Original subtitles

New evidence links Richard Marc Ivanit to

the murders of three teenage girls.

[newscaster] Authorities believe he may have continued

offending undetected, if not for the escape of

a 15-year-old girl.

Hey! Come on in.

[Bonnie] It's very unusual that the survivor of

a serial killer would form a relationship

with his ex-wife.

I'm the one person who knew him the most intimately.

I had wondered over the years

whether he was responsible for other crimes.

One potential case stood out.

[newscaster] The kidnapping and murder of Sarah Cherry.

OK, I want to back up here for just a minute.

A lot of you guys have been asking whether or not I knew

about his conviction in 1987 prior to us getting together.

What Marc had told me was...

he was driving around.

And he had been drinking, and he was blacked out,

and somehow took his clothes off.

And some girls had seen him.

This landed him arrested and in a rehabilitation center.

By the next year, when we were starting to see one another,

he had embraced sobriety.

Had I heard the truth about his conviction, I definitely

would have made a different decision about whether I wanted

to be with this person.

I have here a report from Marc's indecent exposure arrest.

I understand you never got the full story.

And what that really was is that Marc not only exposed

himself, but was masturbating in front of a 15-year-old

and her 3-year-old sister.

- [Bonnie] Jesus. - [Kara] Yeah.

When he was arrested, he stated,

he, Marc, has a problem with masturbating in front of girls.

When he feels the urge, he drives around looking for

a girl, someone who is short in height and has brunette hair.

So we see from 1987, he is laying this groundwork

for a preference.

He is admitting, essentially stalking

girls that look a certain way...

to perpetrate his crimes.

Wow, that's mind-blowing.

I mean, I fit the description of what he was looking for.

Short in height and has brunette hair.

- That's you. - Yeah.

[Kara] It's insane.

[theme music playing]

As long as you both shall live.

[Kara] We know that

Richard Marc Evonitz came to this area about a month

before Sarah Cherry disappeared and was murdered.

Bonnie was not here yet. She was not living with him.

He would have been here by himself.

And so he had the opportunity to go out and commit crimes.

[newscaster] This case remains one of the most high-profile criminal

cases in Maine, the kidnapping and murder of

12-year-old Sarah Cherry.

[Kara] We are about an hour outside of Portland, Maine,

and I've met local private investigator Kevin Cady,

who knows a lot about this case.

Let's think about if Marc Evonitz was responsible

for the abduction and the murder of Sarah Cherry.

The age range matches Marc's MO, and she was taken

in the middle of the day without anyone seeing

or hearing anything.

This reminds me of Sofia.

It reminds me of Kati and Kristin.

And it reminds me of me.

So this is the house where Sarah was?

That's the Henkel residence.

That's where she was babysitting

on that day, starting at noontime.

Mrs. Henkel, when she came home at three, she pulled

into the driveway.

She saw these two pieces of paper and stopped and picked

them up.

The papers identified a person named Dennis Dechaine

Mrs. Henkel didn't know.

[Kara] When Mrs. Henkel saw that Sarah wasn't there,

she called 911.

[Cady] And they immediately started to look for Dennis Dechaine.

[news reporter] A man has been arrested for the murder of 12-year-old

Sarah Cherry.

[reporter] Police say Dennis Dechaine was seen leaving the woods around

eight o'clock on July 6th, saying he was lost.

Neighbors who stopped to help flagged down police,

and Dechaine told officers he'd lost his truck.

[news reporter] Her body was discovered two days later

near his abandoned pickup.

I'm John Nale, and I'm a Maine attorney at law.

I think Dennis Dechaine was wrongfully convicted back in

1989 of the murder of a young girl.

So this is where Dennis would have parked his truck that day,

looking for a place to go into the woods

to get high,

and he got so high that he wandered and then

passed out.

The victim's body was found here,

500 feet deep into this heavily wooded area.

She had been sexually assaulted and stabbed a number of times.

A real killer,

he would have tied her hands in front of her.

The only defense that the victim would have had

at that time would have been to dig the assailant.

In the autopsy report,

there was blood under all 10 fingernails.

Whoever killed that poor girl that night

left there with ten dig marks in their face, in their arms,

or in their hands.

Dennis Dechaine left the woods that night looking like that.

The blood from under the fingernails showed that it

was type A blood.

Dennis is type O.

When we were finally able to get DNA testing done,

the results did show another unknown male.

We do know now that at the time, there was

a serial killer on the loose and in the area, Marc Evonitz.

The way this murder took place is very similar to

his modus operandi.

So Kara, this is the spot where she was found.

Wow.

There's a small stream that was 40 feet away.

The seclusion and the water are known to be Marc's MO.

Right.

[Cady] And also, the way she was found certainly fits.

There was binding of the hands.

It's a midshipman's knot, which is a nautical knot that

maritime people use. - OK.

- And of course, Marc Evonitz-- Navy. - Would've known that.

[Cady] She was found with ligature strangulation on the throat.

Also, she was partially redressed, but what was missing

was her panties.

And the panties were never found.

[Kara] And we know that that was the case with at least one of

his other victims. - [Cady] Yes.

A lot of these things are lining up for me.

[Cady] And it's known that Marc would also travel back and forth to

Brunswick Naval Air Station,

which is literally 15 miles away from us.

[Kara] So the availability of him being in this area and having

committed the crime could have been possible

in this situation. - [Cady] Yeah, I agree.

[Kara] If Marc came across the truck of Dennis, he could have taken

the paperwork and planted it in the driveway

to make law enforcement look at the owner of that truck.

It's the perfect scenario to frame someone.

But to this day, Dennis Dechaine

is in jail for the murder of Sarah Cherry.

So when you lived up here, you were 17?

I had just turned 17 in July.

And we got married in August.

He came up to Maine before me,

and my parents drove me up here in October.

It was your first time living on your own, right?

Yeah, first time doing anything on my own.

When I first moved here, he had to train me to

be his wife.

He expected that I would cook and clean and iron his shirts.

"This is what you're going to be doing now.

- This is what I expect of you." - [Kara] Wow.

Very controlling.

- Right? - Yeah.

[Kara] When I look at a young Bonnie marrying Marc so quickly

and moving to Maine, I see someone who was impressionable

as we all are at that age.

We're talking about a gigantic power dynamic.

[Bonnie] After the first month,

everything sort of shifted.

One day, I was looking through the closet,

and I came across a video.

It was Alyssa Milano's "Teen Steam."

She was a year younger than me.

- ...you'll feel the steam rising, [indistinct]. - [Bonnie] I didn't understand

why he had a teenage workout video.

You know, he just played it off like, "Oh, I just think she's

cute, you know, it doesn't mean anything."

But it made me feel like I wasn't enough.

Marriage was definitely not what I thought it would be.

I had this fantasy about what married life meant,

but he started telling me I was fat and that I needed to join

Weight Watchers.

If I cheated on my diet, he would tell me, "You're going

"to wind up being fat like your mother.

You need to get back on your program."

I was like 152 pounds.

The goal weight was 120 pounds, because that's the weight of

the models in his Playboy magazines.

That was like the beginning of him sort of chipping away

at my confidence.

Looking back, there were definitely situations that were

a little strange.

One day, I walked into our bedroom.

Marc was standing in front of the dresser,

wearing my lingerie.

He immediately blew it off. "It doesn't mean anything.

I was just being silly."

I didn't really have a lot of experience.

He's telling me it's nothing, so I trusted that it

was nothing.

From the beginning, he made it clear we weren't supposed to

discuss our problems with anybody but each other.

And so I wasn't to talk to other people.

It's very helpful to have this full picture of your life here

so that we can pick up these undercurrents of control

that he's starting to weave into your relationship that becomes

so important in his criminal life.

You weren't here very long.

I was only here four months, from October to February.

Marc's ship was being decommissioned in Charleston,

South Carolina.

He was no longer going to be stationed in Maine.

So I got on a plane and I flew down to South Carolina

and waited for him to come down with his ship.

[Kara] We know that there was this time frame

when Marc's time was unaccounted for.

And there is a potential case

we are thinking Marc may have been involved with.

[news anchor] Brutally murdered, stabbed multiple times.

[news anchor #2] Her body dumped into the water.

The murder of Jessica Briggs.

[news reporter] This is Portland police video from May 24th, 1989,

the day the body of 16-year-old Jessica Briggs was found.

[reporter #2] Police are still trying to piece together what happened on

the waterfront Tuesday night.

[Kara] So this is where you worked in the 80s?

Yes, this place was completely different then.

The other side of this building was contracted to the U.S. Navy.

So we had Navy ships in here, and it was very seedy down

at this end.

There was prostitution and a lot of bad stuff going on.

Tell me about what happened here on May 23rd, 1989.

[Cady] It was 11 o'clock at night.

Navy personnel were coming off shift.

These workers witnessed Jessica Briggs heading down

the pier this way with a man.

[Kara] Jessica Briggs was a runaway.

And in order for her to get by, she turned to sex work.

[Cady] The next morning, there was a security guard

doing the patrols around here.

And I looked down and I saw a pool of blood.

[Cady] And witnessed two large pools of blood.

So he called the police.

They called a dive team in and found Jessica in the bottom

of the bay here.

She'd been murdered,

throat slashed, and suffered a brutal death.

Anthony Sanborn Jr. was arrested for this.

Jessica Briggs was his former girlfriend.

The key eyewitness, a 13-year-old girl,

said she watched the murder happen.

Actually, it involved, she said, four people,

but Sanborn's the only one that gets arrested for it.

When the blood was tested, her blood was obviously there,

but there was also blood of someone else.

- And, uh... - [Cady] Whose blood was it?

We don't know.

The blood wasn't Sanborn's, but he was convicted anyway.

It's never been identified whose blood that was.

So as an investigator, I say, if it's not hers, it's going to

belong to the killers.

In 2016, the case was reopened, so I was hired to review

this homicide.

I did a real deep dive into the evidence.

I determined that the key eyewitness was

legally blind.

And when I interviewed her, she said, "Oh my God,

you've got to get him out." Ultimately, we did get him

released from prison.

And what's of extreme interest is Marc Evonitz's ship was

on that side of the Maine State Pier

from 1988 to 1989.

So we have the fact that Marc worked here, and she was found

in the water, which is a common element we see in

his known crime. - Right, mm-hmm.

[Kara] A young girl, dark hair.

She actually looked a lot like Bonnie.

[Cady] Yeah, it's amazing.

[Kara] I don't really believe in coincidences.

I think that when there is a coincidence,

the due diligence is that we look a little bit deeper.

According to naval records, Marc's ship left Maine before

the homicide of Jessica Briggs. And that's a perfect alibi.

We found some information that leads us to believe that maybe

he did come back to the area. - Yep.

Fairly recently, it came to my attention from an informant

that he was here in May of 1989 when this murder happened.

- So May 24, 89. - Wow.

Due to current legal proceedings, Kevin can't really

give any more information about the tip-off, but it's important

because it does let us know that Marc did have

an opportunity to commit these crimes.

On the way to the Pier, I actually spoke to one of

Marc's previous shipmates.

This person wanted to remain anonymous, but he had a lot

to share about his experiences with Marc.

Most namely, he said that he and Marc would go out

drinking, they would go to bars, Marc was always picking

fights, and he had witnessed Marc hiring sex workers before.

The shipmate remembered one night they had picked up

some girls together,

but at one point,

Marc became aggressive towards them.

The shipmate said that he immediately recognized

the girls were uncomfortable, and he took them home.

This information is critical.

Not only does it establish that Marc had a history of

interacting with sex workers, but it lets us know that

we cannot rule out sex workers as possible victims.

In June of 1989, Marc was transferred to San Diego

by the Navy.

Police in San Diego are investigating the deaths of

about 40 young women.

[newscaster] Most of them strangled, all of them dumped.

During the time Marc and Bonnie lived in San Diego

there were sex workers being murdered.

[reporter] Another prostitute has been found murdered.

The situation is becoming more and more dangerous.

This is chilling.

We got to San Diego in June of 1989,

right before I turned 18.

We lived in Spring Valley.

I remember feeling there was so much crime, and they even

thought that there might be two serial killers in our area

at the time.

[news anchor] At least 45 women in the San Diego area

have been murdered.

Many of them were prostitutes.

The cases remain unsolved.

Between 1985 and 1990, there were up to 45 murders.

And initially, law enforcement

thought there must be a serial killer.

They have since determined that it's more likely multiple

people that have been operating.

While there have been some convictions in some of those

cases, there are still

outstanding cases that are unsolved.

This includes two victims who were murdered during

the time frame that Marc and Bonnie were here.

[news reporter] The remains of 24 young women and girls have been found in

remote sites around the city.

The majority of the victims were last seen on

El Cajon Boulevard.

One thing we know about Marc from his known victims is that

he's a road stalker.

Here's a map of the abduction site of the victims.

What sticks out to me is El Cajon Boulevard.

Looks about halfway between the two apartments that Bonnie

and Marc lived in during that time frame of 89 to 90.

[news anchor] Women of San Diego are haunted by these gruesome murders.

[newscaster] Many more women are missing and feared dead.

[Bonnie] Probably about a year into living in San Diego,

I started having anxiety attacks.

The city of San Diego chalked up a record today that no one

there is very proud of the number of killings

in that city this year.

[reporter] 24 young women and girls have been found.

[Bonnie] Marc would watch the news all the time, and it seemed like

every time we turned on the news, there was murders,

missing girls. - [news reporter] Many of them prostitutes.

[Bonnie] I remember feeling so scared to be home alone that I would

shower with the gun on the back of the toilet seat just in case

somebody broke into the house.

[Kara] This is a paper that Marc wrote for a psychology class when

he was attending a local college here in San Diego.

Tell me about this.

I don't think I ever saw this.

It's about panic disorder with agoraphobia.

And this person's name is Beth L.,

the same initials as me,

with the L. - [Kara] Right.

The person that he describes in here has all the elements

of what I was going through,

avoiding showering alone,

fear of victimization,

having panic attacks while watching

television news reports.

I was afraid of leaving the house, and I really should

have been afraid of being home.

[reporter] Homicide detectives believe a 22-year-old woman is

the latest victim in a series of killings across the city.

[Kara] I have an article here talking

about the victims who were murdered

when Marc and Bonnie were here.

The first thing that I noticed

is that this victim's hands were tied with yellow rope.

And the bodies were dumped in deserted areas outside

of the city.

It is very reminiscent of things that we've looked at

from some of these other cases

and absolutely opens Marc up in terms of MO.

[Bonnie] When we lived in San Diego,

Marc got a Polaroid camera.

He wanted to take nude photographs of me.

He suddenly hit a really high sex drive, always groping at me

or trying to get me to have sex with him.

One time, he took me to this adult bookstore.

I had never been anywhere like that before.

Marc came across a pair of fur-lined handcuffs

and kind of looked at me like, "Ooh, I'd like to use these

on you," and

I laughed it off and kept walking through the store.

I looked back and he had picked them up and he decided he was

gonna buy that along with some other toys.

Later that night, he used the handcuffs to tie me

to the bed.

And I got really, like, claustrophobic

about it and super anxious.

And I asked him to untie me, and he did.

So I thought that was that.

I was like, "OK, I didn't like it.

This isn't something that we're going to do."

But then he worked on convincing me that there's

nothing that's out-of-bounds in a marriage.

He just says, "No, we should just try it again.

"Just try it one more time and you'll feel better

this time."

But...

it wasn't better, and I felt even more anxious about it.

He stopped, but he would always bring it up and made it out

that something was wrong with me because I wasn't into that.

I always felt this pressure.

He was never satisfied with

the amount of sex that we were having.

Nothing was ever enough.

The other thing that I have here from the investigation

here in San Diego is poems that Marc wrote.

This poem is called "Standing on the Pier,

San Diego at Night."

Is definitely his handwriting.

[Kara] Right.

I mean, I didn't know he wrote poetry.

[Kara] The thing that sticks out to me is the middle of this page.

[Bonnie speaking]

A final gasp...

Jesus.

- That's dark. - [Bonnie] Yeah.

This almost makes me think that Marc was confessing

to something? - Mm-hmm.

And just seeing if someone was smart enough to catch him.

[Bonnie] When we were in San Diego,

he really wanted to become an officer, but he had this big

roadblock that wasn't really allowing him to move up.

At the time, I didn't really understand the reasons why.

Now I understand that it was because of his conviction.

The Navy had placed restrictions on him as far as

how well he could advance.

And it just created so much tension.

Marc started having a lot of mood switches, and one day

he came home. He was really frantic.

He said, "If I asked you to fly out of the country with me,

would you do it?" And I was like,

"What? What do you mean?

What the hell? Why would you ask me that?"

He's like, "Just answer the question, would you go

with me if I needed to get out of the country?"

And I says, "Well, I guess so."

As soon as I said that, he just like--

[sighs]

He breathed a big sigh of relief and he's just like,

"Oh, OK."

Looking back at that, that seems kind of crazy.

[Kara] He asks her these questions with an urgency of, "We've got

to get out of here."

It makes me wonder, was he running?

Was he running to get away from what he did here?

Not long after that, he decided to get out

of the Navy and move to Virginia.

[Kara] So we're here in Virginia.

What year did you move here?

We moved here in November of 1992.

We had been married a little over four years at that time.

I was only 21.

Once we got into Virginia, Marc was out of work for about

six months.

He was able to collect unemployment, and I was able to

get a job as a hairstylist.

We had about $25 a week left over for groceries.

And he fell into a depression,

and his personality was different.

[Kara] So one thing that we know at this point is that stalking was

very critical to Marc's criminal career.

Was there anything about that time that sticks out

to you now?

Yeah, there was a situation when I was putting away

his laundry where

I found a Polaroid picture.

You could tell that it was taken from

inside the apartment.

And it was of a girl who lived upstairs.

And she was sunbathing.

She was 17, a teenager. And I questioned him about it.

And he said he had masturbated to the picture, which was,

you know, obviously gross.

By that point, he was pretty good at gaslighting me,

and he just kind of blew it off and said, "You know, I was

"bored, and, you know, she's cute, and, you know,

it doesn't mean anything." - Yeah.

And it was me that was blowing things out of proportion.

I was dealing with his unemployment and his

depression, but he eventually did get a job.

He wasn't happy with the job, but it did ease things

financially for us.

We started looking for houses, and when we walked into this

particular floor plan, Marc was so excited because he just

loved how big the house was.

It was further out of our budget, and I didn't really

think we needed it at the time.

But then, of course, he was saying that we were

going to start a family.

All I ever wanted was to have kids.

But it was around that time, too, that I came across stashes

of pornography, boxes full of videos.

He had an obsession with girls shaving each other and bondage.

At the time, I thought, "It's really weird."

But I remember him just convincing me that this wasn't

something to be concerned about.

All men have pornography of some sort.

We brushed it all under the rug.

I didn't know anything about what was going on in reality.

Yeah.

[news reporter] The frantic search

for 16-year-old Sofia Silva continues,

the Spotsylvania teen who went missing last week.

[Kara] Virginia is the place where

Marc establishes himself as a serial killer.

[news reporter] Right now, a killer is at large in the community

of Spotsylvania, Virginia.

They've already kidnapped and murdered 16-year-old

Sofia Silva and sisters 15-year-old Kristin

and 12-year-old Kati Lisk.

This is the bedrock of the entire investigation.

[Kara] One of the things that I've seen in the evidence here

in Spotsylvania was dozens of handwritten notes in which Marc

had clearly stalked young women.

He specifically has notes on these

teenagers.

We're talking 10, 11, 12, 13.

It tells me that he was up and down roads.

He was paying attention to where there could be

possible victims.

This one says, "Appears alone, 3:30 to 4 PM, brunette,

12 or 13, thin, pretty, old corner farmhouse."

It has an address. It has how to get there.

It's literally on the side of a highway.

So this is it.

I mean, this is very clearly the house that's described

in this note.

And there was a young woman. She lived in this house, and...

- And he was stalking her. - Right.

And I think he was thinking he could possibly take her from

a place that's just like right there off of the main road.

[Kara] Right.

I remember when I lived here, he would sometimes,

especially early on, take me on drives.

- [Kara] Oh. - He liked to go just drive the country roads.

[Kara] Right, like he could have enjoyed driving on the country

roads, but then he could have-- - [Bonnie] Also been casing it out.

[Kara] Right, right.

[Kara] This other note actually puts him in the Culpeper area.

What's interesting about Culpeper is that this is

an area that was tied closely to the Route 29 stalker.

[newscaster] The Route 29 stalker.

Route 29 stalker.

Route 29 stalker.

[Kara] The route 29 stalker was active between

January and March of 1996.

In that time frame, up to 30 women came forward and had some

type of experience with someone that they described as male,

approximately 30s to 40s,

average height, 5'10 to 6 feet tall, brown hair.

This person attempted to lure these women

into his pickup truck.

Special attention to anyone who lived in the Spotsylvania,

Fredericksburg, Virginia, or surrounding areas

in the mid to late 90s. I am looking for open cases.

The level of involvement that my social media posts generated

was just overwhelming.

Tell me about your experience here in this area.

At the time of my experience, I was 19 years old, and I was

a student at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

I was traveling 29 every single day, five days a week.

February of 96, I got on 29 South, and soon after,

my car started having some mechanical issues.

Right here.

- That's where I parked. - [Kara] Yeah, wow!

I didn't even really have time to devise a plan,

and a black pickup truck pulled up right next to me.

- [Kara] Next to you? - [Mandy] Yeah.

And so I look over, and a man motioned me to roll

down my window.

And he said, "Hey, do you need a ride?"

- [person] Do you need a ride? - [Kara] Yeah.

I'd never taken a ride with a stranger, but I did get in.

- He said, "Where can I take you?" - Mm-hmm.

And I said, "Well,

this gas station right up here would be great."

He said, "No, no, I'll take you home."

I began to get nervous.

I'm thinking, "Oh gosh, this is really bad idea, Mandy."

He said, "A young girl like you shouldn't be taking rides

with strangers." - [person] Shouldn't be taking rides with strangers.

And what did you think when he said that?

- I thought, "I'm in trouble." - [Kara] Oh, no.

[Mandy] I was scared.

I just was praying, "Please take me to my house.

Please take me to my house."

He pulled into the driveway and dropped me off.

I didn't turn around and look.

I wanted to get in the house

as soon as I could and lock the door.

Two or three weeks later, my dad says,

"Look at this paper."

A woman had disappeared on Route 29.

She was last seen talking to a man in a small dark pickup.

My dad, he says, "What was the type of vehicle that

you rode in just a couple weeks ago?"

And I said, "It was a small black truck," and he says,

"We need to call the police." - Wow!

I thought, "Oh my God, oh my God."

[newscaster] A young woman was abducted while on Route 29.

[news reporter] Witnesses say they saw her climb into a dark

pickup truck.

[Kara] All of the Route 29 incidences describe a dark in color truck.

Marc didn't own a dark in color truck.

At the time, Marc had a friend that lived up the street with

a dark colored pickup truck.

Marc was using his pickup truck.

He was putting a lot of miles on it, and he would take it out

on Route 29.

I've gotten information in the last couple of weeks that

could blow other cases wide open.

This is the person that was behind the car.

Yeahthat's definitely the person.

- [person] That's definitely him. - Yeah, that's him.

- [Kara] No doubt? - No doubt.

It almost makes him look human, but he's a monster.

[Kara] If the information that I've received is correct...

it's insane.

All of these notes just tell me he's hunting.

We didn't have any answers. We didn't have a clue.

Hindsight being 20/20, we assume he'd had

the Silver girl right next door.

I hate thinking about

all of the things that happened in this house.