Chapter 4: Expert asked to check for Reynolds link
Why didn't investigators want Evonitz checked?
Date published: 11/18/2007
By PAMELA GOULD
Five years ago, the FBI and Virginia State Police said forensic tests were being run to see if serial killer Richard Marc Evonitz murdered Alicia Showalter Reynolds.
They weren’t.
In fact, in direct contradiction to those statements, neither the FBI nor state police ever asked any crime lab to run those tests, The Free Lance–Star found in its 18-month investigation.
When the Reynolds hairs and fibers evidence finally made it to the FBI Laboratory two years later, it was as a result of the persistence of the lab’s Evonitz expert. But it still didn’t get examined.
Whether to check Evonitz in Reynolds’ 1996 slaying was never a question. FBI Lab trace-evidence expert Douglas Deedrick had sought to compare evidence in Reynolds’ death with evidence from the slayings of three Spotsylvania County girls as early as 1997.
Once Evonitz was named as the killer of Sofia Silva and sisters Kristin and Kati Lisk in August 2002, all levels of law enforcement were calling for him to be checked forensically against any crime he might have committed.
“Where there is evidence—DNA, hair or fiber—we’re going forward and doing lab comparisons,” Donald W. Thompson Jr., then head of the FBI’s Richmond Division, said just days after Evonitz was confirmed as the Lisk–Silva killer.
“Naturally, we’re comparing Evonitz evidence to the Reynolds case,” Rick Jenkins, then a state police lieutenant, said the following month.
Behind the scenes
Understanding why those exams weren’t carried out requires a look at what else was happening when Evonitz popped onto the police radar in June 2002, and when the Reynolds evidence arrived at the FBI Lab two years later.
In short, federal officials appeared to be so entrenched at that point in their years-long pursuit of suspect Darrell Rice that not even a known serial killer could alter their course.
In April 2002, two months before learning of Evonitz, federal prosecutors had obtained capital murder indictments against Rice in two slayings at Shenandoah National Park despite having no evidence—forensic or otherwise—to directly link him to the crime.
And by June, as part of that case, the FBI was pursuing Rice as the 29 Stalker, the man believed responsible for Reynolds’ slaying.
Date published: 11/18/2007
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