VIRGINIA, MINN. – Two hours into his highly detailed witness testimony, Brian Evenson delivered an emphatic one-word response to close the direct examination in a decades-old Iron Range murder case:
“Mr. Evenson, I’m going to ask you straight up,” St. Louis County Attorney Christopher Florey said. “Did you kill Nancy Daugherty.”
“No,” Evenson responded.
Labeled by the defense as the “alternate perpetrator,” Evenson, 69, is at the center of the murder retrial of Michael Allen Carbo Jr. in the 1986 killing of Daugherty, an Iron Range mother of two teenage children.
Daugherty, 38, was also an EMT and nursing home employee with an eye toward attending school to become a paramedic in the Twin Cities. On the afternoon of July 16, 1986, she was found dead in the bed of her Chisholm, Minn., home. She had been strangled and raped.
Many suspects have been questioned, Evenson perhaps more than anyone else, but Carbo — who was a teenager who lived less than a mile from Daugherty’s home at the time — is the only person ever charged with the killing He was arrested in 2020 based on DNA evidence.
Carbo, who was found guilty of first-degree murder in 2022, returned to court after the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that the district court erred by not letting him use an alternate perpetrator defense during his first trial.
The same attorneys, same judge and a new jury gathered Thursday morning for opening statements and the first witnesses. Among them was Evenson — described by Judge Robert C. Friday as “the most important fact witness in the case.”