Woman Who Unwittingly Married Serial Killer Connects With Surviving Victim On TikTok

In her first-ever post to TikTok, Bonnie Lou Gower revealed she’d been married at 17, divorced at 25, remarried, had two children — then discovered her first husband was a serial killer responsible for the deaths of at least three girls.

People immediately had questions, which Gower has since been answering in a series of posts, “How I Was Married To A Serial Killer.” Her initial post has been viewed more than 32 million times since June 2, including by the only known surviving victim of Gower’s ex-husband, who has also been using TikTok to chronicle her ongoing struggle to heal from the trauma of being abducted at age 15.

Kara Robinson Chamberlain, now 37, told HuffPost she reached out to Gower, who responded with kindness and compassion. And, she said, it’s perhaps unsurprising that people with ties to notorious true crime cases are using social media to tell their stories on their own terms and connect with each other.

TikTok, Chamberlain said, has a “very intelligent algorithm” that pushes people’s stories to a supportive audience “as opposed to people who are simply there to troll.”

“People are becoming more aware of what it means to be a conscious and ethical consumer of these stories,” she said. “It’s just a really lovely kind of place to be sharing these stories.”

Chamberlain first opened up in 2020 on TikTok about her abduction by Gower’s ex-husband, Richard Evonitz, and her daring escape from him after Evonitz restrained and repeatedly sexually assaulted her over 18 hours. That post went viral, as have many of her follow-up posts, in which commenters have commended her courage, candor and vulnerability in speaking publicly.

“[Gower] said that she thought about me a lot over the years and [had] wanted to