Something About Cari

On a mild December evening in 2015, a woman called 911 from a park on the Iowa side of the Missouri River. She had been shot through the thigh—"through and through," as first responders call it—and told the dispatcher the shooter was a woman, now gone. The victim was an unassuming mother of two who ran a house-cleaning business. She had gone to the park for five minutes of quiet and got a bullet in the leg instead. She would survive. But the question of why someone would target her, and who, would unravel into something far stranger than a random attack.

A Crime That Didn't Fit

The shooting itself was unusual. The victim offered few clues about motive, and the fact that the shooter was a woman defied statistical norms about gun violence. Police scrambled. A helicopter from Omaha swept the park with its spotlight, searching a space the size of 150 football fields for a suspect who had vanished. The victim was taken to the hospital, and investigators began piecing together what had led her to that park bench.