Donald Leroy Evans was born in 1957 and spent his adult life drifting between states, working casual jobs, with a record of assault and sexual offences.
On August 1, 1991 he abducted ten-year-old Beatrice Louise Routh from a beach at Gulfport, Mississippi, took her to Louisiana and killed her. He was arrested four days later and confessed.
He then began claiming a great deal more, telling investigators he had killed around sixty people in more than twenty states over sixteen years.
Police forces across the country interviewed him and a very small number of cases were substantiated. He was convicted in Florida of the 1985 murder of Ira Jean Smith, and connected to one other.
The rest produced nothing. Investigators concluded he was doing what a certain kind of prisoner does, trading claims for attention and for trips out of the cell.
He was sentenced to death in Mississippi in 1993. At a hearing he asked the court to be addressed as Hi Hitler, which is the detail most often repeated about him.
On January 5, 1999 he was stabbed to death at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman by another death row inmate, Jimmie Mack, who said he had done it because Evans was a child killer.
Two convictions against sixty claims. The claims are why his name is known, and checking them occupied police forces in more than twenty states for years.