The 6 most harrowing moments from Netflix’s deadly love triangle doc “Lover, Stalker, Killer”

Following his divorce in 2012, Kroupa moved to Omaha, Nebraska, and began dating again, solely to have fun and meet new people in the area. Kroupa created an online dating profile on Plenty of Fish, where he first met Golyar, a single mother and animal lover. He later met Farver, another single mother who previously visited Kroupa’s auto shop to have her car repaired.

After two weeks of seeing Farver, Kroupa said he received a text message from her saying they should officially move in together. “I’m thinkin’, ‘I’ve been seeing you for two weeks,’” Kroupa recalled in the documentary. “‘Yes, it’s been hot and heavy; it’s also been two weeks.’”

Kroupa turned down Farver’s request, which sent her into an immediate frenzy. Kroupa said he received a “barrage of texts” from Farver, who allegedly wrote back, “Fine f**k you,” “You’ve ruined my life,” and “I never want to see you again.”

After not hearing from Farver for a couple days, Kroupa said she began sending him texts again that were more threatening in nature. “You are a bastard,” read one of Farver’s messages, followed by, “I’m going to destroy the things you care about,” “Your life will be ruined for ruining mine.”

“Why she’d be harassing me, I just didn’t get it,” Kroupa said.

Shortly after Farver’s mother, Nancy Raney, reported her daughter missing, Raney began receiving cryptic Facebook messages from Farver. Farver allegedly wrote, “I am not missing, I just don’t want to come home right now. I love you all very much, but I need time.” Raney said Farver's text messages eventually became “one to two words” that “just got steadily nastier and nastier.” 

In addition to harassing Kroupa, Farver also harassed Golyar. In one instance, she keyed Golyar’s car and sent her texts and emails, saying, “I will do more if you don’t leave Dave alone,” and “Whore.” Farver also spray-painted Golyar’s garage door and even broke into her home.  

For the first several days, the texts from Farver came from her original phone number, but after that, they started coming from multiple other phone numbers (“20, 30, 40 . . . You couldn’t block ‘em fast enough,” Kroupa said). Farver’s emails were also under different aliases, “or just under random names, and upwards of 125 a day,” Kroupa recalled.

Farver set Golyar’s house on fire, telling Kroupa in a text, “I hope the whore and her kids die in it.” Golyar and her children weren’t in the house at the time. Golyar’s pets, however, all died. Her house and many of her personal belongings were also gone for good.

After the fire, Golyar took whatever she could salvage from the house and moved, although she never told Kroupa where she was going. Kroupa said he felt like the “only thing I could do was also pack up and move.” He changed phones, got a new job and moved to Council Bluffs, Iowa, in hopes of rebuilding his life away from Farver.

Within the Farver case, there were thousands of text messages and emails that spanned across two years. Tony Kava, special deputy for the Pottawattamie County sheriff’s office, was asked to join the case to help investigate the digital evidence in hopes of locating Farver. Kava sought to find an IP address for an email or text message that would trace back to a specific location. Whoever was sending those messages, however, was using different services to hide their real IP address, thus making the task quite difficult.

Kava ultimately wrote a program named Dex that would help him uncover the IP address he needed. Out of the millions of IP addresses available, 13,000 were revealed to be unique. Out of the top 10 IP addresses seen throughout the case, eight of them were VPN services. 

The top most IP address was connected to a house in Council Bluffs, Iowa, that belonged to Todd Butterbaugh, an IT professional who worked for Kava at the Pottawattamie County sheriff’s office. Butterbaugh said he had an on-and-off, live-in girlfriend who began living at his house after her house was burned down. His girlfriend was revealed to be Golyar.

“Everything suggested Liz [Golyar] had been impersonating Cari [Farver] from the moment Cari went missing,” said Pottawattamie County sheriff’s office investigator Ryan Avis. “Every message that was sent to Dave, to Liz, to Nancy, to Max came from Liz herself.” 

“We believed that Liz was the victim. That’s not true. In fact, Liz is the stalker.”

A micro SD card from an old, abandoned tablet that Kroupa found in his storage unit contained several selfies and pictures of Golyar. It didn’t take investigators long to realize that the tablet’s SD card was actually from Golyar’s phone, back when Farver went missing.

In the documentary, Kava said there was one picture in particular that caught his attention. He initially mistook it for a piece of rosewood but upon closer inspection, realized it was a picture of a foot post mortem. The foot was identified as Farver’s because it contained a tattoo of the Chinese symbol for “mother,” which Raney confirmed belonged to her daughter.

Investigators concluded that Farver was killed in Omaha. She had been stabbed multiple times by Golyar.

Golyar was convicted of murder in 2017. At the time of her conviction, Farver's body had not been found. A Nebraska judge ultimately found beyond a reasonable doubt that Golyar intentionally killed Farver with “deliberate and premeditated malice on or about Nov. 13, 2012, in Douglas County, Nebraska.”

The documentary also specified that Golyar was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole.