Sofia Silva, Kristin Lisk & Kati Lisk

Case background and investigation

Sofia Silva, a 16-year-old junior at Courtland High School, was last seen on the afternoon of September 9, 1996, when she took her homework and a can of soda out to the front steps of her family's home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. According to The Washington Post, she disappeared with no sign of a struggle. Her body was found about five weeks later in water in neighboring King George County.

On May 1, 1997, Ron Lisk came home from work to find his daughters Kristin, 15, and Kati, 12, missing and Kristin's book bag lying on the front lawn, the Post reported. Kristin was a freshman at Spotsylvania High School. A large search followed, and five days later the sisters' bodies were found in the South Anna River, about 40 miles away.

A task force of local, state and federal investigators worked the cases for five years. The Post reported that it followed more than 12,000 tips, that more than 10,000 forensic examinations were carried out on hairs, fibers and tire impressions, and that DNA from the scene was compared with about 1.2 million database samples without identifying anyone.

The break came from South Carolina. On June 24, 2002, a 15-year-old girl was abducted at gunpoint from the yard of a friend's house in the Columbia area and held in an apartment, according to police accounts reported by the Post. She freed herself the next morning while her captor slept and led police to Richard Marc Evonitz, 38. A worker at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children noticed that Evonitz had lived in Spotsylvania at the time of the Silva and Lisk abductions and alerted the task force. Evonitz fled, and on June 27, 2002, he shot himself as police surrounded him in Sarasota, Florida, according to Wikipedia's summary of contemporary reports.

At a news conference on August 13, 2002, reported by The Washington Post, Spotsylvania County Sheriff Ronald Knight and members of the task force said the evidence showed that Evonitz had abducted and killed all three girls. Hair consistent with his was found on each of the bodies, and blue acrylic fibers from a pair of fur-covered handcuffs he owned were recovered from all three. Fibers from the carpet of a house where he had lived in the Fredericksburg area and from the trunk of his Ford Taurus also matched. Examiners found a palm print and fingerprints matching Kristin Lisk's inside the trunk of his car, five years after the abduction. Detectives also learned that he had taken time off work on the days of both abductions.

Evonitz was never charged or tried, because he died before he was identified as a suspect in the Virginia cases; the conclusion that he was responsible is the official finding announced by the task force. Sheriff Knight said at the time that nothing linked him specifically to any other unsolved murder, although the FBI said it was continuing to reconstruct his movements. The Free Lance-Star reported in 2004 that investigators were still examining possible connections to other crimes.