STALKER-killer Shanna “Liz” Golyar got what she deserved when she was arrested for murdering her love rival, her ex’s mom says.
Golyar was arrested in December 2016 for the murder of Cari Farver, whom she’d stabbed to death four years earlier after learning their mutual love interest, Dave Kroupa, was dating them both at the same time.
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Golyar spent the better part of four years impersonating Farver in thousands of emails, text messages, and on social media to make it appear as if Farver was out to kill her and Kroupa.
Her web of lies was eventually untangled after cellphone data revealed it was in fact Goylar authoring the messages.
To keep up her twisted ruse, she had even shot herself in the leg, burned down her home, and killed her dog.
Phyllis Herr told The U.S. Sun that she was relieved when she learned that Golyar had been sentenced to life behind bars.
However, Phyllis said she could have been arrested nearly two decades earlier after the shaken baby death of her 5-month-old son, Cody, in January 1999.
It was Phyllis’ mentally challenged son, Glenn Herr, who would ultimately be convicted of the boy’s murder, but to this day, Phyllis contests her son was framed.
The day before the boy’s death, Golyar allegedly called Glenn at work crying that she’d “dropped” the baby.
Within 24 hours, an unresponsive Cody would be rushed to hospital and later pronounced dead having suffered a brain hemorrhage caused by violent shaking.
Golyar appeared as the star witness against Herr, presenting to the jury seven strangely-written letters she claimed to have received from him behind bars, implicating him in the boy’s death and purporting to show Glenn asking her to lie for him in court.
Phyllis believes Golyar forged the letters, insisting her son struggles with basic reading and writing and wouldn’t have been able to even comprehend some of the language used in the Golyar letters.
He pleaded guilty to Cody’s murder once the letters were read out.
Golyar was the only person asked to verify his handwriting, court records show.
The U.S. Sun reached out to the Calhoun County Circuit Court where Herr’s trial took place to obtain copies of Golyar’s letters to show them to the Herr family to see if they recognized the handwriting as Glenn’s.
However, a court clerk told The U.S Sun Golyar’s letters are not in the case files, and copies of the crucial exhibits were never made.
When asked what may have happened to them, the clerk responded that the letters would’ve been given back to the “party that entered them” after the trial, which in this case would be Golyar.
Phyllis Herr said she finds great satisfaction in the fact that Golyar will never be a free woman again.
However, she wishes it didn’t take for Farver to be killed for Golyar to finally “get what she deserves.”
“She should’ve been locked up 20 years ago,” said Phyllis.
“Unfortunately, a woman had to die for her to finally be locked up, and I feel very bad for that woman’s family. And part of me thinks, had justice been done for Cody the right way, maybe that woman might still be alive. It’s very heartbreaking.
“Glenn says he knows he can’t get back the time he spent locked up, but now Shanna’s in prison for life he feels justice has been served.
“He’s out now,” she added. “He’s got a family and for him, life goes on.
“It’s gone on since the day after he got out because everyone rallied around him knowing he didn’t do this.
“So my message to Shanna would be: It took God a long time, but now our prayers are answered.
“You will remain in prison for the rest of your life – and you will burn in hell.”
REMARKABLE LETTERS
When Golyar appeared on the stand on the second day of Herr’s trial, everyone except for the jury was sequestered out of the courtroom.
Phyllis Herr didn’t even know the letters existed until 2019 when she was contacted by author Leslie Rule for her book on Golyar, titled A Tangled Web.
The letters were sometimes gushing and dramatic and included frequent proclamations of love.
“Shanna, if I said that my feelings for you are very strong, that as my wife-to-be, I need you to come back up here and tell my attorney that on Thursday the 29th of February the reason you called me home from work at eight-thirty p.m. was because you had dropped Cody from about four feet, which then caused Cody to stop breathing,” read one of the letters, dated May 10, according to trial transcripts.
“So then, you shook Cody, not to do any harm but to get him to start breathing again.”
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Another, dated May 11, read, “Hey, what I said in the letter to you on 5-10 about what to say, that you dropped Cody, forget about it. That is wrong of me to ask you to say something you didn’t do.”
Some letters were signed “Glenn bad boy” and referred to Golyar as Herr’s wife and to Herr as Golyar’s husband.
The pair was not married and never engaged.
Their relationship had become almost non-existent in the wake of Cody’s death, court transcripts suggest.
Golyar told the court the letters were initially sent to her aunt and later passed on to her.
She said all of the letters were already opened but arrived in envelopes stamped from the prison where Herr was being held.
“I beg of you that you please come up here. If you do this for me, I would move to Omaha, Nebraska and marry you in a minute flat,” reads another of Herr’s purported letters.
“Shanna, please give me a second to remove the tears from my eyes. Shanna, I love you more now that I feel as though I’ve lost you. Shanna, please let me get your phone number. Please honey, I think of you day and night.”
MASTER FORGER?
Like Phyllis Herr, author Leslie Rule also believes Golyar’s letters may have been forged.
Pointing out that Golyar is now a known pathological liar who is adept at impersonation, deception, and forgery, Rule said she noticed a key similarity between Golyar’s letters and the messages she wrote posing as Farver that suggests to her the former may have been counterfeit.
“One thing that jumped out at me was the fact that when Liz was forging emails in Cari’s name, she sometimes referred to [Dave] Kroupa as ‘my husband,'” said Rule.
“Cari, of course, was not married to Dave. And this seemed to be Liz’s way of making Cari appear to be obsessed.
“And if she forged the Glenn [Herr] letters, she did the same thing, making it appear that the guy was so in love with her that he was already calling himself her husband.”
To emphasize her point, Rule noted that one of the Herr letters included a marriage proposal and was signed, “Love your husband, Glenn John Herr.”
Similarly in one of Golyar’s fake Farver emails, the killer had taken Cari’s middle name, Lea, and combined it with Kroupa’s last name to form the email address leakroupa@gmail.com, to make it appear as though she was his wife.
Some of the emails sent from that account began, “To my husband, Dave Kroupa.”
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Rule believes there’s a correlation between the letters and the staged Farver messages.
“This strikes me as more than coincidental,” she said.
“How many people refer to themselves as husband and wife before they’re married? I’ve certainly never done that! My guess is that this is rare!”
‘HE WAS FRAMED’
After Golyar’s letters were revealed to the court, a recess was called and Herr entered a guilty plea.
He was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison.
Herr’s attorney told local media that Golyar’s letters completely destroyed his case.
“You could tell by the look on the jurors’ faces,” Buscher told The Enquirer. “You could tell it was all over.”
Phyllis said she believes her son pleaded guilty because he felt backed into a corner and entering a plea was likely to get him a more lenient sentence.
She later quizzed her son behind bars as to why he admitted guilt publicly, while privately protesting his innocence.
Recounting that conversation, Phyllis said, “He said that he felt that it would be easier if he went to prison because they had offered him a four-year sentence originally, and that it would be easier for him to enter prison than it would be for Shanna.
“I think if he had known how long he was going to spend in jail he wouldn’t have done it, but part of me understands why he said he did it is because she didn’t have family.
“She didn’t have friends. He had people that believed in him. You know, and it is sometimes easier for a man than a woman in jail, but that’s the type of kid he was brought up to be.
“You step up to the plate to protect a woman, so that’s why he did it.”
Phyllis said she believes investigators and the prosecution were simply unwilling to believe a mother was capable of hurting her own child, leaving her son no other option but to take the fall.
“We still believe that mothers are good and the dads are deadbeats, that’s without boyfriends coming into this,” she said.
“Nobody ever thinks that a mother could do something to hurt their child. I’ll tell you what, I was a foster parent for 15 years, and the things I’ve seen mothers do to their children would curl your hair.
“But until I became a foster parent, I would have never ever blamed the mom – I would have assumed just like everybody, the boyfriend did it.”
MORE LIES
After Cody’s death, Phyllis said never for one second did she believe her son was capable of harming a small, defenseless child, despite the second-degree murder charges filed against him.
Neither did more than 70 of his close friends, family members, associates, co-workers, and even the mother of his biological son, who all wrote to the judge to express he was a loving and kind person, and a doting father.
Since his release from jail, Herr has gotten married, raised two children, bought a house, and held down a steady job as a delivery driver.
Golyar, meanwhile, is serving life behind bars for the murder of Cari Farver.
Today, she is incarcerated at the Nebraska Correctional Center for Women, where she continues to maintain her innocence.
After the release of her book, Rule received letters from Golyar, one of which read, “I will not stop fighting until I am set free and they find the right person.”
Golyar’s murder of Farver is featured in the new Netflix documentary, Lover, Stalker, Killer, which debuted on February 9.
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