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For years, Bonnie Lou Gower shared a bed with a man she thought she knew better than anyone. She had no idea the man sleeping beside her was capable of murder.
Her husband, Richard “Marc” Evonitz, was leading a double life, one that would ultimately expose him as a serial killer who preyed on young girls.
His victims included a 16-year-old who lost her life while Evonitz was still married to Gower.
SERIAL KILLER SURVIVOR WHO ESCAPED 18-HOUR CAPTIVITY REVEALS INSTINCT SHE WISHES SHE NEVER IGNORED
Decades after Evonitz’s crimes came to light, Gower is revisiting the warning signs she didn’t recognize — alongside the young woman who survived him.
In Investigation Discovery’s true crime docuseries “The Serial Killer Connection,” Gower meets with Kara Robinson Chamberlain, who endured 18 hours of captivity and torture before escaping Evonitz, as they investigate whether he may be linked to other unsolved cases.
For Gower, one question has followed her since learning the truth about the man she married.
“When I initially learned about [his crimes] and I told people, honestly their first response is, ‘Well, obviously you knew. How could you not have known?’” Gower told Fox News Digital.
“That was my very first question to the FBI. ‘How could I not know this? How could I not know I was sleeping next to somebody for eight and a half years that was doing this?’ And of course, they assured me that there’s no way I could have known.”
Looking back, Gower admitted there were things she didn’t question at the time.
Whenever she left town to visit family, Evonitz insisted on staying behind, claiming he had to work. Only later did Gower discover that he had actually taken time off while she was away.
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“One of the reasons he never came with me was because he said he was working,” said Gower.
“And then, I come to find out, he had actually taken off work on the days that I was out of town. But at the time, I wasn’t at all concerned about leaving him behind. I was just going and visiting my family. It definitely makes you look at everybody and everything now, whether you can trust someone’s words or actions.”
Gower met Evonitz, who was eight years her senior, in South Carolina. He was the older brother of one of her friends and would come home whenever he was on leave from the U.S. Navy. She quickly developed a crush on him as she got to know him and, at age 16, Evonitz asked her out on a date.
They married in August 1988 when she was 17 and he was 25.
“You think you know who you are when you’re 17, but I really don’t think I did,” said Gower. “I don’t think I had a handle on that. And I was relatively sheltered. I was very naïve, very trusting, taking everything at face value. I think he knew that.”
During the marriage, there were moments when Gower suspected Evonitz was being unfaithful. Whenever she questioned him, Evonitz told her it was all in her head. She believed him. But as the relationship progressed, Evonitz began isolating her from friends and family as they moved around the country, from Maine to San Diego to Virginia.
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“No one ever thinks that their significant other is going to be a serial killer,” Chamberlain told Fox News Digital. “I think worst case, and this is something that she expressed to me, he was having an affair. No one ever thinks your spouse is out murdering someone.”
“He kept that part of himself very tightly controlled and didn’t show it to the people he was closest to.”
The marriage began to unravel after Evonitz left the Navy. Gower said financial pressures fueled growing tensions between the couple, while Evonitz became prone to mood swings and what she described as “rages.” He also frequently criticized her weight. Behind closed doors, Gower was also uncomfortable with his interest in bondage, according to the docuseries.
Even as the marriage reached its breaking point, Gower said she still didn’t see Evonitz as someone capable of hurting her. Walking away, she said, was a decision that came after years of mounting unhappiness.
When Gower made the decision to leave the marriage, Gower said her fear was for him, not herself.
“I was concerned for his safety when he said he was going to take the gun and kill himself,” Gower recalled. “I never feared for my own life.”
Even after she finally walked away, Gower said Evonitz had left her questioning whether she had any justification for doing so.
“When I left, I felt like I was leaving for no real good reason,” she said. “[But] I wasn’t happy.”
According to Gower’s TikTok, she and Evonitz were married from August 1988 until January 1997. Multiple reports indicate that their divorce was finalized in 1998. Years later, Gower would learn just how much she hadn’t known about the man she left behind.
On June 24, 2002, 15-year-old Chamberlain was at a friend’s home in South Carolina when Evonitz pulled into the driveway. 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.
At Evonitz’s apartment, Chamberlain was repeatedly sexually assaulted. He restrained her to a bed. After hours of torture, Chamberlain managed to free one of her hands from a pair of handcuffs with her teeth, unclip a leather leg restraint and quietly bolt out the door as Evonitz slept. As she took off, Chamberlain encountered two men who took her to a police station.
Chamberlain led officers back to her captor’s apartment. But when investigators arrived, Evonitz had escaped. Police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Florida, but as they closed in on him, Evonitz died by suicide. He was 38.
Once investigators began digging into Evonitz’s past, Chamberlain’s abduction proved to be only part of the story. Evidence recovered from Evonitz’s South Carolina apartment, former Virginia residence and vehicle linked him to three unsolved murders.
On Sept. 9, 1996, Evonitz abducted 16-year-old Sofia Silva from the front steps of her home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, where he and Gower had been living. Her body was discovered about five weeks later in neighboring King George County.
Then, on May 1, 1997, sisters Kristin “Kristi” Lisk, 15, and Kathryn “Kati” Lisk, 12, vanished after returning home from school. Both girls had been sexually assaulted and strangled. Their bodies were discovered five days later in the South Anna River.
Notes discovered by investigators indicated that Evonitz already had his eye on other potential victims, Fox News Digital previously reported.
It would be months after Chamberlain’s abduction that Gower learned of her ex-husband’s other victims.
“It felt like it wasn’t real at all,” Gower admitted. “It felt like this was something that happens in the movies. This wasn’t real life. It was very hard to believe that he could hurt anybody. He had never hit me or physically abused me.”
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Now, Gower and Chamberlain are looking to Evonitz’s past for answers about whether there could be other victims.
Gower has helped piece together a timeline of Evonitz’s movements during their marriage, providing investigators with dates, locations and old calendars as potential cold cases are examined.
“Of course, he wasn’t always where I thought he was,” said Gower.
Chamberlain, meanwhile, has been investigating whether Evonitz could be responsible for other unsolved crimes, examining cases dating back to the 1980s and tracing his movements during his years in the Navy and in the decades before her own abduction.
“I genuinely think that there is a level of escalation that we see between an indecent exposure [incident] and then three homicides in approximately nine months and then a break before me that is unexplainable to me,” she said.
“Everything’s possible and nothing has been confirmed,” Chamberlain stressed. “It’s a frustrating place to be, but I will not stop searching.”
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One potential key to finding answers is DNA.
While investigating cases for the docuseries, Chamberlain said she learned that Evonitz’s DNA profile was not in CODIS, the FBI’s national DNA database. However, she said authorities in Spotsylvania County still have a blood sample that can be provided to law enforcement agencies seeking to compare his DNA with evidence from other cases.
Chamberlain said she hopes Evonitz’s DNA can ultimately be entered into CODIS, allowing for broader comparisons with evidence from unsolved crimes.
“I genuinely believe that there’s no way he only murdered three girls and kidnapped me,” she said. “I don’t think that there’s a world in which that’s true.”
While making the docuseries, Gower learned that Evonitz had kept a photograph of her when she was just 11 years old — years before they began dating — hidden behind another framed picture of her. Gower said it was not a photograph she had taken with her when she left home and that she never knew Evonitz possessed it.
“It’s disturbing enough that he would have 11-year-old me in a picture behind something,” she said.
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Decades after learning the truth about the man she married, Gower said she is still trying to make sense of it.
“I don’t think you ever make sense of it,” she said. “There’s no tidy little box to put it in to make it make sense.”
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“I’m still grappling with it. I’m still processing.”