Gina Heslop
Thomas Lawton Evans Jr., 38, has been sentenced to three life terms in prison for his crimes, which include kidnapping a 4-year-old girl, raping her, and murdering his 38-year-old girlfriend, Sharon Nannette Hayden. Last February, Evans Jr. assaulted Brittany Todd at her home in Johns Island, South Carolina, and then kidnapped her daughter, Heidi, before driving her to Alabama.
While in court, prosecutors revealed that Evans had confessed to murdering his girlfriend just days before he assaulted Todd and kidnapped her daughter. After pleading guilty to the charges, Evans Jr. was sentenced to three life terms in prison. US District Court Judge David Norton, who sentenced him, stated that Evans Jr.’s crimes were the worst he had ever witnessed during his 30 years on the bench. Evans Jr. admitted to the gruesome details of how he kidnapped and transported the 4-year-old child across state lines before engaging in aggravated sexual assault and abuse.
During the attack on Todd, Brittany’s daughter Heidi and two-year-old son hid in the upstairs bedroom. Evans Jr. found them and took Heidi with him. He drove from South Carolina through Georgia to Alabama, where he was later arrested in Riverside County, but not before he was able to commit the heinous act of child rape. In court, Todd faced off with Evans Jr. because she wanted to speak in defense of her four-year-old daughter. She stated that “nothing in my life runs the same in my family like before February 13”.
Brittany underwent numerous surgeries to fix her face, which cost $361,000 after the assault and was unable to care for her children for four months.
Evans Jr. admitted to killing his girlfriend during an argument inside their Spartanburg County home just days before he went on his rampage. He revealed all the intimate details of the murder to the FBI. She tried to flee the home after being stabbed and escaped as far as the wood.
There she collapsed, but her body was never recovered, and he has not been charged with her murder. In summary, Thomas Lawton Evans Jr. has been sentenced to three life terms in prison for his crimes, which include assaulting Brittany Todd, kidnapping her daughter, Heidi, and raping her, as well as murdering his girlfriend, Sharon Nannette Hayden. The crimes he admitted to committing just days later earned him the harsh sentence, which the judge called “random, brutal, and senseless”.
