The 3 1 / 2 -year search for the killer of a McKeesport woman ended when a national system that matches evidence from crime scenes to the DNA of convicted felons made its first hit on an unsolved killing from Allegheny County — the 1998 stabbing death of Liane Marie Evans.
Faced with the results of the DNA test, Kevin Worlds, 32, who is serving a 20- to 40-year prison sentence for assaults on two other McKeesport women in 1999, confessed to killing Evans in her Crawford Village apartment during a cocaine-induced panic, police said Thursday. He faces a hearing next week on charges of criminal homicide, burglary and rape.
"I don't know anything about that technology stuff," said Evans' mother, Aurelia, who sobbed several times during a news conference announcing the arrest. "I just know she'll be able to rest in peace now."
County Police Superintendent Kenneth Fulton said the Combined DNA Index System, known as CODIS, helped his detectives close the book on a brutal killing that may have gone unsolved otherwise.
"I don't think we'd be here announcing this arrest without this CODIS system," he said. "Now we're going to beat on the doors of the Legislature to get more money to get all the forensic samples into it."
Worlds' arrest stunned his former girlfriend, Charmaine Gilliam, 33, of Crawford Village, who put her head in her hands and cried as she sat outside her home yesterday afternoon. Even though she first met Worlds at least 15 years ago, Gilliam said she really didn't know the man who fathered her two children, ages 4 and 2. Gilliam said she hadn't seen Worlds since he went to jail.
"This could have been me," Gilliam said. "My skin is crawling thinking that I slept next to him."
Aurelia Evans, found the half-naked body of her 21-year-old daughter in her bedroom on the morning of April 19, 1998. Liane Evans, a singer who had been working as a cashier in a Rite Aid in McKeesport, had been stabbed 21 times in the neck, face and mouth, police said.
"That image is in my mind constantly," said Aurelia Evans, who said she went to check on her daughter after not seeing her for several days.
Liane Evans died just five months after her 16-month-old daughter, Kyla, accidentally suffocated after becoming wedged between a wall and the rail of a daybed.
Police sent blood samples from 30 possible suspects to Allegheny County Coroner Dr. Cyril Wecht's forensic lab, including one from Worlds, an acquaintance of the victim who had addresses in McKeesport and Highland Park.
"We kind of ran into a roadblock and couldn't get any further," county homicide Detective Lee Yingling said.
Then detectives tried the index where state police store DNA profiles from blood, semen, skin or other bodily fluids gathered from unsolved crimes.
The Allegheny County lab began sending those samples to the state lab in Greensburg, Westmoreland County, in January.
Under a law passed in 1996, every person convicted in Pennsylvania of murder, felony sex crimes, felony assaults on children, harassment and stalking must supply DNA samples. These samples are compared with the DNA profiles from the unsolved crimes. If there is no hit, then the DNA from the unsolved crimes are compared to indexes maintained by other states.
Lab director Fred Fochtman, a toxicologist, said his technicians are entering samples from unsolved crimes into the index every week, and samples from older crimes when police come in with leads or requests for testing.
In March, police asked the county lab to make a DNA profile from semen collected from Evans' body. The lab sent that sample to the state, and in April a computer matched the semen to Worlds' DNA profile.
Worlds has been held at the state prison in Frackville, Schuylkill County, since October 1999, when he pleaded guilty to stabbing a neighbor, choking another woman and leading Pittsburgh police on a car chase during one weekend in April 1999, court records show.
During questioning last week, Worlds told Yingling he had run into Evans outside her apartment on April 17, 1998. She was celebrating her 21st birthday, three days before, and they went inside and had sex, a police affidavit filed to support the charges states.
There was a knock at the door, and when Evans went to answer it, he stabbed her with a knife he was carrying in his boot, the affidavit states. He told police he had been doing cocaine, which made him paranoid, and he thought whoever knocked at the door was "out to get him."
A second DNA test confirmed the CODIS results this week and county police charged him with Evans' killing yesterday.
Worlds said nothing as detectives led him in handcuffs and county jail garb from police headquarters to his arraignment. He remains in the Allegheny County Jail without bond.
Worlds hesitated, at first, to tell police what happened in Evans' apartment, investigators said.
“He agreed to speak on tape about it,” Yingling said. “We were holding our breath as he would say some things then stop. But when he was done and had admitted to stabbing her, we asked if he was relieved and he said yes.”
Worlds was unemployed and living with a girlfriend in Crawford Village when he was arrested in 1999 on charges that included stabbing his neighbor, Felicia Brown, 28, in the shoulder and neck, Yingling said. Brown survived her injuries.
One of Evans' best friends, Cicely Bray, 24, of Crawford Village, said she felt Evans was killed by someone who lived in the community.
"I'm not shocked because I always believed in my heart that the person was always out here," Bray said. "It was someone from the Village. I always knew that it was someone that she knew. I always got that feeling."
Catherine Lee, 47, of Crawford Village, said she's glad that there is some kind of closure, but she wished it hadn't taken as long.
"It took four years," Lee said. "It could have been anyone. It could have been the neighbors. We have so many kids out here, and it's a shame that it did take that long. I have grandchildren out here. And I was especially concerned about them. I was scared at night because I didn't know who this nut was or where this nut was."
Bray said Evans wasn't dating Worlds. He was just someone she knew.
According to Bray and others, Evans was a friendly, energetic and attractive woman with a beautiful voice and a generous soul.
"They would just come and borrow things from her," Bray said. "That was the type of person she was. If she had it, she would give it."
