The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story (Marwar. Junction Productions, Lifetime, 2023)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Kiss the Blood Off My Hands I switched channels again to Lifetime for a much-hyped movie called The Girl Who Escaped: The Kara Robinson Story. The film was followed by a documentary just as long as the dramatized version, though since I wanted to watch Kiss the Blood Off My Hands I didn’t turn on Lifetime until a half-hour into the documentary and watched it before the fictionalized version. I found myself annoyed by the seemingly arbitrary changes to the actual story made by writer Haley Harris (a woman, I presume, though her imdb.com page does not reveal their gender). The basic story concerns a 15-year-old gir from Columbia,South Carolina (called “Lancaster” in the film, though both the real county and the dramatized one are called Richland), Kara Robinsion (marvelously portrayed by Katie Douglas), who on a weekend afternoon – – is kidnapped by a stranger in a blue Pontiac Trans Am and forced at gunpoint into a plastic container. She’s then taken to his home, an apartment in one of those complexes in which the various buildings are spread out liver a relatively large area and it’s often difficult to tell them apart (I used to do home care for a woman who lived on a complex like that). Displaying a stunning degree of mental determination and savvy for someone her age, Kara noticed feminine hygiene products in the apartment and a hair brush with long, curly red hairs, dedujcing that a woman lived in the apartment with her abductor even though she wasn’t there at the moment.

Her captor forced her to watch pornographic films with him and describe to him the action on screen – and Kara, who ws totally naïve sexually, had a hard time doing that because she’d never seen people doing things like that. Later her captor raped her multiple times – though, given the usual twitchiness and odd legal codes against showing underage people engaged in sex in the American media, we’re only told, not shown, that. Oh, how I wish writer Harris and director Simone Stock could have come up with a way to dramatize Kara’s abuse the way director Mark Robson (a disciple of Val Lewton and his hint-don’t-show aesthetic) and writer Wendell Mayes did the rape scene in Peyton Place and managed to give us a sense of the victim’s violation while staying within the permissible boundaries of the Productoin Code. After he does whatever horrible things he did to her, her captor puts her to bed after restraining her – only in the early morning hours she wakes up while he’s still asleep and manages to figure out how to get out of his restraints, then burst through the fencing he’s put around his front door and, dressed only in a T-shirt and shorts, she flees his apartment. Kara asks two men in a passing car to take her to the nearest police station because she’s just been kidnapped and escaped, and they do so.

Meanwhile, Kara’s mom Debra (Cara Buono) reports Kara’s disappearance to the police, who at first write her off as a runaway and couldn’t be less interested in the case. (The actor playing the sheriff in the TV-movie, Robert Nahum, reminded me of the animated Santa Claus puppet voiced by Burl Ives in Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.) Eventually, once Kara escapes and arrive at the police station, she agrees to go back with sheriff’s deputies to the complex where she was held. On a tip from a maintenance man who worked at the building, they narrow down the search to apartment 301 and, once they find the apartment empty,call for search warrants. Their main discovery was a Navy footlocker containing various sinister items, including young girls’ panties that were not Kara’s and clippings about disappearances of three teenage girls in Spotsylvania, Virginia: relics the cops assume no one would keep unless he was actually involved in those crimes. The cops eventually identify the tenant as Richard Mark Evonitz (Kristian Bruun,considerably homelier than the extant photos of the real one), and Kara immediately picks his photo out of an eight-picture array.

There follows a bizarre comedy of errors as Evonitz eludes the police dragnet looking for him until the cops finally corner him in Florida, where he’d sent his wife and his mother on a trip to Walt Disney World and where he had a sister living in Bradenton. The police learn that he and his sister have a date to meet at a pancake house in Bradenton – in the documentary it’s identified as an International House of Pancakes but in the fiction film it’s called something else – only Evonitz realizes he’s been followed, tries to escape, and when the cops finally corner him he shoots himself with his own gun, committing suicide and depriving Kara of the final confrontation in court for which she’d been hoping. A lot of minor changes were made in the movie, some of them seeming pretty pointless to me. Kara’s pre-abduction boyfriend’s real name was Chris but he’s called “Ryan” in the movie, and the documentary makes it clear that they broke up shortly after her escape and she married someone else. (Her Web site, https://www.kararobinsonchamberlain.com/about, lists her as Kara Robinson Chamberlain.) I was also annoyed that Evonitz’s wife, a redhead in real life, became a blonde in the film.

Incidentally, the cops were able to trace an ex-wife of Evonitz in California who said she left him largely over his insistence on involving her in S/M, but his wife when he died said he never wanted to do S/M with her and she had no idea of that side of him. The final scenes of the documentary show Kara becoming a deputy with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department and working as a school resources officer, but since that was made she’s left the department to concentrate on raising her two young sons (though some pedophiles go after boys instead of girls, I still heaved a sigh of relief that she didn’t have any daughters) and speaking out to audiences about her own survival as an example for others. I was profoundly moved by The Girl Who Escaped: Tke Kara Robinson Story – more than I’d expected to be, since I’d thought this would be a movie about a long-term sexual enslavement instead of about someone whose psychosis was to abduct young girls, toy with them for a few days, and then kill them – and I found myself admiring Kara’s sheer gumption and wishing what I would have done in her place (probably nothing near what she accomplished).