Beatrice Louise Routh was a 10-year-old female from a homeless family who had come to Gulfport, Mississippi, hoping the Gulf Coast might offer work, shelter, and a fresh start. In late July 1991, her mother, Tammy Giles Routh, and a small group of relatives and friends traveled south in a van, staying in motels, shelters, and finally living out of the vehicle as they searched for employment and permanent housing.
On August 1, 1991, they parked at Jones Park on the Gulfport waterfront so the children could play by the beach and the harbor, an ordinary afternoon that would mark the last time anyone saw Beatrice alive.
That afternoon, Tammy encountered a drifter, 34-year-old ex-convict Donald Leroy Evans, around the beachfront area. Evans had recently been paroled in Texas after serving a fraction of a 15-year sentence for rape and had made his way along the Gulf Coast, at times staying in shelters and doing odd jobs. According to later court records and news reports, Tammy allowed Beatrice to approach Evans near a shop by the harbor to get cigarettes or go with him to a nearby store after speaking with him earlier in the day. Some accounts describe Evans at a pay phone by a small harbor store; others say he offered to take the child to a supermarket. Whatever the exact words, the decision to let the child walk off with a stranger became the critical moment. Hours passed with no sign of Beatrice or Evans, and as the sun dropped over the Gulf, Tammy finally contacted police to report that the child had vanished from the beachside park.
Behind the scenes, Evans had already turned the brief encounter into a cross-state abduction. Investigators later established that he drove west from Gulfport into Louisiana, heading toward Covington and through rural Tangipahoa Parish. In subsequent court findings, judges summarized his own admissions: once he had the child alone, he sexually assaulted her repeatedly—both vaginally and anally—and then strangled her with a length of white cotton rope. Instead of leaving her where she died, Evans kept the body concealed in the back seat of his vehicle as he continued driving. Eventually he crossed back into Mississippi and turned off onto a wooded area in Pearl River County, where he dumped the body off a rural road and discarded her clothing nearby, leaving the remains hidden in thick undergrowth while her family and local authorities searched in desperation along the beaches and parks of Gulfport.
The investigation moved quickly once Evans drew attention to himself. On August 5, 1991, four days after the abduction, law enforcement officers in Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana, arrested him in connection with the kidnapping, noting that he matched the description of the man last seen with Beatrice and was driving a stolen vehicle. Under questioning, Evans began to talk. He admitted taking the child from the Gulfport park, described raping and strangling her, and eventually agreed to lead officers to where he had abandoned the body. About ten days after the disappearance, he directed investigators to a secluded patch of woods in southern Mississippi, where searchers found Beatrice’s nude remains lying off a rural highway. News accounts from the time emphasized how completely her disappearance had mystified authorities until Evans’s confession, and how chilling it was to have him calmly point out the spot where the child lay.
As detectives processed the crime scene and gathered evidence, the case shifted from a local missing-child search to the first confirmed child murder tied to a man who claimed to be one of the most prolific serial killers in American history. Evans not only confessed to the killing in Mississippi but began spinning a vast web of alleged crimes—more than 60 or 70 murders across at least twenty states and even Canada, many of which authorities would later regard with skepticism. Yet for Beatrice’s death, there was nothing abstract or speculative: he had led police to her body, and his detailed description of the abduction, assault, and disposal matched the physical evidence.
Even as prosecutors built their case against Evans, scrutiny fell on Beatrice’s mother. Harrison County authorities charged Tammy Giles Routh with being an accessory to sexual battery, alleging that she had permitted the child to go with Evans knowing that some form of sexual activity was to take place between the two. She was held on a $10,000 bond, both as a defendant and as a crucial witness against Evans. Journalists digging into her background discovered that years earlier, in Maine, she had pleaded guilty to a child endangerment charge after her 15-month-old son was found badly bruised with cigarette burns on his lips, injuries attributed to Tammy and her then-husband. Contemporary coverage portrayed a troubled family history marked by poverty, instability, and prior abuse—factors that seemed to culminate in the disastrous decision to trust a stranger on a Gulf Coast beach.
The legal process against Evans unfolded on two tracks. Federally, he was charged with kidnapping for abducting Beatrice and transporting her across state lines; he pleaded guilty on August 19, 1991, and on October 24 received a life sentence in federal prison. Mississippi authorities then pursued their own case. On October 15, 1991, a Harrison County grand jury indicted Evans for capital murder, with kidnapping as the underlying felony, along with two counts of sexual battery. Because pretrial publicity had saturated the local community, the court changed venue for jury selection, but the trial itself proceeded in Mississippi in September 1993. Over several days, jurors heard Evans’s confession, forensic testimony about the sexual assaults and strangulation, and evidence of the interstate abduction and calculated dumping of the body. They found him guilty on all counts, and the same jury sentenced him to death for the murder.
Evans appealed, arguing about the voluntariness of his confession, procedural issues, and the way the state had handled overlapping federal and state prosecutions. In 1997, the Mississippi Supreme Court issued a lengthy opinion in Evans v. State, affirming both his conviction for the murder of Beatrice Louise Routh and the death sentence that accompanied it. The justices recounted the timeline of the kidnapping, the brutal assaults, his guidance to the body, and the overwhelming evidence against him, concluding that the sentence was legally and constitutionally sound.
In the years that followed, Evans remained a disturbing figure in the public imagination. He was later tried and convicted in Florida for the murder of Ira Jean Smith, receiving a life sentence there as well, even as law enforcement agencies across the country sifted through his many claims in search of corroborated victims. His death sentence for Beatrice’s murder was never carried out: on January 5, 1999, while on death row at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, he was stabbed to death by another inmate. For Beatrice’s family, the man who had taken her life never faced the execution he once demanded, but the record of his conviction stands as a stark narrative of how a momentary act of misplaced trust at a Gulfport park ended in the abduction, assault, and killing of a child whose family had come south looking for a better life and instead found unimaginable loss.
