On the afternoon of June 24, 2002, Kara Robinson was fifteen and helping a friend's family by watering the plants in their front yard in Lexington County, South Carolina. A man pulled into the driveway. Robinson later recalled thinking, "That's weird." He carried pamphlets, said he was selling magazines, and asked whether her parents were home. Then he pressed a gun to her neck, told her he would shoot if she screamed, and forced her into a large plastic storage container in his car. He was Richard Marc Evonitz, thirty-eight, a Navy veteran and traveling salesman who lived in an apartment in Columbia. The car, according to The Washington Post, was his mother's green Firebird.
He drove her to the apartment he shared with his wife, who was away on a trip to Walt Disney World. Over the next eighteen hours or so he handcuffed and bound her, drugged her and raped her repeatedly. He made her watch the evening news to see whether her disappearance had been reported. Robinson's own later account is that her family had called the police, but that she was listed at first as a runaway.
She decided early that resistance would not save her and that information might. "My body just automatically kicked into survival," she said in 2023. She did what he told her and volunteered for chores, sweeping his kitchen and talking with him, to keep him calm and to gain his trust. All the while she memorized. She fixed in her mind the layout of the apartment, the kinds and number of animals there, the names and phone numbers of a dentist and a doctor on refrigerator magnets, a serial number printed inside the container he had carried her in, and small signs that someone else lived there: a long red hair in a hairbrush, a second toothbrush, feminine hygiene products.
Sometime in the early hours of June 25, Evonitz fell asleep with Robinson still restrained. Lexington County Sheriff James Metts told CNN a week later that she heard him snoring and "chose her opportunity to get away." Accounts of how she got loose differ in detail. The Oxygen network, citing the New York Daily News, says she slipped out of one handcuff; A&E's 2026 account says she was cuffed to the bed and worked the clip connecting the cuffs loose with her teeth. She left the apartment, found two men in a parking lot and begged them to drive her to the police. They took her to a Richland County sheriff's substation.
There she gave investigators everything she had stored up. She led officers back to the apartment complex and to the apartment itself. By the time they arrived, Evonitz was gone. But a photo lineup identified him, Metts said, and investigators now had a name. "Without it," Metts said of her escape, "she would have been dead."
What police found in the Columbia apartment, in the Crossroads complex in the St. Andrews area, turned the hunt for a rapist into something larger. WIS-TV reported that a locked box held a newspaper clipping about the Spotsylvania murders, and that handwritten notes described white girls by age, "11 or 12" and "14 or 15," with the words "brunettes" and "very cute." Investigators later described a large pornography collection, and the Portland Press Herald reported in 2022 that it included child pornography and girls' underwear. Among his papers were newspaper clippings about the abduction of two sisters in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1997, and handwritten notes that Spotsylvania Sheriff Ronald Knight later said described four unnamed girls and seemed to map a route near the sisters' home. Evonitz had lived in Spotsylvania County in the 1990s. In those years he had served as president of his subdivision's homeowners association in the South Oaks neighborhood. A neighbor, Theresa Lambert, told the Associated Press in 2002 that she had been inside his home about a week before Sofia Silva disappeared, and that he had told her she could "come back any time."
The first of the Spotsylvania girls was Sofia Silva. She was sixteen, and she had dreamed of going to cosmetology school. On September 9, 1996, she was doing her homework on the front porch of her family's home; her older sister was inside and heard nothing. Police treated the case at first as a missing person. Her body, wrapped in a blanket, was found about five weeks later in a creek in King George County. The Washington Times gave the date as October 14, 1996.
Eight months later, on May 1, 1997, Kristin Lisk, fifteen, and her sister Kati, twelve, got off separate school buses near their home. Kristin had just finished her first year of high school and played soccer. Kati played the clarinet and liked to draw. Kati's book bag was found inside the house. Kristin's lay in the front yard with its contents strewn across the grass. Five days later the sisters' bodies were found floating near a bridge over the South Anna River in Hanover County, about forty miles from home.
On May 10, 1997, about a hundred friends and relatives gathered at a single grave dug beside the family's church, and then nearly a thousand people, many of whom had never met the Lisks, filled Spotswood Baptist Church for a ninety-minute service. Ron Lisk, who worked at a photography studio in Fredericksburg, spoke; Patti Lisk, a nursing instructor at a community college, sat in the front row. He told the mourners that during the search they had kept repeating a Bible passage that promised "your children will come back home." "I always thought I had some faith, but my faith has been challenged," he said. An eleven-year-old classmate of Kati's wore a blue and purple ribbon in the sisters' favorite colors. "I'm not going to forget her," she said. Sheriff Knight said the investigation had more than a thousand tips and no witness, either where the girls were taken or where they were found.
There were no witnesses in either case. What there was, investigators said, were tiny fibers and a few hairs, enough to persuade them that one person had killed all three girls. A task force of the Spotsylvania and King George sheriff's offices, the Virginia State Police and the FBI worked the cases for five years. It ran down more than 12,000 leads, compared its evidence against more than 45,000 unsolved cases, and checked DNA against 1.2 million profiles in law enforcement databases. Evonitz, who worked at the time at the Naval Surface Warfare Center in King George County, had come up as an early suspect, The Washington Times reported, but police did not have enough evidence to compel a DNA sample.
Evonitz was born on July 29, 1963, at Providence Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. The Post and Courier, reviewing his life in 2024, described a controlling father and a dysfunctional family; a Radford University case study compiled from news reports and Diane Fanning's 2004 book Into the Water describes the father as a heavy drinker who abused his children. Evonitz graduated from Irmo High School in 1980 and later joined the Navy, where he trained as a sonar technician. He served eight years, was honorably discharged and twice received the Navy Good Conduct Medal, according to The Washington Post.
His record in the Navy was not clean. In January 1987, while he was stationed at Mayport Naval Station in Jacksonville, Florida, he masturbated in his car while a fifteen-year-old girl walked her three-year-old sister down the street, A&E reports. The next day the girl and her mother saw him following them in a mall parking lot and called police. He was charged with a lewd or lascivious act in the presence of a minor and told officers he "had a problem masturbating in front of girls." According to the police report as described by WIS-TV in 2002, he said that when he felt the urge he drove around looking for girls of about eighteen or nineteen, short, with brunette hair. The Radford case study records that he pleaded no contest that June and received three years of probation with counseling.
At twenty-five he married Bonnie Lou Gower, a teenager eight years his junior. They settled in Spotsylvania County, where, according to the Radford study, he sold air compressors, and they later divorced. By 1999 he was back in South Carolina. In 2002 he was married again, to a woman The Washington Post identified as Hope Evonitz.
After Robinson's escape, Evonitz ran. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said investigators traced him through his ATM withdrawals and cell phone, and nearly caught him at a motel in Orangeburg, about thirty miles south of the abduction site. He crossed into Florida. From there he called his sister, Jennifer Harris. According to Lott, as quoted in The Washington Post, he told her he had killed before and had committed "more crimes than he can remember." Harris went to the authorities and told them he could be found at a restaurant in Sarasota. "I think we're only at the tip of an iceberg," Lott said in the first days after his death.
On June 27, 2002, police spotted him. A chase at speeds reported at up to 100 miles an hour ran from Manatee County into Sarasota and ended on Bayfront Drive when his tires ran over police spike strips. As officers and a police dog closed in, Evonitz shot himself in the head. The Radford case study, drawing on 2002 reporting, says the gun was the .25-caliber semiautomatic he had used in the abduction. The FBI's 2008 alert on him lists his date of death as June 26, 2002; the contemporary reports in The Washington Times and others give June 27.
His death ended any chance of a trial, but not the investigation. The furry handcuffs Robinson had worn became part of the evidence. FBI Special Agent Doug Deedrick, a trace evidence specialist with thirty years at the Bureau, went to examine what Evonitz had left behind. Deedrick told ABC News that he walked through the Columbia apartment looking for anything "blue, dark blue, red," the colors of the fibers recovered from the girls' bodies.
Eight or nine dark blue acrylic fibers had been pulled from Sofia Silva's shirt, and similar fibers had been found on both Lisk sisters. Held up to the light, fibers from the cuffs Robinson had worn looked dark blue. "Handcuffs by themselves didn't strike an interest to me," Deedrick said. Pink fibers found on Kati Lisk's body led him to a pink bath rug packed in a box in a linen closet. "I said, 'Pink fibers, I think they look like a bath rug of some type,'" he recalled.
Then came the trunk of one of Evonitz's cars. On the inside of the lid, Deedrick saw what looked like "four fingers, small." They matched Kristin Lisk. The Washington Post reported that a palm print and fingerprints of hers were recovered from inside the trunk of his Ford Taurus, intact five years after the abduction; a forensic scientist called the find a "miracle." "Fingerprints were really the icing on the cake in this," Deedrick said.
The rest of the evidence, as police described it in August 2002, ran in the same direction. Evonitz's DNA matched a head hair found in Kati Lisk's sock, and his hair was also found on the clothing of both sisters and intertwined in the rope used on Sofia Silva's body. Carpet fibers from a house he had lived in near Fredericksburg matched fibers on the girls. Fibers in the trunk of the Taurus matched all three girls, and fibers from a blanket found on his South Carolina property matched samples from Sofia Silva and Kati Lisk. He had taken time off work on the days the girls were abducted. In all, the FBI examined about 600 items and ran more than 10,000 tests on three hairs and 190 fibers.
The Washington Post also reported a quieter link in the chain. A worker at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children noticed that Evonitz had lived in Spotsylvania County when the girls were taken, and alerted Maj. Howard Smith, who headed the task force.
On August 13, 2002, Sheriff Knight announced that the cases were solved and that Evonitz had acted alone. He wept as he spoke. The investigators' statement said that sexually obsessed offenders often leave a signature in their crimes and use the same techniques and devices again and again. Knight credited Robinson, still publicly unnamed then, saying her escape had "led investigators to her captor," and called her "that brave little girl." Smith said she had "made this case" and that he would recommend she receive the $150,000 reward offered in the Silva and Lisk killings.
The families spoke too. "Patti and I were robbed of our children," Ron Lisk said, and he asked parents to "hang on tight to your children." Pam Silva, Sofia's sister, said her family felt Evonitz was facing "a much . . . harsher punishment than he ever would have on Earth." Hope Evonitz told the Post: "He was my husband, he is still my husband, and I love him dearly."
Police in Virginia have named Evonitz in three murders and no more. Every other case below has been raised by investigators, lawyers or reporters, and none has been proved against him. Some have been weakened or ruled out by later evidence.
FBI agent Donald W. Thompson said at the August 2002 announcement, "This is not a closed book." The notes in the Columbia apartment described other girls. One of them told The Free Lance-Star, in remarks carried by the Associated Press, "It is kind of scary that some guy was out there looking at me," and "I want to know why he didn't get me." In March 2008 the FBI and the Spotsylvania County Sheriff's Office issued a ViCAP alert asking other agencies to compare their unsolved cases against him. It described his habits as investigators understood them: surveillance of victims beforehand, a preference for girls under eighteen, binding, the use of tubs or containers, and bodies left near water. It said his travels for the military and for sales work were documented in twenty-two states.
Alicia Showalter Reynolds, twenty-five, a Johns Hopkins graduate student, was last seen on March 2, 1996, driving on Route 29 from Baltimore toward Charlottesville. Her car was found abandoned in Culpeper County that day, and her remains were found two months later in a field near Lignum. Witnesses described a white man of thirty-five to forty-five with a dark pickup, possibly a green Nissan, stopped with her car on the shoulder. In Evonitz's apartment, investigators found a note with directions to "29 North" and to a highway beginning with "G" (WIS-TV noted that Reynolds's body was found near the Germanna Highway), and The Washington Post reported on July 1, 2002, that police believed he had killed her. By mid-August Virginia authorities said they had no evidence tying him to her death or to other Virginia murders. Her case remains unsolved. The University of Virginia's student newspaper had noted in 1996 that hers was one of three unsolved deaths of women in the area in four months; another was Anne Carolyn McDaniel, twenty, whose remains were found near Route 723 in Culpeper that September. Police at the time had not linked the cases, and no agency has publicly linked McDaniel's death to Evonitz.
The most persistent claim concerns a crime for which another man is serving a life sentence. On July 6, 1988, Sarah Cherry, twelve, was taken in daylight from a house in Bowdoin, Maine, where she was babysitting. Her body was found in the woods about three miles away two days later. She had been sexually assaulted and strangled.
Dennis Dechaine, a thirty-one-year-old farmer from Bowdoinham, was convicted by a jury in 1989 of murder, kidnapping and gross sexual misconduct and sentenced to life. His truck was parked near where the body was found; a car repair receipt and a notebook of his were found in the driveway of the house Sarah was taken from; and yellow rope binding her hands matched rope in his truck. Dechaine has always said he was lost in the woods after getting high and that the items were planted. His supporters point to two pathologists, Walter Hofman and Cyril Wecht, who concluded in 2009 that she probably died after Dechaine was already in police custody, and to male DNA under her fingernails that was not his. Maine's courts have rejected every bid for a new trial.
Evonitz's name entered the case through his Navy service. According to a 2022 Portland Press Herald investigation by Colin Woodard, his ship, the USS Koelsch, was in Portland from May 8, 1988, to May 31, 1989, for a refit at a Bath Iron Works facility on the waterfront. Sarah Cherry was killed about two months into that stay. Evonitz drove a white Toyota Corolla and shopped at the commissary at Brunswick Naval Air Station, about thirteen miles south of Bowdoin, according to Bonnie Gower, then his sixteen-year-old fiancée back in South Carolina. About five weeks after the murder he married her, and he rented an apartment on State Street in Portland, where she joined him that October.
Deirdre Enright, a University of Virginia law professor whom Maine papers have described as a founder of its Innocence Project work, has argued that the crimes share a pattern: daylight abductions from semi-rural homes, girls bound and gagged, sexual assault followed by strangulation, and a man who struck when his partner was away. She told the Press Herald that Evonitz, "a known serial killer, in the same area, alone," made "a far better suspect than Dennis Dechaine." A defense team had looked at him as early as 2004 but could not find evidence strong enough for court. The Press Herald also reported that Maine State Police and Portland police told the federal task force in 2002 that they had no matching unsolved cases, and later said they had no record of the task force's requests.
New DNA testing was ordered in July 2022 over prosecutors' objections. That November the lab reported partial male profiles on several items; Dechaine was excluded from DNA on Sarah's bra, the bandana used to gag her and one other item, while results on the scarf used to strangle her and her T-shirt were inconclusive. Enright sent Evonitz's DNA profile to Dechaine's lawyer for comparison, but the Press Herald reported that the new profiles had not been matched to anyone. On January 30, 2025, Superior Court Justice Bruce Mallonee denied a new trial. He found the samples might have been contaminated when the items were taken from the woods without gloves, called the new DNA evidence "weak, vague, and without practical meaning," and wrote, "This is not a close case." Dechaine filed a further appeal on other grounds in February 2025. No court or police agency has linked Evonitz to Sarah Cherry's death.
Enright also once tied Evonitz to the May 1996 murders of Julianne Williams and Laura "Lollie" Winans, who were camping in Shenandoah National Park. A Maryland man, Darrell Rice, had been charged with capital murder in that case, and the charges were dropped after hair and DNA from the scene did not match him. In 2022 the Press Herald reported Enright's view that the DNA was consistent with Evonitz. In June 2024 the FBI announced that new DNA testing had identified the killer as Walter "Leo" Jackson Sr., a convicted rapist from the Cleveland area who died in prison in 2018. The FBI put the chance that the crime scene DNA came from anyone else at one in 2.6 trillion.
In 2024 Enright told The Post and Courier that her team was examining seven cases that might fit Evonitz, among them the 1989 killing of Justin Turner in South Carolina. She said his ship had docked in Charleston on March 3, 1989, the day Justin disappeared, but that she had not yet received the Navy records to confirm it. That claim sits uneasily with the Press Herald's account, which places the Koelsch in Portland for its refit until May 31, 1989. The Radford University case study, drawing on Fanning's book, attributes to him a June 1995 home break-in in Virginia in which a thirteen-year-old girl was raped, and says he was never a suspect at the time; no police agency has confirmed it. Sheriff Lott has said investigators could not identify other victims, adding, "That doesn't mean they're not out there." No police agency has publicly linked Evonitz to any other crime since 2002.
Kara Robinson kept her name out of the news for years. She later worked with victim services and the DNA lab at the Richland County Sheriff's Department, graduated from a police academy, and investigated sex abuse cases. Oxygen reported in 2021 that she had left law enforcement to raise her sons and speak about survival; publicity for a 2026 television series describes her as a sex crimes and child abuse investigator. In 2021 she told her story in a TikTok video that drew millions of views, and in February 2023 a Lifetime television film was released, The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story, with Katie Douglas in the title role. At first, she has said, she was angry that Evonitz died before she could face him in court: "I wanted him to look at me and know that choosing me was the biggest mistake he ever made." Later she said: "Since then I've realized it's the best thing that could have happened."
On October 7, 2026, Investigation Discovery premiered The Serial Killer Connection, a three-part series in which Robinson Chamberlain and Evonitz's first wife, Bonnie Lou, who found each other through social media years after the crimes, go back through his photographs, notes and clippings, his movements and his sister's testimony, looking for cases that may still belong to him.