Serial Killer Survivor Reveals Warning Before 18-Hour Captivity

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Kara Robinson Chamberlain was only 15 when she was kidnapped by a serial killer. More than two decades later, the survivor and victim advocate is using her experience to help families still searching for answers in long-unsolved cases.

Chamberlain hosts “Somebody Knows Something,” a true-crime series from ABC News Studios and Freeform that reexamines cold cases involving disappearances and killings that have remained mysteries for years. In each episode, she works with victims’ families to bring renewed attention to a case, with the hope that fresh exposure may uncover the tip investigators need.

“My purpose was to let families have the mic and show what law enforcement has done,” Chamberlain told News Outlet. “We want people to have the information they need, so they can come forward with anything that could be helpful. Several of these cases involve children, young people. I have three kids, so I found myself identifying with either the young person who is missing or the victims themselves as parents.”

“I genuinely think we can make a difference,” Chamberlain said. “If I can get answers for one of these families, it would be a life goal for me.”

For Chamberlain, the work is far more than a television project. Her commitment to victims’ families is rooted in her own harrowing survival story, which began more than 20 years ago.

On June 24, 2002, 15-year-old Chamberlain was at a friend’s home in South Carolina when Richard Evonitz, the man who would abduct her, pulled into the driveway.

“There was a moment when my captor pulled into my friend’s driveway, and I thought, ‘That’s weird,'” she recalled. “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.”

It was a split-second instinct Chamberlain would soon wish she had trusted.

The stranger approached her with pamphlets and asked if her parents were home. Then, he held a gun to her neck and threatened to shoot her if she screamed. He forced Chamberlain into a dark storage container in his car.

“I’m often asked, ‘What’s the thing that we can learn from your story, Kara, to keep ourselves or our children safe?'” she said. “And 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.”

“Essentially, what the ‘Gift of Fear’ describes is that we all have something inside of us that’s paying attention, and we’re taught to silence that intuition for the sake of being nice, not hurting someone’s feelings — lots of different reasons. And that’s something that is meant to keep us alive.”

“I hesitate to say if there’s a lesson in these cases because they’re all quite different,” she continued. “But that’s the big thing that I try to tell people — listen to your intuition and teach your children how to listen to that intuition. It is a powerful gift that everyone has, and it saves your life.”

At Evonitz’s apartment, Chamberlain was repeatedly sexually assaulted. But this time, she trusted the instinct telling her what to do: survive.

“I have to acknowledge that there was something inside of me that said, ‘Not today. Not me. I’m going to outsmart this guy,'” Chamberlain said, describing herself as “very stubborn.”

“Then, I think really the rest of it was maybe part luck,” she said. “It was also a big part of my coping mechanism … how I chose to appease my captor, which essentially is one of the lesser-known trauma responses. It’s basically playing nice to let that person put their guard down. And then, I think partially, there’s this part of him that was very arrogant, and he’d done that multiple times before. So I think all of those things played together in terms of my escape.”

For 18 hours, Chamberlain was held captive. Throughout the ordeal, she quietly memorized as many details as she could about her surroundings.

Once her captor fell asleep, she managed to free herself from her bindings and escaped. Chamberlain found people sitting in a car in a parking lot and pleaded with them to take her to police.

“Anyone who learns my story … tends to be sometimes confused by how I tell my story, which is very direct, very to the point, kind of unemotional,” she explained. “And that’s because my trauma response was to dissociate. … That enabled me to get through.”

After arriving at a police station, Chamberlain led officers back to her captor’s apartment. But when investigators arrived, Evonitz had escaped. Investigators learned Evonitz had taken Chamberlain to the apartment he shared with his wife, who was away at Walt Disney World, according to The Washington Post.

Police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Florida. As police closed in on him, Evonitz died by suicide. He was 38.

Evidence recovered from Evonitz’s apartment, former residences and vehicle linked him to the abductions and murders of three girls from Spotsylvania County, Virginia — Sofia Silva, 16; Kristin Lisk, 15; and her sister, Kati Lisk, 12. Notes discovered by investigators indicated that Evonitz already had his eye on other potential victims, News Outlet previously reported.

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Today, Chamberlain still wonders whether Evonitz had other victims.

“I genuinely believe that he was responsible for more than we know of,” she said. “But unfortunately, having taken his own life, that, at this point, is still a mystery.”

Chamberlain’s own unanswered questions have also shaped how she thinks about families who are still searching for their loved ones.

“I think the biggest misconception is that these families will be able to get closure one day,” she said of the series.

“I hear people say, ‘Let’s get these families closure’ all the time. And at the end of the day, these people are always going to have some level of trauma. If their loved ones are recovered, they’re going to look at a future where they are trying to support that person. If their loved ones are not recovered, they’re never found, or unfortunately, they’re found, and they’re deceased, then they’re looking at the rest of their lives missing someone they love.”

“That’s the biggest thing for me, closure really is a myth,” she added.

In 2010, Chamberlain completed training at the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy and began working for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department as a school resource officer, WIS-TV reported.

That experience helped Chamberlain while filming the series and speaking with families, including a grieving father.

“These people at the center of these stories are more than this story that we know,” Chamberlain explained. “They’re more than how they disappeared or what happened to them.”

“I remember thinking, ‘I have so many questions to ask this man,'” she recalled. “[I’m] looking at him and saying, ‘This is a man that’s heartbroken, who doesn’t know what happened to his daughter. He wants to talk about who she was, so I’m going to step back, and I’m going to let him do that.'”

Chamberlain said her 15-year-old self wouldn’t have been surprised by the work she does today.

“She would’ve said, ‘I knew it,'” Chamberlain said. “She would’ve known it because I think from very early on, I thought that I was able to handle what happened to me the way that I was able to handle it for a reason. Yes, I had this bad thing that happened to me, but that just became part of building who I became. That’s not who I am. It’s just a part of my story.”