Donald Leroy Evans was 34 when he was arrested in Louisiana in August 1991 for kidnapping a 10-year-old girl from a park in Gulfport, Mississippi. He confessed to killing her, led investigators to her body, pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping and was later sentenced to death in Mississippi for capital murder. Within days of his arrest he was telling investigators that he had killed more than 60 other people across the country, and the claim brought national attention and an FBI team to check it. One other charge, for a 1985 killing in Florida, was reported. The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed his conviction and death sentence in 1997. He never reached the end of his appeals: in January 1999 another death row prisoner stabbed him to death at the state penitentiary at Parchman.
Evans grew up in Watervliet, Michigan, according to an uncle who lived there and spoke to reporters in August 1991. Newsweek, drawing on a 1987 psychiatric report, described him as one of nine children in a family troubled by mental illness. The magazine reported that he tried to kill himself at 16, left high school without finishing, and was discharged from the Marine Corps for what the report called a "paranoid personality." He left the Marines in 1977, according to his court-appointed lawyer.
After that he drifted. Newsweek reported that he used aliases and took work in the oil fields and on fishing boats, and that he had repeated trouble with the law over gambling scams and theft. The Deseret News, gathering court and corrections records in August 1991, set out part of that history. In 1982 he served three and a half months in an Oregon jail for theft and unlawful use of a vehicle, on a three-year sentence; he was paroled on October 6, 1982, and sent to Nevada on outstanding warrants. A Nevada court convicted him of cheating, gambling and theft, but the sentence was suspended and he served no time there. A trespassing warrant from Las Vegas was still outstanding in 1991. "The charges against him were real lightweight back then," an Oregon corrections spokesman, Dave Schumacher, told the paper.
In February 1984 he checked himself into a Veterans Administration hospital in Chicago and left in March. His uncle said a psychiatrist there warned that he should not be on the street and that he would hurt someone. Time, citing the Washington Post's account of the 1987 psychiatric evaluation, quoted it as finding a "lifelong history of behavioral difficulties and frank mental illness," and reported that he had been hospitalized for psychiatric treatment and had a long arrest record. Newsweek wrote that the same report called him a skillful liar.
On April 19, 1986, Evans was arrested in Galveston, Texas, on a sexual assault charge, according to Lieutenant Joe Gregory of the Galveston sheriff's office. Newsweek reported that the victim was a woman and that Evans was using the name Jason McGowen at the time. He pleaded no contest and was sentenced on May 13, 1987, to 15 years in prison. He was paroled in April 1991; the Deseret News gave the date as April 18.
He went back to Galveston and to his girlfriend there, Newsweek reported. Police told the magazine that shortly before the events in Mississippi he took her television and VCR and set off on the trip that ended in Gulfport. By the summer of 1991 he was, in the words of the Mississippi Supreme Court, a Texas parole violator. The jeep he was driving, a Suzuki Samurai, had been stolen.
Beatrice Louise Routh was 10 years old and homeless. Her mother, her brothers and sisters, and another family had traveled together to the Mississippi Gulf Coast hoping to find work and somewhere to live, according to the Supreme Court of Mississippi. They had stayed in shelters for a time and then lived in their van.
On August 1, 1991, the group was in Jones Park in Gulfport. Beatrice's mother sent her to buy cigarettes, and the man she asked was Evans. He gave her cigarettes and walked back with her to the van. To the adults he presented himself as a former Navy SEAL who had once taught school in Texas, the court wrote.
He then offered to buy the family groceries and asked Beatrice to come along, and her mother agreed. They returned in about 20 minutes with water, juice and ice. A second short trip, to a convenience store for diapers and snacks, followed. Back at the park, Evans suggested a barbecue and asked to take Beatrice to the store once more. He told her mother the errand would take about an hour, because he also needed to call a friend who could help the family find an apartment.
Before that third trip, Beatrice asked another woman at the park to ride with them, because she did not want to go alone with Evans. Evans refused to take the woman along. The woman told Beatrice's mother, but Beatrice was allowed to go. They left at about 7 p.m., according to the opinion. Evans did not go to the store. He drove west, toward Louisiana.
Beatrice did not come back. Evans later confessed that he killed her, and the Associated Press, reporting his death in 1999, said he had been sentenced to die for strangling her. He left her body in Pearl River County, Mississippi, the court found, and investigators found it after he described where it was. The court's account says he then removed the top of the stolen jeep to change its appearance and spent the next four days on the road, cashing checks at country stores.
When the hour passed and Evans and the child had not returned, the woman who had refused to let Beatrice go alone called the Gulfport Police Department. She described Evans, Beatrice and the jeep, and she had memorized its license plate number, the Supreme Court of Mississippi wrote.
Detective Whitney Carvin of the Gulfport police and another officer met Beatrice's mother at the park. From the plate, Carvin found the jeep's owner and established that it was in Evans's hands. The next day he signed an affidavit and obtained a warrant charging Evans with kidnapping, and he contacted the FBI, where Special Agent George Holder joined the case. Investigators placed a monitoring device on the telephone of Evans's girlfriend in Galveston and followed the trail of checks he was cashing.
On August 5, 1991, a sheriff's deputy in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, arrested him. He was taken before a federal magistrate in New Orleans and charged with federal kidnapping, waived extradition, and was returned to Mississippi on August 7.
On August 8, 1991, Magistrate Judge Roper appointed Fred Lusk, a private attorney, to represent Evans on the federal charge. Over the next two days Evans met with Lusk and with his girlfriend from Galveston, who came at his request. An assistant United States attorney, Jay Golden, also met with them. Evans wanted to plead guilty to the federal kidnapping charge and to be held in a federal prison. Golden testified that he could make no promises, and the court quoted his remark at the time: "if this guy ever wants anything out of us he better tell us where the child is if the child is alive." Golden left the jail before Evans made any statement.
On August 10, Evans gave the first of several statements to Carvin and Holder. In it he described the kidnapping and agreed to lead investigators to the child. In a second statement, given at about 2:56 a.m., he confessed to kidnapping and killing her. On August 14 he gave a longer statement on videotape. Each time he refused to sign the waiver-of-rights form, though he was warned of his rights repeatedly, the court found.
Before speaking, Evans had written his own document about how his words could be used. It stated that his account was "to be used exclusively by my attorney Fred Lusk and the federal authorities," and that the State of Mississippi and Louisiana "shall have no power to use this statement for any investigative or criminal applications whatsoever." Evans and Lusk signed it, and Major Wayne Payne of the Gulfport police and Agent Holder witnessed the signatures.
The document became one of the central questions on appeal. The Supreme Court of Mississippi held that it was "a private agreement between an attorney and his client, not a 'waiver' of rights," and that the State had no duty to honor its limits. Evans himself, at his federal plea hearing, had called it "just basically an attestation to the fact that Fred Lusk has advised me of my right to remain silent."
Within days of his arrest, Evans's lawyer was relaying a much larger story. Evans said he had killed more than 60 people over about a decade, most of them women, in at least 20 states, from the time he left the Marines in 1977 until his imprisonment in Texas in 1987, Lusk told reporters. Newsweek put the claim at more than 60 people in at least 21 states between 1977 and 1986. Evans told investigators he could lead them to every one of the victims, Time reported. The Deseret News wrote that if the claims proved true he would be responsible for more killings than anyone known in American history.
Investigators were wary from the start. Time's report on August 26, 1991, carried the subheading that police were skeptical, and said police and FBI investigators had begun a thorough check the week before. The FBI and local officials formed a task force. Gulfport's police chief, George Payne Jr., told Newsweek they meant to avoid a repeat of the Henry Lee Lucas case, in which confessions that had not been checked were later withdrawn. Newsweek reported that Lusk said Evans often wept as he described the killings, and that the lawyer could not say whether remorse or vanity drove him. Lusk also told reporters that Evans's main wish was to receive the death penalty. Newsweek quoted Evans: "I want to be executed by the state for my crimes against humanity."
Two of his accounts drew particular attention. Evans described killing two women in Florida in 1985, one in Daytona Beach and one in Fort Lauderdale. Time reported Lusk as saying that evidence gathered in those two cities "basically match[es] in detail" what Evans told investigators, and police in Florida told Newsweek his account might fit two unsolved 1985 killings. The Deseret News reported in August 1991 that police in both cities had not yet established firm links to him.
By June 1993 the Associated Press reported that, although Evans boasted of 72 killings over a 10-year spree in several states, he had been charged in only two: the Gulfport case and a killing in Fort Lauderdale. When he died in 1999, the Associated Press described him as a drifter who had falsely claimed to have killed dozens of people in 22 states. The Supreme Court of Mississippi, in its 1997 opinion, referred to his claim to have killed "in excess of sixty people" and to the national coverage his "confessions to multiple murders across the country" had drawn.
On August 19, 1991, Evans pleaded guilty in federal court to kidnapping Beatrice Routh. His lawyer had said beforehand that Evans was willing to plead guilty and accept a life sentence, the most the charge allowed. At the plea hearing, Lusk agreed that "some agreements" had been made but said they were not "necessarily tied to this plea," and the private document was placed under seal, the court recorded. On October 24, 1991, Evans was sentenced to life in prison on the federal count. The Supreme Court of Mississippi later found that no plea bargain had been reached that barred the State's use of his statements.
While in the Harrison County jail, Evans was kept in isolation because of threats against his life, Sheriff Joe Price said in August 1991.
On October 15, 1991, a Harrison County grand jury indicted Evans for capital murder, with kidnapping as the underlying felony, together with two other counts.
Evans later argued that a Mississippi statute barred the State from prosecuting him for an offense covered by his federal kidnapping plea. The Supreme Court of Mississippi rejected that: the statute's language "clearly does not include the federal government," the court wrote, and under the long-settled dual sovereignty doctrine a state and the federal government may each prosecute the same conduct.
At the hearing on his motion to suppress, Evans testified that a Gulfport sergeant had threatened him in Louisiana and that jail staff had mistreated him, denying him a mattress, a bath, sleep and food. His own federal lawyer's testimony conflicted with those claims. The State called Carvin, Holder and Major Payne, and in rebuttal Golden and Chief Payne. The trial judge found the confessions voluntary, and the Supreme Court later held that the finding was not manifestly wrong, pointing to the videotape.
The court treated the presence of Evans's girlfriend during the August meetings as "somewhat problematic" but found that she was not acting for the police, had come at his request, and had not drawn the confession out of him. Evans also argued that he had been held too long before being taken before a state magistrate. The court noted that he had appeared promptly before a federal magistrate, that no state murder charge existed until August 20, and that he had a lawyer and had been warned repeatedly, so the delay did not make the confessions involuntary.
On June 4, 1993, a motion was filed asking the court to determine whether Evans was competent to stand trial. In a letter to the trial court Evans objected to it, and he raised his own refusal to consult with his lawyers.
On a Sunday night in June 1993, a few months before trial, Evans and three other prisoners broke out of the Harrison County jail, according to the Associated Press; one of the others had pulled a homemade knife on a guard. Officers searched the beaches and casinos crowded with tourists, set up roadblocks and used helicopters and dogs. Shortly after daybreak on the Tuesday, deputies found Evans, 35, hiding in a shed at a lumber yard about half a mile from the jail. He wore stained yellow rain gear and gave up without resistance when ordered to surrender, a Highway Patrol dispatcher said. He was returned to the jail. Jurors at his trial later knew of the escape from news coverage, the Supreme Court of Mississippi noted.
The case had been covered heavily on the Gulf Coast. The Supreme Court of Mississippi counted more than 100 articles in the Sun Herald and about 87 in the Clarion-Ledger, and national coverage followed his claims of other killings. The trial judge moved venue for jury selection only, choosing Adams County, where coverage was much lighter; the Natchez Democrat had carried about 12 articles through February 1993. The jurors chosen there were then brought back to Harrison County to hear the case.
About 116 prospective jurors were summoned and about 101 considered, each questioned individually. Evans renewed his venue motion during jury selection, citing articles published the day the trial began, and again after a photographer was seen taking pictures of the panel; both requests were denied. Of the 12 jurors seated, three had read a Natchez Democrat article on the case. When one prospective juror said it was "very difficult to be in the same room with" Evans, the defense asked for a mistrial. The prosecutor, Mr. Caranna, asked the others whether the remark would affect their fairness, and all said it would not. The motion was denied. Several prospective jurors who said they could never consider a death sentence were excused for cause, and the Supreme Court found no error.
The trial ran from September 13 to September 18, 1993, in Harrison County, according to the Supreme Court of Mississippi. Dr. McGarry, a pathologist on the state's list of certified pathologists, testified about the autopsy performed in August 1991; the high court rejected Evans's challenge to that testimony. The jury found Evans guilty of capital murder and of the other two counts, and in the sentencing phase returned a sentence of death.
William S. Boyd III of Gulfport represented Evans on appeal, and Evans also filed papers on his own behalf; the court's caption gives his address as Florence, Colorado. Attorney General Michael C. Moore and his assistants Marvin L. White Jr. and Leslie Staehle Lee argued for the State. Evans raised 31 assignments of error, covering the confessions, venue, jury selection, the autopsy evidence, the effect of the federal plea and his competency, among others.
On September 11, 1997, the Supreme Court of Mississippi, sitting en banc in an opinion by Justice Smith, affirmed. "This Court affirms Evans' convictions and sentences," the court wrote, holding that issues not raised at trial were procedurally barred and that the rest had no merit. A motion for rehearing was filed on September 19, 1997, and the court's mandate issued on August 17, 1998. The decision is reported as Evans v. State, 725 So. 2d 613. A list of Mississippi death penalty cases kept by the state's Office of State Public Defender records that he was killed by another inmate before any decision on a motion for state post-conviction relief.
Evans was held on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. The Associated Press reported on January 5, 1999, that he had been stabbed to death there on the Monday by another death row inmate, Jimmie Mack, with a makeshift knife. A Corrections Department spokesman, Ken Jones, said Mack was being taken to the shower by officers when the attack happened, and Evans was being led to his cell. "He was stabbed to death by Jimmie Mack, another death row inmate," Jones said.
Evans's count of other killings was never proven. Lusk relayed a figure of more than 60 in 1991; the Associated Press later gave his boast as 72. The states he named numbered 20, 21 or 22 depending on the report. None of these killings was ever tried against him. The two Florida accounts from 1985, in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, were the ones investigators said matched known deaths; by June 1993 he had been charged in the Fort Lauderdale case. When he died, the Associated Press called his claims false.
His father, reached in Sebring, Florida, in 1991, said he had not seen his son in more than 10 years and felt nothing for him.
1977: Leaves the Marine Corps, according to his lawyer; later the starting year of his unproven claims.
1982: Serves three and a half months in Oregon for theft and unlawful use of a vehicle; paroled October 6, 1982, and sent to Nevada; a Nevada conviction for cheating, gambling and theft follows, with a suspended sentence.
February 2 to March 8, 1984: A patient at a Veterans Administration hospital in Chicago.
April 19, 1986: Arrested in Galveston, Texas, on a sexual assault charge.
May 13, 1987: Sentenced to 15 years after a no contest plea.
April 1991: Paroled in Texas.
August 1, 1991: Takes Beatrice Louise Routh, 10, from a Gulfport park.
August 5, 1991: Arrested in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana; charged with federal kidnapping.
August 7, 1991: Returned to Mississippi.
August 10 and 14, 1991: Gives statements, including a videotaped one; leads investigators to the child.
August 19, 1991: Pleads guilty to federal kidnapping.
October 15, 1991: Indicted in Harrison County for capital murder and two other counts.
October 24, 1991: Sentenced to life on the federal count.
June 4, 1993: Motion filed to determine his competency.
June 1993: Escapes from the Harrison County jail with three other prisoners; found hiding nearby and recaptured on the Tuesday after a Sunday night breakout.
September 13 to 18, 1993: Tried in Harrison County before a jury chosen in Adams County; convicted and sentenced to death.
September 11, 1997: Supreme Court of Mississippi affirms.
August 17, 1998: Mandate issues.
January 1999: Stabbed to death at Parchman by death row inmate Jimmie Mack, reported January 5, 1999.