Our collective obsession with murder, madness, mayhem, and serial killers shows no signs of abating, with Netflix’s You currently the most talked-about TV series on the planet to hammer the notion home even further, but the fact a Lifetime movie is capable of becoming the number one most-watched feature on streaming highlights the desire for such content, with The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story instantly ascending to the summit.
Per FlixPatrol, the dramatization of the harrowing true story has immediately wound up as the top-viewed title among iTunes customers in the United States, and a large part of that will no doubt be due to the subgenre the story occupies, as unsavory as it sounds to think it out loud.
The real-life Kara Robinson was only 15 years old when she was abducted from her friend’s garden in South Carolina back in 2002. Kidnapper Richard Evonitz was a known sexual predator responsible for at least three murders, and he was seeking another victim when he forced Kara into his car at gunpoint.
Mercifully, though, the teenager managed to free herself from the restraints in Evonitz’s apartment after suffering an 18-hour ordeal of assault, and ended up making a successful dash for freedom while her attacker was asleep. Three days later and with the police closing in on his whereabouts, he turned a gun on himself rather than being dragged back to prison.
Lifetime might have a reputation for schlock, but that doesn’t make the events behind The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story any less powerful.