Killing Suspect Due at Hearing in Mississippi

A man who claims that he killed more than 70 people is being flown around the country in an effort to find his victims’ bodies, but Mississippi officials want him here Tuesday to answer to capital murder charges.

“I don’t care when he gets here, I just want to see him in court on Tuesday,” Harrison County Dist. Atty. Cono Caranna said.

Donald Leroy Evans is scheduled for a preliminary hearing on a charge of murdering a 10-year-old homeless girl.

After spending two days in the Arizona desert showing authorities where he buried the bodies of three women that he claims to have killed, Evans was whisked out of that area Friday. Authorities refused to say where he was taken.

No bones or other clues were found in the desert area, about 50 miles north of Phoenix, FBI spokesman M. C. Overton said.

Evans claims to have killed 72 people in 21 states and Canada, says his attorney, Fred Lusk of Biloxi, Miss.

In court documents filed in Harrison County Circuit Court, Caranna asked federal officials to return Evans for his hearing.

Evans, 34, of Galveston, Tex., already has pleaded guilty to federal kidnaping charges in the death of Beatrice Louise Routh, 10. Evans allegedly took the girl from a Gulfport park Aug. 1 and raped and strangled her in Louisiana. He led authorities to her body in a wooded area in southern Mississippi.