What Happened to Damaris Huff and Rhonda Ward’s Killer?
(‘DNA Dragnet,’ Forensic Files)
Police must have thought they had a slam-dunk case against Damaris Huff’s husband. After her murder, James Huff quickly had his wife’s body cremated against her relatives’ wishes. That’s usually a blinking arrow that says “guilty.”
Likewise in the homicide case of Rhonda Ward Goodwin. Police seemed to have solid evidence when an eyewitness placed someone who looked like her boyfriend close to the scene of the crime.
And as Forensic Files viewers know, the boyfriend or husband did it.
Skeletons in closet. But thanks to DNA testing, police cleared those suspects and discovered that a criminal named Fredrick Evins raped and killed both women.
For this week, I looked for more background information on the two victims and also searched for an epilogue for Fredrick Evins. Along the way, I discovered that Fredrick’s criminal history includes an especially horrifying felony that Forensic Files didn’t mention.
So let’s get going on the recap of “DNA Dragnet,” the 2009 Forensic Files episode about the case, starting with Damaris because her death came first:
Happy union. Damaris Adams entered the world on Jan. 11, 1947, in Spartanburg, South Carolina. She graduated from Converse College. By the time she met James Huff (Forensic Files uses the pseudonym “Wynn” as his surname), she was divorced with a child.
“We fell in love, and we stayed in love all the rest of our lives,” wrote James, as reported by Go Upstate, the website for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. “I can honestly say we grew closer over time.”
Damaris worked as a bookmobile supervisor.
“Reading and exploring different belief systems and ideas were so important to her,” Jennifer Washburn, her daughter, told the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. “I think she really wanted to understand everyone in the world — why people are the way they are.”
Concerned spouse. On a Saturday, Sept. 15, 2002, Damaris went for one of her usual walks in Duncan Park near her home in Spartanburg.
She never returned to the family’s house at 335 North Park Drive.
James told police that he was worried she’d been injured, and he’d taken a drive around to look for her but had no luck.
Walkmans in stereo. Her body soon turned up amid some vegetation in Duncan Park. The killer had stolen her purple Walkman, wrapped the cord around her neck, and taken her clothing except for her blue-and-white socks.
An autopsy indicated the attacker had sexually assaulted Damaris and strangled her to death.
As mentioned, James Huff made a likely suspect. In addition to hastily disposing of her body, he failed a polygraph. Plus, police found a purple Walkman in the couple’s house. What was it doing there if an unknown killer had stolen it? James claimed that Damaris owned two purple Walkmans. He engaged a lawyer to represent him and, on at least one occasion when the Herald-Journal asked him about the case, he declined to comment.
Husband off hook. But, as one YouTube viewer commented, “Why would a husband rape his wife in the woods? Or take items from her as ‘trophies’?” Also, even though James might have soured on the media, he cooperated with police, according to Go Upstate.
And fortunately for James, DNA testing on Damaris’ rape kit eliminated him as a suspect.
Police also asked for DNA samples from men in and near the park around the time of the murder. They acquired 25 specimens, but none matched the rapist’s.
Another casualty. Investigators plugged the DNA from the rape into the Combined DNA Indexing System, aka CODIS, but got no hits.
By January 2003, the police had upped the $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest to $20,000.
Five months later, on February 15, 2003, a woman from a different world disappeared.
Demure victim. Rhonda Ward Goodwin, 32, lived at 111 Hanover Apartments and had recently separated from her husband. She’d gone back to school in order to win herself a promotion to manager of a convenience store, Cigarettes 4 Less, in the Reidville section of Spartanburg.
“She was a very tender-hearted person, a very soft spoken person,” said her mother-in-law, Faith Goodwin, during her appearance on Solved.
Rhonda’s mother, Cathy Tessier, told Solved that she and her daughter were best friends and that Rhonda, who had two daughters and a son, dedicated her life to her family and her work.
Workday never started. “She was the big sister definitely, always looking after me, making sure I was doing right,” Rhonda’s brother said on Solved.
On Feb. 13, 2002, Rhonda went missing after dawn when she arrived early to open up the store on Drayton Road.
Three days later, Rhonda’s body turned up in an apple orchard.
Car torched. Like Damaris Huff’s attacker, the killer had sexually assaulted her and taken her clothes. The assailant stabbed Rhonda 12 times, according to court papers. Some of the cuts were defensive wounds to her hands.
A witness tipped off police that she’d seen a parked white car and a man and a woman who looked like Rhonda headed toward the orchard the night that Rhonda vanished.
Police found Rhonda’s white 1993 Nissan Sentra in front of an abandoned crack house at 106 Bell Avenue in Greenville County. Someone had taken the car stereo and then burned the vehicle.
Pompous newswoman. The Secret Service helped police enhance security footage from the store parking lot to figure out what happened; after Rhonda parked in front of the store and got out of the car, it looked as though a man forced her to get back in and then drive off with him in the passenger seat.
“If you get in a car and go to a second spot, most likely you’ve just signed your death certificate,” TV reporter Amanda Abbott said during her Forensic Files interview.
I have three things to say about that: First, the expression is death warrant, not certificate. Second, she’s blaming the victim. Rhonda didn’t sign her own death warrant — the maniac who killed her did. Third, Rhonda was probably too terrified to refuse to go to the second location. Sorry, Amanda, but women under attack don’t suddenly turn into Bruce Lee.
Boyfriend vindicated. OK, back to the narrative.
Again, investigators probably thought they cracked the murder case, this time because store employees said the man with Rhonda on the security footage looked like Chester Donovan, a 26-year-old teacher’s aide whom she was dating. He failed his polygraph test, and the witness from the apple orchard picked Chester’s photo from a lineup.
But Chester furnished a solid alibi, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division found that his DNA didn’t match that of the rapist.
There was, however, a bombshell: It matched the DNA from Damaris’ attacker.
Mysterious background. Police then got wind of a man attempting to sell a Nissan car radio in exchange for cocaine. He was 35-year-old Fredrick Antonio Evins, a short-order cook and ex-con. Fredrick, a divorcé with a teenage son, accrued a long criminal record including an earlier rape and robbery as well as punching a woman in the face while snatching her purse and using a box cutter to lacerate a male victim.
Aside from his rap sheet, little background came up on Fredrick. The South Carolina Department of Corrections lists him as a naturalized U.S. citizen but doesn’t specify his country of birth.
But forensics offered plenty of information on the 6-foot-2-inch felon. The DNA also exposed Fredrick as the perpetrator of another terribly disturbing crime that happened more than a decade before the murders. On Nov. 21, 1991, Fredrick tied up an 83-year-old woman and raped her in front of her 7-year-old granddaughter, whom he also bound. The man declined the little girl’s offer of her piggy bank, but robbed the house of a VCR. Both victims survived the assault; the older woman had died in 1999, too soon to witness the resolution.
Shifting story. Before addressing that cold case, the authorities went full-throttle on Rhonda’s rape and murder.
It helped that Fredrick followed the typical rapist-murderer blueprint by changing the story he told investigators. Fredrick accepted the investigators’ lie that his mother ID’ed him on the videotape (she hadn’t seen the tape) but claimed that he never had sex with Rhonda. At some point, he offered a story that he and another man were in the woods together and his companion made him kill Rhonda, according to court papers. But he also told cops that he and Rhonda had plans to meet up at the store and then go off to use drugs and have sex. After consensual sex in the apple orchard, Rhonda got mad and threatened him with a knife so he killed her in self-defense (Jack Boyle and Jonathan Nyce), he contended.
Investigators theorized that Fredrick just happened upon Rhonda outside the convenience store — he lived nearby — and decided to rape her. He took her by surprise in the parking lot and forced her to drive to the orchard. After the murder, he stole her Sentra but couldn’t drive it for long because the Nissan dealership remotely disabled the vehicle’s starter. With the auto no longer mobile, he burned it to destroy evidence.
Already detained. As for Damaris’ murder, investigators theorized that he had been sleeping in Duncan Park shortly before he spotted Damaris walking by, and attacked her.
In February 2003, Evins was charged with kidnapping and raping Rhonda and grand larceny for stealing her car. Meanwhile, he was already in county jail on a charge of driving without a license.
The trial started a year after the murder. The prosecution alleged that after killing Rhonda and taking her money, Fredrick went on a drug binge.
Stoic in courtroom. Fredrick’s claim that Rhonda willingly went to the apple orchard to have sex with him didn’t hold up in court — it had been freezing on the day of the attack.
In 2004, Fredrick was found guilty on all charges.
He “showed little emotion” as the verdict was read, according to an Associated Press account.
Ultimate price. At the sentencing hearing, a woman whom Fredrick pleaded guilty to raping in 1986 said that he ruined her life. Another woman told the court about how he raped her, choked her, and left her on the frozen forest floor.
He received the death penalty, and Circuit Judge Ned Miller scheduled his execution for Jan. 19, 2005.
With Fredrick already on death row, authorities didn’t have a trial for Damaris Huff’s rape and murder.
Intelligence an issue. Fredrick’s attempts to get a new trial in the Rhonda Ward case stretched all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2007; the justices declined to review his case.
But in 2014, a judge overturned Fredrick’s death sentence because of the ever-popular “ineffective counsel” claim as well as allegations that he had intellectual disabilities (Ronnie Joe Neal and John Lotter).
A psychiatrist said he scored below 70 on an IQ test she administered. (I’m always suspicious about those — can’t the criminal purposely give the wrong answers in an effort to avoid the death chamber?)
Justice for oldest victim. Fredrick ultimately accepted a plea deal for life without parole. He also received a life sentence for Damaris Huff’s murder.
And the granddaughter of the late 83-year-old victim saw him sentenced to three consecutive life sentences plus 155 years in connection with his 1991 crimes against them; he apologized to the granddaughter and her mother in court.
Under the deal, he will not face execution, which in South Carolina would mean lethal injection, electric chair, or firing squad.
Captive achiever. Today, 54-year-old Fredrick Evins resides in McCormick Correctional Institute in South Carolina. He’s made no escape attempts and has accrued no disciplinary problems.
Fredrick has earned two culinary certificates and served as an electrician’s helper, a ward keeper’s assistant, and a hauler.
There his story ends because he has virtually no chance of plying his new skills outside of prison walls.
Scales balanced. Although TV shows trumpeted the power of DNA technology and databases in securing his conviction, the case is also notable because of something else — the publicity it drew. The media focused as much attention on the murder of the working-class convenience store employee as that of the polished upper-middle-class librarian.
Sometimes, a little egalitarianism is just as impressive as a lot of forensics.
That’s all for this week. If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe and share on social media. — RR
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