Pastor David Evans and his wife Kristie lived in Ada, Oklahoma and had been married for over 30 years. They started dating in February 1991 and married just four months later. At the time this all happened, David was 50 and Kristie was 47, so they had been married very young.
The couple had one daughter and two sons together.
David was a pastor at Harmony Free Will Baptist Church. I had a look at the church’s website and their slogan/motto is GROWING THE KINGDOM // GROWING THE CHRISTIAN // GROWING THE MISSION
You can view Kristie’s Facebook here and David’s Facebook here.
The bulk of this story takes place in March 2021.
On March 18, David wrote a Facebook post about some mission work that he was doing near the Mexico border. “Doing our best to be the hands and feet of Jesus and showing God’s love to others,” “Helping migrant people as they are dropped off right across the border by Border Patrol.
You can see some of his other Facebook posts from the time here (be sure to read Kristie’s comments too!):
Before David left for his Mexico trip, on March 15 he wrote a Facebook post about the love for his wife.
David returned home from Mexico to his seemingly idyllic life.
Kristie made a Facebook post on March 21 (side note, her FB has been locked down but we have the screenshots in our group )
She said David had sent her specialty-made necklaces while he was in Mexico. The post saying in part, “So, every day, I opened a card and was reminded of how blessed, loved and lucky I am!!! I love you so much, David!!!!”
All was well until March 22. Kristie called 911 to report that her husband had been shot in the head while sleeping in bed.
“Someone shot my husband,” she says frantically in the 911 call. “He’s in a pool of blood and I heard a loud pop.”
She goes on to say, “he’s bleeding out his nose and mouth and it’s all over the bed.”
She also says she didn’t know how it happened.
“Do you see a gun or anywhere around him?” dispatch asked. “No, I don’t see anything,” she responded.
Little is known about the next few days following David’s death – I haven’t been able to find much about the initial investigation.
But on March 25 (three days after the murder), things started to get VERY interesting. Kristie confessed to police that she had orchestrated the murder.
We need to now backtrack before the murder. It seems that Kristie and David were living a double life. Facebook messages between the two which range from 2017 to early 2021 show that David was unhappy with his sex life. He pushed Kristie to make it more ‘exciting’. In one exchange on Nov. 27, 2017, Kristie said she was open to anything — as long as it only involved the two of them. But by the next month, the messages show David asking how she’d feel if, during a threesome, he and another man called her “bitch,” “slut” and “whore.”
She didn’t mind, she responded, as long as the insults remained “generic.”
Kristie has since revealed that David took her to nudist parks and also to sex clubs.
David also started posting on craigslist, soliciting for sex partners.
He also keep hounding Kristie via messenger about their sex life. He asked her twice to bring home a co-worker for sex — she declined — and to perform sex acts with other men. At one point, he demanded she provide him with a typed-up, printed statement detailing their sex life. “MUST HEAR FROM YOU,” he wrote. In an hours-long fight that April, the messages show he called her a “frigid bitch” and blamed her for their failure to hook up with other swinger couples.
“They did not want a second round with you,” he said.
Kristie replied and said she “wasn’t looking for sex with those people anyway.” Eventually, David threatened suicide.
“I will be supportive and quiet,” she said. “Soft and gracious.” “Give me something sexual,” he responded. “Something now. That you provide. Not that i make happen or beg or force. YOU GIVE SOMETHING.”
The Evans’ marriage troubles continued right up to at least February this year. David told their kids that Kristie was divorcing him. Their daughter Brittney tried for hours to contact her mother and when Kristie finally answered the phone, she was acting “robotic,” offering brief answers and saying she and their father were fine.
Brittney found out later why Kristie was acting that way – she said David was sitting near her during the phone call and had a .357 revolver aimed at his chin.
At some point this year, David succeeded in finding a sexual partner for a threesome. The man is 26 year old Kahlil Deamie Square.
The court documents that were released after the murder say that David and Kristie met Khalil ‘a few months ago’ at a Super 8 motel for sex.
“The three of them, Kristie, Kahlil and David, had a sexual relationship. Kristie and Kahlil also had a separate sexual relationship, just the two of them,” Capt. Beth Green, Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation said.
I have also seen Kahlil referred to in articles as David’s lover, so it seems all three of them were intimate together (this wasn’t a case of David watching his wife with someone else).
On one occasion at the motel, Kristie dropped her phone number on the floor for Kahlil to find and the two continued to have a separate sexual relationship without David.
When David was in Mexico right before his murder, Kahlil went to the Evans house to stay with Kristie. The two then planned David’s murder:
“The plan was for Kahlil to come into the house in the middle of the night and shoot David with the gun and ammunition that actually belonged to David that Kristie had given Kahlil,” Green said.
“Kristie gave David’s gun and a box of bullets to Kahlil,” the document states. “Kristie and Kahlil agreed upon an approximate time Kahlil would come to the Evans’ residence to kill David. Kristie left the backdoor unlocked so Kahlil could make entry to the residence.”
Kahlil arrived sometime around 1 a.m., When Kristie heard him arrive, she went into the living room to find him “crouched down” in there.
“Kahlil told Kristie he was concerned he was making too much noise,” the affidavit said. “Kristie urged him to proceed with the plan.”
She turned her back while Kahlil snuck into the bedroom and remained in the living room as he fired the fatal shot, authorities said.
Kristie said that after Kahlil ran out the back door, she went into the bedroom and saw her husband lying in bed, making “a gurgling sound,” the Post reported. She sat on her side of the bed and called 911, she said.
Neighbors gave investigators surveillance footage showing what was allegedly Kahlil’s white Ford Mustang at the house the night of David’s death.
When Kristie confessed to police, she told them David had been abusive to her for many years.
She said he called her ‘fat, ugly and a slut.’
“What she told agents was that he was verbally abusive and controlling of her,” Green said.
It was also revealed that Kristie said she ‘begged’ Kahlil to help murder David.
“She seized an opportunity to escape from her personal hell,” said her father, Ed Armer, 68.
A social worker named Evan Stark has written a book called “Coercive Control: How Men Entrap Women in Personal Life,” and his thought is that Kristie’s circumstances show a ‘classic case’ of coercive control.
“It’s really about taking away the things that make us free,” he said.
These relationships can include frequent, low-level physical violence — “You don’t show up at church with a black eye,” he said — and several other abusive behaviors. “He’s denying her the right to walk the way she wants, to sleep the way she wants, to bathe when she wants,” he said, referring to how coercive control works generally. “These are all the little rights that people take for granted.”
The couple’s children have also since spoken about the abuse the whole family suffered.
There is an amazing article from NBC about this case, and this info comes from that.
Outside of their home, David Evans was a confident jokester with a magnetic personality, someone who told “actually funny jokes,” Brittney said. But inside their home, she couldn’t recall a time when her father wasn’t abusive. He would slam the kids’ heads together and lift them by their hair, Long and one of her younger brothers, Zachariah Evans, 28, recalled. When they were younger, the siblings said, he would make them stay up all night cleaning. If they finished, he’d knock everything over again — and insult them while they worked.
Brittney also recalled how in high school, she and her mother would stop at Sonic Drive-In, the fast-food franchise, and she’d be reminded to throw out her trash so her father didn’t see it.
“He hadn’t given her permission to spend that money,” Brittney said.
On April 4, 2010 — Easter Sunday — Brittney, then 18, said her two younger brothers were placed with her mother’s parents after her father physically abused them and they reported the incident to authorities. (Brittney said she was also abused.) The Roland Police Department didn’t have a record of the event — it doesn’t keep files that old, a police official said — though one of the brothers, Zachariah Evans, also described the alleged incident, saying he had experienced the abuse by his father. Their grandfather, Ed Armer, said he and his wife briefly cared for the boys after they were removed from his daughter’s house.
Even in our group, lots of people have questioned why Kristie didn’t leave David. She even had a chance when he was away for days, right before his murder. David’s mother Jean Richardson feels the same way:
In her view, the fact that Kristie Evans had her own car, job and credit card showed that she wasn’t so controlled that she was “homebound.” And if their relationship had been so harrowing, Richardson said, Kristie Evans should have left her son or sought help.
“She could have gone to a new city or a battered women’s shelter,” said Richardson, a retired nurse who said she’d often tended to abused women during her career. “This young woman was not too dumb to know these things are available.”
Kristie has told police that she stayed with her husband due to a complex mix of shame, concern and fear: shame over the secret life she said her husband had pushed her into, concern about what her departure would do to him and fear of who he might hurt after she left.
Brittney was asked by the media why she thought her mother finally snapped. She told them that her siblings and her knew that when they turned 18, they could leave the home.
“We knew we could escape,” she said. “My mom didn’t see an end to it. I don’t think she had it in her to continue living that way.”
Kristie and Kahlil are both currently charged with first degree murder. Both of them are/were due to have a hearing on July 8 – I cannot find any media coverage if this went ahead. Kristie’s defense team have said they intend to present her case as that of a battered woman.
So, will the battered woman defense work for Kristie? The NBC article outlines the case of Sally Challen — who was sentenced to a life term in prison for bludgeoning her husband to death with a hammer in 2010 — also helped raise its profile, said Harriet Wistrich, director of the U.K.-based Center for Women’s Justice and a lawyer who represented Challen in appellate court. The killing and its aftermath were widely covered in the media, she said, and her sons publicly advocated for her release from prison.
In 2019, after a judge found that Challen’s mental illness had been worsened by years of coercive control, she pleaded guilty to manslaughter. Her life term was reduced to time served.
A few hours before he was murdered, David gave a sermon at the church. It was posted on FB (the whole page has since been deactivated).
He talked about the ways the devil tries to “seek and destroy” those who witness God’s power. If the devil is not attacking you, he said, it means you aren’t doing enough to make others believe in Jesus.
“What a challenge to us, because who’s coming to Christ because of us?” “Who’s believing in Jesus because of us? And if we’re doing anything in that direction, expect for the enemy to come to destroy you. So don’t be shocked and start whining and crying. Expect it. Be prepared for it.
“If the devil is not attacking you, there is a reason. If the devil is attacking you, there is a reason.”
The church released a statement following David’s death – “Harmony Free Will Baptist Church has been grieving the death of our pastor, David Evans, over the last few days,” the statement read. “The circumstances that are now coming to light have taken us by surprise and we are greatly saddened.”
“We are aware that even pastors can succumb to human frailty.”