John Louis Evans III was an altar boy, a Little League pitcher and a high school trumpeter before he became a condemned killer.
Born Jan. 4, 1950, one of three sons and four girls of a well-to-do Beaumont, Texas, contractor, Evans showed signs of being a loner at the age of 13, relatives and friends said.
But Evans also was an altar boy in the Catholic Church and a pitcher on the Little League baseball team. At Beaumont High School, he played football on the junior varsity squad and trumpet in the band.
His dream was to become a member of the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels precision flight team.
A Beaumont High School classmate who asked not to be identified remembered Evans as 'immature, a person who would pull stupid tricks just to get attention.' But he said he never saw Evans 'disruptive or violent.'
While none of the other Evans children has received more than a traffic ticket, Evans admitted he was a 'rotten kid' and required psychiatric help at age 13.
'My dad was advised to quit taking me hunting because the psychiatrist felt like I was dangerous with a gun,' he said.
His first arrest came in 1966 in Beaumont for investigation of car theft. FBI records show he was arrested 11 times between 1966 and 1977. The first time Evans served in prison was in Indiana in 1975, when he received a one-to-five year sentence for 'theft under $100.'
At the Indiana Youth Center in Plainfield, Ind., Evans met and befriended Wayne Ritter and the two began planning a crime spree.
After both were released, Evans rented a light blue Cutlass at the Indianapolis airport on Christmas Eve 1976 and took off with Ritter on a three-month crime wave that included 22 armed robberies, two extortion kidnappings and one murder in nine Southeastern states.
They netted $13,520 before being captured by the FBI on March 7, 1977, in Little Rock, Ark.
Edward Nassar, a pawnbroker in Mobile, Ala., was shot during a robbery in the middle of the spree and Evans and Ritter were convicted of murder.
Evans, who was sentenced to die for killing Nassar, said he pulled the trigger during the Jan. 5, 1977, holdup, but claimed Nassar 'committed suicide' by reaching for a gun.
He said his only regret was Nassar's daughters, ages 9 and 7, saw their father killed.
Following his arrest and conviction, Evans refused to fight his death sentence.
On April 5, 1979, just six hours before his scheduled execution, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist granted a stay filed by Evans' mother and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Afterwards, Evans changed his mind about dying, saying God must have interceded in his case.
Evans decided to challenge the constitutionality of Alabama's death penalty law. He began taking a correspondence legal course from Auburn University and became a born-again Christian.
