VIRGINIA, MINN. – More than a decade after Nancy Daugherty was found dead in her home in Chisholm, Minn., a local law enforcement official sat down for another formal interview with Brian Evenson, a longtime person-of-interest in the cold case.
Evenson already had been through this process upward of seven times.
“You know, the human mind is a strange thing,” he said on the 1998 recording, played in part Friday morning at the St. Louis County Courthouse. “And I’ve often wondered, ‘Geez, did I wake up in the middle of the night, drive over there and kill her, go back to bed and not know it?’ ”
This is where defense attorney JD Schmid dove into his cross-examination of Evenson on the key witness’ second day on the stand.
Evenson, 69, isn’t on trial for Daugherty’s murder. But he is at the crux of Michael Allen Carbo’s alternate perpetrator defense in a retrial born of the Minnesota Supreme Court’s decision that Carbo, who was found guilty in 2022, should have been allowed to point to Evenson the first time around.

Daugherty was 38 when she was found dead in her bed in July 1986, a victim of strangulation and rape. Evenson long was eyed as a suspect but was never arrested or charged — no one was until advances in genealogical technology led investigators to Carbo.
Schmid said in opening statements this week that this proves only that Carbo, who was a student at Chisholm High School at the time, had sex with Daugherty on the night of her death — not that he killed her.
Evenson told Schmid that when he made the statement questioning his own involvement, it was a “casual remark” to former Chisholm Police Chief Scott Erickson, whom he had worked with on an ambulance crew. It was not a confession, Evenson said.