By Marnie O'Neill
Two weeks after David Kroupa started seeing Cari Farver, his life took a strange and disturbing turn.
The attractive, 37-year-old brunette was one of several women Mr Kroupa was casually dating at the time who hadn't seemed fussed about the no-strings arrangement.
Or so he thought.
Tens of thousands of terrifying emails, text messages and phone calls - seemingly from Ms Farver - began days after Mr Kroupa saw her for the last time in 2012.
In less than a fortnight, she had apparently developed a dangerous obsession, inundating Mr Kroupa with threats that also targeted his friends, work colleagues and other women he was dating, one of whom was Shanna Golyar.
For the next four years Mr Kroupa found himself at the centre of a relentless stalking campaign. But the perpetrator wasn't Ms Farver at all. It was the woman who had stuck with him throughout the nightmare, who had refused to be intimidated by the daily, hourly (and sometimes minute-by-minute) campaign of terror - Golyar.
On Tuesday, a court in Omaha, Nebraska sentenced Golyar, 41, to life imprisonment for the murder of Ms Farver, whose body has never been found.
The court heard Golyar ambushed and killed the mother-of-one on November 13, 2012 after she spent the evening with Mr Kroupa at his home. She then assumed her victim's identity, taking over her social media and email accounts to make it look like she was still alive but didn't want to be found.
Ms Farver's family and young son were left devastated and confused after a status update on her Facebook page explained that she had decided to leave them indefinitely "to sort things out".
In fact, it had been penned by Golyar. In a particularly cruel move, Golyar embellished her story with an unnecessary detail, claiming Ms Farver's own son, who was a toddler at the time, had refused his mother's offer to take him with her.
In the absence of a body, prosecutors were forced to rely heavily on circumstantial evidence, much of which was found within the 12,000 emails Golyar purportedly sent to Mr Kroupa posing as Ms Farver and others, the Omaha World-Herald reported.
Thirteen of those emails contained graphic descriptions of a murder that only the killer would know - amounting to a confession, they argued.
One email sent in January 2013 included a photo of a bound and gagged woman in a trunk of a vehicle.
"You will dump (Golyar), and you will start seeing me again that (sic) it no arguments about it," it read. "If you don't agree she will stay in my trunk and since no one knows my car you won't find her."
But the court heard evidence that Golyar took the photos of herself in the trunk in various
positions to make sure her face was hidden just enough to avoid identification.
The emails also claimed Ms Farver was pregnant with Mr Kroupa's baby and that the two were married.
Another asked Mr Kroupa how to find a hit man to kill Golyar and had a photo attached of an unknown bloodied dead woman.
Many emails contained details of Mr Kroupa's whereabouts and photos of his apartment or vehicle or Golyar's home, children and car. They had subject lines such as "Watching," and "See, I am really here".
They were sent mostly at night and early morning, from dozens of email accounts with variations of Ms Farver's first, middle and last names or Mr Kroupa's surname.
He also received thousands of texts, from more than 25 phone numbers.
In the beginning, Mr Kropa reported most of the messages to police but gave up after becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume, the court heard.
The most incriminating evidence linking Golyar to Ms Farver's death included a series of photographs found on a memory card inside a tablet hidden in a storage unit belonging to Golyar's ex boyfriend.
One picture shows a close up of a human foot with a tattoo of a Chinese symbol.
Ms Farver's son testified that the tattoo was strikingly similar to the one his mother had on the top of her left foot which was the Chinese character for "mother".
At Golyar's trial, forensic pathologist Michelle Elieff noted that the foot appeared to be decomposed, citing discolouration of the skin and blood vessels, although she was unable to determine how long it had been decomposing.
She also identified a small white mark on the skin as a "scuff mark" which can appear when a dead person's skin has been touched.
The court heard that Ms Farver had three tattoos; an Aztec sun on her upper back; a yin-yang symbol and another Chinese symbol on her thigh; and the "mother" Chinese symbol on her left foot.
Images of similar thigh and foot tattoos were found by police on the tablet's memory card. The tablet was found in a storage unit.
Omaha Police Department forensic investigator William Henningsen agreed with Dr Elieff that it was likely the photographs were of Ms Farver.
As the daily onslaught of threatening, expletive laden messages entered a third year, Mr Kroupa continued an on and off relationship with Golyar while seeing other women casually.
At the same time, he was still desperately searching for Ms Farver, who he believed was behind the vicious stalking campaign.
"If I had (found her), this would have been over a long time ago," he told the court.
When Mr Kroupa and Golyar finally called it quits in November 2015, the flood of abuse slowed to a trickle. They stopped completely when Golyar was arrested the following month.
The killer's Jekyll and Hyde personality was chillingly highlighted at the trial when Mr Kroupa was cross-examined by her legal team.
Asked whether he ever heard Golyar utter the word "whore," which is used thousands of times in the emails, during their relationship, Mr Kroupa said: "negative". niacal stalker" and never confessed any crimes to him.
"Up until very recently, I presumed that it was (Ms Farver) causing all of these problems," he told the court.
Mr Kroupa could recall one encounter with Golyar that struck him as odd: one cold night he'd returned home from a night at the pub to find Golyar lurking between his apartment and some parked cars.
"I heard some rustling and saw (Golyar) crawling ... on the ground," he testified.
He called for her to come over, but she didn't answer. As soon as he walked through his front door, he received a stream of texts from Golyar explaining that she had been at a nearby bar drinking with friends, she was very drunk and didn't know what she was doing.
"It was very strange," Mr Kroupa said.
Ms Farver's family welcomed the life sentence but said until Golyar revealed where she put her body, they could never put her to rest.
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