Kara Robinson and the eighteen hours she spent collecting evidence

The front yard

It was the last week of June 2002, and Kara Robinson had stayed the night at her best friend’s house in Lexington County, South Carolina. The plan for the day was a lake house. While her friend showered, Kara went out to water the plants in the front yard.

A car went past, turned around, and came up the driveway. The man who got out was middle-aged, tidy, wearing a baseball cap, holding a binder. He said he was distributing magazines. She told him it was her friend’s house. He asked whether the parents were home.

Then he stepped close, and something cold pressed against the side of her neck.

There was a large plastic storage container in the back seat. He told her to get into it and closed the lid.

Stay calm, gather information, escape

Inside the container, on the road, she did two things. She listened, so she would know the songs that were playing and feel the moment the car merged onto the interstate. And she read the serial number stamped in the plastic beside her face and committed it to memory.

At one stop he opened the lid, handcuffed her, put a gag in her mouth and told her to scream as loudly as she could. He listened. He nodded. He closed the lid and drove on. He had proved to himself that nobody could hear her.

She understood what that meant. Nobody was coming.

He carried the container into his ground-floor apartment near Columbia. Over roughly the next eighteen hours she was drugged and assaulted. She has written that it was during those hours that she decided she would never simply be the girl this had happened to, and that she was not going to let him decide how it ended.

So she behaved as though she were compliant, and she inventoried his life. She read his mail. She memorized the names of his doctor and his dentist from magnets on the refrigerator. She noted the caged animals, the pictures on the walls, the cigarettes, the radio station. She saw long red hair in a hairbrush and women’s toiletries and understood that a woman lived here. In conversation she learned he had been in the Navy. She offered to help clean the apartment.

Dawn

That night he fastened fur-lined handcuffs around her wrists, ran a rope from them to the bed frame through a screw-gate clip, and roped her right ankle to the foot of the bed.

She woke to light at the window and the sound of him breathing beside her. The cuffs were too tight to slip. So she lifted the clip to her mouth and turned the screw with her teeth. One turn, then another, until it opened.

She freed her ankle, pulled on her shorts in the living room, and reached the front door. It was dead-bolted, and the storage container had been pushed up against it. She moved the container, worked the locks, and ran out barefoot across the parking lot, expecting the whole way to be shot in the back, and thinking that it did not matter, because at least now someone would be able to find him.

Two men in a car drove her to the Richland County sheriff’s office.

What she carried out

She gave deputies enough to identify Richard Marc Evonitz, a 38-year-old former Navy sonar technician. By the time they reached the apartment he was gone.

Two days later he called his sister, told her he had committed more crimes than he could remember, and asked her to meet him in Florida. She called the police. He was cornered in Sarasota and took his own life. He was never tried, and Kara has said plainly that she wanted a courtroom instead.

The evidence she had carried out on her own wrists did the rest. Fibers from the fur-lined handcuffs were matched to fibers recovered from the bodies of Sofia Silva, 16, and sisters Kristin and Kati Lisk, 15 and 12, all taken from their own front yards in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, in 1996 and 1997. Kristin Lisk’s handprint was identified inside the trunk of his car. In March 2019 investigators formally closed all three murders.

Kara Robinson Chamberlain went on to intern with the sheriff’s office, work in its DNA lab, and serve as a deputy on sex-crime and child-abuse investigations. She executive produced the documentary about her own abduction, and now works as a survivor advocate and television host. She has called herself the mistake he made.