Trailed, p.28
Trailed, page 28
Because of Kara Robinson’s almost superhuman ability to remain calm and mentally record copious details, even during unimaginable trauma, police were able to identify Evonitz shortly after she arrived at the station. They ran his criminal record and found only an indecent exposure charge from his time as a young navy crewman. “We had not heard of Richard Marc Evonitz,” an officer later told the media. “He was not on our radar at all.” He definitely was now. Bulletins went out throughout South Carolina and neighboring states. The night of Wednesday, June 26, Florida police spied him somewhere just outside of Sarasota, Florida. They initiated a high-speed chase, but Evonitz refused to relent. They then forced his car over a spike mat, disabling his vehicle. He opened the door, brandishing a handgun. The police sent in a trained German shepherd to pull him from the vehicle. The dog bit his leg and arm, but Evonitz was determined to end the ordeal on his own terms. He placed the barrel of the gun deep into his mouth and pulled the trigger. He died instantly.
Back at Evonitz’s apartment, police returned with a search warrant. What they found was deeply disturbing: caches of women’s underwear, multiple dildos and vibrators, dozens of types of lubricants. They found bondage devices of every stripe, from nipple clamps to ankle cuffs, along with old floppy disk boxes filled with locks of women’s hair. They logged hundreds of VHS tapes of porn, most of it hard core and some of it homemade movies featuring Evonitz himself. In the investigative reports, officers made particular note of the fact that most of the women in Evonitz’s pornography collection had shaved or waxed vaginas. To their line of thinking, this seemed like further evidence of his pedophilia. As anyone who’s watched much porn knows, it’s standard wardrobing for pretty much every adult film star of this period.
They also found multiple weapons, including several guns and knives, and they archived dozens of slips of paper on which Evonitz had been tracking women across the country:
Nora, 5'7". 23. Chicago. Just broke up with boyfriend.
Kami, 16. Syracuse. Looks like Rachel from Friends.
Rhonda Lee. Assistant to a Senator. Age 28. 36D. Average build.
Wants kids.
Erin. 19. Vancouver. Disabled. Thinks I could change her mind
about liking sex.
Based on this evidence, the FBI issued a report, stating in part, “Indications are that Evonitz may have been involved in an unknown number of kidnappings and possible murders throughout the US.” By August 13, 2002, the bureau announced it had all the evidence it needed to establish that he had killed Sofia Silva and the Lisk sisters: fibers taken from all three girls were found in the trunk of Evonitz’s car. Microscopic analysis of hairs found on all three girls revealed “substantial similarities” to Evonitz. Most damning, forensic agents were able to lift a palm print identified as belonging to Kati Lisk from the trunk of his car. The South Carolina sheriff working the Robinson case told shocked reporters that Evonitz had been an original suspect in both cases, but Virginia law enforcement hadn’t had the evidence needed then to obtain court-ordered forensic testing.
After news of Evonitz’s involvement in these three murders broke, the FBI issued a second bulletin stating that Evonitz had a preoccupation with drowning, along with forcing victims to wash or shave their pubic hair. His MO also included binding his victim’s hands, the use of sex toys—especially vibrators—and wrapping his victims in blankets. As late as 2004, the FBI was still considering him in unsolved murder cases of young women as far away as California. In the meantime, local authorities felt they had enough circumstantial evidence to link him to two 1995 rapes in Virginia. Although agents never pursued either investigation, they did note that in at least one of the assaults, the assailant arrived with strips of cloth that he used to bind the victim, along with duct tape, a knife, and surgical gloves. Some of the Route 29 stalker victims came forward to say they were certain he was the person who had accosted them.
Nevertheless, when asked by local reporters, a spokesperson for the FBI said that Evonitz had received “only a cursory look” in Julie and Lollie’s case, despite the fact that he was not at work and no one could account for his whereabouts on May 26 and 27, 1996. The agents told those reporters it was easy to rule him out in that case: Evonitz was at work on May 24, 1996. And he clearly preferred little girls.
The possible connection between Evonitz and the other murders in the Shenandoah Valley might have stayed unexamined forever, had it not been for an FBI trace evidence analyst who had been assigned to work on the special detail task force that was analyzing Evonitz’s role in the Lisk and Silva murders. That expert insisted Evonitz should be considered a strong suspect in the 1996 Shenandoah National Park murders. By the spring of 2003, the FBI lab had already run the hairs found in the duct tape and the gloves found at the scene against Darrell Rice’s DNA and determined they were not a match. What the lab had confirmed by way of microscopic analysis was that the glove hairs and the tape hairs were contributed by the same person and that person was most likely Evonitz.
It’s worth noting that microscopic hair analysis has fallen out of favor in the world of forensic science. Known more formally as “hair microscopy,” it can be a highly subjective analysis, since the process is conducted by a lab technician who compares microscopic patterns between two hair shafts and then determines the likelihood that those two hairs came from the same person. Although multiple law enforcement agencies continue to employ the technique, detractors are quick to point out historical flaws. In 2015, an investigation into the FBI determined that over 90 percent of its hair examiners overstated the likelihood of forensic matches when under oath as expert witnesses for the prosecution. To date, according to the national Innocence Project, at least seventy cases involving people wrongly convicted of serious crimes were done so based, at least in part, on erroneous hair sampling.
That said, it was hair microscopy that first implicated Evonitz in the Silva and Lisk murders. And the patterns observed between the hairs found at the crime scene and those taken from Marc Evonitz, however subjectively they were analyzed, were clearly strong enough that they warranted further attention.
By May 2003, that FBI analyst had persuaded the Richmond office to submit some of Evonitz’s DNA for comparison in the Shenandoah case. The subsequent request form, signed by Jane Collins, who was then the lead agent in the case, instructed the lab to compare the DNA obtained from the crime scene hairs with that of both Darrell Rice and Marc Evonitz. On October 1, 2003, the lab sent back its findings: Rice’s DNA again did not match that of the hairs. Evonitz, on the other hand, could not be excluded. On October 21, 2003, the Richmond office again requested a DNA analysis of the crime scene hairs. This time, they requested that it only be compared against Rice, and not against Evonitz.
If there is a single moment in this case that most haunts me, it is this one. Like the NPS decision not to announce the murders, this decision seems more than just catastrophically myopic: it also suggests a more deliberate agenda.
At that time, DNA analysis of hair was done entirely with mtDNA testing. Of the 16,569 base pairs in mtDNA, forensic experts had isolated eight hundred pairs most suitable for this kind of comparison. Lab protocol standards stipulated that more than two differences in these base pairs would rule out someone as a contributor. Evonitz had only one. For that reason, based on the FBI’s own protocol, he still should have been considered a suspect.
After reading the lab results from Evonitz’s DNA test, I contacted at least twenty different leading international geneticists. All said the same thing: that not only could you not exclude Evonitz based on that one base pair difference, but also the location of that difference made it all the more likely he had contributed the sample because of a condition known as “heteroplasmy.” Deirdre Enright had first uncovered this phenomenon during her research in 2003. At the time, what was known was that a body sometimes misfires a protein in a particular place, stamping a C protein when it would normally stamp a T, for instance. As a result, two hairs taken from a person with heteroplasmy may not be perfect matches to each other, even though they share identical DNA.
In 2003, little was known about rates of heteroplasmy or its pervasiveness. In the intervening years, a body of scholarly work has been dedicated to the subject. Thanks to the rapid rise of ancestral testing and sites like 23andme, we’re only now beginning to collect enough sample DNA to understand that heteroplasmy is far more prevalent than anyone could have guessed. Hair samples, for instance, can have rates of heteroplasmy as high as 37 percent. One of the most common places to see that difference is in position 16,217—that same place where the one discernible difference was noted between the hair at the crime scene and the blood taken from Marc Evonitz.
Of the twenty geneticists I contacted, fifteen, including a representative of the European Union’s DNA bank and the former head of the US Armed Services Identification program, agreed to look at the FBI lab reports of Evonitz’s DNA. Each one said the same thing: that this single difference, particularly given its location, could not be considered cause to rule out Marc Evonitz. They also agree that the place and nature of that one base pair difference in the Evonitz results are the most commonly observed kind of heteroplasmy. Finally, they agreed that it would be highly unusual to see only one difference between samples taken from two different people and that a lab error could just as likely be to blame for that one difference. When we learned that the hairs from the crime scene were actually compared to Evonitz’s blood, the experts said the likelihood of seeing a base pair difference in that location was even greater, since they were comparing mtDNA from two different types of tissue.
I also emailed my public affairs liaison back at the FBI lab. She reiterated that the geneticist who had run the tests on all the DNA associated with the Shenandoah murders could not answer any questions specific to that case. But she’d be glad to consider general questions about mtDNA analysis, the liaison added. I wrote back and asked the scientist’s thoughts on what the other geneticists had said about heteroplasmy. She said she concurred and provided paragraphs of explanation as to why she did.
I thought back to my visit to the FBI lab at Quantico almost exactly three years earlier: Even if we wanted to, we’re not the ones who get to open that vault, the scientists had told me. The lab exists in support of the field. All we do is examine what they tell us to. So why had no one told them to test Evonitz again?
The FBI had asked me not to contact Jane Collins directly, and they once again denied the FOIA request I sent asking about the 2003 tests. So instead, I called Tim Alley. By then, we’d settled into what felt like a casual friendship: he’d talk about his summer cabin in Maine or tease me about my politics, and the exchanges were always warm and meandering. This one was not. As soon as I brought up Evonitz, the conversation ran off the tracks and exploded. Tim railed about Evonitz and amateur detectives and what he knew to be true. As he did, I paced my kitchen, sending my dogs scuttling as I tried to envision a way to defuse whatever warhead I had just detonated. Twenty minutes into the conversation, we both realized what the real problem was. “You’re saying that all the work I have done for the past twenty-two years has been a total waste of time,” he insisted. I apologized and tried to explain that wasn’t the case. But in a way, it was. And we both knew it. Before that moment, I had never understood how much the case, which is really to say how much Lollie and Julie and their families, had meant to Tim and what it would mean if he was wrong.
By the end of the conversation, we were both exhausted. But we’d at least found an uneasy détente. “Send me the information about the heteroplasmy,” he told me. “I’ll make sure it gets where it needs to be.”
I thanked him. But he wasn’t done. “Evonitz was a pedophile,” he reminded me before hanging up. “Besides, he was never in the park.”
24
In February 2020, the Rice team at Virginia’s Innocence Project convened around a large conference room table, preparing for our first official meeting. While we waited for Deirdre Enright to arrive, I tried making friendly conversation. The students seemed formal and polite but distant. My normal nervous get-to-know-you jokes were falling flat. Thankfully, Deirdre arrived a few minutes later with a case of chilled seltzer water and bags filled with takeout from P.F. Chang’s. “Try the mapo tofu,” she instructed. We of course complied.
Deirdre and I outlined the case as best we knew it. The students had smart questions about legal procedures and the nuances of discovery. She spoke about some of her most recent cases: a client who had been in prison for 28 years for a rape he did not commit; another who was sentenced to 132 years for armed robbery. “We were able to free them because we found evidence they didn’t do the crime,” she told the students. “In almost every exoneration case, the only way to free a client is to prove someone else is guilty. That’s what we are looking for here.”
She and I spent several hours outlining the case against Rice and what we had learned about Marc Evonitz.
“They totally dropped the inquiry into Evonitz,” Deirdre explained. “And at that point, they had no reason to do that. I really feel like the decision not to test against Evonitz smacks of a deliberate attempt not to tarnish their case against Rice, even if it helps to solve the crime,” Deirdre said.
She told them about that Hail Mary attempt to find Darrell Rice’s DNA on the women’s gags. The FBI knew that there was male DNA on at least one of them, and it was sent to the independent lab for the more sophisticated Y-STR testing. It, of course, excluded Rice as well. One of the students asked if that test had also excluded Evonitz.
“No idea,” she told him. “Because the prosecution dismissed the case, we weren’t allowed to see the results.” Enright and the rest of the legal team had tried to lobby the judge, pointing out that because charges against Rice were dismissed without prejudice, he could find himself back in the courtroom whenever the prosecution decided to take up the case again. For that reason alone, they argued, those Y-STR results ought to be considered part of the ongoing discovery. The judge disagreed.
She outlined the team’s strategy for the semester. The most important task at hand, she said, was the attempt to build a strong enough case against Evonitz that the government would have no choice but to retest the evidence in comparison with his DNA.
“That task force the FBI formed to put Evonitz under the microscope was disbanded before it ever really got off the ground,” she warned the students. “So as far as I can tell, he hasn’t really been looked at for the murders of Alicia Showalter Reynolds or Anne McDaniel or the killing of any other woman over the age of eighteen.”
We made a list of witnesses to reinterview and evidence requiring further consideration. Deirdre explained the legal research that would be needed to see if Rice’s team even had any standing to request further government action. She talked to the students about spreadsheets and cataloging evidence and how they would divide the content of all the boxes for reexamination. Four hours later, long after we’d finished eating the mapo tofu and everything else in the take-out bags, we were ready to get started.
After that first visit, I flew back to New England. On my way home from Boston’s Logan International Airport, I made a spontaneous decision and exited I-95 just before the Maine border. There, off the traffic circle in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is a stretch of bypass locally notorious for its smoke shops and robust offering of adult stores. I parked at the one that had the highest Yelp ratings and went inside. Behind a tall purple counter with a safety-glass screen, the one clerk in the store was helping a variety of customers. I waited until they left and introduced myself and the book project. “You’re a journalist?” the clerk asked. “Yes,” I assured her, “I am.” She told me she was going to need to see my official credentials. In all my years of reporting, she was the first person to ever ask. And I had to hand it to her for even thinking of it. I explained that I didn’t have any credentials with me, which rightly made her suspicious. As a compromise, we pulled up my author website. She took comparing the headshot and my face seriously. “Okay,” she finally said. “What do you need?” What had struck me most about the disturbing story of Evonitz’s final days were all the sexual fetishes it seemed to include—not to mention the sheer volume of sexual props, toys, and pornography in his apartment. I showed her the photos of the vibrator found at Julie and Lollie’s campsite and asked her what she could tell me about it.
“For starters, it’s a piece of crap,” she said, coming out from behind the counter. She took me to the back wall of the store, which was covered entirely in rows and columns of every possible vibrator—dozens and dozens of them. She walked me through the different features of several. “All of these were available by the early 1990s, and most women I knew already owned them.” She took the photo from me and studied it again. Then she pulled a few items off the shelf and brought them back to the counter. There, she cut open the packaging. She removed the dildos inside and pulled off their latex coverings. Inside were cylinders that looked identical to the ones in the photo. “Is that even actually a vibrator?” she asked. I told her I didn’t know.
