Mary Evans was a young lawyer with seemingly everything going her way when she made a series of decisions that would shock her community — and the nation.
Evans was 27 years old and the daughter of a university vice president when the Knoxville attorney was appointed to defend a client who would change her life forever.
Evans was, at the time, in a relationship with John Lockridge, a man the April 23, 1984 issue of PEOPLE described as “one of Knoxville’s most successful and attractive attorneys.”
That Mary would leave that life behind to go on the run with her new client — a man then serving a term of 65 years and facing a possible death sentence for murder — was 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 to those around her.
But that’s exactly what happened when she met Tim Kirk.
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People Magazine Cover April 23, 1984.
Kirk was serving a 65-year term for armed robbery at Tennessee’s Brushy Mountain prison when, on Feb. 8, 1982, he and six other white inmates were charged with killing two Black inmates and wounding two others.
Kirk was then charged with first-degree murder, and Evans was assigned to be his chief trial counsel.
Over time, the two grew close, with The Washington Post reporting that the attorney “made 21 visits” to Brushy Mountain prison, some visits lasting as many as 11 hours.
Soon, it would become apparent that the meetings were about more than Kirk’s looming trial.
On March 31, 1983, Kirk was undergoing what should have been a standard psychological examination when Evans pulled a pistol from her handbag, and watched as he “bound and gagged three prison guards and the therapist,” per PEOPLE’s earlier reporting.
As the psychologist said when the gag came off, “The guy was strong and attractive beneath that heavy beard. “She probably just fell in love with him.”
But the series of events was befuddling to most — certainly to those around Evans, as the New York Times wrote at the time in a story titled, “Role of Lawyer in Her Client’s Escape from Prison Mystifies Friends.”
PEOPLE’s reporting at the time offered a similarly confounding assessment: “With her ice-princess looks, good job and honey-voiced beau with the drooping mustache, Mary seemed to have everything, while William T. Kirk was one of life’s losers.”
The duo fled in Mary’s Toyota, relying on $1,500 of her money and several thousand dollars of his, per PEOPLE’s earlier reporting, and taking on names they found on tombstones in a children’s cemetery. For a month, they stayed in a Best Western motel in Daytona Beach and just ten days after the escape, in a call back home, Evans expressed no regrets, saying “I’ve never been happier in my life.”
During their time on the lam, justice did not sleep, and Kirk was convicted in absentia of voluntary manslaughter in the two prison deaths, and also convicted of aggravated kidnapping and intent to commit manslaughter stemming from his escape (and the abduction of the prison guards during that escape).
And while he and Evans evaded capture for nearly five months, ultimately, their money ran out, and the FBI found them in a Daytona Beach Western Union. They were then arrested and taken to prison — while reportedly holding hands and sharing a kiss in shackles.
Their relationship would dissolve shortly after their capture.
Tim, who would have been up for parole in the year 2008 had he not escaped, was sentenced to 40 more years in prison for the crimes committed during his escape, with the sentence to “begin when he would have been up for parole in the year 2008,” PEOPLE reported.
Mary pleaded guilty to an escape charge and, at her sentencing hearing, defense psychiatrists described her as a paranoid schizophrenic who had suffered hallucinations and heard “demon voices” beginning in her teenage years, saying she was suicidal and desperate when she met Tim Kirk.
At the age of 17, those defense psychiatrists testified, she dreamed of stabbing her then-boyfriend until he was “nothing but holes.” Two years later, she would marry Thomas H. Evans Jr., the son of a wealthy family, though psychiatrists said that was merely an attempt to feign normalcy.
At 23, her marriage to Evans ended. She found love again, with Lockridge, a man 22 years her senior, and the head of a successful Knoxville law firm (and also, married, but separated from his wife).
The judge was, as PEOPLE described, “unsympathetic,” sentencing Mary to three years in jail.
“She plotted this escape,” Tennessee circuit court Judge Buddy Scott said. “She continued to live with this man in Florida. I see no act of contrition on her part.”
Court records showed that Mary served 11 months of her sentence and, in 1985, got married again — to her former husband’s cousin, per a news report at the time.
