The Cereal Killer Chronicles of Battle Creek

Jenn Carpenter

• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781439672907
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

At the convergence of the Battle Creek and Kalamazoo Rivers lies Cereal City, USA. Named after a bloody battle between Native Americans and land surveyors, Battle Creek is most famously the home of the Kelloggs, a family of eccentric inventors and entrepreneurs who would go on to rule the world of breakfast foods. But before their worldwide fame came the sanitarium…and the questionable deaths…and the fires. After their downfall came the complicated legacy that would result in tragedy for decades to come. Author and podcaster Jenn Carpenter reveals how cereal, Battle Creek's lifeblood, also served as the root cause of bloodshed in the city many times over.

THE MONSTER

Probably more than any other time in the city’s history, parents in Battle Creek worried about their daughters in 1983—what with missing and murdered local girls dominating the headlines daily. The Golyar family was no exception. Their adopted seven-year-old daughter, Shanna, had already been through so much in her short life, her parents couldn’t imagine losing her to a monster. But try as they might—and they did try—they couldn’t save their little girl.

Shanna Kay was born in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on June 28, 1975, the first and only daughter of a young, unwed mother and an alcoholic, abusive father. By all accounts, both of Shanna Kay’s parents doted on her and treated her like a princess. But there was trouble in the home. In 1967, Shanna Kay’s father had been convicted of taking indecent liberties with a child and spent nearly three years behind bars. Soon after his release, he met Shanna Kay’s mother, who was a divorcee with two young sons. The home they made together was so unsafe that the boys were removed from their custody and became wards of the state. Shanna Kay actually never met her older half-brothers, but she did have a little brother who was about eighteen months younger than her.

In early 1978, two-and-a-half-year-old Shanna Kay and her brother, who was around a year old, were removed from their parents’ care due to violence in the home. Their mother, who was twenty-eight at the time and had already permanently lost custody of her two older children, couldn’t lose her babies—not again. So she finally found the courage to leave her abusive boyfriend. As a result, the state agreed to return Shanna Kay and her brother to their mother’s care. After all, she wasn’t the problem. She was said to be a loving, attentive mother with a big heart. It was just her taste in men that made her unfit.

It was late spring 1978. The kids had already been gone for a couple of months, but they would be coming home within days, and Shanna Kay’s mother was beyond excited. One afternoon, with temperatures in the seventies and the sun shining brightly, Shanna Kay’s mother walked to the laundromat that was four blocks from her Kalamazoo apartment to wash the children’s bedding so they would have fresh, clean blankets when they returned. On the walk back to her apartment, she was hit by a car and killed. With their mother gone and their father unfit in every way possible, Shanna Kay and her brother became wards of the state. The courts deemed their extended family—they had aunts, uncles and grandparents—unfit to raise them. Many of Shanna Kay’s uncles had rap sheets a mile long, several of her cousins had been taken from their parents’ custody and put into foster care; there was just violence and debauchery across the board in her birth family, and the state wanted to give her and her brother a chance at a good life.

So, just days before Shanna Kay’s third birthday, she and her brother were split up and placed in the foster care system. After years of being bounced here, there, and everywhere, Shanna Kay was adopted by Ronald and Theresa Golyar of Battle Creek, and her name was changed from Shanna Kay to Shanna Elizabeth Golyar.

Shanna’s adoptive father worked for one of Battle Creek’s biggest employers, the Kellogg Company. The salary he earned working for the cereal giant provided a comfortable life for his larger-than-life family. He and his wife fostered and adopted many children over the years. Some of the children were simply passing through on their way to their forever families or during a rough patch at home, while others stayed. Shanna stayed, even though her upbringing wasn’t the happiest. The Golyars provided her with the necessities—a safe roof over her head, financial support, an education—but there wasn’t a lot of love in the home, as Shanna would later testify. Her parents were strict and devoutly religious, their rules stifling. Still, when the Kellogg Company transferred Ronald Golyar to their plant in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1990s, Shanna went with them. When she turned eighteen, she returned to Michigan, got married at the age of twenty, and settled in the small town of Delton with her new husband. The young couple divorced in 1997.

W.K. Kellogg Institute for Food and Nutrition Research. Courtesy of Erica Cooper, 2020.

That same year, Shanna began dating twenty-two-year-old Raymond Nycz, her coworker at Triple S Plastics in Battle Creek. The plastics factory was just a few miles down the road from the cereal factory Shanna’s father had worked at during her childhood. Raymond quickly fell head over heels for his new girlfriend, but her insane jealousy of other women drove a wedge between them, and by early 1998, Raymond was looking for a way out of the relationship. His timing, though, was terrible—because Shanna was pregnant. The baby was due in August, and Raymond wanted to do right by his little family, so he bought a trailer for them to live in together. But when she was eight months pregnant, Shanna shocked Raymond and broke his heart by moving in with another man, twenty-one-year-old Glenn Herr. Glenn and Shanna lived in a small house in Emmett Township, the same Battle Creek subdivision that Daisy Zick lived and died in. At first, Shanna insisted that Glenn was just her roommate, but it soon became apparent to Raymond Nycz and everyone else that there was more between them. In her final weeks of pregnancy, Shanna bounced back and forth between Raymond and Glenn, sometimes even staying at a women’s shelter when she wasn’t getting along with either of them.

Cody Nathaniel Golyar was born on August 25, 1998, in Battle Creek. He was just a little thing—barely six pounds—with thick, dark hair and big brown eyes. After Cody’s birth, Shanna’s back and forth between men came to an end, and she chose to try to make a life with Glenn. Raymond, Cody’s father, only saw his son a handful of times after that. Life was not easy for Shanna and Glenn. Glenn had a son just a few months older than Cody, so there were two infants in the house. Cody was colicky, so he was always crying. Both Glenn and Shanna worked at a convenience store, so money was always tight. They actually worked at the same store, but they worked opposite shifts, so one of them was always working while one of them was always home with the babies. And they were so young—Shanna was just twenty-four, and Glenn was only twenty-one. They both had pretty fresh exes, so there was quite a bit of drama. That would be a lot of pressure for anyone, and it was too much for Shanna and Glenn.

On the morning of January 29, 1999, Shanna got up early with Cody, got him dressed, and then left the house before 9:00 a.m. for a full shift at work. That evening, around 5:00 p.m., she was notified that her five-month-old son had been rushed to the emergency room. When she arrived at the hospital, she was told that Cody’s prognosis was grim. Her little baby was hooked up to a ventilator and needed to be transferred to Bronson Methodist Hospital in Kalamazoo, where a trauma team was waiting. But nothing could be done to save Cody Golyar. In the early morning hours of January 30, he died from a severe brain hemorrhage that officials said was caused by shaken baby syndrome. Later that morning, Glenn Herr was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. Baby Cody was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, not far from the Kellogg family plot.

Glenn’s trial began in December 1999, almost a full year after Cody’s murder. His attorney insisted that Glenn hadn’t harmed the baby—that the closest he had ever come to shaking him was when he would toss him into the air and catch him, a game he often played with Cody to get him to stop crying. He claimed that the night before Cody’s death, on January 28, when Glenn was working and Shanna was home with Cody, she’d called Glenn at work and said, “I dropped Cody. You need to come home right now.” By the time Glenn arrived home, Cody was sleeping and seemed okay. The next day, though, Cody’s behavior was off; he was abnormally quiet and not his usual fussy self. Glenn’s mother noticed Cody’s odd behavior when she took the two shopping the morning of January 29, but didn’t see any serious warning signs that something might be wrong. When she returned to the house around 5:00 p.m. that evening, she found little Cody unresponsive and called 911.

The grave site of Cody Golyar, Oak Hill Cemetery. Courtesy of Erica Cooper, 2020.

On the second day of Glenn’s trial, Shanna was called to the stand. She produced several letters that she claimed Glenn had written to her from jail, asking her to cover for him and say she’d dropped Cody, imploring her to lie and say that it was an accident. After this testimony, a recess was called, and when Glenn returned to the courtroom, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder for the death of his girlfriend’s five-month-old son. At the age of twenty-two, he was sentenced to eight and a half to twenty-five years in prison. Immediately following the trial, Shanna moved back to Omaha, where she stayed until tragedy struck again.

In Omaha, Shanna started going by Liz, which was short for her middle name, Elizabeth. She continued to be unlucky in love; she went through a plethora of relationships, but none of them stuck. She had two children, a boy and a girl, who she raised on her own. She became something of a party girl, drinking heavily, going out a lot, hooking up with lots of men, not always clearly ending one relationship before beginning another. Far from her strict religious upbringing in Cereal City, Michigan, Liz was in her prime. She was petite with long brown hair and big brown eyes, her porcelain skin adorned with tattoos. In September 2010, when Liz was thirty-five, she met a man on an online dating site. For the sake of this story, we’ll refer to him as Tom. Tom was an IT tech living in Council Bluffs, Iowa, a city just a few miles east of Omaha. The two had an on-and-off (but mostly on) relationship for several years. Tom was good to Liz; he helped her with money when she needed it and helped out with her kids while she worked. He thought they were exclusive, but unbeknownst to him, Liz was still meeting other men online.

In the summer of 2012, two years into what Tom believed to be a monogamous relationship, Liz met a thirty-five-year-old single father by the name of Dave Kroupa on Plenty of Fish. Dave had just recently moved to the area with his girlfriend of twelve years and the mother of his two children, Amy Flora. Amy was originally from Council Bluffs, so when talk of marriage between the two reached a stalemate—Amy wanted to get married, Dave didn’t—she decided to move back home to be closer to family. Dave went with her, leaving behind the only life he’d ever known, but their relationship quickly fell apart after the move. Wanting to stay close to his children, Dave rented an apartment in Omaha, near the auto repair shop where he worked.

Liz Golyar was the first woman Dave met on Plenty of Fish, and he was very up front with her that he was not looking for a commitment. He just wanted someone to talk to and have a good time with—no strings attached. Liz told him she wanted the same thing, which would make sense considering she was in a serious relationship with someone else. But she was lying. Before long, she began pressuring Dave to make a commitment to her, pushing him for more. She became borderline obsessed. Dave, however, had not been lying, and he had no interest in a serious relationship, which he told her over and over and over. They fought—a lot. And their on-and-off casual relationship was mostly off by the night of October 29, 2012, when Liz arrived unannounced at Dave’s apartment to get some of her things. He wouldn’t let her in because he had a date inside, a woman named Cari Farver. This shouldn’t have bothered Liz as much as it did, since she had a serious boyfriend at home, but she was hurt. She caused such a scene that Dave’s date left. The tall, beautiful brunette with hazel eyes passed Liz as she exited Dave’s apartment, and according to Liz, Cari called her a bitch. The encounter was all of ten seconds long, if that.

Once Dave’s date was gone, Liz entered his apartment to gather her belongings, and she and Dave argued. She cried. He asked her to leave. They had a few more encounters over the next couple of weeks, but then they stopped talking altogether. After just a few months of dating, it was over—or so they both thought. But then things started to get weird.

It was mid-November when Liz called Dave, frantic and furious. She wanted to know how Cari Farver, the woman who was in Dave’s apartment that night, had gotten her phone number, her email address and her home address. She told Dave that “Crazy Cari” had been sending her vulgar and threatening emails and text messages for days and had broken into her garage, keyed her car, stolen her checkbook, and spray-painted the words “Whore From Dave” on her garage wall. As it turned out, Cari had been angrily stalking Dave as well. He felt awful to have dragged Liz into the whole thing. Who knew that dating multiple women from Plenty of Fish at once could end in trouble? Dave and Liz agreed to meet to talk about everything that was going on.

He told her that he and Cari had dated casually for just a couple of weeks when all of a sudden, she flipped a switch on him and asked him to move in with her. When Dave declined, she freaked out and began stalking and harassing him—calling and hanging up, texting and sending emails upward of fifty and sixty times a day, threatening him, threatening his children. But he had no idea she’d been contacting Liz, and he had no clue how she’d gotten Liz’s information. Although, she was a computer programmer with a genius-level IQ. Cyber stalking was probably nothing at all to her.

Dave told Liz that he found out from police that Cari had also ditched her son, quit her job, and dropped off the radar altogether. Her mother had reported her missing just a few days after she started acting strangely toward Dave. On November 21, 2012, police visited Dave at work—at first, interrogating him as if he were a suspect in Cari’s disappearance. But after he explained to them everything that had happened and showed them the crazy messages Cari had been sending him, they changed their tune. Cari was bipolar, after all, and had probably gone off her meds. She was likely in the throes of a complete psychotic break. And for some reason, Dave, a guy she’d only casually dated for two weeks, and his ex, who he’d only casually dated for a few months, were her primary targets.

Over the next several weeks, things got worse—much worse. Dave started getting texts from Cari that confirmed she was physically stalking him from outside his apartment. She would comment on what he was wearing, what he was doing and say things to let him know that she was watching him. His apartment was broken into; his belongings were slashed and cut up. Liz continued to get threatening texts and emails as well, and her house was broken into several times. Cari clearly hadn’t left town, which was what she’d told her mother, that she’d taken a job in Kansas and was just dropping her entire life, including her son. But the police couldn’t find her. Her messages were coming from dozens of devices and from locations all over the country. Police figured that since she was a computer programmer, she was using software to disguise her location.

On January 10, 2013, two months after the “Crazy Cari” nightmare began, Dave arrived home from work and took notice of an SUV in the parking lot that was completely encased in snow, as if it had been there a while. It’s not uncommon for a Nebraska snowstorm to bury an entire parking lot, but most people dig their vehicles out within a day or two. This one was still covered, so it stood out from the others. When Dave looked closer, he realized it was Cari’s Ford Explorer. He called the police. They impounded the vehicle, processed it, and dusted it for prints, but they found nothing that would help them figure out where Cari was.

The insanity went on for months. Cari was texting and emailing Dave and Liz incessantly, no matter how many times they changed their numbers. The police couldn’t find her. Her family couldn’t get in touch with her, but she was around—she had to be. She kept breaking into Liz’s and Dave’s apartments. She was watching them, stalking them. Liz filed dozens of police reports, but nothing was happening. Cari was active on social media. She would send her family birthday wishes, chat with her son here and there, rant about how much she hated Liz. One post even claimed that Dave had proposed to her and she’d said yes. But for all of her online activity and emails and texts, nobody that knew Cari had actually seen her or spoken to her since November 13, 2012, the day she flipped out on Dave.

What was it about Dave? Liz had become completely obsessed with him after just a few months of casually dating, even though she had a real boyfriend at home who treated her well. And now Cari, a brilliant, independent woman, after just two weeks, had gone absolutely insane over the man. If there was a silver lining for Liz in the whole ordeal, it was that the trauma and drama of being stalked brought her and Dave closer together, and they started seeing each other again.

In early August 2013, nine months into the “Crazy Cari” saga, two things happened: Liz and Dave broke up—again—and Liz and her kids moved in with Liz’s long-time boyfriend after being evicted from their home. The poor guy still had no idea Liz had been cheating on him for over a year. On August 16, Cari sent Dave an email that said she was going to burn Liz’s house down. Dave was so numb to Cari’s wild messages by this point that he either didn’t see the email because he was no longer reading them, or he just didn’t take it seriously—but he should have. By then, Liz and her kids were living with Liz’s boyfriend in Council Bluffs, but they were still moving things out of their house in Omaha.

On the morning of August 17, the day after Dave got that threatening email, Liz went to her house in Omaha to get some more of her belongings and found the house ablaze. According to officials, it was a clear case of arson; there were several points of origin for the fires. Liz lost two dogs, a cat and a pet snake in the fire, along with personal and household items. Liz was beside herself. By the age of thirty-eight, she had lost her mother, father and brother—her entire biological family. She’d lost her first baby. She’d lost Dave, who obviously meant a lot to her. She’d lost her sense of security when Cari began stalking her. And then she lost her home and four of her pets. That’s a lot. It’s too much. But this wasn’t just taking a toll on her. Dave was a nervous wreck. He started drinking heavily. He bought a gun. This cute girl he’d met online who said she was only interested in no-strings-attached sex was ruining his life.

Eventually, though, things started to calm down. The messages went from fifty and sixty a day to three or four. Liz focused on her relationship with her boyfriend. Dave moved to Council Bluffs in early 2015 to be closer to his kids and their mom. Amy Flora, Dave’s ex, had been harassed by Cari through all of this as well, just not quite to the degree that Liz and Dave had been. But as the years passed, there was still no sign of Cari Farver.

Liz and Dave just couldn’t seem to quit one another, and in mid-2015, they started dating again. In October 2015, Liz and her boyfriend broke things off for good, although it would be a few months before she moved out of his house. And then in November 2015, Dave and Liz broke up again—this time, for the last time. But the drama was far from over.

On December 4, 2015, Liz Golyar filed a police report for harassment. This time, though, it wasn’t against Cari Farver; it was against Dave’s other ex, Amy Flora. She said that Amy had started sending her threatening texts and emails, and she noticed that the tone in them, the typos and misspellings, all reminded her quite a bit of the messages she’d been getting from Cari for the past three years, and it got her thinking. Suddenly, it didn’t make sense that Cari, who’d only dated Dave for a couple of weeks, would go so psycho over him. But Amy, who’d broken up with him because he refused to marry her, who’d given him twelve years of her life and two children, only to be rejected because Dave would rather date random women on Plenty of Fish, had cause to behave like a woman scorned. It made more sense for her to be the one to go to drastic lengths to get rid of her romantic rivals. She had more invested and more to lose. Liz told police that the reason she wanted to file a report was because in her latest message, Amy had threatened to shoot her. And Liz knew that in one of the more recent break-ins that had been attributed to Cari, Dave’s gun had gone missing. A detective took the report and told Liz he’d follow up with Amy. But before he had a chance, things got worse.

The very next day, on December 5, 2015, a call was placed to 911 from Big Lake Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Liz Golyar had been shot and was bleeding out, alone in the dark. An ambulance came, and she was rushed to the hospital, where she underwent hours of surgery before doctors were able to stop the bleeding and stabilize her. She told police that she’d gone to the park alone to think, and that while she was sitting on a bench on the walking trail, Amy Flora had come up behind her, pointed a gun at her and asked, “How do you like fucking Dave?” And then she shot her in the leg.

Police raced to Amy Flora’s apartment with guns drawn, only to find her in her pajamas, holding her toddler in her arms. She insisted she’d been home with her...