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Kara Robinson Was Tortured By a Serial Killer for 18 Hours Before She Escaped. Inside Her Life Today At age 15, Kara Robinson was abducted by Richard Evonitz
At just 15 years old, Kara Robinson was abducted in the middle of the day from the front yard of a South Carolina home.
On June 24, 2002, the teenager was spending time with a friend when Richard Evonitz threatened her at gunpoint, forcing her to get into a plastic container in the back of his car. For 18 hours, Evonitz held her captive in his apartment, where he sexually assaulted her. Despite the horrifying circumstances, Kara remained focused on getting away.
As she later explained in the 2021 documentary Escaping Captivity: The Kara Robinson Story , Kara continued to tell herself, “Gather information, wait for him to be complacent, escape.” As soon as he fell asleep, she freed herself and ran. “ Fear barely even kicked in ... the human will to survive and the survival mechanism really just can’t be underestimated,” she told PEOPLE in February 2022.
Kara didn’t just escape, though. With the information she had gathered about her captor, the teenager was able to lead police back to Evonitz’s apartment, where they uncovered evidence that linked him to three additional abductions of teenage girls in Virginia. Tragically, those cases all ended in murder.
Kara’s story of survival has inspired multiple TV specials and documentaries. In 2026, she appeared in the Investigation Discovery docuseries The Serial Killer Connection , which follows her and Evonitz’s ex-wife, Bonnie Lou Gower , as they team up to dig deeper into his crimes. The series premiered on Oct. 7.
Here’s what to know about where Kara Robinson is now.
During the early afternoon hours of June 24, 2002, 15-year-old Kara was watering plants and bushes in the front yard of her friend’s house in West Columbia, S.C., when a Pontiac Trans-Am pulled into the driveway.
A man wearing jeans, a button-down shirt and a baseball cap exited the car and approached Kara, offering her some “pamphlets.”
“He said, ‘Are your parents home?’ and I said, ‘Well, this isn’t my house. This is my friend’s house,’ ” Kara told PEOPLE in February 2022. “And he said, ‘Okay, well, what about her parents, are her parents home?’ And I said, ‘No, her mom’s not home right now.’ ”
The man, later identified as 38-year-old Evonitz, then walked toward Kara and revealed a gun. He pressed it to her neck and forced her into a large storage bin that was in the back seat of his car.
Evonitz drove Kara to his apartment, stopping along the way to restrain her with handcuffs and place a gag in her mouth. But during their journey, Kara paid close attention to the details — including how many turns he took, the serial number on the plastic container and what radio station he listened to — in the hopes it could save her life.
AP Photo/Robert A. Martin/The Free Lance-Star
Evonitz held Kara hostage in his cluttered apartment for 18 hours. According to The Washington Post , Evonitz lived there with his second wife, who was visiting Walt Disney World at the time of the kidnapping.
During her captivity, Evonitz terrorized Kara, repeatedly sexually assaulting her and restraining her to a bed. After hours of torture, she was able to free one of her hands from a pair of handcuffs with her teeth and unclip a leather leg restraint at the foot of the bed while Evonitz slept.
Kara tiptoed to the front door, unbolted two locks and then took off for the parking lot, where she encountered two men who took her to the police station.
After Kara made it to the police station, she was able to lead officers back to Evonitz’s apartment, thanks to the observations she made while in captivity. However, by the time police arrived, he was gone.
On June 27, 2002, after two days on the run, police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Fla. A high-speed police chase ensued and ended with Evonitz running over spike strips on the highway. As police and a police dog closed in, Evonitz shot and killed himself.
AP Photo/The Free Lance-Star, Reza A. Marvashti
In Evonitz’s apartment, authorities found evidence that linked the Navy veteran to the unsolved murders of three girls: Sofia Silva and sisters Kati and Kristin Lisk.
The girls, who ranged in age from 12 to 16, all went missing in the mid-1990s from Spotsylvania County, Va. Evonitz kept newspaper clippings about their abductions in a locker in his apartment, and authorities later found both fingerprint and DNA evidence connecting him to the crimes, The Washington Post reported.
“It was one of the most important things that’s ever happened to me,” Kara told PEOPLE in February 2022 about helping solve the Spotsylvania murders. “Because it brought home the importance of what I did.”
She continued, “I felt like, ‘Wow, I’m actually giving these families something that they never would’ve gotten without me.’ Just the closure of knowing that the person responsible for their daughters’ death is no longer here.”
Additionally, while running from the police, Evonitz reportedly called his sister and confessed to killing more than three people and committing “more crimes than he can remember,” according to the Richland County Sheriff’s Department, per The Washington Post . Despite this claim, police have not publicly linked Evonitz to any additional murders or kidnappings.
Though his family members stated that Evonitz idolized serial killer Ted Bundy , Evonitz’s first wife, Gower, claimed in a series of TikToks that she had no indication her former husband was a serial killer. Gower, who married Evonitz when she was 17, said that she even asked the FBI how there were no warning signs during their more than eight-year marriage.
“Their answer to me was that serial killers are usually sociopaths, and sociopaths are really good at compartmentalizing,” Gower said in a TikTok video . “So, it’s really easy for them to hide things.”
She continued, “In fact, if I had seen signs, then he wouldn’t have been a sociopath, and he probably wouldn’t have gotten away with the crimes the way that he did.”
Kara was inspired to pursue a career in law enforcement after surviving her abduction.
In high school, she worked part-time over the summers doing administrative work for the sheriff’s department. After graduating from the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy, Kara went on to work as a school resource officer and an investigator of child abuse and sexual assault cases, according to her website .
After becoming a mother (Kara shares two sons and a daughter with her husband), she left her work in law enforcement and started telling her story to help other survivors. In 2019, she participated in a 90-minute Lifetime special, Smart Justice: The Jayme Closs Case , with five other survivors to lend support to Jayme Closs, a Wisconsin teen who escaped her captor that same year.
Following the special, Kara then worked with kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart to make a documentary about her own ordeal for Oxygen. The documentary, called Escaping Captivity: The Kara Robinson Story , was released in 2021. A Hulu film about Kara’s abduction and escape, titled The Girl Who Escaped and starring Katie Douglas as Kara, debuted in 2023.
Kara is also active on Instagram , and hosted a podcast, Survivor’s Guide to True Crime , with Kimberly Corban, who survived a sexual assault in 2006, per her website .
“I always knew that what happened to me was something that happened so that I could help other people,” Kara told PEOPLE in February 2022. “I knew that if I wanted to help people, I needed to tell my story in a way that I was proud of.”
In 2026, Kara hosted the first season of Hulu’s true crime series Somebody Knows Something . She also appeared in the Investigation Discovery docuseries The Serial Killer Connection.
If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org .
Source: Lifestyle
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