Shanna “Liz” Golyar murdered Cari Farver on or around November 13, 2012, then spent four years impersonating her — sending thousands of threatening messages to herself, burning down her own house, and shooting herself in the leg — all while attributing each act to Farver or a woman she wanted to frame. The conduct is a forensically documented case of manufactured victimhood: fabricating evidence of being targeted in order to control a target, deflect suspicion, and eliminate competition. Digital forensics unraveled it. Golyar is serving life in prison.
The Setup
In the fall of 2012, Dave Kroupa was doing what a lot of newly single people do. He was dating casually. He met Shanna Golyar, who went by “Liz,” on a dating site. They started seeing each other. He was clear with her from the beginning: he was not looking for a commitment. He was seeing other women.
That was not acceptable to Golyar. By the accounts that emerged at trial, she had already begun to want something exclusive. But Kroupa did not stop dating. Near the end of October 2012, he met Cari Farver — a 37-year-old Iowa woman, single mother, who had brought her SUV into the auto shop where Kroupa worked. They went on a first date on October 29. There were plans for more.
Golyar knew about Farver. Kroupa had told her. That was the beginning of what would become one of the most elaborately constructed homicide cover-ups in Nebraska’s documented history.
What the Record Shows: November 13, 2012
Cari Farver was last seen alive on November 13, 2012. She had been at Kroupa’s apartment in Omaha.
Within hours of her disappearance, the messages started. Texts from Farver’s number saying she hated Kroupa, never wanted to see him again, that everything between them was over. They escalated fast. Threats. Rage. Within days, Farver’s SUV turned up abandoned in a parking lot near Kroupa’s apartment complex. Kroupa reported the sighting to police. Authorities impounded the vehicle and found it had been largely stripped of useful forensic material. A mint container inside the car, however, retained something Golyar had not accounted for: her own fingerprint.
At the time, nobody knew that. What law enforcement had was a missing woman whose phone was still sending messages, whose car had turned up abandoned, and whose family was receiving cryptic texts from her accounts telling them not to look for her.
The Mechanics of Self-Stalking
What Golyar built over the next four years was a dual-function deception. It was a cover for murder. It was also a manipulation campaign designed to pull Kroupa back toward her.
The self-stalking piece is the part that distinguishes this case from other homicide cover-ups. Golyar did not simply impersonate Farver to misdirect investigators. She constructed herself as a co-victim.
She reported spray-painted slurs on the interior of her own garage to Omaha police — alleged vandalism she attributed to Farver. She sent threatening messages to her own phone and email, which she then showed Kroupa as evidence that Farver was tormenting her too. She used communications software that allowed her to schedule messages in advance, meaning that texts from “Farver” could arrive in Golyar’s inbox in real time while Golyar was sitting next to Kroupa — with Kroupa watching the notification appear.
The self-stalking accomplished two things at once. It gave Golyar a reason to spend more time with Kroupa — they were both being terrorized by the same person, so they sought comfort in each other. And it gave Golyar perpetual plausible deniability. If she was also being victimized, how could she possibly be the perpetrator?
In August 2013, Golyar burned down her own house. All four of her pets — two dogs, a cat, and a snake — died in the fire. She attributed the arson to Farver. Emails from “Farver” arrived claiming responsibility for the fire. Kroupa felt guilty. He felt protective. He rekindled his relationship with Golyar.
“I felt like Liz was being harassed because I dated this woman who’s now making her life hell too,” Kroupa said in the Netflix documentary Lover, Stalker, Killer. “I felt like she was the real victim in all of things, and I wanted to try to protect her.”
That is exactly what manufactured victimhood is engineered to produce.
Escalation: Framing a Second Woman
By 2015, Golyar’s narrative was beginning to show strain. Investigators were looking more closely. Golyar shifted the frame. She identified a new suspect: Amy Flora, the mother of Kroupa’s children. She suggested to investigators that maybe it had never been Farver sending the messages at all — maybe it had been Flora all along, disguising herself as Farver.
Then, one day later, Golyar called 911 to report that she had been shot in the leg at a local park. She named Flora as the shooter.
Investigators did not find evidence supporting Golyar’s account of the shooting. The conclusion they reached was the same conclusion they would eventually reach about everything else: Golyar had shot herself. The wound was real. The attacker was not Flora. The entire episode was another self-inflicted manufactured attack, this time designed to frame a specific named person for murder.
The willingness to inflict actual physical injury on herself — a gunshot wound — to sustain the narrative is worth pausing on. This is not casual deception. This is a person who had so thoroughly constructed a false reality that she was willing to shoot herself in the leg to maintain it.
How Digital Forensics Broke the Case
No body. No weapon. No eyewitnesses. The Nebraska Supreme Court acknowledged all of this in its 2018 opinion affirming Golyar’s conviction. What the court also acknowledged was that the circumstantial digital record was overwhelming.
Investigators traced the thousands of messages attributed to Farver to Golyar’s own devices. The scheduling software she used to maintain real-time alibis left traces. The fingerprint on the mint container in Farver’s abandoned vehicle placed her inside the car. And on a tablet linked to Golyar — a device that Dave Kroupa ultimately helped investigators access — there was a photograph that the court characterized as depicting what appeared to be a tied and decomposing human foot bearing a distinctive tattoo matching the tattoo documented on Cari Farver.
Judge Timothy Burns did not find reasonable doubt.
In his ruling, Burns stated that Farver “did not voluntarily disappear and drop off the face of the earth.” The court found the evidence sufficient to prove purposeful and premeditated killing. Golyar was convicted of first-degree murder and second-degree arson. The Nebraska Supreme Court, reviewing the case in 2018, agreed unanimously: a rational fact finder, viewing the evidence in favor of the state, could conclude the state proved Golyar killed Farver with deliberate and premeditated malice. State v. Golyar, 301 Neb. 488 (2018).
Golyar continues to maintain her innocence. She claims Farver’s real killer is still at large.
The Psychology of Manufactured Victimhood
The clinical literature on erotomania — characterized by a delusional belief that another person is in love with you, typically someone with whom the relationship is minimal or nonexistent — describes a pattern in which the person experiencing the delusion often reverses the actual dynamic. They believe they are being pursued. They believe the object of their fixation is signaling love or connection through actions that, to any outside observer, mean nothing of the sort.
Golyar’s situation was not textbook erotomania. She and Kroupa had an actual relationship, however casual. But the reversal pattern — the insistence that she was being victimized by the person she was, in fact, pursuing and terrorizing — maps onto a related and well-documented phenomenon. Manufactured victimhood operates on the same inversion. The aggressor casts themselves as the target. The harm flows outward while the narrative flows inward.
Self-stalking works because it exploits the presumption of victim credibility. When someone reports being threatened, vandalized, or attacked, the instinct — both for law enforcement and for the target of the manipulation — is to believe them. The real-time arrival of threatening messages in Golyar’s inbox, while she was with Kroupa, was functionally irrefutable to anyone who didn’t know she had scheduled them. The self-inflicted arson and shooting produced physical evidence of victimization that pointed nowhere near her. The system was manipulated precisely because it was designed to take victim reports seriously.
What sustained the behavior was its utility. Every self-inflicted “attack” achieved something: sympathy from Kroupa, police attention directed away from Golyar, the tarnishing of a dead woman’s reputation. Farver’s family watched while their daughter was publicly portrayed as a dangerous, unstable stalker. Her name and reputation, as investigators later noted, were thoroughly tarnished in her small Iowa community — because the only narrative anyone had was Golyar’s.
Investigators at the Omaha Police Department noted that nothing in their experience had prepared them for a case of this scale and complexity. Retired detective Chris Legrow, who worked the investigation, said in the Netflix documentary that he thought he had seen it all. He had not seen this.
What the Record Did Not Show — Until It Did
For four years, the record looked like a missing woman who had gone erratic, cut off her family, quit her job, and started stalking the man who had briefly dated her. That was the narrative the messages constructed. It was false in every particular.
Farver’s mother received messages from her daughter’s accounts. Farver’s son received messages. Both testified at trial. None of the messages were from Cari Farver. All of them were from the woman who had killed her.
The record is not always what it appears to be.
In the Farver case, the record was fabricated from the inside — constructed by the perpetrator, aimed at the perpetrator’s target, designed to survive law enforcement scrutiny.
It survived for four years.
What broke it was not a confession, not a witness, not a body. It was the data underneath the messages — the metadata, the device traces, the scheduling logs, the fingerprint on a mint container.
The record always leaves something.
The Behavioral Profile: Who Does This
Manufactured victimhood is not a diagnostic category in the DSM. It is a behavioral pattern. And like most behavioral patterns, it exists on a spectrum — from the person who exaggerates a minor slight into a major injustice to the person who burns down their own house and shoots themselves in the leg.
Research published in Personality and Individual Differences in 2020 by Gabay, Hameiri, Rubel-Lifschitz, and Nadler identified a stable personality construct they termed Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, or TIV — defined as an enduring feeling that the self is a victim across different kinds of interpersonal relationships. This is not a description of people who have been genuinely harmed. It is a description of a stable orientation, present across relationships, that does not require objective victimization to sustain itself.
The researchers identified four core dimensions of TIV:
The 2020 research also found that TIV was associated with anxious attachment — an insecure relational orientation rooted in early caregiver relationships. This matters for understanding how the pattern develops, though it does not excuse the conduct. Anxious attachment produces a chronic fear of abandonment and an intense need for proximity and reassurance from attachment figures. When that reassurance is not forthcoming — or when a rival appears who might displace the person — the response can be disproportionate in ways that a securely attached person would not generate.
The Gabay et al. research found that TIV was directly linked to a desire for revenge — and that this desire was mediated by negative attributions toward the perceived offender combined with entitlement to immoral behavior. The person does not experience their revenge as wrong. They experience it as the only moral response available to them. This is how a person can burn down their own house, kill their own pets, and shoot themselves in the leg — and genuinely believe they are the righteous party.
It is also worth noting what TIV is not. The research explicitly distinguishes TIV from genuine victimization. A person can be objectively harmed without developing this pattern. A person can have this pattern without ever having been harmed at all. The trait is about an internal orientation toward perceived victimhood, not about the objective facts of what has happened to someone. Importantly, the researchers also distinguish TIV from narcissism, though the two overlap. Grandiose narcissists feel superior. High-TIV individuals feel wronged. The pathway to victim-signaling is different even when the outward behavior looks similar.
Signs: What Manufactured Victimhood Looks Like From the Outside
The behavioral profile above describes the internal orientation. The question for anyone working a case, a relationship, or a situation where something feels off is: what does this look like from the outside, and how do you distinguish it from genuine victimization?
None of these signs is individually conclusive. Pattern is the operative word. The more of these that cluster together, and the more consistently they appear across different relationships and contexts, the more likely you are looking at a manufactured narrative rather than a real one.
How to Identify It: The Investigative Approach
The FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime has published guidance on false allegation crimes that is directly applicable to manufactured victimhood investigations. The core framework is a two-pronged approach: an overt track that treats the claim as potentially legitimate, and a covert track that quietly builds a picture of the claimant without tipping them off.
The covert investigation is the one that breaks these cases. The overt investigation is necessary — if the claim is real, you need to find the actual perpetrator. But the covert investigation is what identifies whether you are dealing with a fabrication.
The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin notes that false allegation crimes consume resources that would otherwise go toward real victims, and that when they are eventually exposed they make it harder for law enforcement and communities to take genuine victim reports seriously. That is not a minor side effect. In the Farver case, Cari Farver spent four years being publicly characterized as a dangerous, unstable stalker. Her reputation was destroyed in the small Iowa community where she had lived. Her mother received messages from the woman who had killed her daughter. Her son grew up being contacted by his mother’s murderer while everyone believed his mother was alive and harassing her ex-boyfriend. The harm to real victims who are not believed because the pattern has been exploited is real and documented. It is one more cost that the person running the manufactured victimhood operation does not account for and does not care about.
I have worked cases where someone was alleging harassment, stalking, or threats — and the person sending the messages was themselves. It is bonkers stuff. Absolutely bonkers. And it is more common than most people realize, because the behavior exploits exactly the dynamic that makes victim reports credible: the assumption that someone reporting harm is experiencing harm.
The tell, in my experience, is in the architecture of the narrative. Self-stalking cases tend to produce documentation that is too convenient, too perfectly timed, and too consistently useful to the person reporting it. Every incident advances the same story. Every “attack” lands at a moment when it redirects attention, generates sympathy, or eliminates a problem. Real victimization is chaotic and arbitrary. Manufactured victimization has a logic to it — because it was designed.
In the Farver case, that logic was digital. The scheduling software, the message volume, the real-time delivery while Golyar was visibly accounted for — all of it had a structure that a human being built. Digital forensics found the seams. When you know what you’re looking at, the record opens up.
Cari Farver’s name was dragged through four years of being called a stalker and a danger. Her family was manipulated. Her son grew up receiving messages from the woman who killed his mother, messages purporting to be from her. That is the cost of the manufactured victimhood pattern that investigators rarely talk about in these cases: the dead woman pays the reputational price while the investigation focuses in the wrong direction.
The record is the record. But someone has to know how to read it.
Sources
If you have documents and a situation that doesn’t add up — fabricated evidence, a narrative that’s too clean, a record that points everywhere except at the person constructing it — a forensic record review maps the contradictions, identifies the gaps, and produces written findings you can act on.
