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An excerpt from Ghosts Among Us by Leslie Rule 👻
This book is SO good. It’s retellings of ghost stories from around the United States, and I am just eating up this book. It’s a light read, nothing too serious or scary, but very entertaining. If you love the paranormal, I highly recommend this book!
A Tangled Web, by Leslie Rule
Leslie Rule is the daughter of true crime writer Ann Rule and this is her first foray into the genre.
I have heard of the case involving Dave Kruopa, Cari Farver, and Shana "Liz" Golyar before and it is honestly one of the weirder stories.
Dave Kruopa was just a guy who had gotten out of a twelve year relationship and just wanted to date and have some fun. So he signed up for an online dating site and met some women.
Two of those women were Liz and Cari Liz was possessive and wanted a relationship, but Dave was very clear on the fact that he just wanted to date casually, that didn't stop Liz from asking about it, a lot.
Then, one day Dave met Cari and there was chemistry, best of all, Cari wanted to keep things casual too.
A couple of weeks later though, Cari vanished and Liz and Dave started getting threatening texts and emails from someone claiming to be her.
Cari would stay missing for years, messages refusing to talk to her tight knit family and her son being sent right along with ever increasingly unhinged and violent messages to Dave and Liz. The messages were also accompanied by vandalism and even a fire that destroyed Liz's house.
Through it all Dave still kept dating even though many women he dated were run off by the stalker targeting them. He found himself with Liz often because they were bonded through the stalker madness, however, he still didn't a permanent relationship with anyone.
Meanwhile, Cari's family is sure that the messages they are getting, with their confrontational tone and horrible grammar, are not from their Cari.
It takes years and a lot of work from Cari's family to unravel this mystery. It is truly a sick plot.
I've read a few Ann Rule books and have always liked the way the cases are handled. I will say that Leslie brought the same kind of empathy to the telling and the same commitment to informing the reader and building context. Even though I knew about this case before reading the books, there was a lot of background I had not come across before, and it was very interesting.
One of the thing I liked was that the book never tried to paint Dave as a bad guy for dating a lot of women. He was always very up front and clear with what he wanted and what he didn't. He left no room for misunderstanding. And this was treated fairly. He wasn't depicted as playing with anyone's feelings or screwing around on anyone, he was dating, and that was okay. The same can be said for most of the women he dated. There wasn't a lot of detail about many of them as sometimes they either only had one coffee date, or if they took things farther, it was casual. But the dating was never implied to be bad, or a factor in why all of this stuff happened.
Often times there is a shade of shaming in true crime on people who don't live what I think of as The Rom Com narritive. "They were dating all of these people, no wonder someone got attached and things got crazy" or "If they would have just settled down, this wouldn't have happened". In fact, this was something that was said to Dave and because of the idea that dating should lead to something, it wasn't seen as a red flag.
I liked the fact that this book didn't go for that low hanging fruit.
Stunned
It's 1:23 am where I am right now and I sit on my computer with my Kindle by my side laying open on the pages of Anne Rule's newest book of true crime stories "Lying in Wait"...
I just read a book that was about my life.. how surreal is this? I can't even wrap my brain around this right now.
I knew this was coming. I have had the book for days and even started to read it at a recent family gathering....even then, I couldn't get very far because my eyes started to burn and hot tears threatened to spill as everyone stared at me waiting for a reaction...I had to put it down. I smiled my token "I'm okay" smile and put the book down while everyone gathered around to hug me. I couldn't do it. I couldn't read it.
Finally, today, alone, I read this story that is so bizarre and absurd that there's no way it could possibly have been true...but it is. It IS true and it's MY life. I read through the words and tried to convince myself that this was me and even still, I don't believe it.
As I sit and let the facts of this story sink in, I get even more and more frustrated and ANGRY that I have no mother. I have no mother because some greedy psychopath took her from me, and isn't even being punished for it. It literally makes me sick.
It also lights a fire in me. This fire has always been there, smouldering and just waiting for the right kind of spark to send it into a full on raging flame.
I WILL make sure that my mother is not accused of taking her own life, and I WILL make sure that Jackie Schut suffers the consequences of her crimes.
Follow my story, share it with others...help me find justice.
Shock and awe..
A few months ago when I was approached by Ann and Leslie Rule, I had no idea what my life would turn into. My whole world has been turned upside down and inside out and everything I knew became useless. The grip I thought I had on my own life was a poor excuse for a plan that I tried to follow as closely as I could....trying to maintain any sense of normal that I could.
I gave up on normal. NOTHING about this is normal.
The emotional roller coaster I am on rivals even the biggest and scariest of any regular coaster that I’ve ever been on. I have become accustomed to being surprised on a regular basis. Saddened and disappointed frequently when I hit a brick wall and realize that I need answers that I can’t get. Elated when I get messages from my mothers high school friends telling me what a wonderful person she is, and recently I even got a message from one of her high school friends telling me that my mother had made a baby blanket for her son and now her own granddaughter uses the very same blanket.
Those are the peaks of the roller coaster…the part where you creep up the rails to get to the top and that feeling you get in your stomach just before the car tips over the hill sending you careening down at rocket speeds.
The next message I got turned out to be the 80 mile ride down the slope. The slope that’s so steep and carrying you so fast that the sheer speed sucks the air out of your lungs and you can’t even scream…
This message was from a woman named Ronnikka Hurst. I clicked to open the message and ONE sentence immediately caught my attention… “I am the alleged daughter of Jackie Schut, and I testified against her in her trial for murdering Geneva Clemons.” I couldn’t read ANYTHING else…there it went…every molecule of oxygen was sucked out of my lungs, and I could not scream. Like this ride I was on, my thoughts began to careen out of control, my brain going in eight million directions as I tried to wrap myself around this.
Ronnikka Hurst was the daughter of Jackie Schut. This was the child of the woman that murdered my mother. This is the closest I had been to the woman that lured my own mother away from her home and killed her in a hotel room in Houston.
Up until three months ago, I could never have fathomed that Jackie Schut was in any way human enough to be a mother to anyone. She was stealing peoples babies and selling them to couples who, for some reason, couldn’t or wouldn’t adopt. This was the daughter of a murderer and she wanted to talk to me.
I was terrified. This feeling was so vastly different from the feeling I got when I found Tracey Clemons. There was no instant feeling of camaraderie, there was no underlying, soulful bond of sisterhood. The only thing I could feel as I read her letter was utter dread. Every cell in my body was on fire and my stomach tied up in knots. What was she like? Did she want to hurt me?
After learning of Jackie’s daughter when I initially made contact with Ann and Leslie, I WAS curious about her. Most of what I had learned about her was from the newspaper articles. I knew she had suffered unspeakable abuse at the hands of her own mother. I knew she had been witness to some of her mothers crimes. I wondered what it was like to be in her shoes, to live in her skin. What must it be like to suffer so much and still get up every single day?
It took me a long time to read her letter. It was soft and heartfelt…it wasn’t cold and callous like I had expected it to be. She wanted to know me. She wanted to know who I was and what I was like, just like I wanted to know her. She was just another piece of the puzzle in this strange story that starred all of us.
We ended up talking for many hours. We talked about everything but mostly she let me ask her question after question after question…after question. She answered each one honestly, even if it was painful for her to do so. As our conversation went on through the evening, I found myself utterly fascinated by her. She had endured so much physical and emotional pain. She told me the story of how she watched her mother shoot Geneva Clemons. She told me about how she hid in the car and tried to get as close to the floor as she could, and about how her step father had slapped her so hard in the face that her nose bled. We were skype chatting (something I am VERY new at), and as she told me her story, I couldn’t help but watch her face as she poured out her heart and soul and did it with such poise and bravery. I had endured pain. Not being allowed to know my mother caused me pain, it caused me to grow up scared and anxious. What I had grown up feeling, was nothing compared to what it was like to grow up with a murderer as a mother. She had struggled for years you could see it on her face.
I found myself in awe of her strength to tell her story, inspired by her determination to uncover the truth about her own identity as she feels that she herself was abducted by Jackie. She is desperate to uncover the reasons why she had to grow up the way she did. She is desperate for answers. She wants justice too. She is just like me.
We are all links in this dysfunctional bizarre chain…bound to each other by our pasts…destined to be connected forever and all ready to let the world know what kind of person Jackie Schut is, and ready to help each other move on..
Today, I humbly dedicate this blog post in admiration of the strength and perseverance of Ronnikka Dawn Hurst and in memory of her angel daughter, Makyla
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Share my story. Follow my blog. Like my facebook page My Journey for Justice. Power in numbers.
Telling ghost stories
I run a second Tumblr as a group blog, designed for sharing personal and true ghost stories: myghoststories.
You can follow it on Tumblr, or via RSS feed, which would make me happy, and/or submit your own story, which would make me even happier. If you would like to become a contributing member, which means I don't have to approve your postings first, you may do so: just message me via ask for the link.
I've already shared one of my own stories at length:
Carla's parents' home
Carla's parents' home: addendum
Recommended books on the subject:
Brad Steiger's Real Ghosts, Restless Spirits, and Haunted Places
Hans Holzer's Ghosts: True Encounters with the World Beyond
Leslie Rule's Ghost in the Mirror: Real Cases of Spirit Encounters
