began pulling apart the digital architecture of three years of deception, thread by careful thread. The task was monumental. They had a significant advantage from the outset. The phone data downloaded from both Krupa and Goliath back in January 2013 had been sitting in the files of the original investigators. Now Cava had it, and almost immediately something became clear.

31:55 Right off the bat, Tony was able to point out that Liz was posing as Carrie, Detective Doty would later say. But the evidence didn't tell us what happened to Carrie or where Carrie was. They knew what was happening. What they didn't yet know was what it meant or how far back it went. Proving it was another matter entirely. Between 2012 and 2015, Golya had done a careful job of concealing her electronic trail, using applications and digital proxies to hide her IP addresses. When we picked up the case, Carver said she had learned how to get better and better at hiding her trail.

32:44 And so Carver did what few investigators would have thought to do. He went as far as to write his own code, creating software that could efficiently examine the terabytes of information he needed to process in order to build a solid case. The scale of what he was dealing with was immense. 10s of thousands of messages, dozens of fake accounts. A constantly shifting web of digital identities, each one carefully constructed to look like someone else. The hard part was proving it, Carver said. But Golia's obsession had worked against her in a way she hadn't anticipated.

33:31 The sheer volume of what she had produced had left an enormous number of data points for Carver to work with, and buried within that data came the break he had been working toward one of the top IP addresses traced back to the house that had burned down Golia's house. Being able to trace an IP address to a place she was actually laying her head cover said, was like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. It turned out to be a lucky break for us. There were more shocking discoveries. The top IP address was connected to a house in Council Bluffs that belonged to a man who worked for Carver at the Sheriff's Office, an IT professional who said he had an on and off live in girlfriend who had moved in after her house burned down.

34:30 That girlfriend was Golia, the digital trail that it appeared to lead everywhere, sent to Kansas, to a woman on the run, to a stalker consumed by jealousy. Lead, in the end, to a single address, a single person sitting in a house, day after day, typing. Keyboard tabs echoed softly in the quiet room. But why? Everything suggested Liz Golia had been impersonating Carrie Father from the moment Carrie went missing. Detective Avis would later say every message that was sent to Dave, to Liz, to Nancy, to Max came from Liz herself.

35:14 We believe that Liz was the victim. That's not true. In fact, Liz is the stalker. But knowing it and proving it in a courtroom in a murder case with no body, no weapon and no witness were very different things. The investigators needed something physical. They were about to find it in the last place anyone might have thought to look.

35:42 By the time the case was approaching trial in 2017, investigators had built something formidable. Thousands of traced messages. Fake e-mail accounts. IP addresses mapped back to Golia's home. A fingerprint on a mint container. Blood stains hidden beneath the fabric of a car seat. It was a compelling body of circumstantial evidence, layered and interlocking. But there was still no body, still no physical confirmation that Carrie Father was dead. And without that, a defense attorney could stand before a judge and ask the oldest question in the book.

36:28 Where is she? The answer, it turned out, had been sitting quietly in a storage unit.

36:37 Before the trial began, investigators asked Dave Krupa if he had held onto any old electronic devices from the period when he had been dating both Carrie and Golia. He found a long dead tablet buried in his storage unit and handed it over. An old device, long since forgotten, gathering dust among other discarded things. Tony Carver took the tablet and examined it carefully. Inside, he found a micro SD memory card. Investigators discovered that the SD card had also been in Goliad's phone around the time of the murder.

37:19 Using forensic recovery software, Cava began working through its contents. He scrolled through them slowly and methodically. The way he approached everything. And then he came to one image that stopped him. I came to a photo that no one had seen before, Carver said. I wasn't sure what I was looking at first, but it turned out to be a human foot with a tattoo. He paused. His first impression, he would later say, was that he was looking at a piece of rosewood. But upon closer inspection, he understood what he was actually seeing, A foot in a state of decomposition known as Venus marbling.

38:07 And on that foot, clearly visible, was a tattoo, a Chinese character, the symbol for the word mother. Carrie. Father's mother, Nancy Rainey, confirmed that her daughter had that exact tattoo in that exact place on her foot. A medical examiner also determined that the foot in the photograph belonged to a deceased person. The room must have gone very still in that moment. After four years of chasing a ghost, here was something solid and irreversible. It was shocking, Carver said. It made me realize that Liz Golia killed Carrie Father and she was taking photos of her body.

38:55 Carrie Father was dead. She had been dead since November 2012, and Shanna Golia had known it all along because she had been there. But the photograph was not the only thing the case against Golia now rested on. They were also the emails the ones Golia had fabricated and sent to herself, purportedly from Amy Flora, in her attempt to redirect the investigation. Investigators had traced those emails back to Golya beyond any doubt and buried within them, written in Golya's own hand under the guise of another woman's name, with details about what had happened to Kari that no innocent person could possibly have known, one e-mail, supposedly from Flora read.

39:49 I had taped her with a knife. I stabbed her three to four times in chest and stomach area. I took her out and burned her. I stuffed her body in a bag with crap. Another described driving Carrie out to the woods while she was still alive, still begging. It was huge, Detective Doty said, because she was saying stuff that only the killer would know. She thought we had a body. And those emails described it happening in Kyrie's vehicle. Investigators went back to Father's black Ford Explorer for 1/3 time.

40:28 They removed the cover from the front passenger seat, and beneath it they found a red stain, a spot of blood that was later confirmed to be Cari Father's. The picture was now complete. Golia had spent three years building an elaborate fiction to convince the world that Cari Father was alive, unstable and dangerous. In the end, it was her own meticulous record keeping that handed investigators the truth. Doty later reflected on what the investigation had accomplished beyond securing A conviction.

41:06 Carrie was from a small town in Iowa, he said. Everybody had heard about this case. It totally tarnished her image and reputation. Our investigation set the record straight. It wasn't Kari sending the harassing messages. It was Liz Goliad pretending to be Kari. Goliad was arrested on December 22nd, 2016. She denied everything. The trial of Shanna Goliad began on May 10th, 2017 in a Douglas County courtroom in Omaha. It lasted 10 days. There was no jury. Goliad had waived that right, leaving the verdict in the hands of a single judge, the Honorable Timothy Burns.

41:55 The defense argued what it had always argued Nobody. No murder weapon, no witnesses. Without those things, they contended, how could anyone say with certainty that a murder had even occurred? Chief Deputy Douglas County Attorney Brenda Beadle had been preparing for exactly that argument. On May 24th, 2017, Judge Burns delivered his verdict. Carrie Father did not voluntarily disappear and drop off the face of the earth, he said just before he spoke the words the Father family had been waiting nearly five years to hear.

42:38 Very sadly, she was murdered. Golia's face reddened as the verdict was read. She kept her eyes closed as deputies LED her out of the courtroom. Nancy Rainey wept, hugging her husband. This morning, finally, all of that came to a head. Nancy Rainey said in the hours after the verdict. She's got her name back. It's not tarnished. On August 15th, 2017, Golia was sentenced life in prison without the possibility of parole for the murder of Carrie father, plus a consecutive 18 to 20 years for the second degree arson of her own home.

43:22 She sat stone faced throughout the sentencing hearing and did not address the court. Nancy Rainey did. She's got a life sentence now, Rainey said. But she also gave everybody else that loved Kari a life sentence. She took Kari's life, she gave my grandson a life sentence of not having his mother there and all of the people that loved her. We have to live with a nightmare that we have lived with for so long, Brenda Beadle, who had prosecuted the case, reflected afterwards. In my 20 plus years of doing this job, this is one of the most calculated and bizarre cases I've ever seen.

44:06 Even in Golia's pre sentencing letter to the court, Beadle noted the defendant refused to accept responsibility. She lacked empathy and she lacked remorse. Beadle said she was still making excuses. In November 2018, the Nebraska Supreme Court rejected Golia's appeal unanimously. The conviction stood. Shanna Golia is currently serving her sentence at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women in York County, Nebraska. Her next parole review is scheduled for November 2027. To this day, she maintains her innocence and has said she will not stop fighting until she is set free and what she calls the right person is found.

44:58 Sadly, Carrie Father's remains have never been recovered. The exact location of where her body was taken after that November morning in 2012 remains unknown. The case itself has taken on a life of its own in the years since. The Netflix documentary Lover, Stalker Killer, released in February 2024, brought the story to a global audience and briefly became the platform's most watched film. Tony Carver, who led the digital forensics work, said. I don't think we will ever have another case like this one.

45:40 None have been as challenging in terms of complexity and scale. He, Detective Doty and Detective Avis also established a scholarship in Carrie's name at the local Community College she attended, awarded annually to students studying computer information technology, a field Carrie herself had worked in, Carver said they wanted to associate something positive with her memory. And that, perhaps, is where this story finds its quiet resting place. Not in the courtroom or in the prison cell, but in the effort of the people who refused to let her be remembered only as a ghost, only as a digital fiction constructed by someone else's obsession.

46:31 Carrie father was a mother, a woman who drove an hour to work each morning across a river and came home each evening to a son who needed her. She was loved, and she did not simply walk away. If I could talk to Kari right now, Nancy Rainey has said I'd say I love you. I'm so glad that you are in my life. You have a beautiful son who's got a wonderful life coming, and I miss you terribly. This has been Edward. Thank you for joining me. If you like my style of storytelling, please let me know. Sleep well.

47:12 Good night.