CLIMAX, MINN. – Brian Evenson has long lived with outsiders’ suspicions that he murdered a woman he loved, and has even sometimes wondered if he strangled her in the middle of the night, drove home, and then forgot about her. it.
In the 40 years since Nancy Daugherty, a 38-year-old mother and nursing home aide, was murdered in her Chisholm, Minnesota, home, investigators have interviewed Evenson a dozen times. They collected her DNA, the shirt she was wearing the last time they saw her, a list of places she left her fingerprints in her house. He was one of the last to see her alive. He was the one who touched her cold, stiff fingers the next day and knew she was dead.
At a news conference in July 2020, Chisholm police and other law enforcement officials said that another man, one who had never been a suspect, had been charged with Daugherty’s murder thanks to advances in genetic genealogy. . The cold case had its first arrest, Michael Allan Carbo Jr., which came after authorities analyzed the DNA of more than 100 suspects and thousands of dollars in rewards went unclaimed.
“Oh my God, finally,” Evenson remembers thinking when he saw the news.
A jury found Carbo guilty in St. Louis County District Court in 2022. But he and his attorneys said their defense was hampered because they were not allowed to point to an alternative perpetrator. This month, the Minnesota Supreme Court agreed and sent the case back to District Court for a new trial.
That brought Evenson back into the spotlight. He is the alternative perpetrator.
“I want to start by saying that I didn’t kill Nancy,” Evenson, 74, said recently as he sat at his kitchen table, empty except for a small red and blue toy ambulance in the center, a gift from Daugherty when He finished school to become a paramedic.
Evenson lives more than 200 miles from his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota, in this Red River Valley town of 243 people named after chewing tobacco, according to tradition. He has a small, simple house in a row of houses beyond the center. The fields abut two sides of the property. The house is tidy, without much decoration.
He works part time on his cousin’s farm. She has lived here for over a decade; She plans to retire soon and live here until his death.
Every day, Evenson said, his mind returns to Daugherty. He considers her the love of her life. She is detail-oriented and remembers important dates.
The two met in 1979, but most of their friendship, which turned romantic for about eight months, was between 1982 and 1986. They were on the same ambulance crew at Chisholm and shared a circle of friends. Some of their best moments, Evenson said, were simply sitting across from each other and talking.
Daugherty was a softball player, skier and swimmer. She enjoyed fishing and camping. She had plans to move to the Twin Cities and go to school to become a paramedic. She was adored at the Heritage Manor nursing home, where she was an assistant.
She was easy to be with, Evenson said. “Just (her) way of looking at things. It was very refreshing,” he said. “And just kindness, what a heart.”
Beyond investigators and the courtroom, Evenson has clung to the story of Daugherty’s last night alive and his discovery dead in his home. He hasn’t told new friends or even his immediate family. He contacted the Star Tribune after the Supreme Court ruled on Carbo’s retrial; He wanted to break his silence.
Evenson had left Iron Range in the summer of 1986 and was a paramedic in Appleton, Wisconsin. He and Daugherty kept in touch through phone calls and letters. The letters appeared during the investigation: handwritten missives that talked about her life, reminisced about old times and expressed frustration that she did not respond to him frequently.
Evenson felt like returning to the Twin Cities area. After a job interview in White Bear Lake, he drove to the Hibbing-Chisholm area to see family and friends, including Daugherty.
Evenson stopped by his house and they spent some time. Daugherty received a phone call that he silently accepted, without commenting on who was on the line. The two then went to Tibroc, a pizzeria and bar in downtown Chisholm, for a few hours.
Evenson took Daugherty home around midnight, used the bathroom and stayed until she said she was tired. She then drove to her parents’ house in nearby Hibbing, where she talked to her sister and her father, drank a glass of milk and went to bed.
Evenson was ready to help Daugherty move in the next morning. When he arrived at her house, he found the curtains drawn and the door locked, out of character for her or anyone else in this town in the mid-1980s. He tried calling. There was no answer. She returned repeatedly throughout the day.
A neighbor intervened. He told Evenson that early that morning his teenage daughter and her friend, who had been at a party, heard fighting coming from Daugherty’s house. Evenson discreetly consulted with his mother, who worked in the emergency room.
Had he seen anyone he knew the night before? he asked. Her “no” gave him a bad feeling.
Evenson and the neighbor called Chisholm police. Daugherty’s car keys were found on the grass. Inside the house, his glasses lay on the kitchen floor.
They found her in her bedroom, lying under a blanket. They had raped and strangled her.
Forty years later, the memory still makes Evenson cry at her kitchen table.
Carbo, whose DNA was found on Daugherty’s body and under her fingernails, and whose vomit was found in the yard, was convicted two years ago in Hibbing. She was 18 when Daugherty was murdered and lived about a mile from her home. Her defense team argued that the two had consensual sex, but that Carbo left after her and did not kill her. His was the only DNA found at the scene.
Carbó was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole. He is housed in Rush City Prison.
“To the children and family of Nancy Daugherty: I did not kill Nancy,” Carbo said in a prepared statement at trial. “I obviously had sex with her and I don’t remember it about her.”
In their appeal, Carbo’s defense attorneys said the girls who heard the fight at Daugherty’s house saw a dark-colored pickup truck parked outside in the middle of the night. At the time, Evenson was driving a gray Ford Bronco II. Daugherty was missing one of his earrings, which had been a gift from Evenson. Had she taken him as a sample of her after killing her?
Evenson was obsessed with Daugherty, the defense team argued in court papers, and believed she had made plans to go out after he dropped her off that night.
More than a decade after the murder, then-Chisholm Police Chief Scott Erickson asked Evenson if perhaps he lost his temper that night and didn’t realize what he had done.
“You know the human mind is a strange thing, and I’ve often wondered, gee, did I wake up in the middle of the night, drive there and kill her, come back to bed and not know it?” Evenson told Erickson, according to court documents.
Evenson has answers to the accusations. Carbó’s father had a dark-colored truck. He says he wasn’t obsessed or jealous; He and Daugherty were friends. He has maintained his innocence and the same story from the beginning.
“If there was evidence to prove it, I would have been arrested a long time ago,” he said.
Although the defense was prohibited from using an alternative perpetrator defense, vague reference to Evenson’s identity and additional details about him was made during the trial. Reading the trial transcripts, he was surprised at how often he appeared.
Evenson describes this as “trash that (Carbo’s attorney, JD Schmid) was saying about me.”
The new trial promises to go into greater detail.
“The Supreme Court’s decision ensures that jurors will get a much fuller picture that someone else did it,” Schmid said.
Daugherty’s family doesn’t want to go through another ordeal. Dave Haggard said the process feels like his wife’s mother is being murdered all over again. The family says they believe Carbo is guilty and that there has never been enough evidence to charge Evenson.
“Brian was probably persecuted more than anyone else in this state,” Haggard said. “In most crimes, the last one to see her is the one who committed it. He wasn’t even taken to jail.”
Evenson lives with decades of questions he may never learn the answers to.
“Who called her that night?” she asked. “And what happened between 00:45 and 03:15?”
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