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Even if it were the only crime he committed, it still would be horrifying. A Texas drifter told police in Gulfport, Miss., how he murdered a little homeless girl on Aug. 1. Donald Leroy Evans, 34, said he raped Beatrice Louise Routh, 10, then strangled her with a rope. Evans led police last week to the child's nude body in the Mississippi woods. But that wasn't all the ex-convict confessed: Beatrice, he said, was only his latest victim. Between 1977 and 1986, Evans claims, he killed more than 60 people, mostly women, in at least 21 states-if true, a national record for serial murder. "I want to be executed by the state for my crimes against humanity," he reportedly said.
Is Evans the fiend he says he is? His lawyer, Frederick J. Lusk Jr., says Evans wept frequently when he described his crimes, but it's hard to determine whether remorse or egotism was driving his confession. The FBI joined local officials last week in creating a task force to investigate Evans's claims and the possible complicity of Beatrice's mother in the case. They promised to proceed with caution. "You are not going to see us doing a Henry Lucas thing," said Gulfport Police Chief George Payne Jr. He was referring to the 1983 case in which another Texas drifter, Henry Lee Lucas, claimed to have committed some 360 murders in 27 states. After hasty investigations, police closed the hooks on cases around the country. But Lucas later recanted, and further inquiry showed that he may be guilty only of the 1960 murder of his mother. In Evans's case, police in Florida believe his confession may match details of two unsolved 1985 murders.
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Investigators know little about Evans, but a psychiatrist's report, filed in a Texas court in 1987, casts some light-and shadow. Though he acknowledged that Evans was a skillful liar, the doctor pieced together a profile of a troubled personality: Evans was one of nine children in a family with a history of mental problems. At 16 he attempted suicide and was hospitalized-but "in two weeks I talked my way out of there," he said. A high-school dropout in Texas, Evans joined the Marines but was released for having a "paranoid personality. " In the years that followed, he traveled around the country, using aliases, working in oilfields and on fishing boats, and having brushes with the law for gambling scams and theft.
In 1986 Evans was arrested for sexual assault in Galveston, Texas. Then known as Jason McGowen, he forced a woman to perform oral sex at knifepoint. When he fell asleep, she escaped stark naked. Evans pleaded no contest and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. He was paroled in April and returned to his Galveston girlfriend, Gail Stewart, described by neighbor Joe Whitted as "a Christian lady [who] tried to convert him." Evans seemed to settle down-but late last month something snapped. One day he asked to "borrow" Whitted's car. Then, police say, he stole Stewart's TV and VCR and went on a spree that ended in violence in Gulfport.
In a disturbing twist investigators now say Evans had a partner in crime. According to police, the victim and her mother, Tami Jean Giles, 30, were vagabonds who reportedly were escaping Giles's abusive husband in Maine. Last week police charged Giles, who has a criminal record for child abuse, with being an accessory to sexual battery before the fact. "The investigation revealed that the mother permitted this child to go with Evans with full knowledge that sexual activity was to take place," said Harrison County prosecutor Bobby Payne. (Giles's lawyer says Evans tricked his client.) With his litany of confessions, Evans may have taken center stage, but the image that will linger from the Gulfport case is of a little girl being dragged into the woods to die.
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