Kara Robinson Chamberlain is speaking out about her escape from a serial killer to help other victims trust their instincts.
Chamberlain, now 37, hosts the ABC News Studios and Freeform true-crime series “Somebody Knows Something,” which revisits cold cases that have stumped investigators for decades. The victim advocate works alongside families in each episode, hoping renewed attention will generate leads that finally crack unsolved disappearances and murders.
“My purpose was to let families have the mic and show what law enforcement has done,” Chamberlain said. “We want people to have the information they need, so they can come forward with anything that could be helpful. Several of these cases involve children, young people. I have three kids, so I found myself identifying with either the young person who is missing or the victims themselves as parents.”
“I genuinely think we can make a difference,” she added. “If I can get answers for one of these families, it would be a life goal for me.”
That mission carries deep personal weight for Chamberlain, whose own survival story began more than two decades ago in South Carolina.
On June 24, 2002, 15-year-old Chamberlain was at a friend’s home when Richard Evonitz pulled into the driveway. She recalled the moment her intuition first stirred — and how she immediately silenced it.
“There was a moment when my captor pulled into my friend’s driveway, and I thought, ‘That’s weird,'” she recalled. “That was my intuition. But I immediately started making excuses for why he could have been there, what could have been the reason. And so, I quieted my intuition.”
The stranger approached with pamphlets, asked if her parents were home, then pressed a gun to her neck and threatened to shoot her if she screamed. He forced Chamberlain into a dark storage container in his car.
At Evonitz’s apartment, Chamberlain was repeatedly sexually assaulted over 18 hours. But she began trusting the instinct that told her to survive, quietly memorizing details about her surroundings while appearing to cooperate.
“I have to acknowledge that there was something inside of me that said, ‘Not today. Not me. I’m going to outsmart this guy,'” Chamberlain said, describing herself as “very stubborn.”
“Then, I think really the rest of it was maybe part luck,” she continued. “It was also a big part of my coping mechanism … how I chose to appease my captor, which essentially is one of the lesser-known trauma responses. It’s basically playing nice to let that person put their guard down. And then, I think partially, there’s this part of him that was very arrogant, and he’d done that multiple times before. So I think all of those things played together in terms of my escape.”
Once Evonitz fell asleep, Chamberlain freed herself from her bindings and fled. She found people in a parking lot and pleaded with them to take her to police. She then led officers back to the apartment, but Evonitz had already escaped.
Police tracked Evonitz to Sarasota, Florida, where the 38-year-old died by suicide as authorities closed in. Evidence from his apartment, former residences and vehicle linked him to the abductions and murders of three Virginia girls — Sofia Silva, 16; Kristin Lisk, 15; and Kati Lisk, 12. Notes indicated Evonitz had already targeted other potential victims.
Today, Chamberlain still believes Evonitz had additional victims unknown to investigators.
“I genuinely believe that he was responsible for more than we know of,” she said. “But unfortunately, having taken his own life, that, at this point, is still a mystery.”
Chamberlain’s experience with unanswered questions shapes how she views families still searching for loved ones. She rejects the common notion that resolution brings closure.
“I think the biggest misconception is that these families will be able to get closure one day,” she said. “I hear people say, ‘Let’s get these families closure’ all the time. And at the end of the day, these people are always going to have some level of trauma.”
“That’s the biggest thing for me, closure really is a myth,” she added.
In 2010, Chamberlain completed training at the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy and worked for the Richland County Sheriff’s Department as a school resource officer. That background informs her approach with grieving families on the series.
“These people at the center of these stories are more than this story that we know,” she explained. “They’re more than how they disappeared or what happened to them.”
She recalled one father of a missing daughter: “I remember thinking, ‘I have so many questions to ask this man.’ [I’m] looking at him and saying, ‘This is a man that’s heartbroken, who doesn’t know what happened to his daughter. He wants to talk about who she was, so I’m going to step back, and I’m going to let him do that.'”
Chamberlain said her 15-year-old self would have expected the advocacy work she does today.
“She would’ve said, ‘I knew it,'” Chamberlain said. “She would’ve known it because I think from very early on, I thought that I was able to handle what happened to me the way that I was able to handle it for a reason. Yes, I had this bad thing that happened to me, but that just became part of building who I became. That’s not who I am. It’s just a part of my story.”
In the viral moment that has resonated with millions, Chamberlain’s abduction and escape became a touchstone for discussions about intuition and survival. Held for 18 hours by a man later linked to multiple murders, she turned her trauma response — dissociation she describes as enabling her to get through — into a framework for helping others. Her direct, unemotional telling of her own story reflects that dissociation, she explained, not detachment from what happened but the mechanism that allowed her to endure it and ultimately outmaneuver her captor.
Now Chamberlain emphasizes one lesson above all when asked what people can learn from her experience.
“I’m often asked, ‘What’s the thing that we can learn from your story, Kara, to keep ourselves or our children safe?'” she said. “And the one thing that I tell people the most is there’s a great book called ‘The Gift of Fear.’ And it’s the first time that I’ve heard someone describe the way I feel, which is to listen to your intuition.”
“Essentially, what the ‘Gift of Fear’ describes is that we all have something inside of us that’s paying attention, and we’re taught to silence that intuition for the sake of being nice, not hurting someone’s feelings — lots of different reasons. And that’s something that is meant to keep us alive.”
“I hesitate to say if there’s a lesson in these cases because they’re all quite different,” she continued. “But that’s the big thing that I try to tell people — listen to your intuition and teach your children how to listen to that intuition. It is a powerful gift that everyone has, and it saves your life.”
“Somebody Knows Something” is currently streaming on Hulu.