Who Was Serial Killer Richard Evonitz, Who Was Caught When a Victim Escaped?

Richard Marc Evonitz was a serial killer, kidnapper and sexual predator responsible for the murders of three girls in Spotsylvania County, Va. Their deaths remained unsolved for five years until Evonitz abducted 15-year-old Kara Robinson from a yard in South Carolina. 

Chamberlain escaped and helped lead authorities to her abductor, who fled to Florida and died by suicide as law enforcement closed in. 

Investigators subsequently found extensive forensic evidence linking him to the three Virginia murders, including hair, fibers and the fingerprints of one of the victims inside the trunk of his vehicle. 

Evonitz also told his sister that he committed countless other crimes, but authorities haven’t been able to connect him to others. Since then, the FBI has also sought information about whether his statement is true.

Before Evonitz abducted 16-year-old Sofia Silva and sisters Kristin Lisk, 15, and Kati Lisk, 12, in Virginia, he was stationed at Mayport Navy Station in Jacksonville, Fla., and facing legal troubles there. In January 1987, he drove beside a 15-year-old girl and masturbated while she walked her 3-year-old sister down the street. 

The next day, the girl and her mother saw Evonitz following them in a mall parking lot and called the police. He was arrested on a charge of lewd/lascivious act in the presence of a minor child. Evonitz told police that he “had a problem masturbating in front of girls.”

When he was 25, Evonitz married his first wife, Bonnie Lou Gower, a teenager who was eight years younger than him. The couple moved to Spotsylvania County in 1996 but eventually divorced.

In September 1996, Sofia was abducted from her front porch as she was doing her homework. Her body was found five weeks later in a creek in King George, Va. Investigators had few leads until, on May 1, 1997, Kristin and Kati were taken from their front yard after getting off their school bus. Their bodies were found five days later, floating in a river.

In both cases, there were no witnesses and almost no evidence left behind except a few tiny fibers and a couple of strands of hair that connected the sisters with Silva, suggesting to investigators that the same person killed all three girls. 

A task force consisting of the FBI and Spotsylvania County and state police ran down more than 12,000 leads. Investigators compared evidence against items from more than 45,000 unsolved cases and checked DNA samples against 1.2 million genetic profiles.

Then, in June 2002, investigators caught a break after Robinson was abducted at gunpoint from her front yard in South Carolina. The kidnapper held her captive and assaulted her for 18 hours. When he fell asleep, Robinson escaped. 

“Fear barely even kicked in...the human will to survive and the survival mechanism really just can't be underestimated,” she told People in 2022. Robinson directed police to the apartment where she was held, but by the time authorities arrived there, the kidnapper was gone.

However, evidence including fibers from bathmats, blankets and carpets found in the apartment led police directly to Evonitz, who had abducted Robinson while his second wife visited Disney World. 

“Bells really went off in our heads that we just didn't have a kidnapping of Kara Robinson,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott told People. “This was something else. This was actually a serial killer.”

On June 27, 2002, two days after Robinson escaped from the apartment, police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Fla. When police tried to pull him over, he took them on a high-speed chase that ended with Evonitz running over police-deployed spike strips on the highway. 

As officers and a police dog closed in, Evonitz shot and killed himself.

Before his death, Evonitz called his sister to admit he had committed “more crimes than he can remember,” though police haven’t been able to connect him to others.

The next month, police announced they recovered the fingerprints and a palm print from Kristin from the inside trunk lid of his car. The prints had stayed intact for five years.

Decades later, Gower made a series of TikTok videos detailing her marriage to Evonitz. 

Gower said in a video that Evonitz explained away his arrest in Jacksonville, telling her he was just “driving around naked” while “blacked-out drunk” and was arrested because “some girls had seen him.” She was just a teenager, she said, and she accepted his lies.

In another video, she said that around the time the Lisk sisters went missing, Evonitz was having “a lot of mood switches” and one day came home frantically asking if Gower would leave the country with him.

“I was like, ‘What do you mean? What the hell? Why would you ask me that?'” Gower recalled in the videos. She accepted his answer that he was having a tough time at work, and the couple never left the country. 

Robinson, now Kara Robinson Chamberlain, also made a series of TikTok videos detailing her own experience. 

"My ability to escape was part of my trauma response," she said in a video that has since been removed. "So, I was able to stay calm and collected and appease my captor so that I could make him feel safe enough to sleep. So, when I escaped, it was when he was asleep the next morning. I was handcuffed. I had to actually use my teeth to kind of loosen the clip that connected the handcuffs to the bed and then slide out of the bed, get my things together. So, I think the key for me was to stay calm, and that's not always an option for everyone."

Chamberlain is now a retired police officer who continues her work through survivor advocacy. She is an established voice for ethics in true-crime media and has helped produce multiple true-crime TV shows and documentaries.