The Family Wedding

The lights of the city skyline seemed to wink as they picked up the ripples on the river. And the muted hum of city sounds drifted across the Missouri to the Iowa side, as if those winking lights knew something as if that hum was gossip. A jet plane descended to epic airfield. Broke the spell because of course cities don't really know secrets or when something is about to happen. Those something certainly was any minute now. It was unusually mild for Midwest evening so late in autumn. Snow was sparse and threadbare in the park on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. It was the first week of December in the year of our Lord 2015 just past 6.30 pm. Quite dark now. And then... No question what that was. It was followed by this. I want to get us a clear emergency. Oh yeah, I've been shot in a way. It was a woman in pain obviously. She told the 911 operator she had come to the park alone in her car. I'm in the park damn. I'm on the first hand side. I have a little red Toyota and I'm playing like two kids. Okay. Is the statement still there by? I don't think so. It's all burning. Okay, okay, okay. We're getting started. Okay, ma'am. The woman said the bullet had gone clean through her thigh in one side and out the other. The true and true is what first responders call that kind of wound so a quick response would be crucial. Is there any serious bleeding? Oh my God, she's not wearing a gun so I'm going to go out. Oh, jeez. And the shooter or shooters? Long gone, said the woman. You know who did it? No, look at him. An attacker roaming free with a gun in a city park. Well, that gets him immediate attention. So that a spatcher quickly called in squad cars from the council bluff's Iowa police department. Well, that was radio traffic. Okay, you're not going to hear me for a second. Oh, jeez. An agency assist came from across the river. The helicopter from the Omaha PD was in the air with its spotlight scouring a city park the size of 150 foot both heels for any sign of a suspect back and forth at flu looking for whoever had fired the shot looking essentially for a drop of water in a pitch black pond. How many people were there? I don't know, I only heard one. About whom the victim offered at least one clue. You know, the male or female? The shooter was a woman. The fact that flu in the face of all those statistics that law enforcement collects about gun violence. Well, it's a cardiac spawning, a big leg area. There's nothing information. Officers arrived. This is a recording from their dash cam. Where'd you go? Who is it? Who is it? I don't know. Asking their questions as the victim was bundled into an ambulance. Did you run down the trail? And why fired this victim? An unassuming mother of two who'd made her living as the owner of a business at clean houses. She had just gone to get five minutes peace in a quiet place and got a bullet in the leg. She would live, by the way, for the shooter? Okay, we need to know which way she went. Yes, and well, we imagine them looking for a woman with a gun in the dark in that giant park by the river across from the hum of the city. With its sparkling towers. A mystery as opaque as the night black river began finally to reveal itself in all its confounding weirdness. Had you ever encountered a thing quite that elaborate before? No, nothing, nothing like this. This is a unique case, at least. Here was harassment, stalking, assault, arson, and of course murder. All I heard was open up police. And I didn't like it. Traumatizing, I was freaked out. And of all the smart investigators who worked on the case couldn't connect the dots. Well, perhaps it was understandable. Detective 101 rarely covers this sort of diabolical scheming. But whatever the reason it went on, and on, and on. For years, you're on edge as to what's going to happen next. Until that night, by the river. They found out what the point was. They only hit me with one I think. This night. Finally, it began to make some sort of sense. The best part of it was being able to tell her, we've rested somebody for the murder of your daughter. That was what made working this whole case worth it. I'm Keith Morrison, and this is something about Kerry, the podcast from Dateline. Episode 1. The Family Wedding To begin, three years before that shooting in the park, the question was simple and urgent. Where was she? It was a question that 14-year-old Max Farmer had been asking for days now. About his mom. There was a family wedding to attend in Des Moines, Iowa. Max's uncle was getting married. Max was to be an usher. Third week of November, 2012. Max, with his mop of dark hair and his good manners and his all-round kindness, was as close as could be to his mom. Kerry Farmer. She, the 37-year-old computer programmer, had been planning her road trip with Max for weeks. They were going to make it fun. Drive from home in a tiny farming town called Macedonia to the big city two hours away, singing along with their favorite playlists. You two were pretty close. They were. Close. All right. The kind of you and me against the world thing. A single mom and her only child is her son. It's like that. Yeah. Almost like one person in a way. Yeah. We were definitely really close. Like, after she would bring a guy home to meet me, and she would always ask what I thought of him. And I knew that if I said anything bad, she'd end it right there. I knew she would. Max and his mom loved reading together, watching Disney movies. She nicknamed him short-round from the Indiana Jones films. On the subject of your mom, what springs to my first one? I just say that. How much she kept track of me and made me keep my grades up? Kerry was fierce, bright, determined. But there was something else about her too. And it mattered in her life and in our story. Kerry was not always her own best friend. Two husbands had come and gone. Sudden decisions had sometimes gone wrong. Behaviors were frequently unpredictable. But this weekend, the third weekend in November 2012, was to be about mother and son. The two of them. Kerry had booked a hotel for the weekend with two queen-sized beds and seemed to be looking forward to it. When pickup time arrived, Max waited and waited. But Kerry failed to show. So Max had to get a ride to the wedding from his grandmother. And I never got any texts once that like the wedding started. I kept texting or I tried calling or nothing. Do you remember where you were feeling at that point? I was worried. You couldn't really enjoy the wedding knowing something was going on. It was also confusing. Especially since the wedding day had been moved up several months because Kerry's dad, the groom's dad, was on hospice, suffering from stomach cancer. Was she close with her dad? Oh yeah, very. Very close. So yeah, she wouldn't have missed them. Tell me something weird tonight. That was a very weird night. Very weird. Because people kept asking where she was and I couldn't give an answer. Nor could he. For a very long time, something wasn't making sense. No. Family was important to the farvers. To Kerry, her son Max, their family went back generations in southwestern Iowa. Kerry's mom, Max's grandmother, was herself, born and raised on a farm just outside Macedonia. A sweet and even tempered woman, Stolid, Midwestern Nice. Her name is Nancy Rainey. It's a very small town. I think there's only around 250 people that live there now. It's very, it's just home. It's quiet there. It's not a lot that happens. Nancy had always known there was something a little different about Kerry. She was all business about school, but but yet she didn't really want to go with the norm. She didn't want to just go along with what the other girls were doing. She felt like she wanted to do her own thing and sometimes that doesn't always go well. Yeah. School was easy for her, but then so were boys enticed by Kerry's big hazel eyes. Her mischievous grin and natural beauty that came effortlessly said her friend, Holly Drummond. She was so shiny. She was, I mean, she was very pretty. Guys were just drawn to her. And she liked it. Yeah, she did. Why shouldn't she? But there was that other something about Kerry. The tendency to sometimes make dubious choices. Well, you know, like I said, you know, she was a... Kerry, Kerry knew how to have fun. Like the time when Kerry was away at college and there was this guy, one of a parade of guys. I mean, she made it sound like... She made it sound like a romantic movie. But the romance didn't last. Even when Kerry found out she was pregnant, again, her mom, Nancy. Did it come as a surprise? Yes. Yeah. She named the baby Maxwell. Everybody called him Max. Kerry's friend Holly. I got to the hospital after work. She had had him laying in her lap and she said, oh gosh, you're home, I have to share you with anybody. And she marked the occasion, did Kerry, by getting a tattoo on the top of her left foot. A very unusual tattoo. The Chinese symbol for mother. A tattoo was for you. She reminded me of it too. But now, how painful it was when she stood him up, skipped out on the wedding and the special trip they planned. He told himself she'd be back. She would get over whatever it was it kept her away. And he watched the driveway for her and tried to calm himself. No idea that his life was already utterly changed. This week on Meet the Press, all eyes on Iran we dig into the latest as the conflict escalates throughout the Middle East. Plus Steve Kornaggi with a brand new NBC news poll as we break down the first primaries of the 2026 midterms this week on Meet the Press. Listen to the full episode now wherever you get your podcast. In the days after that wedding, Kerry missed on the November 17th, 2012. Max tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out what happened to his mother. What was she doing? It was more important than him than the wedding. I wasn't sure what was going on. Except maybe, thought Max, maybe it had something to do with a new guy in his mom's life. A guy Max said heard of, but only knew as Dave. Dave who lived in Omaha in an apartment that happened to be very close to Kerry's office. I just had heard of a Dave that was about it, but she didn't talk about it. No. Usually things like that she didn't really talk to me about it. She didn't plan on bringing him home to family or anything. Wasn't that kind of relationship? Yeah. No, it wasn't. It was just kind of an in between thing, nothing real serious. So she didn't bother with bringing him home because she knew it wouldn't be a long-term relationship. And I knew that she was going to stay with someone in Omaha just because she'd be working from like 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. and she didn't want to drive 45 minutes home, go to sleep, drive 45 minutes back, which seemed normal to me. I mean, sure. Wasn't weird. So you wanted to stay with your grandma? Yeah. No, a real big deal. I had to stay with her in the past a few times, not often. Yeah. But often enough that it wasn't weird me home. So Max had spent that week before the wedding with his grandma, Nancy. And now, well, Carrie's mom, Nancy said she had no idea either. None at all. This is just too weird. Yeah, it was all too weird. Except Nancy had already been handed a clue of sorts. It was a text message from Carrie that week before the wedding. Nancy didn't tell Max about it, didn't want to worry the boy. And anyway, she was worried enough for both of them. For one thing, Carrie's text said she'd broken up with her boyfriend. The mysterious Dave, perhaps? That was unclear, but then Dave was the one she'd been talking about. Do you know how to reach this guy? No, I didn't. What his last name was? But that was classic Carrie. And that wasn't what worried her. It was this. The text also said she was thinking about checking into a mental hospital. I didn't know how to start looking for it. So what was that like? It's hell. It's just frustration and just helplessness. It's scary. Yes, it scared me tremendously. Scared, said Nancy, because after college in the mid-twenties, Carrie had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but used to be known as manic depression. Carrie's condition manifested mostly as extreme debilitating depression. She got real down, real depressed. When she did that, she just would go under the covers and sleep. And she'd just, you know, she'd hybrnate. She'd close herself off from everything. But it was torn, I think. Yeah. Yeah. And then... It's hard for a mother to watch it. Yeah. It is. And to, you know, talking to her and just trying to get it out of her, you know, what can I do? And there's really nothing that I can do or say, she's got... She's the one that has to help herself. Carrie's medication helped keep her stable. But now her mom wondered, has she gone off her medication? And that's maybe right off the rails? So when she failed to make her date with Max to drive to the wedding, Nancy contacted the County Sheriff's Office to file a missing persons report. And for good measure, she also reported Carrie's Ford Explorer stolen. Though, who knew really did somebody steal it? Or was Carrie at that very moment driving off to some imagined new life? They took down all the information, of course. They couldn't... They didn't really offer too much. Well, I guess they thought what she's a grown woman. She can live what she wants to live. Right. Nancy, of course, told the deputies about Carrie's struggle with bipolar disorder. And here's what they told her, said Nancy. Well, she's probably off her medicine and you know, these things happen. And so there's... That happens a lot. It felt like a brush off. So Nancy just kept trying to reach Carrie, called her again and again and again. But her daughter just wouldn't pick up. And then sudden relief, Nancy got another text message from Carrie. Short lives relief. There were at least some answers, but not exactly the answers Nancy had been hoping for. Carrie wrote that she had quit her job in Omaha and was on her way to Kansas to a brand new home and a brand new job and Dave was with her. They were moving in together. Oh, and Carrie said she had sold her furniture. All of it. She attached a photo of a $5,000 check from the buyer. Carrie wanted Nancy to let the buyer pick up the furniture from the home where Carrie and Max lived out in Macedonia. Clean it out. Well, you can just imagine how Nancy reacted to all that. And I said, absolutely not. I said, either you call me, you come see me. I'm not doing anything until I hear you. And that's when the nasty text started coming. Why did she say that? And that I was a bad mother. She said, I'm going to take Max. You're going to, we're going to leave. After the wedding, Max received text from Carrie too, letting him know of her plans. Max was well aware that his mom took medication for her bipolar disorder, of course. But this new aggressive tone suggested she'd stop taking it. You're coming with me. You have no choice. I'm the adult here. And when I say goes, I just try to imagine what it was like to be you in the middle of that situation. It was a little bit scary because we all thought that someone might come at school to try to get me because the school would legally have to let them let me go with them. Then meaning maybe this Dave guy, if Carrie sent him. I was thankful to have my cousin as one of the teachers at school because he's a big guy. He's probably six, two, two, one, I'm 83 pounds. Wow. So every time that my name got called in the intercom, I'd kind of glance in the office for a quick, just to make sure that it was okay to go in. Because if it wasn't, I was supposed to go get him, have him come with me. Because he wasn't going to let me take him. And frankly, the way his mom was acting, Max didn't want to go anywhere with her or her friend, Dave. Max was upset because he didn't know this person either. Never met him. No. And I thought there's no way he's going to take, she's going to take him with this person that I don't even know. I've heard all of these horror stories about people having these personality changes and going off the deep end. And I thought I've got to do something about Max. I've got to keep him safe. Nancy took a drastic step. Two weeks after the waiting, she got temporary guardianship of Max. That must be so weird. Oh. Oh. Frank. Yes. And just wondering, what am I doing to my daughter? If we were doing this, the lawyer said, now this is just temporary. Now if she comes back, you know, you can always undo this. So, okay. Meanwhile, surely the sheriff could find her daughter, get some help, right? She showed them carries text about the furniture. The phone company told him to investigate as the text were coming from a cell phone in Omaha. Officers went to the address and found no sign of carry or her car. They found nothing at all. Sergeant Jim Doty and Corporal Ryan Abyss of the Potta-Wattamie County Sheriff's Office joined the investigation much later, said the obvious step was to find the person who Britain carried a check for that furniture. That was a woman Nancy had never heard of. Her name was Liz Gauier. Liz were the mother of two. She also lived in Omaha. Here's Corporal Avis. They called her, let the boys smell, which she returned that call the next day. Liz jumped at the chance to help. Maybe because she knew a thing or two about the mysterious Dave. In fact, she too had once gone out with Dave and on again, off again, sort of thing. Well, anyway, just as you'd expect in a story this strange, Liz told the cops that check she'd supposedly written to buy carry's furniture. That wasn't her. She didn't write any check for $5,000. But somebody had recently broken into her house and what was one of the things the thief for thieves took? It was her checkbook. Liz had a lot more to tell those law officers too, and we'll get to that. But the most important thing she told the deputies who were remember searching for carry was how to contact Dave, the man seemingly in the middle of all this mess with the now very in the wind carry farmer. She's with him and then suddenly she goes off the rails and starts doing weird stuff like this. So he must know something. Yeah. Out. Definitely a person you want to talk to. And detectives didn't know it yet, but Dave, a 36 year old tattooed auto mechanic who worked at a shop in West Omaha, and who had some would say an extreme fear of commitment was about to tell them a story that might have rivaled the Harlequin romance novel in chapter one anyway. The rest of the story certainly not what they expected, not at all. There's an old saying in police work go something like this. Good people wonder who's coming to the door. Bad people know who's coming. But in Omaha, Nebraska, auto mechanic Dave Krupa seemed to have no such worries when a coworker at the auto shop told Dave that he had visitors. It was a winterish morning, a week after Carrie's vanishing act, four days after that wedding she'd missed. November 21st, 2012. I think I was out back on one of the guys that's like, hey, the police are here looking for you. I'm like, yeah, okay, you know, I don't know what was that like. Well, at first I didn't think anything of it. I thought, oh, maybe there's some band in Toronto parking lot or something. I didn't realize it was detectives. I wouldn't think it's a black and white, you know. But nothing was black and white that morning. Not when those detectives appeared out of the blue. It just showed up. Oh, yeah, there was no warning the first time I came. They just showed up at the shop. The detectives wanted Dave to step outside. One started things off and it tells me, hey, do you know Carrie? Yeah. Okay, so where is she now? Or no idea. Dave claimed Carrie up and left about a week ago and now her whereabouts were a mystery. That's what Dave told the detectives anyway. Not that the investigators seemed to buy it. He was drilling me with them, policemen, eyes, then ones that are like, you know, we feel like you're in the principles of it. Where were you at 630 on that morning? Yeah, and that was how he approached me was as if I'd already done something and he already knew it and it's time to deal with it, you know, and I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down. Slow down because Dave Kruple had a story to tell. At what a story it was. About a relationship that began quite sweetly, innocently. And now somehow the apparently ended very, very badly. It all started about three months earlier back in the late summers a day when Carrie stopped at his garage looking for someone to repair her Ford Explorer. She walks in, I see her, we meet eyes and just for a moment I kind of stop and I go, well, hello, you know, in the back of my mind, I'm taking a while. She's gorgeous, but I'm a work representing the company I work for. That's opposite table. It's not a possibility. And so properly restrained by the mere prospect of doing something improper, when Carrie drove away, Dave went back to work. But then a couple of weeks after Carrie stopped into the garage, it seemed like fate. Dave went on a dating website as he was want to do. And there she was. Her profile, her picture, her name, Carrie. He started typing. I just said, hey, I know you, haha. And she replied same thing. And one day, not long after, Dave looked up from his work at the garage and Carrie in the flesh was looking right at him. Well, that was saying eighth and there's kind of some spark flying. We're looking at each other like we're both trying to say something and we did and we exchange phone numbers. Dave said, how about dinner? And he knew, she'd say yes. It was October 29, two weeks before she disappeared, said Dave. They met at Applebee's that first evening. The food didn't matter much. And we were very, I wouldn't say enthralled with each other. And then both caught up in that glow. They went to Dave's place. But timing. Dave wasn't exactly what you'd call a one woman man. And moments after he ushered Carrie into his apartment, the doorbell rang. It was one of his ex-girlfriends. She'd stopped by to pick up some things she left in his bedroom closet. The awkward. But Carrie, proving to Dave just how cool and how different she was, just laughed, volunteered to show herself out. She said, I get it. It's not a big deal. I'm going to go home. You call me when you're done dealing with this mess. So Dave escorted Carrie to the door and then waited impatiently for his previous woman of passing interest to gather up her things and get out the door. And after which Dave called Carrie to apologize and regroup. And she invited me out to her place, which was like an hour drive outside of town. When I got to her place, where there were 20 minutes making coffee, BS, and and of course, pretty soon we're on the couch and we're getting a little closer. Now, this boy we haven't even kissed. And she turns to me and she said, look, if we're going to have sex, that's all it is. Period. There's nothing more to it. And ask me, are you good with that? Is that going to be a problem? And of course, my eyes lit up and I'm like, ping, I hit the power ball. Because Dave, Dave felt exactly the same way. As a man, I want companionship. So I'm always looking for a girlfriend, but never a committed relationship. And you let them know that this is the way it's got to be. That was the first conversation. Take her leave it. That's how it is. But with Carrie, he didn't even have to bring it up. It was all her and we hit it off right from there. Carrie told him she was a computer programmer. Her office was in Omaha and by happy coincidence, it was just a few blocks from his garage and his apartment where no strings, no messy commitments, they met often. Made love, talked. She was extremely intelligent. She was much smarter than I am. Just in general, she just had a brain honor. Different than the women you had dated before. The majority of me. Yeah. Yeah, she, well, for instance, what she did for a living programming, I considered myself a little bit of a computer nerd, but compared to her, I didn't even know what a computer was. In some of the more amorous moments, Dave even began to reconsider his no commitment rule. He had been determined about that rule ever since he broke off a 12 year relationship with the mother of his two children. But after a couple of weeks with Carrie, was he weakening? Would he? All this Dave related to the detectives who'd come to see him, they listened intently as he finally got to the important bit, the strange events during the second week of November 2012. That is, the week before Carrie blew off the big family wedding in Des Moines. That week, said Dave, Carrie told him she had a big project at work. So instead of driving all the way home to Little Macedonia, Iowa every night, could she stay at his place? Absolutely, said Dave. And so that Monday, November 12th, they began their work week together. And Carrie came over after work, they spent the night together. Someone looking in on that happy scene could be forgiven for assuming they were taking more permanent co-abitation for a test drive. That would be wrong, of course. There's no commitment Dave would have told them. Anyway, next morning, Tuesday, November 13th, Dave said he left as he always did, few minutes before 6.30am, to walk to work at his garage. Carrie had been up early on her computer and Dave said when he left, she was still getting ready for work herself. They were chiseling the way out the door. Like, see you later, honey? That kind of thing. It was almost like a 50s TV show garbage show. That doesn't sound like a guy who's got no attachment. Well, I didn't say honey, but that's the way it changed the process. When she brought that out of me, that's why I say it with Carrie, it was potential that long term it might have been different. So when you went off to work, that you're pretty good mood. Yeah, I was in a great mood. This beautiful lady is going to be in my house when I got home. I don't know who was falling about that. But Dave wasn't smiling now as he met with those detectives because what he would tell them next, oh, you couldn't make it up. A story straight out of left field. Coming up in future episodes of Something About Carrie, Dave Krupa's big surprise. By 10 o'clock, I received a text from her that says, do you want to move in with me? Weird. Very weird. Very what is going on here. So in the back of my mind, I'm taking a huge, high-dodge of bullet there. Seemed like the friendly cop. We're the dumb one. I'll be whatever she wanted as long as she kept telling us information. It was exciting because this, I think, was about as close as we got to having a smoking gun in this case. Something about Carrie is a production of Dateline and NBC News. Shane Bishop and Jessica DeVera Lapis are the producers. Brian Drew, Marshall House Feld and Greg Smith are audio editors. Brittany Morris is field producer. Molly Derosa is assistant producer. Adam Gorfane is co-executive producer. Paul Ryan is executive producer and Liz Cole is senior executive producer. From NBC News Audio, sound mixing by Rich Cutler. Friday night on Dateline. We don't get too many cases like that. A hit for hire and an undercover sting were just the beginning. Some people call this a twisted love story. I think it's true love. To see that this case took a turn, no one expected is really the understatement of my career. Nobody saw this coming. Dateline Friday night at 9.8 Central only on NBC.