Opening statements took place Thursday morning at the St. Louis County Courthouse in Michael Carbo Jr.'s retrial. He is accused of killing Nancy Daugherty in 1986. (File/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

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.”

Brian Evenson testified for more than two hours on Thursday at the St. Louis County Courthouse. ANTHONY SOUFFLE • anthony.souffle@startribune.com (Anthony Souffle/The Minnesota Star Tribune)

The courtroom was nearly full, with members of Daugherty’s family and Carbo’s friends sometimes sharing a row.

The defense has long wanted to point suspicion at Evenson, who spent some of Daugherty’s final hours with her over Southern Comfort at what was then Tibroc, a Chisholm bar and grill. He drove her home. He used her bathroom; he lingered. He doubled back to her house once to ask a quick question before driving his Bronco to his parent’s place in Hibbing, talking to his sister, drinking a glass of milk and going to bed, he testified.

Evenson is also the one who felt unease the next day when Daugherty didn’t answer his knocks on her door, despite their plans. Her curtains were closed, and her doors were locked. Earlier that morning, two neighbor girls had heard ominous sounds from her house.

This was all unusual, Evenson said.

Michael Allan Carbo Jr. has been in St. Louis County Jail in the months leading up to his new trial, which had opening statements on Thursday in Virginia, Minn. (St. Louis County Jail roster)

Once inside Daugherty’s home, Evenson was the first to see her fingers pointing out from beneath a blanket on her bed. When he touched them, he said, he knew she was gone. And when he pulled back the blanket and saw her face, Evenson said, he knew she had suffered a horrific death.

Evenson, who has a keen memory for dates, provided a precise and detailed testimony about his life, working alongside Daugherty on the ambulance squad and their brief romance. In Evenson’s take, he still loved Daugherty but was satisfied with a friendship.

Florey, the county attorney, homed in on Evenson’s decades-long cooperation with investigators. He was questioned upward of eight times, provided DNA samples and offered a forwarding address to investigators when he moved.

“I wanted to find out who killed Nancy,” he testified. “I wanted the case to be solved and someone to be punished for it.”

Evenson will face cross-examination on Friday morning.

Now with an alternate perpetrator defense in hand, Carbo’s attorney J.D. Schmid spent much of his 30-minute opening statement centered on Evenson as a man in love with Daugherty — frustrated that his feelings went unrequited. He highlighted snippets of letters Evenson had written to Daugherty that indicate he wanted more alone time with her and to write him back.

In one letter projected on courtroom screens, Evenson tells Daugherty that sometimes when he thought about her he grew so mad he could “wring her neck.”

Schmid pointed at the state’s evidence, which includes several examples of Carbo’s DNA — on a washcloth in Daugherty’s room, his vomit in the yard, his skin beneath her fingernails and DNA in her body. These are signs of consensual sex, he said.

“The wrong person is on trial in this case,” Schmid told the jury. “Mr. Carbo had sex with Ms. Daugherty, and that’s it.”

The first witness was Gina Haggard, Daugherty’s daughter. She offered a portrait of her mother as a woman who helped on an Alaska roadside when their family came across a car crash during a family trip. A great softball player who enjoyed skiing, sunbathing and her job working with seniors at a local nursing home.

In Haggard’s favorite photograph, her mother has a slight smile, big glasses and is wearing her EMT uniform.

“I miss her a lot,” she said. “Every day.”