A woman at Jones Park in Gulfport watched a ten-year-old girl walk away with a man toward a jeep, felt uneasy about it, and memorized the license plate. That is why the case was solved.
The girl was Beatrice Louise Routh. She was homeless. On August 1, 1991 she had approached the man to ask for cigarettes for her mother, and he gave her a pack and walked her to the vehicle.
When she did not come back, Gulfport detectives had the plate. Detective Whitney Carvin traced the jeep to its owner and established it was in the possession of Donald Leroy Evans. He signed a kidnapping warrant the next day, and when word came that Evans was heading for Louisiana or Florida he called the FBI.
Evans was arrested on August 5 in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana. He had been working on a fishing boat. He was thirty-four, born at Watervliet in Michigan on July 5, 1957, and at the time of the killing he was a parole violator out of Texas.
The Texas record explained that. In 1986 he was convicted in Galveston of raping a local woman and sentenced to fifteen years, of which he served five. Paroled in 1991, he went back to Galveston and took a job as a motel desk clerk until parole officials, who objected to a convicted sex offender working in a motel, had him let go. A former girlfriend then told police he had threatened her with violence, a new warrant followed, and he stole a car and drove to Mississippi.
He raped the child and strangled her, and left her body in open country. At his trial the state medical examiner testified that she had been conscious and able to feel pain throughout an ordeal that lasted most of a day.
He said nothing at first. Then he pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping, and at that hearing he made a joke about the death penalty.
He also tried to write his own legal protection. Having been given a draft statement by counsel, he rewrote it himself, adding wording that his account of the kidnapping was to be used by his federal lawyer and federal authorities only, and that Mississippi and Louisiana were to have no power to use it for any investigative or criminal purpose. Whether that worked, and whether his confessions should have been suppressed, became the central question of his appeal. It did not work.
Then he started talking about everything else. He told investigators he had killed people at parks and rest areas across the country over a decade; the number is given as around sixty in more than twenty states in some accounts and more than seventy in twenty-two states in others. An FBI task force was assembled to work through it.
What came out of all that was one further conviction. Two of his descriptions matched unsolved killings in Florida, and in 1995 he pleaded guilty to the strangling of Ira Jean Smith, thirty-eight, on March 7, 1985, in exchange for a life sentence; the Florida record also carries an aggravated battery. Some lists of his victims add Janet Marie Movich, thirty-eight, who died on April 14, 1985, but he was never convicted of her death. Investigators looked at a dozen or so other possibilities and could stand none of them up. The conclusion they reached was the ordinary one about a certain kind of prisoner: the claims bought him attention, and they bought him days out of the cell.
He was indicted at Gulfport on October 15, 1991 for capital murder, with kidnapping as the underlying felony, and two counts of sexual battery. The publicity was heavy enough that the court took the unusual step of going to Adams County to select a jury and then bringing that jury back to Harrison County to hear the case. The Mississippi Supreme Court dates the trial to September 13 through 18, 1993; other accounts have the jury convicting him on August 16, 1993 and returning the death sentence three days later.
He escaped from the Harrison County jail in June 1993 and was recaptured soon afterward, hiding in a shed about a mile away.
He was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to death. At some point in the proceedings he asked to be known as Hi Hitler, which is the thing most often repeated about him. He professed neo-Nazi views.
The Mississippi Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and the sentence on September 11, 1998. He was represented on that appeal by William S. Boyd III of Gulfport and also filed for himself, from the federal prison at Florence, Colorado.
On January 5, 1999 he was stabbed to death in the shower at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman by another condemned man, Jimmie Mack, who said he had done it because Evans killed children. He was forty-one. Mack had been sent to death row for the 1990 murder of Henry Fulton in Bolivar County. He was convicted of manslaughter for killing Evans and given twenty years, and in 2006, after a judge ruled him intellectually disabled, his own death sentence was commuted to life.
Two murders were proved. The claims are the reason his name is known at all, and chasing them down occupied police forces in more than twenty states for years.