An ex-wife has shared details of her marriage to a notorious US serial killer - a man who led a secret double life as a husband and brutal killer of girls. Bonnie Lou Gower married Richard Evonitz when she was 17 and divorced when she was 25.
Five years later the FBI showed up at her door and told her he was responsible for the murders of three girls. Bonnie has now revealed details of the shock revelation in a series of TikTok video that have notched more than 30 million views.
Evonitz, say investigators, was responsible for the murders of Sofia Silva, 16; Kristin Lisk, 15, and her sister Kati Lisk, 12, in Virginia between 1996 and 1997.
He was caught when one of his captors, 15-year-old Kara Robinson Chamberlain, escaped and called the cops. Evonitz shot himself three days later after a high-speed car chase.
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Bonnie begins her first video by raising her hand and saying: "Put a finger down if you were married at 17, divorced by 25, remarried, had two children, and then five years later the FBI showed up at your door to find out that your first husband was a serial killer who murdered three girls." She explains, "There's a lot to unpack here'" and the full chilling story will be revealed in several videos.
Bonnie first met her future husband through his younger sister who she was friends with at school. Evonitz, who was in the Navy at the time, had an 'older brother' charisma and she developed a crush which he responded to when she was 16.
"He decided to ask me out," she says. Her family had reservations about the age gap - she was 17 and he was 25 - but they eventually supported it. "They could see how much we liked each other," she says.
They married in August 1988, eight years before the murder of Sofia Silva.
In her next video instalment she says the couple moved to Maine and 'everything was fine at first'. But he 'very quickly took charge and let me know what my responsibilities were supposed to be to him as a wife.'
Evonitz was working as a sonar technician in Portland but Bonnie was unemployed. She only had her high school diploma with no plans of going to college and took on the role of a traditional stay-at-home wife, reports the Mail.
"He started telling me I was fat and that I needed to join Weight Watchers,' said Bonnie. "If I cheated on my diet, he would tell me you're going to wind up being fat like your mother."
"Up until this point, I felt pretty good about things overall, but as time was going on I was regretting my choice of getting married."
In the summer of 1989, they moved to San Diego but his attitude got worse, she said in her part 3 video . He was controlling, wanting her to get a job but not approving of the few she was qualified to do.
Eventually he allowed her to go to cosmetology school. "It really opened up my world and allowed me to get out of the house and make new friends," she says. "He didn't really like that that much.
"Not having a lot of friends or anybody who I could talk to about my relationship, I really didn't know how different it was from the average marriage. I really didn't have anybody to bounce things off of and find out what was normal, which I think was probably exactly what he wanted."
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In her fourth video released a few days ago, she revealed what happened in November 1992.
Evonitz was struggling with transition out of the military. One day she says he came home and repeatedly asked her if she would join him if he suddenly had to fly out of the country.
After failing to get a clear answer about why he would make such a request Bonnie finally agreed she would go with him to get him to calm down.
"Looking back at that that seems kind of crazy," she says.
Her story on TikTok is yet to conclude and Bonnie says she will drop more insights. She has also written a book about her experiences.
Evonitz's 2002 kidnapping victim Kara Robinson Chamberlain already has a large social media presence on TikTok . She has spoken of the nightmare experience of escaping Evonitz's clutches before he could make her his fourth murder victim.
The killer confronted her at gunpoint in the front yard of her friend's house in South Carolina. She was handcuffed, gagged, raped and tortured for 18 hours.
"My ability to escape was part of my trauma response," Chamberlain said in a June 4 TikTok video . "I was able to stay calm and collected and appease my captor so that I could make him feel safe enough to sleep. So when I escaped, it was when he was asleep the next morning."
She used her teeth to loosen the clip that connected the handcuffs to the bed and then slid out. She led the police to his apartment, where they found evidence linking Evonitz to the unsolved murders of the three girls, People Magazine reported.
There has been speculation that Evonitz murdered more than the three known victims. As police closed in on Evonitz in 2002, he allegedly called his sister and admitted he'd committed ' more crimes than he can remember .'
Bonnie says she later learned he had allegedly killed multiple people before and during their eight-year-long marriage.
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