Kara Robinson Chamberlain, a South Carolina woman who was abducted at 15 and spent 18 hours with a serial killer, is now using what she learned to help other families dealing with the unanswered disappearance of someone they love.
The story, which she has told many times, starts not with a gun or a stranger’s hands grabbing her on the street, but with a car she didn’t recognize. The car pulled into her friend’s driveway in West Columbia, and immediately, something in her head told her it wasn’t right. She ignored it.
“… I thought, ‘That’s weird,’” she told Fox News. “That was my intuition. But I immediately started making excuses for why he could have been there, what could have been the reason. And so, I quieted my intuition.”
In June 2002, Chamberlain was 15, watering plants as her friend got ready for a trip to the lake. The driver was Richard Evonitz, 38, who walked up holding magazines and asked whether her parents were home. He then pressed a gun to her neck and forced her into a plastic storage bin in his car. He stopped on the way to his apartment to handcuff and gag her.
What she did next is the extraordinary part of the story. Rather than fight, she began cataloguing everything she saw, counting the turns the car made as well as the serial number stamped on the bin she was lying in. Inside his apartment, she logged the magnets on his refrigerator and the caged animals he kept, and she even offered to clean the place — a disarming gesture meant to make the man trust her.
The three instructions that ran in her head were to gather information, wait for him to get complacent, and then escape.
Chamberlain spent hours in that apartment, then attempted her escape
Despite the trauma she endured in those 18 hours, including being restrained to a bed and being repeatedly sexually assaulted by Evonitz, she never stopped collecting details. (via People) When he finally fell asleep, she worked one hand out of the handcuffs using her teeth, then unclipped the leather restraint holding her to the bed. Then she bolted to the door and ran. Two men sitting in a parking lot drove her to the police station.
Chamberlain gives some credit to luck and some to Evonitz’s arrogance. Since he’d done this before and gotten away with it, he thought he had her under control. The rest she attributes to stubbornness and to a survival response that is neither fight nor flight. It is appeasing a captor until he lowers his guard. “I have to acknowledge that there was something inside of me that said, ‘Not today. Not me. I’m going to outsmart this guy,'” she added.
What her memory was worth, and what she’s doing about it now
Everything she had memorized came out at the station, and it was enough to help the officers locate the apartment. Evonitz was gone by then, but the investigators found evidence tying him to the abductions and murders of three girls from Spotsylvania County, Virginia. They were Sofia Silva, 16, and sisters Kristin Lisk, 15, and Kati Lisk, 12. (via The Washington Post)
Police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Florida, on June 27 and he shot himself as they closed in. Chamberlain believes there were others who were never identified.
Chamberlain now heads the true-crime series Somebody Knows Something, and it revolves around similar unsolved cases. “My purpose was to let families have the mic and show what law enforcement has done,” she told Fox. “We want people to have the information they need, so they can come forward with anything that could be helpful.”
Asked if there’s a takeaway, she points to a book. “… the one thing that I tell people the most is there’s a great book called The Gift of Fear. And it’s the first time that I’ve heard someone describe the way I feel, which is to listen to your intuition.”
Chamberlain has spent the years since trying to make sure people do that.
Published: Aug 16, 2026 10:45 am