A woman once married to serial killer Richard Evonitz has described the horrifying moment she discovered she was married to a madman who preyed on and murdered teenage girls.
Bonnie Lou Gower also married Evonitz, a classmate’s brother who was eight years her senior, in 1989 when she was still a teenager, she told her followers in a TikTok series detailing her sham marriage.
Their eight-year relationship was littered with shocking red flags, from Evonitz’s refusal to allow Gower to go to college to his desperate request for her to flee the country with him (a question he suspiciously asked around the time several girls from his community were found dead).
“Looking back, it seems kind of crazy, but at the time I just thought he was stressed out at work, because it was a big change for him to leave the military and move to Virginia and start a new life and try to find a job,” Gower said. In one of her videos she saidShe added that she plans to publish a book about her terrifying experience.
They had been married for several years at the time, she said, and her relationship with Evonitz did not go well from the start, but she stayed in the marriage because she believed in the promise she made.
Gower did not go into detail about instances of physical abuse, but said her serial killer husband confined her to her parents’ home, did not allow her to go to school, find a job or make new friends and even controlled her weight.
“My father put strict limits on how much I could spend on phone calls with my family,” Gower recalls.
“I had no friends, I had no one to talk to about my relationship. I didn’t really know how it was different from a normal marriage, I didn’t have anyone to talk to or know what was normal, and I think that’s probably what he would have wanted,” she said in the TikTok video.
Evonitz kidnapped and murdered 16-year-old Sophia Maren Silva in 1996 in Spotsylvania, Virginia, where the couple had moved after living in San Diego and South Carolina. Silva’s body was found in a roadside creek a month later.
Seven months later, Evonitz struck again, abducting and murdering Kristin Michelle “Kristy” Riske, 15, and Katherine Nicole “Kati” Riske, 12, from the front yard of their home, sexually assaulting them, strangling them, and dumping their bodies in a river.
Around that time, Evonitz began to have “high mood swings” and one day returned home desperately asking Gower to leave the country with him.
“I thought, ‘What do you mean? What on earth? Why are you asking me that?'” Gower recalls.
Evonitz saved face by pretending he’d had a rough day at work and wanted his wife to be there for him through the good times and the bad, an answer she was happy to accept at the time.
Gower is yet to finish her series detailing this crazy tale, but she hinted that she divorced Evonitz and then remarried him before his reign of terror ended in 2002.
A man abducted 15-year-old Kara Robinson at gunpoint in the yard of his South Carolina home and took her back to his apartment, where she escaped while the man was sleeping.
Evonitz fled when he realized police were on his tail, and called his sister before committing suicide in Florida, confessing to “committing more crimes than I can remember.”
Though it has not been confirmed, police believe Evonitz was also involved in other crimes dating back to before her marriage to Gower, as well as at least one other murder.
“It’s been a long time coming, it’s been 22 years and I’d have to say we’re doing pretty well at this point. There are definitely moments in our relationship now and over the last few years where it comes out,” Gower said.
“Let’s talk about trust issues.”
