- I'm Ana Garcia
and this is "Beyond the Headlines: Toxic Love."
- [John] It was a a typical Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
You know, where you have this beautiful nurse
and then you've got this cold murderess
who could kill her husband and then dismember him.
- [Ana] Four tales of toxic love triangles.
- Her brain was so deliriously in love
that it was impossible for her
to truly see how this would destroy her life.
- [Ana] Wives with devious plans.
- She did not want her husband to be around.
She wanted him to disappear.
- [Ana] And infatuations turned deadly.
- He continued to get texts from her phone number
and they became threatening and belligerent and obscene.
- [Ana] While heartbroken loved ones are left behind
to pick up the pieces.
- She came to me in my dream and she said,
"Mom, it wasn't supposed to be this way.
I had so many plans for my life."
And that's when I knew for certain
that she was no longer alive.
- Few things test the strength of a romantic relationship
like a love triangle.
When a committed party of two suddenly turns into three,
things can spiral into something much bigger
and deadlier than anyone could ever imagine.
In this next hour,
we'll explore stories of real life toxic love triangles.
We'll hear about a wife and mother
who went to gruesome extremes to get out of her marriage
and a love-struck prison employee
who risked it all for a convicted murderer.
There's the case of a jilted woman
who went to twisted lengths to eliminate a love rival.
And finally, the heartbreaking story
of a lonely young military wife
who sought comfort in the arms of a killer.
Through the telling of their stories,
we'll learn what it means to live a life beyond the trauma
and beyond the headlines.
(dramatic music)
When Melanie and Bill McGuire got married in 1999,
they seemed like a perfect match,
two attractive and charismatic people
with wicked senses of humor.
Together, the McGuires made a nice life for themselves
in New Jersey, welcoming two sons
and building successful careers,
hers as a fertility nurse and his as an IT professional.
But in 2004, right after they closed on their dream home,
Bill went missing.
His dismembered remains,
contained in three separate suitcases,
washed ashore nearly 300 miles away in coastal Virginia.
What unfolded in the days and weeks
after his murder would shock the nation
and shatter this image of the McGuires
as the perfect couple.
- My name is John Glatt.
I'm a true crime author and I know the case very well
because I wrote the book "To Have and to Kill" about it.
To the outside,
Melanie and Bill seemed like a very happy couple.
For a while, they were really in love
and they got married and they had the kids.
They worked very, very long hours
and then they kind of drifted apart, I think.
Melanie was hired to work for this fertility clinic
and her boss was Dr. Bradley Miller who ran the program
and he was a very, very successful doctor.
He was becoming a millionaire.
And Melanie and he gravitated together.
They started an affair
and that's really when the marriage plummeted.
I think Bill really loved Melanie.
He loved being a father,
but Melanie wasn't content.
She was looking for something else.
The first suitcase washed up in Virginia Beach
on May the 5th, 2004.
The second one came five days later, a tourist found it.
The third one came on May 16th and that washed up, too.
And by that time, everybody was expecting a third suitcase,
so nobody tried to open it first,
they just reported it to the police.
Virginia Beach police came to New Jersey,
interviewed Melanie, and were very, very suspicious
because she immediately lawyered up.
They tried to do whatever they could to investigate,
but really they couldn't do much in Virginia Beach
'cause the case was in New Jersey.
It was multi-jurisdictional.
But the New Jersey police didn't seem to be wanting
to do very much about it.
So Bill's sister, Cindy Ligosh, went to the press.
Because of the publicity it got,
the New Jersey Attorney General started taking a look at it
and recruited Patty Prezioso
to investigate the whole matter.
- When the case first came
into the Attorney General's office,
we learned from the Virginia Beach Police Department
that Bill and his wife had closed on a home in New Jersey
on the day that he was last known to be alive.
We knew that his car was recovered in Atlantic City.
We knew that the victim's wife had not formally reported him
as missing.
When there's a case that seems involved and detailed,
it is like solving a puzzle.
The killer in this case was meticulous
and it took using every forensic tool available at the time.
With a lot of hard work,
we were able to find piece after piece after piece
and everything fit together
and pointed directly at Melanie.
The public was very captivated
because the story was salacious
and the defendant is visibly beautiful.
She's well-spoken, she's smart,
and the media were encircling her.
My strategy with the case was to keep the jury focused
on the evidence.
There was a lot of noise that was in the courtroom.
There was a defendant
who was getting a lot of attention from the media.
There was Joe Tacopina representing her.
- Joe Tacopina was probably the number one New York lawyer
at that point.
He was very suave and he was very, very good at what he did.
- Joe is a wonderful attorney.
He's also a big personality.
He knows how to put attention on him
and how to put attention on other things.
But I wasn't presenting a case for the camera,
I wasn't doing work for Court TV.
My work was to convince the people in the jury box
and that was my sole and only focus.
We all as humans wanna believe
that people that commit despicable acts
could not be likable.
So was I concerned
that that may influence the deliberations?
Of course I was.
- Well, the defense was that Melanie was totally innocent.
She was a loving wife and mother.
And in fact, Bill was an inveterate drunkard
who gambled big money in Atlantic City
and it had caught up to him.
And they would do anything to try and portray Bill McGuire
as this terrible character.
- Everybody has multiple sides to them,
and I don't mean to represent
that Bill was any sort of a saint,
but certainly from the evidence that we had at trial,
he seemed like a very decent man
who was driven by his desire to do well for his family.
The evidence that you'll hear in this case will be
almost completely circumstantial.
There will be no witness that comes to the witness stand
and tells you "I saw her do it."
- What made it particularly challenging
for the prosecution was
that it was basically a total circumstantial case.
There was no actual murder scene or crime scene.
The gun was never found.
There was no direct link
between Melanie and the murder of Bill McGuire.
New Jersey nurse Melanie McGuire was accused
of murdering her husband Bill in order to be with her lover,
Dr. Bradley Miller.
Distracted by a media circus,
prosecutor Patty Prezioso faced an uphill battle
for a guilty verdict.
- The prosecution's version of what happened that night was
after they finalized on the house,
Bill opened a bottle of red wine to celebrate
and Melanie slipped him a drug called chloral hydrate
in his drink and he became unconscious.
And then some point,
she shot him and then dismembered his body,
putting them into suitcases and then driving 300 miles
to Virginia Beach and dumped them into the Chesapeake Bay.
- The list of circumstantial pieces of evidence
that we had was very, very long.
In the days just before Bill disappeared,
there were searches that she did on her home computer,
things like sedatives, undetectable poisons,
how to buy a gun in Pennsylvania,
how to commit a murder.
Then, with a fake Pennsylvania license,
Melanie went into a very small gun shop in Pennsylvania
and she purchased a 38 caliber gun and wadcutter bullets.
The deceased had been shot through the head
and there was ballistic evidence
that were 38 caliber wadcutter projectiles.
Bill's car was recovered in Atlantic City
where it had been parked at a small hotel.
Through wiretaps, we knew that it was Melanie
that parked Bill McGuire's car down there.
In the glove compartment was a vial of chloral hydrate
and a syringe.
Lo and behold,
there was a prescription for chloral hydrate written
on the prescription pad
of the medical practice that she worked for,
where a handwriting expert testified it was not the doctor.
Also, what was in Bill McGuire's car parked by the defendant
were very small pieces of flesh.
The forensic pathologist testified,
and he described it that the tissue is not
what would normally be shed from a live human being.
We tested the tissue
and that tissue belonged to Bill McGuire.
The searches included...
I remember saying to the jury at the end of my summation,
referring to the evidence,
"You have everything you need now to decide this case.
Please don't let looks or media take you away
from the important job that you need to do."
I think that this defendant seriously thought
that she was smarter than everybody,
and I think she thought that she could manipulate her way
through not being convicted.
- Just before the word went down that there was a verdict,
she was very, very upbeat.
She had a couple of her friends with her and she was smiling
and she was convinced she was gonna get off.
And then when the guilty verdict came down,
she literally just crumpled into Joe Tacopina's arms.
It was a shock for everybody, I think.
- When the verdict was read,
I recall feeling tremendous relief that justice was served,
but there were no winners with this trial.
There were two children who, for all intents and purposes,
lost both parents and it's a tragedy.
So there is a lot of pain that still exists about this,
and I think it's important
that everyone be sensitive to that.
- To this day, Melanie McGuire denies she had anything to do
with the killing of her husband,
but has exhausted all of her appeals.
She is eligible for parole on May 20, 2073,
when she will be 101 years old.
(lock clicking)
Like Melanie McGuire,
a Kansas woman named Toby Young strayed from her husband
with someone at work.
In her case, a prison inmate.
The lengths
this seemingly mild-mannered prison volunteer took
to run away with her lover shocked both her family
and the public who watched the drama unfold
in the national news.
Dawn Bormann Novascone first encountered Toby
and her prison dog fostering program
while reporting for the Kansas City Star.
- Well, that's just a fantastic story
that you never get when you cover prisons.
Toby seems like the absolutely perfect person
to be running a prison program.
She was a model citizen.
She was someone who probably made cookies
for half of the neighborhood after school every day.
John Manard was a young man
who at 17 years old was part of a carjacking.
And during the commission of that carjacking,
a man named Donald England was pulled out of his convertible
and was shot and later died.
This wasn't John Manard's first time being involved
with the law.
He had had a troubled youth
and this, however, was the end of that youth.
He was to spend the rest of his life in prison.
John Manard first got involved
in the Safe Harbor Prison Program
after it had started a while,
and he came up to Toby Young and tried to convince her
that he needed to be part of this.
At some point,
there was an inmate who got in Toby Young's face
and threatened her.
John Manard decided he would be there
every time that she was at the prison
and he would be her protector.
Looking back, this was an unusual relationship,
no question.
It should be a corrections officer there protecting her.
It shouldn't be an inmate.
What appeared to be an innocent friendship
between dog trainer Toby Young
and inmate John Manard turned out
to be much more scandalous.
- I think it was easy for Toby to imagine John Manard
as someone who loved her.
Part of that was because at home,
she wasn't satisfied with her marriage.
She didn't feel loved, she didn't feel needed.
She needed someone to need her.
John Manard asked Toby Young, "If I wasn't in prison,
would you be with me on the outside?"
And she contemplated it and said, "Yes."
Manard could think of nothing but escaping.
And he framed it as "I wanna escape to be with you,"
and it's about them, not his freedom necessarily.
In a way, actually, it's about both of their freedoms.
She could be free from a marriage
and a life she wanted to escape
and he would be free of prison bars
that he most certainly wanted to escape from.
Toby Young was such a good citizen
that everyone trusted her.
They didn't really question her motivation at the time
with John Manard.
(phone dialing)
Toby Young brought a cell phone to him,
which of course is illegal in any prison.
She took out about $40,000 from her 401K plan.
Then she bought a truck
and she hid it away in a storage unit
that she knew did not have security cameras.
Meanwhile, inside prison,
John Manard lost 20 pounds
so he could get into this tiny cardboard box,
and eventually he thought he would sneak out that way.
This seemed like a ridiculous plan until, lo and behold,
a corrections officer asked Toby,
"Could you please get rid of all this material
that you're not using anymore?"
Which was leashes and dog bowls,
but it was also a wire crate
that was large enough for a box, so the plan became real.
So that day, John Manard was waiting
and knew that Toby Young would come through the gates.
Toby came in with her van,
made small talk with a corrections officer,
and waited while the inmates loaded John Manard,
who is hiding in the cardboard box, into her van.
Corrections officer didn't run a heartbeat check,
didn't thoroughly search her car,
let her leave that day with John Manard in the vehicle.
I think Toby was so in love
and so captivated by the idea of a plan
that maybe she didn't think through the consequences.
I think her brain was so deliriously in love
that it was impossible for her
to truly see how this would destroy her life.
The entire Kansas City area was thinking,
how on earth can these two people escape authorities?
It had to be one of the longer escapes in modern history.
It elevated the situation quite a bit
with authorities knowing they both had the capability
to be armed and clearly were dangerous.
The authorities were on TV saying,
"We've heard she purchased a vehicle.
If you sold her the vehicle, call us."
That tip eventually led them to a dealership
that had indeed sold her a truck.
And the truck title wasn't available yet,
so she asked them to go ahead and mail that title
to a little cabin in Tennessee.
The US Marshals were gathering,
getting ready to close in on the cabin
where they were staying.
John Manard and Toby Young have no idea
that the US Marshals have spotted their vehicle
and are very carefully following them.
The highway patrol puts on their lights
and John Manard has a decision to make.
Do we pull over and turn ourselves in or do we gun it?
And he guns it up to 100 miles per hour in the truck.
Eventually, John Manard lost control of his truck,
hit a tree pulling about 100 miles per hour,
and somehow managed to survive it.
Toby was eventually extradited back to Kansas.
- Toby, why'd you do it?
- I can't say anything.
I can't say anything right now.
- She received 27 months in prison
and she suffered a lot of consequences as a result,
obviously strain with her family.
John received another 10 years on top of his life sentence
and went right back to prison.
Toby Young is hardly the first woman
to fall in love with an inmate or to fall in love
with somebody that they shouldn't be with,
and she certainly won't be the last.
- After her release from prison in 2008,
Toby remarried and became a public motivational speaker
and author.
John Manard remains in prison.
Technology has dramatically changed the way we date.
Apps and social media make it easier to find romance,
but they can also come with a cost.
Catfishing, cyberstalking, and sextortion are just a few
of the hazards of the digital age.
In 2012, Liz Golyar hooked up with a man named Dave Kroupa
on a dating app,
but when the relationship fizzled
and Dave connected with another woman named Cari Farver,
digital technology allowed Liz
to go to desperate and shocking lengths
to keep Dave in her life.
True crime author Leslie Rule takes us
through this unbelievable story
of sex, stalking, and murder,
which she wrote about in her 2020 book, "A Tangled Web."
- Dave Kroupa was a mechanic in his late 30s
and he just recently separated
from the mother of his children.
The first woman he met was Liz Golyar.
He met Liz for coffee and he found her very attractive,
but he made it clear from the start
he was not interested in any kind of commitment.
He thought that Liz understood,
but she latched onto him very quickly.
Dave met Cari Farver when she brought her Ford Explorer
into his shop for a minor repair.
They were instantly attracted to each other.
They started seeing each other soon after
and saw each other almost every day for a couple of weeks.
Liz became very alarmed when she realized
that Dave thought Cari was special.
He was spending a lot more time with Cari
than he had with any other woman since Liz had met him.
In mid-November of 2012,
Dave got up to leave for work
and Cari was sitting on the sofa with her laptop out
and he said goodbye.
Halfway through the morning,
he saw that she had sent him a text and it said,
"Let's move in together."
He responded, "No, I don't wanna do that,"
and got a text right back.
At the end of the day,
he went home and there was no sign of her.
It was as if she'd never been in his life at all.
Cari seemed to suddenly quit her job and break up with Dave.
Both of those things were done by text.
Meanwhile, Cari's mother, Nancy Raney,
had not heard from Cari in a few days,
so she tried to get ahold of her.
Cari would not answer the phone,
and they ended up having a text exchange.
Not only were the texts rude and short,
they were filled with misspelled words,
and Cari had always been meticulous
when it came to texting.
Nancy was immediately alarmed.
She was used to talking to her daughter every day.
But because she was still sending texts,
the police were not alarmed when Nancy reported her missing.
They told Nancy, "Hey, people do this all the time.
They take off.
It's nothing to worry about."
Meanwhile, in Omaha, Dave was alarmed
because Cari didn't seem to be letting go of him.
He continued to get texts and emails
and they became threatening and belligerent and obscene.
Not only that,
Liz said that she was getting texts like that also,
and she was terrified.
She told Dave she was angered
that he had unleashed this woman on her.
Liz basically said, "If you'd only been satisfied with me,
we'd never have been in this situation."
This case was very difficult to solve,
partly because several different
law enforcement jurisdictions were involved.
Cari lived in Iowa, so she'd been reported missing there.
Meanwhile, in Omaha,
the Omaha police thought they were dealing
with a crazed stalker.
They thought that Cari was a stalker.
In Iowa, in Pottawattamie County,
Detectives James Doty and Ryan Avis asked
if they could have the Cari Farver missing person case.
They had heard water cooler talk
and they thought something did not sound right.
As the detectives begin to investigate,
they realized that one name continued to surface.
Liz Golyar.
When Liz and Dave reported that Cari was stalking them,
they'd allowed police to download their phones
and they discovered Liz had actually used an app
to send a threat to Dave
and made it appear as if it came from Cari.
Though Liz Golyar had allowed a download of her cell phone,
she had no idea that it was possible
for detectives to retrieve deleted images.
Deputy Anthony Kava discovered many deleted things
on Liz's phone
that tied directly to Cari's disappearance.
There were thousands of emails and texts
that could be traced back to Liz.
It was clear to them that Liz was behind the threats,
but it didn't prove murder,
it proved only that she was stalking Dave.
They decided to investigate the case
from two different perspectives.
Avis began investigating it as if Cari were alive,
while Doty investigated it as if she was dead.
The detectives realized that Cari's absence was very odd.
Even if she had flipped out and gone off on her own,
she would've had to support herself somehow.
She'd have to be living somewhere,
but there was no trace of her at all.
There were no bank accounts, no apartments rented.
It made no sense.
The only proof that Cari was still alive were the reports
that she had been stalking people,
but all of those came through texts and emails.
No one had actually seen her in person.
In 2015, Iowa detectives investigated the mystery
of 37 year old Cari Farver,
who was missing for nearly three years,
but her ex-boyfriend, Dave Kroupa,
continued to receive threatening emails
and text messages from her number.
While detectives suspected that one of Dave's other exes,
Liz Golyar, had murdered Cari and was impersonating her,
they had no actual evidence that Cari was dead,
and it seemed that Cari wasn't the only person
Liz Golyar was pretending to be.
- Liz actually impersonated Amy Flora,
the mother of Dave's two children.
Liz went to shocking extremes to convince Dave Kroupa
that she was being stalked by Amy Flora
and that she was a victim.
She set fire to her own house with four pets inside,
and the pets died.
And she also shot herself in the thigh
and claimed that Amy Flora had shot her.
She was sending emails in Amy's name,
hoping to make Amy look like she was the killer.
The detectives knew
that the emails were not coming from Amy.
It was clear to them they were coming directly from Liz.
While Liz was impersonating Amy,
Liz revealed details that only the killer would know.
She said that Cari had been stabbed in her Ford Explorer.
When the detectives located the Ford Explorer,
they peeled back the covers on the seats
and discovered that the passenger seat was saturated
with blood.
They compared the DNA
and discovered that the blood belonged to Cari Farver.
They knew now that Cari really had died in that car,
and Liz was the only one who knew that.
On December 22nd, 2016, the detectives arrested Liz Golyar
for the first degree murder of Cari Farver.
Though the detectives had enough to arrest Liz,
they weren't sure if they could get a conviction.
Her body had never been found
and they didn't have any real proof that Cari was dead.
As the trial approached,
they suddenly found some very telling evidence.
Shortly before the trial, Dave Kroupa showed up
with the tablet device he had overlooked
and handed it over for Detective Anthony Kava.
Anthony Kava wasn't expecting that much,
but he took out the SD card that was in the tablet
and began to examine it.
He was stunned to see
that that card had once been in Liz Golyar's cell phone.
Among the new images that Kava found,
it was a picture of a tattoo, a closeup,
and it appeared to be on a foot.
The foot was in a state of decay.
It proved that Liz had photographed Cari
after she died.
When detectives checked with Cari's family,
they confirmed that Cari did have a tattoo on her foot
and they sent them a photo.
The photo of the tattoo on Cari's foot was
the single most powerful piece of evidence
that detectives had.
The trial began on May 10th, 2017
and lasted approximately two weeks.
Liz was found guilty
and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
- In 2020, investigators established a scholarship
in Cari Farver's name at her alma mater,
Iowa Western Community College.
The $1,000 scholarship goes to students
of Cari's chosen career of information technology.
Like Cari's mother, Nancy Raney,
Lore Heavilin would also experience the painful outcome
of a daughter caught in a toxic love triangle.
In 2012, her 19 year old daughter, Erin,
married her high school sweetheart,
a Marine named John Corwin,
and moved with him to a base in 29 Palms, California.
John and Erin appeared to have a happy life,
but Lore would find out
that things weren't quite as they seemed.
- From the time that Erin and John started dating,
he knew he was going to join the Marines.
Erin was 18 and John was 19 when they got engaged.
My biggest concern was they were very young.
They got married in Vegas.
My impression of life as a military wife was
it could be very lonely,
especially for someone like Erin,
who is very much a homebody, who is very shy.
She doesn't make friends easily.
We talked about the changes and what she could expect,
and she kept saying,
"I know, Mom, I know, Mom, I know, Mom."
She didn't know.
Erin and John moved into
a little apartment complex on base.
Chris and Nichole Lee lived in the apartment
next to Erin and John's,
and I feel like having that little network
of people was good for Erin.
She enjoyed their time together,
she would talk about their cookouts,
and I think she was okay
with just that small group of friends.
Erin had let me know that she was pregnant.
She was really excited.
She was posting it all over Facebook and she loved kids.
She was about 10 weeks when she lost the baby.
I think because they were so young,
they just didn't know how to deal with it.
And John being so stoic,
I don't think he just knew how to do
what he needed to do for her.
My last conversation with Erin was
on Friday, June 27th, 2014.
On Saturday, I sent her a text.
Well, she never answered that text,
which was so unlike her.
On Sunday, June 29th, about 11 o'clock,
John called and he said, "Have you heard from Erin?"
And I'm like, "Well, no, why?"
And he goes, "She's missing."
After they settled in their new home
on a California military base,
Erin and John Corwin were thrilled to discover
they were expecting their first child.
That joy was short-lived
when Erin miscarried 10 weeks into the pregnancy.
From her home in Tennessee,
Erin's mother, Lore, did her best to comfort her daughter
in daily phone chats, but she was left in the dark
about how much the marriage was crumbling
in the months leading up to Erin's sudden disappearance.
- A desperate search is underway
to find the pregnant wife of a US Marine
who's been missing now for eight days
in the California desert.
- John had told us that she was pregnant again,
and if she was truly lost in the desert,
I felt like it was gonna be harder on her
'cause she was probably gonna be dehydrated
and in not the best shape.
When I found out that they had found Erin's car without her,
I felt like something really bad had happened.
John told me about the affair with Chris Lee.
I still struggle to wrap my brain
around Erin having an affair.
It was so out of character for her.
What I feel like happened is she had the miscarriage,
John didn't know how to be there for her,
and Chris, I think it just started like as a listening ear,
and then it just kind of happened after that.
I started suspecting Chris
when I talked to John and Erin's other neighbors.
There was just so many discrepancies, and then Chris,
there was just like the empty look when I saw him.
So just that gut instinct that Chris had done something.
While Erin was missing and we were waiting to find her,
I felt numb because there was nothing we could do.
About a week before she was found,
she came to me in my dream and she said,
"Mom, it wasn't supposed to be this way.
I had so many plans for my life."
And she turned around and walked away.
And that's when I knew for certain
that she was no longer alive.
August 16th, we got a phone call
that they had found a body at the bottom of a mineshaft,
and he was pretty sure it was Erin.
In a strange way,
there was almost a peace because it was over.
We weren't going to wonder
for years and years what truly happened to her.
When I learned Chris was arrested,
it was like a "yes" moment.
I wanted to be at the trial every day
because I felt like it was the last time
I could support my daughter.
The hardest thing was when they did the demonstration
with the dummy on how he strangled Erin.
I just closed my eyes and prayed.
I didn't need to see it.
There was no remorse.
It was like he was a robot.
He, at one point in time, cried, but there were no tears.
It wasn't genuine.
When Chris was found guilty,
I was relieved that it was all over
and that he was gonna have consequences for his actions.
- In 2016, Christopher Lee was found guilty
of first degree murder
and sentenced to life in prison without parole.
He appealed the sentence in 2018, but it was denied.
- Erin's legacy is she's an incredible young lady
that loved life, loved animals,
and was an extremely loyal friend.
- Five miles away from the mineshaft where Erin was found,
wellwishers built a rock garden in her memory.
A killer nurse, a fugitive couple, a deadly jilted ex,
and a lonely young wife murdered by her lover.
On the surface, it's no surprise
that these tales of toxic love made national headlines,
but behind these sensational cases are real people
whose worlds were changed forever.
Families torn apart and promising young lives cut short
by hasty and heartless decisions.
- It's important that Erin's story is told.
Parents will private message me,
"How do I get through this?"
I can just share what helped me.
And God has allowed me to help people walk through it.
And if it can help somebody else, then it's worth telling.