Richard Evonitz

On January 3, 1987, Evonitz pulled up beside Kelli Ballard, 15, in his car in Jacksonville, Florida and exposed himself and masturbated while she walked her 3-year-old sister down the street. The following day, Evonitz was seen following Kelli and her mother in a mall parking lot. Kelli and her mother took down his license plate information and alerted the police. He was arrested a month later when his ship returned to port. He entered a plea of no contest and was sentenced to three years' probation.[6] Evonitz told the police that he “had a problem masturbating in front of girls.” Evonitz is also suspected of a 1994 abduction and rape and a 1995 rape in Spotsylvania, Virginia.[5]

On July 6, 1988, 12-year-old Sarah Margaret Cherry was abducted while babysitting at a home in a rural part of Bowdoin, Maine. Several days later, Cherry's body was found hidden in a wooded area. She had been bound with rope, sexually assaulted with birch sticks, stabbed, and then strangled with a scarf.[7][8] On March 18, 1989, Dennis Dechaine was convicted for the murder. However, Dechaine has filed a number of appeals, maintaining that he is innocent, and the circumstances surrounding his conviction remain controversial.[7][9]

Evonitz served as a sonar technician aboard the USS Koelsch which was based in Portland, Maine from May 8, 1988, to May 31, 1989, while the ship was undergoing a refit at the Bath Iron Works facility. Deirdre Enright, the founder of the University of Virginia Law School’s Innocence Project, has linked Evonitz to Cherry's murder due to similarities with his modus operandi.[10] Evonitz had access to a white Toyota Corolla similar in description to a vehicle sighted near where Cherry's body was found and he was known to have frequently visited Brunswick Naval Air Station commissary, thirteen miles south of Bowdoin. DNA evidence recovered from Cherry's body was unable to be compared to Evonitz's profile due to being deemed insufficient. Dechaine remains incarcerated at Maine State Prison in Warren, Maine.

At 7:30 a.m. on March 2, 1996, 25-year-old Alicia Showalter Reynolds left her Baltimore, Maryland residence to drive to Charlottesville, Virginia.[11] At 6 p.m., Alicia's car was found abandoned along a highway near Culpeper, Virginia. Witnesses later came forward to police saying they had seen Alicia along Route 29 talking to a man with a blue pickup truck on the side of the road. Her body was discovered in a wooded area fifteen miles to the southeast of where she had gone missing on May 7, 1996. Although the cause of death has not been released, investigators believe that she had been murdered.[12]

On September 22, 1996, the burned remains of 20-year-old Anne Carolyn McDaniel were discovered by sportsmen exercising their dogs just ten miles from where Reynold's body was found. McDaniel, who had cerebral palsy, was last seen leaving a group home for mentally and physically disabled adults in the town of Orange on September 18, 1996, trying to hitchhike along Route 29.[13] Authorities believe Evonitz may have killed McDaniel after discovering scribbled directions to Reynolds' dumpsite in one of his footlockers.

On September 9, 1996, Evonitz abducted 16-year-old Sofia Marlene Silva from her home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, after returning from school near Loriella Park. She was last seen doing her homework on her front steps and was taken without an apparent struggle or any witnesses. Her decomposed body was found a month later in Birchwood Creek off State Route 3 in King George County.[14] She was wrapped in a white cover and her pubic hair had been shaved off.

On May 1, 1997, Evonitz abducted sisters Kristin Michelle “Kristi” Lisk, 15, and Kathryn Nicole “Kati” Lisk, 12, from their front lawn on Block House Road in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Both were last seen getting off their respective school buses. Their father came home from work later to find no sign of his daughters except Kristin's book bag laying discarded in the front yard. After sexually assaulting them, he strangled the sisters and dumped their bodies in the South Anna River. Their bodies were found five days later.[15]

On June 24, 2002, Evonitz abducted 15-year-old Kara Robinson Chamberlain from a friend's yard in Columbia, South Carolina. He got out of his car and approached her, pretending to offer her some "pamphlets." After she said her friends parents were not home Evonitz held a gun to her neck[16] and then forced her into a plastic bin. He took her to his apartment, raped her, forced her to smoke marijuana, and tied her to his bed. After watching the evening news about her abduction, he tied her to a homemade wooden apparatus to spread her legs. Robinson was then able to free herself while Evonitz was asleep, escape, and identify her abductor to the police using information she was able to find on Evonitz's fridge.[17] However, Evonitz had fled after finding Chamberlain gone.

The police determined that the fibers from the furry handcuffs on Kara’s wrists were also found on the bodies of Silva and the Lisk sisters. Kristin Lisk's handprint was also lifted from the inside of Evonitz' car trunk.[18] In addition, in his apartment police found nude photos of young girls, hundreds of pornographic images and videotapes of children on his computer, including one of him molesting a young girl and another of him masturbating to Polaroid photos of other children. There were also a large number of girls’ underwear which have never been linked to any individual.

On June 27, 2002, Evonitz called his sister, Jennifer, admitting to having committed "more crimes than he can remember," and told her to meet him at an IHOP in Jacksonville, Florida but she instead called the police and turned him in. Later that day, Evonitz was surrounded by police on Bayfront Drive in Sarasota, Florida. He was urged to surrender peacefully but after a police dog was released, Evonitz shot himself and was declared dead at 10:52 p.m.