Kristie Dawnelle Evans sobbed through the middle-of-the-night 911 call. She had woken up to a “loud pop,” she told the operator, and found her husband gasping beside her, a bullet wound in his head.
“He’s laying in a pool of blood,” she said in a recording of the March 22 call obtained by News 9. “Oh my god.”
Evans stuck to that story after police responded to the single-story Ada, Okla., home and pronounced David Evans dead. Someone had shot her husband, a well-liked pastor at Harmony Free Will Baptist Church, as they slept. She didn’t know who.
But days later, as the community reeled from the shock of a church leader killed in his own home, that account fell apart and new details emerged challenging much of what had been known about the couple and their 30-year marriage.
Investigators say Evans orchestrated her husband’s death, asking another man, Kahlil Deamie Square, to kill him. Behind the shooting was an affair between the two, which Evans claimed once included the pastor, and allegations of abuse.
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Evans, 47, and Square, 26, were arrested late last week on first-degree murder charges. While confessing to the plot, an arrest affidavit said, she told investigators her husband was controlling and verbally abusive. Brittney Long, the couple’s oldest child, told The Washington Post that her father had obsessed over her mother’s appearance and whereabouts.
Evans confided in Long before going to the police.
“She said that a life in prison would be freer than what she was dealing with before," said Long, 29. "And she had already accepted that.”
Before the shooting, Evans had often posted fawning messages about her husband online, News 9 reported. She described him as her best friend in a March 18 Facebook post, writing, “Every day with you is special!”
But Long said her mom posted those messages at her dad’s direction. She said that he was able to easily conceal his treatment of her mother, adding that he was “well-liked and funny, and it’s like he just had this switch that he could turn on and off.”
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Within recent months, according to what Evans told police, she and her husband had met Square and the three gathered at a Super 8 multiple times to have sex. During one of those visits, she dropped her phone number on the floor for him. The two began communicating on a daily basis, without her husband’s knowledge.
Evans told police she had “told Kahlil stories about how David mistreated her,” according to the affidavit. While the pastor was on a mission trip to Mexico, he stayed with her and they plotted his death. Evans gave Square her husband’s gun and a box of bullets. They decided on a time.
On March 21, hours before the murder, the pastor gave a sermon about the devil. In a video reviewed by the Daily Beast before it was apparently removed, he warned parishioners the “enemy” would try to attack them for sharing their faith.
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“Sometimes, I just stop and think. If the devil is not attacking you with everything he’s got in trying to destroy and kill you, maybe [it’s] because you’re not the reason anybody is believing in Jesus,” he said. “And as a pastor and just as a Christian, what a waste.”
That night, Evans left a back door unlocked at the couple’s house, the affidavit said. She waited in their bedroom until she heard noises. Then she found Square crouched in the dining room.
“Kahlil told Kristie he was concerned he was making too much noise,” the affidavit said. “Kristie urged him to proceed with the plan.”
She went into the living room and turned away while he went into the bedroom. Then she heard the popping noise, and Square ran out of the house.
Evans went to the bedroom, where her husband lay in bed making what she described to investigators as “a gurgling sound.” She sat on her side of the bed and dialed 911.
This story has been updated.
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